You’re not doing anything wrong, she told herself.

  Okay, she was doing something wrong, just not what it looked like.

  “Have you been paying attention to what I said at all?” Posey demanded.

  “Definitely,” Charlie lied.

  Posey rolled her eyes and kicked the leg of Charlie’s chair with a slippered foot. “There’s this video where people take ayahuasca and are guided through waking their shadows. Everyone on the message boards are flipping out over it. I know someone with a lake house over by Lake Quinsigamond, and he wants a bunch of us to re-create it—if someone can get the DMT.”

  Charlie raised her eyebrows. “That’s the stuff that makes you vomit all night. And grosser stuff.”

  Posey shrugged. “Can you get it?”

  “DMT?” Charlie said, trying to decide how bad an idea it really was. “I don’t know. Ask around Hampshire College. If someone is dealing it locally, they’re dealing it there. Or maybe when you start at UMass you can see if someone can synthesize you some in the bio lab.”

  Charlie’s sister had spent the last few years bingeing Reddit threads, watching videos, and chatting with other gloamist hopefuls until dawn. But lately things had gotten worse. Posey had started staying up for days at a stretch and not leaving the house for weeks. Despair seemed to be chasing her heels as her shadow refused to quicken. She’d gone so deep down the rabbit hole that Charlie worried it had become an oubliette.

  That was why it was so important for Posey to go to school. At UMass, she could study umbral science with actual professors instead of yutzes from the internet. Maybe she’d even discover some other interest.

  The only problem was the number of forms and fees and surprise charges. While Charlie had gotten together most of the money for this last bill, she didn’t have it all. But she could get it once Doreen’s brother came through and bought them a little more time.

  So Charlie fell back on the family tradition of mostly ignoring the situation and occasionally, guiltily, suggesting that her sister try to go to bed earlier. Acting like her problem was insomnia.

  Like they didn’t both know Posey was drinking buckets of coffee and soda and maybe popping Adderall to stave off exhaustion. At least that would serve her well in undergrad.

  Charlie had a sinking feeling that her sister already had an idea about where she was going to get DMT, and that it’d involve boosting something. Most likely, Charlie boosting something.

  Posey’s cell pinged, and as she checked it, Charlie devoted herself to the drinking of her coffee. She was going to need it.

  “Mom pulled the Seven of Cups today,” Posey muttered, holding up her phone so Charlie could see the photo of their mother holding a tarot card.

  The card of a daydreamer, a searcher. Their mother was living in a long-stay motel with a new guy, but there was always a new guy. She liked to have Posey weigh in on her fortunes, since divinations were free for family.

  Charlie ignored a familiar stab of guilt, dulled by time but never totally gone. “What are you going to tell her?”

  Posey scowled. “What do you care? It’s not like you believe I know what I’m talking about.” At her tone, Lucipurrr looked up from the sink and hissed.

  “That’s not fair,” Charlie said. “And you’re upsetting the cat. She hates it when people fight.”

  Posey ignored her. “There’s a reason they cut shadows off people and sell them. Everyone wants magic. It’s not just me.”

  Charlie glanced automatically toward the bathroom where Vince was showering. She lowered her voice. “I wasn’t criticizing you. Stop being so fucking paranoid.”

  When Charlie was a kid, someone had given her a box of tricks for a birthday. A handkerchief that pulled inside out to change colors. A hat with a false bottom. A stack of marked cards. She’d practiced night after night. But in the end, it was just another kind of fakery. A different way of lying.

  Of course, Charlie knew what it was like to want magic.

  Posey dragged her laptop over. “Let me show you something.”

  Charlie took another sip of coffee and started to make a pile of the mail scattered over the table. Catalogs, electric bill, propane bill, cell phone bill, another letter from the hospital marked in red, and three from a collection company. The total crept higher each month, with interest. Plus, she was going to have to resuscitate a 1998 Toyota Corolla, before it got towed. But first, Posey.

  “Think about all the things that have been covered up,” Charlie’s little sister said. “Testing radiation on dead babies, forcing companies to poison the stuff used to make bootleg alcohol during Prohibition. And not just our government, or any government. Companies. Institutions. If there was a way to quicken a shadow, they’d hide it from us.”

  Posey turned around the screen of her computer to show a video of teenagers sneaking around a hospital. Underneath, the file claimed to be undoctored surveillance footage. The kids’ eyes glowed in the green infrared light. It was creepy, seeing them giggling beside sleeping patients, snipping with their fingers like they were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors—and only picking scissors, over and over and over.

  “What are they using all those shadows for?” Posey asked. “They must have a way to wake them.”

  Charlie frowned at the screen, unimpressed. She didn’t think much of shadow robbers. They were the sloppy stickup artists of the magical crime world. And she figured shadow dealers were selling to people who’d lost their shadows through excessive alteration, or used them for experiments. If someone really knew how to quicken a shadow, it seemed unlikely to Charlie they’d just sit on that information when the world would be full of money ready to rain down on them.

  “You ever heard of shadows ripping?” Charlie asked, partially because she wanted to know, and partially to change the subject.

  Posey scowled. “What?”

  “I saw one—last night—that was—I don’t know—it looked like it had been through a shredder or something. And there was a man who…”

  Posey stared at her so oddly that Charlie let the last sentence trail off. Posey, who believed everything, didn’t appear to believe her. Charlie wished there was a way for her to prove the shadow had come from a tattered plastic bag. That the man had been wearing gray gloves. But Charlie knew what she’d seen.

  “Someone must have been trying to cut it off,” Posey said finally. “They say it’s like having your soul cut away from your body to lose a shadow.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And you know Vince—”

  “Oh, come on, stop,” Charlie said, cutting her off. “He has a fucking soul.”

  “There’s something wrong with him,” Posey said. “He couldn’t do that grim shit job of his if there wasn’t.”

  Vince cleaned hotel rooms after something happened involving a lot of blood or a body—a stabbing, a shooting, an overdose. His boss handled dispatch, farming out the work to three freelancers who worked off the books: Winnie, an older woman with grown children who had been a professional clown before she started this. Craig, who said he was doing it for a year to learn what gore looked like before he applied to Tom Savini’s school for special effects makeup. And Vince.

  “You’re one to talk about shit jobs,” Charlie said.

  Posey ignored her. “He’s too quiet. And I think he’s been lying about speaking French.”

  Charlie gave a weird snort-laugh, surprised by the ridiculousness of the accusation and the seriousness with which Posey spoke. “He’s done what now?”

  Posey scowled. “We were watching television and there was an episode where one of the characters said something in French and he grinned before the show explained what any of it meant. It wasn’t just bonjour or whatever, either; he understood an entire French joke.”

  “So he took it in high school. So what?”

  Posey shook her head. “No one remembers the language they took in high school.”

  “I’ve got no idea what bothers you about him,” Charlie said, throwing up her hands. “And I don’t think you do either.”

  “I guess he’s good-looking, but you know there’s something missing there. You text other guys behind his back.” Posey grabbed Charlie’s cell phone off the table. “See? Oooh, Adam, let’s meet somewhere private.”

  “Give me that!” Charlie grabbed it out of her hand.

  “Admit it, what you like best about Vince is how much he’s willing to put up with.”

  Before Charlie could explain, Vince’s heavy step announced him. His hair was wet, his shirt tight over the thick, muscled part of his upper arms, his gray eyes tinted greenish from the yellow walls.

  Posey got up, then pushed past him, laptop tucked under her arm. She wasn’t gentle either, shoving her shoulder against his chest.

  Vince raised his eyebrows. “She finally heading to bed?” he asked, and went to pour coffee from the pot.

  “Hopefully,” Charlie said, forcing her gaze away. She wondered how much he’d overheard and if he’d confront her. What he might admit, if rage loosened his tongue. Would he tell her that he wished he was somewhere else, with someone else? That he was just marking time? Would he stop being so careful?

  Charlie Hall, imp of the perverse. Appreciated a relationship for being simple and still tempted to see if she could make a complicated mess of it.

  Impulsively, she picked up her phone and searched for questions in French.

  “Voulez-vous plus de café?” she asked, stumbling over the pronunciation.

  He stared at her in confused alarm, which was understandable since she’d just spouted gibberish. “What?”

  Charlie shook her head, feeling ridiculous. “Nothing.”

  “We better go look at your car,” he said, taking a deep swallow from his mug.

  She bit her lip. “Okay. Yeah.”

  * * *

  Vince drove a white van, rusty parts covered with house paint. It was easily as old as Charlie’s car and equally likely to give up the ghost at an inconvenient moment, although it hadn’t so far. She swung herself up into the passenger seat. An old Dunkin’ foam coffee cup rested in the center console, next to a phone charger with the prepaid phone he always used plugged in and a yellowed paperback entitled Cry of Evil with a lady on the cover holding a gun in a sexy but unlikely position. A tree-shaped air freshener hung from the mirror, only adding a layer of lemon oil to the aggressively bleach, vinegar, and Lysol smell of the back.

  Vince’s gaze was on the road. Charlie studied his profile. His jawline. His hands on the wheel.

  “Last night,” she said. “I think I saw a dead body.”

  He glanced at her. “Is that what you and your sister were arguing about?”

  “We weren’t—” she started, then stopped herself. “Posey just needs someone she can shout at. She’s wired from all the caffeine, irritated from not enough sleep. And there was a video of kids breaking into a hospital that bothered her.”

  Vince didn’t look as though he entirely believed her. “Where did you see the body?”

  “On my way home.”

  He glanced at her, frowned. “Walking?”

  “I was fine,” she said as he pulled into the empty parking lot of the bar. “It was just weird. I never saw anyone dead before.”

  He must see bodies all the time, at his work. But he didn’t try to one-up her by pointing that out.

  He didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t have been out alone or try to make her promise that she wouldn’t do it again either. He never told her how to act, or what to wear—which was, for the record, an extremely boring black v-neck t-shirt, black jeans, and checkerboard Vans—and that was good, of course. But there was a part of her that kept wanting to squabble. Like Posey, maybe she needed someone to yell at. Maybe she wanted to be yelled at.

  Charlie tried to swallow the impulse.

  She turned to sit with the door open, letting her legs dangle out of the van as Vince opened up the hood of her Corolla. He started poking at the insides, then went around to try to turn the car on. It didn’t so much as shudder.

  “Can you tell what’s wrong?”

  “Starter, I think,” he said, frowning.

  It made her twitchy to sit by and watch, even though she knew next to nothing about cars. “You need me to do anything?”

  He shook his head. “Not at the moment.”

  She watched him work, the bend of his body. The sureness of his hands. And the way he seemed to defy the sunlight, casting nothing on the ground.

  Charlie had known a local girl who’d sold her shadow. She’d been a pole dancer, over at what locals unkindly referred to as the Whately Ballet. She finished her shift around the same time as Charlie, so they ran into each other sometimes at the few eateries open all night.

  “He paid me five grand,” Linda had confided in a whisper, her expression hard to read. “And it’s not like I was using it.”

  “Who paid?” Charlie had asked, taking a bite of very oily fried eggs.

  “I’d never seen the guy before. Bought a lap dance, and that’s when he made the offer. At first I laughed, but he was serious. Said there was someone who wanted a shadow just like mine.”

  The diner had been dimly lit and Linda was sitting. From that angle, it hadn’t been obvious anything was missing.

  “Do you notice that it’s gone?” Charlie had asked, frowning at the blurred edges of her own shadow.

  Linda had taken a slug of her coffee. “You know when there’s a word and you feel like it’s on the tip of your tongue? It’s like that. There was something inside me that isn’t anymore, but I don’t know what. I’m not sure I miss it, but I feel like I should.”

  Every time she thought of the conversation, it made her wonder if it was how Vince felt too. But when she’d asked him about it, he’d told her he couldn’t remember what it had been like before. And when she’d asked him if he wanted a new shadow, he said he didn’t need one.

  Charlie picked up her burner phone and scrolled through the local news, looking for some mention of a body found in Easthampton. Nothing, even though the local crime beat at the paper was so sleepy that shoplifting and drunk students got reported. Who was the dead guy? And had he really stolen a book from Lionel Salt?

  That rich bastard’s name stood at the top of lists of donors to museums and charities and hot chocolate runs. Kids swapped stories of seeing Salt’s car creeping along different roads—a matte black and silver Rolls-Royce Phantom Mansory Conquistador—a car whose name guys in high school had delighted in saying in its entirety so often that it lodged in the head like an earwormed song.

  But most people hadn’t been inside Salt’s horror show of a house or watched him poison someone in the hopes of stealing a quickened shadow. If there were a different set of rules for the rich, Lionel Salt operated without rules at all. Just thinking about him made Charlie nervous.

  She turned her mind back to the dead guy. He’d ordered bourbon and paid with a card. Which meant there’d be a receipt in Odette’s office with his name on it. If she knew who he was, she’d be able to ask around. Find out more about what he thought he’d been doing.

  Her phone buzzed, and it took her a moment to realize it was her burner. Adam. We haven’t talked payment.

  This was why Adam needed Balthazar as a go-between, not just for anonymity, but because Balthazar would have nailed down the cash immediately.

  Since she wasn’t planning on paying him anyway, she could have promised any amount. But she figured she’d take the opportunity to find out just how much bliss he’d been rolling. Can we work something out? she texted.

  The reply came quickly. What kind of connections do you have?

  Charlie frowned. She’d expected him to bring up bliss, not whatever this was about. I know people, she wrote.

  He took a moment to respond, and when he did it was a long message: I have something that I need to move Somehting big but I don’t want anyone to know it’s me making the deal. Act like its you and ill get your thing for free.

  A job like the one she was offering could have gotten him a grand, easy. Twice that, if the client was desperate. What could Adam have that he needed to hide? He was, by all accounts, not a particularly skilled thief. And he had Balthazar to move things for him.

  Sure, she wrote. Who are you making the deal with?

  He typed his message back fast. All you’ll have to do is talk on the hotel phone. I’ll tell you what to say.

  Charlie noticed Vince watching her and shoved her phone guiltily into her pocket. “How did you learn about cars?”

  “I told you my grandfather was strict, right?” Vince said, his attention returning to the guts of the Corolla. “He taught me lots of stuff. He believed in the improving power of work, no matter how old you were. He didn’t believe in excuses. And he had a limo that broke down sometimes.”

  “So he was a livery driver?” Charlie asked. “He let you ride in the back sometimes?”

  He shrugged. “Dropped me off the first day of high school. Everyone stared at me like I was somebody.”

  She tried to picture him back then. Had he been a gangly kid who ate two lunches and never filled out? The boy who sat in the back of the class and read comics? The track star? Nothing fit.

  “You wouldn’t have liked me,” Charlie told him, bumping the toe of her sneakers against the van door. “I was a weird kid.”

  Her boobs came in at ten, cresting over the tops of her Walmart bras. Between that and her home life, she’d kept her head down until high school, when she found ways to make herself look scary. Oversized clothes, lots of eyeliner, and hair that hung in her face. Frankenstein boots that she wore until the soles peeled off.

  Vince gave her a heavy-lidded look and she wondered if he was going to make a joke.

  “I like weird,” he said instead, and went back to disconnecting something on the car.

  He had no idea.

  A few moments later, Odette’s shiny purple Mini Cooper pulled into the lot. She got out, a voluminous black caftan billowing around her. The faded facial tattoos on her papery skin and the heavy silver piercings along her lips, cheek, and all the way up her ears made it clear that she’d been a badass while they were still in diapers.