A trio of musicians in animal masks played classical music. An owl with a violin. A fox with a cello. A bear with a viola. Through the windows, an outdoor garden was lit with low lamps that showed off marble statues of shrouded figures.

  What must it have been like to grow up in a place like this? Surrounded by this much wealth? Force-fed untold depravity?

  Charlie finished her circuit and ate the remaining hors d’oeuvres so she had an excuse to go back to the kitchen. Setting the silver tray down on the marble island to be wiped and refilled, she took the opportunity to grab her backpack. Then she headed directly for the library.

  Charlie’s memories of the house were blurry and indistinct, more nightmare than recollection. A voice close enough for her to have felt breath on her neck. Cavernous rooms linked together in a puzzling maze.

  The library, with a secret door leading to a room of treasures, including a safe. With the rug she vomited on, and where she might have died.

  When she glanced in, she found two men in the leather chairs, talking in an intense way, one gesturing with a snifter of cognac. An empty glass and a napkin rested beside the other. They looked extremely settled.

  Charlie needed to make them move, and quickly.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, squatting down in front of the one she thought seemed more self-important. “I’m sorry, but there was a woman asking for you in the other room. Tall, with red hair. Very pretty. She described you and told me that if I saw you, I should inform you of her interest.”

  He looked smug, and rose. “I’ll just be a second,” he said to his friend, but his friend was rising too.

  “Going to refresh my drink,” the man said with a little too obvious relief, and Charlie had the sudden thought that perhaps she’d saved him from being buttonholed for the entire evening.

  Charlie picked up the crumpled napkin and began to sweep up imaginary crumbs until she was alone. Then she went to the light switch on the wall, throwing it so that the darkened room would seem off-limits to other guests.

  She reached into her backpack and drew on gloves and glasses with tiny lights attached to both sides. Once she switched them on, they would make her face a confusing blur to cameras, as well as provide a way to work in the dark.

  Finally, she went to the wall of books. Red and gold. Red and gold. Something with flames, something with a title that started with an I. She couldn’t find the lever. Two pulls of books with red spines and gold type went nowhere. Then she spotted it, a shelf lower than where she’d been looking and a foot to the left. Inferno. She lifted it and the bookshelf door swung jerkily inward, revealing the smaller library, and the painting with the safe behind.

  Charlie stepped through into the secret room, its walls covered in shelves packed with older books. Nausea abruptly constricted her throat. The memory of lying on the library carpet rushing back at her as though no time had passed between then and now, as though she were still a terrified kid. The rough texture of the merino wool against her cheek, the wetness from her vomit, the voice coming from the dark.

  Don’t look behind you.

  The smell of beets still made her gag.

  Charlie stepped through onto the onyx tiles of the smaller chamber. Shelves lined the walls there too, with older and more precious books filling them. Memoirs, notebooks, and scientific journals, a hundred at least, all worth stealing. The Mystical Discoveries of Tovilda Gare sat beside Confessions of Nigel Lucy, Magus and Diarios de Juan Pedro Maria Ugarte. There were other books, in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a whole half wall in French. Her fingers itched to choose a few at random and stuff them into her bag.

  Pushing the bookshelf door closed, she checked for any additional wiring that might indicate an unexpected surprise.

  Charlie didn’t find anything that seemed worrisome, and turned toward the back of the hidden room.

  A trompe l’oeil of a dead goat, entrails spilling out and mingling with split pomegranates, hung above a club chair, the only piece of furniture.

  Gingerly, she felt around the edge of the hideous painting. She found hinges, with no lock on the other side.

  She swung it open to reveal the wall safe she remembered.

  Made by Stockinger, who were known for offering solid, bespoke models with the bells and whistles of all the custom luxury safe makers like Buben & Zorweg or Agresti. There would be winders for watches, cloth-lined wooden drawers, but none of the ridiculous golden and bejeweled neo-Victorian extravagances of Boca do Lobo pieces. Stockinger made serious safes for serious people.

  A dial rested on the front, beside a gleaming handle engraved with Lionel Salt’s initials. And beside it, a keypad.

  Most modern safes were digital, offering none of the romance of breaking into the old ones. None of the listening for when the spin changed, the infinitesimal slotting into place, the softer click-click as satisfying as the crack of knuckles. If she could ignore the keypad entirely, she would. Digital safes weren’t just unromantic, they were nearly impossible to open without the code.

  Taking a deep breath, she reset the lock by spinning clockwise, then started going counterclockwise. She heard the first notch at five. Then she reset and spun again and again until she had five numbers: 2–4–5–63–7. She was certain of them. She was as sure as sure could be.

  But what there was no way to know was the order. And five numbers meant five tumblers, five interior wheels, and one-hundred-twenty possible combinations.

  All she could do then was grind through them, while sweat beaded up at her forehead and in the hollow of her throat. She was conscious of the party going on, of time slipping away, of the possibility that someone might find her.

  Charlie could hear the moment the fence fell and released the locking mechanism. She let out a long, unsteady breath and turned the lever.

  It only moved halfway.

  Then the digital keypad lit, green and bright and blinking.

  Charlie stared at it in disbelief. This safe wasn’t digital or dial; it was both. Her heart rate kicked up and her mouth tasted sour with panic. She had no way to know if there was a timer on entering the code, and she’d be limited in the number of tries. Safes like this offered three, usually, before locking up and setting off an alarm.

  Fishing a UV penlight out of the bottom of her backpack, Charlie turned off the lights of her glasses, pushing them up onto her head. Then she shone the penlight onto the keypad.

  Very few people wiped down their keys after use. The light revealed the grease of fingertips, limiting the number of options for the combination.

  2–3–4–5–6–7.

  The same numbers as the other side. Relieved, she moved to type in the order that had worked on the dial. She stopped herself a moment later, finger hovering over the keypad. There were more markings on the two and the six than on the other numbers, suggesting they repeated. If that was true, then this was a seven-digit code, at minimum.

  If cracking a mechanical safe was about understanding the machine, cracking a digital safe was about understanding the person who set it. Would they choose a random number and then hide the combination somewhere they could find it? Or would they pick something less random and therefore more memorable?

  Lionel Salt was the kind of person who needed to be better than everyone else. With his carved stairs, his awful paintings, and his willingness to murder for his own amusement.

  Not his birthday, since it would be a reminder of his age and mortality. Not his name in numbers, because even he would know that was too obvious. Perhaps a word, then? Blight? Shadow? Gloaming?

  She stopped.

  The key is abandon all hope.

  Abandon all hope. It used all of the numerically converted letters and used the six and two four times each. And Salt would like the idea of giving a clue in the form of the book that opened the secret door, referencing the most famous quote from Dante’s Inferno, the one that even Charlie, who’d never read it, knew: “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” She bet he felt rather smug about his cleverness.

  Charlie ignored her racing heart, her sweaty hands and panicked thoughts. She went over the word again, writing it out in numbers in the dust of the onyx floor: 22263662554673.

  Carefully, she punched the code into the still-blinking pad. There was a sharp beep, as though an alarm was about to sound. Then she heard the second locking mechanism opening.

  She turned the lever again.

  A soft glow came from inside, showing off felt-lined drawers and several shelves of items. Charlie opened one. A small bag of diamonds rested inside. In another, she found an antique pistol chased in gold. And at the bottom, wrapped in cloth, the thing she’d come looking for.

  Quickly, she made the exchange, shoving the item deep into the bottom of her backpack, hoping like hell that she knew what she was doing.

  Then, in the privacy of Salt’s hidden room, she got out her party outfit. Suzie Lambton, the only person whose closet she had access to at the moment, wasn’t even remotely her size. She still had her key to Rapture, though, and there was no better time to borrow that red satin suit abandoned in the back. With a little stretch to the fabric, it fit her like a second skin. Add to that some notice-me red lipstick, and Charlie would seem like she’d just arrived at the party, instead of robbing it for the better part of an hour.

  Before she was ready to go out there, she pushed on a three-finger knuckle ring set with onyx and shoved the onyx dagger she’d gotten from Murray’s into her bra. Holstered with a makeshift sheath of duct tape, it would be there if she needed it. She waited for the familiar rush, that pleasurable hit of adrenaline, but it wouldn’t come.

  Charlie turned back to the safe, intending to close it, when she noticed a black button in the upper corner, close to the back. Could there be something behind the safe? A compartment she hadn’t opened yet?

  Come on, Charlie Hall. You don’t have to stick your finger in every socket.

  But that cautious instinct seemed to belong to someone who hadn’t already chosen the path of recklessness. She pressed the button.

  A click came from the shelf to her left. Another bookshelf swung open, revealing a hall. A passageway that must run behind the walls of the house.

  Taking out her phone, Charlie checked the time. She’d gotten to the house at half past six. José had told her that the party was supposed to go officially until ten, and that there was going to be a champagne toast at eight thirty. It was seven forty-five. Time was tight.

  Still, Charlie stepped through, into the dark.

  She switched back on the lights on her glasses. They illuminated something that mixed the architecture of a wine cellar with that of a mausoleum. More tiles of onyx ran across the floor. Two cells were ahead of her, with a door opposite them. A groove had been carved into the ground, running in front of the bars, the blue line of a gas flame outlining the edge. The air had a faint smell of rot, and of incense.

  Sweat dampened her palms and brow. This was the bad kind of adrenaline. The kind that made her twitchy instead of careful, that made her stomach sour and her hands shaky.

  This felt like a haunted place.

  Still, she kept walking. The soft soles of her flats scratched against the floor. The cells were deep enough that Charlie’s little lights couldn’t pierce the darkness.

  Along the wall were an assortment of restraints. A rope that had been threaded with onyx beads. A pair of shackles with blue silk padding on the inside, the cloth sewn tightly with rectangular onyx tiles. Above them, a shelf with onyx containment boxes.

  The door on the opposite side was slightly ajar, flickering colors within. She pushed slowly with her foot and found herself staring at a bank of screens. Surveillance footage of the house.

  Caterers in the kitchen. Partygoers moving through the rooms. The Hierophant, speaking with Vicereine, seeming completely composed. She peered at him more closely, hoping for some tell. The only thing notable was that he was thinner and more unhealthily pale than ever.

  In another room, two men were making out, one a blurred outline. Was he kissing his own shadow? Someone else’s? Charlie couldn’t tell.

  Outside in the garden, three men were arguing. One had the other by the shirt, their shadows looming large behind them like the spread plumes of fighting peacocks.

  Salt was walking through the rooms with purpose, a drink in one hand, looking as though everything was going his way. He glanced up, for a heart-stopping moment, peering directly into the camera. The time in the upper right-hand corner read 7:52.

  “Charlie?” Vince’s voice came out of the darkness.

  She whirled around.

  He was in the cell, standing just behind the bars. Broad-shouldered, hair like old gold. A small smile turning up the corner of his mouth. As familiar as her own heart.

  “What happened to your eye?” he asked.

  “Hold on,” she said, so relieved at the sight of him that her voice broke. “I can get you out of there.”

  Before Charlie could pick the lock, she had to disable whatever the gas line running along the seam beneath the bars was supposed to do. She guessed it was on some kind of trip wire that would send up a burst of flames when the cell door opened. There had to be a way to turn it off.

  Charlie hesitated. The wrongness of the scene bothered her, like an itch in the mind.

  Pale, hollow eyes followed her movements. She wanted to believe it was Vince in the cell, behind bars of onyx, with a gutter of fire between them. But those weren’t restraints meant for a human.

  “You’re not Vince, are you?” she asked softly, walking to the bars.

  The silence from the cell was her answer.

  Charlie met the Blight’s gaze. “You’re his shadow. You’re Red.”

  31

  THE FOOL, THE MAGICIAN, AND THE HIEROPHANT

  Only when her back hit the wall did she realize how far she’d moved from the cell. “You found the Liber Noctem,” she managed to choke out. “You did the ritual.”

  “Because I look like a person?” the shadow asked. “It was Edmund who made me like this.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.” Her voice came out too high. She didn’t know how to comprehend the being in front of her. It was a doppelgänger. A mirror reflection come to life. A thing Frankensteined together from discarded parts of Vince: slime and snails and puppy dog tails. “Is he here? Is Vince all right?”

  The shadow shrugged. Even its expression was one that Vince would make, slightly chagrined. The tailored suit it wore was the color of its eyes. “We met before. Do you remember?”

  Don’t look behind you.

  Charlie didn’t speak for a long moment. It wasn’t as though the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but she’d had a hard time believing it. “In the library.”

  “I suppose you wanted it to be Remy who saved you,” the shadow said, voice soft. “Not Red.”

  Charlie wasn’t about to answer that. Yes, she had a naive desire for the sort of romance a palm reader would trace on the inside of a hand. A fated love, begun in childhood. Love was a family religion, passed down to her when she’d been too young to protect herself from belief. “Even back then, you were already a Blight?”

  The shadow nodded, allowing her to turn the subject.

  “And you killed people for Salt.” She kept her voice stiff.

  “Yes,” it said.

  She had to remind both of them that she wasn’t some fool who was going to trust it just because they had a weird past together. “Tell me—the way you killed Adam, was that special? Cracking his ribs open like you were going to spatchcock a turkey, and painting the walls with his blood? Or is that how you did them all?”

  It stepped closer to the bars. “Adam?”

  “You’ve got to remember the guy you murdered on my couch. In a very gross way.”

  The shadow stared at her with what appeared to be real horror. “I’d never do that to you. Never.”

  Charlie hated how much it looked like Vince, and how much that made her want to trust it. “Okay, tell me about all the other people you didn’t murder.”

  “You’re clever,” it said, with a small rueful smile. “And I’m not used to explaining things. I didn’t do much talking, before. I don’t think I’m very good at it.”

  “Try,” Charlie said.

  “You shouldn’t have had to come back here.” It seemed sad, and tired. She had no way to know if that was something it was putting on, or if flesh conferred weakness. “You should go and never come back, like I told you that night.”

  “So, what, I’m supposed to grab my sister and mother and blow town? Let Salt win? Do whatever he wants to Vince?”

  “Yes,” it said, with more heat than she expected. “He can handle himself.”

  “He shouldn’t have to,” Charlie said.

  “He left you,” the shadow said.

  “And you as well, didn’t he?” Charlie asked. “Must piss you off, to have him create you and then shed you like he was crawling out of a chrysalis. Leave you behind.”

  Red looked at her with Vince’s eyes, but there was a little amusement in them. “I’m made of his anger. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, refusing to be distracted. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  The shadow turned its face from her, the amusement gone. “I was always the part of him that took care of things when he wasn’t able to manage. I was given everything that made him uncomfortable—the desire to cause pain, the terror at what Salt made us do, the ability to intuit how other people felt when the bad stuff happened. I was made to be strong, so he didn’t have to be. So yes, I was angry when he was gone, but I loved Remy, no matter what he did and no matter what he made me do.”

  A shiver went through Charlie’s shoulders.

  Red went on. “He wanted to block out what was happening when I was on his grandfather’s missions, so I asked him to try untethering me. We didn’t understand about Blights then; all we knew was that it worked. Each time I returned to him, I was stronger than before. More solid, and for longer. We hid it from Salt,” he said. “Adeline knew, but she kept our secret.”