“Because she and Vince were close,” Charlie offered.

  His lashes brushed his cheek as he looked down and away. “We all three were, once. Too close, maybe. We only had each other.”

  It came to her, one of the things she’d heard that night. The boy’s voice. He doesn’t like you.

  And then the girl. That’s not true. We have games we play that he would never play with you.

  There was something bad there, lurking beneath the surface, but Charlie was too much a coward to ask.

  She glanced into the room with the monitors. On the screens, Charlie could see that speeches were underway. She was running late.

  “Where’s Vince?” Charlie asked.

  The shadow stared back at her with Vince’s pale eyes and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck begin to stand. The itch of wrongness was back, worse than ever.

  “I know this house,” Red said. “I could help you get out without anyone knowing you were ever here.”

  “Not without Vince,” Charlie said. “You say you care about him. Help me save him. Help me find him.”

  “I’d do anything for you, Char,” he told her. “But don’t ask me for that.”

  There was only one person who called her Char. “No. You’re not him. Stop acting like him.”

  “Char,” he cautioned.

  “Where is he?” she demanded, heart thundering.

  “You already know,” he said.

  She didn’t want to put the pieces together. Vince had snapped Hermes’s neck and gotten rid of the body. He cleaned up crime scenes awash in blood for a living. None of that sounded like Remy. But it sounded a lot like Red.

  “Vince faked his death,” Charlie protested. “Or Salt faked it for him. He was on the run. And two days ago, he was in a hotel room…”

  The shadow didn’t speak.

  It was hard to fake a death. There were dental records. There was evidence of past surgeries or fractures. Forensics could tell a lot from bones—sex, ancestry, age, height.

  Salt could have paid someone, or several someones, to cover all that up. There was another answer, though: that the burnt body found in the car had belonged to Edmund Carver, and the person she had known wasn’t him at all.

  The shadow wasn’t a malevolent entity taking the shape of Vince. It was Vince. He was Vince. And Vince had always only been the lost parts of Edmund Carver, the scraps from his table, his upside-down self, his mirror self, his night self.

  He was right, part of her had known from the moment he’d been horrified about Adam. She hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. Charlie Hall, flinching, finally discovering the puzzle she hadn’t wanted to solve.

  “When Remy was dying,” Vince said. “After his grandfather stabbed him. While Adeline screamed. Remy grabbed hold of me, and pulled me to him, so I would have all his blood, all his strength. As it left him, it became mine. He breathed his last breath into my mouth.

  “For a moment, I didn’t understand how I could be naked, how I could feel the cold floor under me. Then I ran. Hours later, I woke up beneath an underpass, lying on asphalt and broken glass, with no idea how I got there. And then I had to learn how to be a person all the time. I tried to be, for you.”

  Charlie recalled his words during their last fight, their only real fight: I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth.

  If this was what was behind the mask, she understood why he hadn’t wanted to remove it.

  “And called yourself Vincent,” Charlie said.

  “The one thing Remy didn’t give me that I took anyway,” the shadow said, lifting his chin, as if daring her to judge him for it.

  Down the hall, gears shifted in the wall, making a soft but distinct noise. Someone had entered the secret room beyond the library. In moments, they’d enter the corridor where Charlie was standing.

  “Vince,” she said. Their eyes met.

  “Hide,” he told her.

  Charlie made it to the shadows of the security room, crawling under the leather couch at the same time she heard steps in the hall. How many times had Salt sat on that couch, watching something awful on the screens? Rand might have died in one of these cells. Charlie herself could have died there.

  Could still, if she wasn’t careful.

  “Red.” A woman’s voice, soft and worried. Adeline, Charlie realized. “He didn’t tell me you were here until now. Did he hurt you?”

  Only silence answered her.

  “I know. I should have left when you did,” she said, with a big huffing sigh. “You must be very angry with me.”

  Vince’s voice had a veneer of calm, but beneath you could hear the vibration of some very different emotion. “Once his mother was dead, he wasn’t going to rest until the world knew what your father had done. You should have warned him she was in danger.”

  “I didn’t know. How could I have known she was going to overdose? I thought she was getting better. We all did.”

  “You know why she never got better,” Vince said. “Your father needed her to be sick, and then he needed her to be dead.”

  Vince sounded as though he was talking about a family that wasn’t also his. His mother. Your father. The only person he considered to be his family was Remy.

  “I swear I didn’t know about any of it,” she protested.

  The hall was dark, and Charlie thought it might be possible to slip out past Adeline while she was distracted. Quietly, she pulled herself out from under the couch. But as she edged closer to the door, Charlie’s whole plan started to seem wobbly.

  Maybe she should bonk Adeline over the head and try to get Vince out of the prison. But if Adeline didn’t have the key—and neither Adeline nor Vince were behaving as though there was a possibility of her freeing him—then they were all screwed.

  Carefully, Charlie slid behind Adeline’s body, moving slowly and sticking to the shadows.

  “You can still help me.” Vince’s voice was soft. He didn’t look in Charlie’s direction, but there was something so carefully blank in his stare that the effort showed.

  Adeline put her hand on one of the onyx bars of his prison. “How?”

  Charlie was far enough down the hall by then that she didn’t hear Vince’s request. Maybe it was unfair to think he couldn’t trust Adeline as far as he could throw her.

  If Charlie’s plan worked, it wouldn’t matter. She’d come back with a hammer and a flame-retardant blanket and get him out.

  She would. Even if she was afraid of him.

  Sliding the door open, Charlie slipped through. Then she climbed back through the second hidden bookcase, into the library. She needed to get outside and meet Posey, but she was distracted, thinking of how he’d guided her through the house that night.

  Don’t look.

  What would she have seen if she had, back then? Perhaps a smudgy shape, like a ghost. Perhaps he would have been half boy and half shadow.

  Don’t look at me.

  She snuck into a garden room. Ominously large plants with waxy leaves filled the spaces between pieces of white cast-iron furniture. Through the windows she could see the gardens. Charlie took out her phone and sent a text. The time on her screen read 8:16. Fourteen minutes to do what she needed to do, and no chance for errors.

  But she had at least one answer she hadn’t before. If Red wasn’t the Blight that Salt had been using to do his dirty work, she knew who had been in his employ.

  Opening a multipaned glass door halfway, she slipped through into the cold night air.

  Posey met her on the side of the house, breathing hard.

  “I made it.” She looked wide-eyed with panic.

  “You’re still sure?” Charlie asked her sister.

  “You’re the one who has to be sure,” Posey told her, although she was obviously nervous, and not just about getting caught. “We can still walk away.”

  Walk away. Wasn’t that what she’d tried to do for years? Walked away from the death of Rand, pretended it hadn’t scarred her. Pretended she didn’t remember. That she didn’t blame herself for surviving.

  Walked away from being a thief and told herself it was because of the bullet in her side, that she’d lost her nerve, rather than admit she’d scared herself with how easily and brutally she’d turned the betrayal back on Mark. She’d never been all that afraid of getting hurt, or dying. It had always been her own abilities, her capacity for solving a puzzle, for getting a job done at any cost. She was terrified of what she could do if she tried.

  From the time she’d pretended to channel Alonso and it had actually gotten rid of Travis, she’d been afraid of herself.

  Somebody needed to keep her in check, and so that person became Charlie herself. Making sure she got knocked down every time things were going too well, picking the wrong people to love, getting fired from jobs, screwing up.

  Charlie had been walking away from herself her whole life.

  She sat down on the grass.

  Posey sat down opposite her, their feet touching. Charlie took the onyx dagger from its sheath.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Posey nodded.

  Charlie wasn’t sure what she expected, but the first cut didn’t feel like anything. The real challenges were spotty moonlight and inexperience, and she was relieved when her part was done and Posey took over.

  Inside the house, she watched Salt move to the front of the great room. He had a champagne flute in one hand. This must be the part where he thanked them all for coming and the Cabal for accepting him as a member.

  Charlie staggered to her feet, not quite sure how she felt. Not lighter. Not less herself. But changed.

  Maybe there really was such a thing as fate. Maybe people really did have destinies that could be deciphered through cards. Maybe Charlie needed to stop fighting hers.

  With a last look back at Posey, she opened one of the glass doors to the great room. A great gust of cold wind whipped through the room behind her, filling the long white curtains like sails. Conversations went out like candles as the gloamists turned toward her.

  She hadn’t expected to make quite so dramatic an entrance.

  Charlie stuck close to the doors, making sure the light was coming toward her.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice carrying in the high-ceilinged room and remaining steady, despite all the eyes on her. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Charlie Hall,” Lionel Salt said, furious at the interruption and doing a bad job of hiding it. “I didn’t expect you’d make it.”

  Tension straightened her spine, drawing back her shoulders. She was certain he’d been counting on her not showing up. After all, he’d given her a terrifying threat and then set her a task at which she’d been guaranteed to fail. The last place she ought to be was at his party. The smart thing to do would be to leave town for a couple of weeks, until things cooled off. Maybe not come back.

  But of course, whatever kind of smart Charlie was, it wasn’t that kind. “You told me what would happen if I didn’t.”

  A few hushed conversations became less hushed after that. Gossip was the lifeblood of any party.

  A musician—the one in the owl mask—made for the exit, instrument in hand. A waiter whispered to José. The waiter pointed. José took a canapé off a silver tray and ate it. This was definitely not going to help her reputation back home.

  Across the room, the Hierophant left where he’d been standing and began to move toward her. His eyes were more sunken than ever. His lips had a faintly blue cast.

  “I would think that this was a piece of performance art for our entertainment, except that Lionel seems absolutely flummoxed,” said Vicereine. The head of the alterationists was in a tuxedo, her shadow taking on the appearance of a large hunting cat pawing the ground beside her. “Maybe you missed your cue?”

  Salt cleared his throat. “I hired her to steal back a book that I lost, the Liber Noctem. It is a jewel in my collection, and I had hoped to have it on display tonight. So, Ms. Hall, do you have my book?”

  “I do,” she said.

  He smiled at that, with all the satisfaction of someone checkmating a rogue king. “Well then, come and give it to me.”

  He had, after all, arranged a situation where all her choices were bad. The only book she had was the one that had belonged to Knight Singh. She could bluff and give him that. He’d probably appreciate having it, since the cover was stuffed with pages full of heinous shit he’d done. But no matter if she gave him something valuable, he’d still accuse her of foul play. Of trying to pass off that book as his lost one.

  Charlie took a deep breath, letting Salt really enjoy the moment. Then she reached into her backpack and took out what she’d brought from the safe in the library, where it had been locked up tight the whole time. The famed Book of Night. The genuine Liber Noctem. Light streaming through the crystals of the chandelier reflected off the polished metal cover, sending rainbows along the wall.

  The smile left Salt’s face so quickly that it seemed as though it had been slapped off. “Where did you find—”

  “I stole it,” Charlie said. “That’s what I do. You told me to get it, so I got it.”

  The Hierophant reached for the book with pale, trembling fingers. “Mine. Those secrets belong to me.”

  32

  THE CHARLATAN

  This close, Charlie could smell the sour sweat of the Hierophant’s body. She held tight to the book and turned her gaze to Salt. “Shall I give it to him?”

  “No!” Salt barked, then saw the warning in the Hierophant’s face and modulated his tone. “Bring it to me, so I can verify this is the authentic volume.”

  Charlie frowned. “So you don’t want me to give it to him?”

  “Do not make me repeat myself,” Salt said. “Bring the book to me.”

  Her heart pounded. There were so many chances to get things wrong here and only one chance to get them right. People were watching. Vicereine was close by, but so far with no reason to be anything but amused.

  “I can promise you this copy of the Liber Noctem is authentic,” Charlie said. “Since I got it from your safe, along with a certificate from Sotheby’s and a receipt from the auction. The book never left the house. You just let everyone believe that it was stolen.”

  “Is that true?” the Hierophant croaked out.

  Salt began walking toward Charlie, allowing him to lower his voice, making it harder for the rest of the crowd to listen in. “Let’s discuss this further in private.”

  Charlie had puzzled over why Salt had set her an impossible task with an even more impossible deadline, unless he wanted her to fail. It was thinking about that which had made her remember Knight Singh’s opinion on the Liber Noctem.

  If there had been a ritual in the book to let a Blight take human form, then nothing made much sense.

  But if there was no ritual, if the book was as useless as Knight had claimed, then Salt was free to employ the rumor to convince a Blight to help him. But that depended on keeping the book forever out of the Blight’s hands—and yet seemingly obtainable enough to stay hooked. Hence the need for a thief of the original volume (Edmund Carver), a new possible lead (Paul Ecco), and the most recent red herring (Charlie Hall).

  If she hadn’t shown up, Salt could have convinced the Hierophant she had the book and was hiding it from him. And Charlie would wind up with her guts smeared on the ceiling, just like the others.

  Or she could have shown up to the party to say she hadn’t found the Liber Noctem. That might help some, but Salt would accuse her of holding out, and her guts would still wind up on the ceiling.

  What Salt needed was someone for the Hierophant to blame. Anyone other than him. Which meant he knew where the book was, and the simplest answer for how he knew was that he still had it.

  She’d had a bad moment when she saw Red in the cell, not just astonished by him, but abruptly sure she’d been wrong about everything. But then she realized he must have been the convincer. The reason the Hierophant believed Salt in the first place. If there wasn’t a ritual, then how could he exist?

  “Private? I don’t think so,” said Charlie, shaking her head. “You’re responsible for a lot of murders. Knight Singh, for one. I’d rather not be next.”

  A wave of murmuring moved through the crowd. It was one thing to chuckle at a party’s host bickering with a guest; an accusation like the one Charlie was making required a more serious response from the Cabal.

  “Come along.” Salt grabbed for her arm.

  “What did that young woman say?” asked Malik. He stepped forward, several others with him. Charlie didn’t think surrounding Salt was intentional, but it spoke to how the mood of the room had shifted.

  Two things she’d known from the time Salt forced her into his car at gunpoint were that he wanted control more than anything, maybe even more than power. And that he expected absolute obedience from those he considered beneath him.

  He sent his shadow toward her. They were close enough that it might not have been immediately noticeable to the crowd, but she felt it brushing against her shoulder and cheek, as though she’d been touched by a piece of muslin whipped by a breeze.

  She only had time to gasp once before it flooded into her skin. She could feel it worming inside of her, trying to force her to speak. Trying to make her tongue form the words that would cause her to deny everything.

  Long ago, when Charlie had come to Salt’s house with Rand, she had practiced rolling up her eyes into her head to indicate that she was possessed. Had been ready to speak with another voice. Ever since Alonso, she’d found it disturbingly easy to be someone other than Charlie Hall. A relief, to give in to such an old urge.

  “I’m drunk!” she shouted in a deeper voice than her natural one. “And a liar! A drunk liar! Also, I have a secret resentment toward the fantastic, handsome, totally-not-a-killer Lionel Salt! Who is most certainly not trying to puppet me!”

  He stared at her, mouth agape. Everyone was looking at his shadow now, the way it had bent against the light to get to her.