She strode over to them, giving a wave with a gloved hand that had metal claws attached to the tips of the cloth.

  “You’re a tall drink of water,” Odette said, looking Vincent up and down. Her gaze didn’t travel to the asphalt, to his missing shadow.

  Vince wiped a hand on his pants and stuck it out. “Vince,” he said. “You must be Odette. Heard a lot about you.”

  Charlie wondered what her boss saw when she looked up at him. He had dirty fingernails from working on the car. A lot of dark blond hair covering his face. Gray eyes that looked hollow in the wrong light. Handsome, in that broad-shouldered, hard-jawed way that seems to defy decadence. Handsome enough to annoy her when people looked at him, and then at her, and drew unflattering conclusions.

  After a beat, Odette gave him her hand as though she were a queen bestowing it to a knight. “All bad, I hope.”

  “Awful,” he agreed, giving her a lopsided smile.

  Odette winked at Charlie. “The quiet ones always do surprise you,” she said.

  Then she headed inside.

  Vince was almost done with the repair when a Lexus parked behind Rapture, as far from them as possible. A white-haired man in mirrored sunglasses got out. He had a sport coat on and immaculate boat shoes.

  “Is that guy lost?” Vince asked.

  “He’s probably a client,” Charlie told him. Odette still had a few.

  “Huh,” Vince said.

  The man had to pass by them on his way to the main entrance. He kept glancing in their direction nervously.

  “Some of the guys have been tied up by her for four decades,” Charlie whispered. That was a decade and change longer than she’d been alive.

  “Rich,” Vince said.

  “No doubt,” Charlie agreed. “It’s funny. None of them are ever what I expect. He looks like a regular businessman, the kind of guy who’d have a winter house in Florida, brag about his grandkids, vote Republican. Have a puppeteer on staff for corporate espionage but be too nervous to look them in the eye.”

  Vince squinted at the man. “He’s wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch. South of France, for the house. He can afford it.”

  Charlie frowned. “I hope she hits him extra hard.”

  Vince turned back to the engine, and Charlie watched flies buzz around the lot. As the afternoon stretched late, it came to her that it was odd for Vince to know about a watch so fancy that she’d never even heard of it.

  Maybe his grandfather with the limo knew about rich people. Or maybe Vince took stuff people left in hotel rooms. The idea that he might have secrets bothered Charlie, even though she had plenty. But he wasn’t supposed to be like her.

  “Tell me about some of Odette’s other clients,” he said. “While I work.”

  Vince loved gossip, even about people he didn’t know. If you met him, silent and six-foot-whatever, you wouldn’t think it. But he’d listen, and comment, like the stories mattered. He remembered the details.

  Sometimes she wished he wouldn’t. It made her worried he was going to see through her patter and figure out the real reason she’d left the game.

  Charlie had spent so many years in it. Robbing libraries, museums, antiquarian book fairs. Lied and charmed and conned, picked pockets and locks, and even once trapped a Blight in an onyx binding box. She might not have been magic, but she’d cross-pollinated the magical world like a bee.

  Gloamists didn’t have spells, per se, but they had notes on techniques and experiments done by glooms through the ages. At first, there was a movement to digitize and share them in a large online free library, until people began to upload hacked versions.

  The library was formally dismantled after a copy of the Cosmometria Gnomonica was uploaded, detailing a way for gloamists to gain power by pushing past previous limits by feeding an open stream of life energy to their shadow. Thirty gloamists died before it became clear that the critical last part, which explained how to calculate how much was too much and cut off the supply, had been deleted from the PDF version.

  Ever since, gloamists guarded what they had and were suspicious of anything they couldn’t authenticate. Which led to hiring people like Charlie to get originals.

  It was scary work, dealing with people who could rip out a part of her. Once, caught, a gloamist altered Charlie’s shadow so that she was so filled with terror that she trembled in her closet for the better part of a week. Not only that, but cons required her to become other people. When she came up for air between jobs, Charlie wouldn’t quite know who she was. She’d get another tattoo, as though it could root her in place. She’d get drunk. Maybe she’d find someone to break her heart. Burn through a chunk of cash, squirrel the rest away, and then do it all over again.

  It ended when she stole a volume for Vicereine, the head of a local gang of alterationists who called themselves the Artists. A nineteenth-century memoir, not easy to get off the puppeteer in Albany who’d lifted it from some guy in Atlanta. Charlie had taken a month to worm herself into the right position to get her hands on it.

  Then, Charlie’s boyfriend, a cowardly shitlord named Mark, tried to sell it out from under her. He made a side deal with another gang for far less than the book was worth. Like Posey, he wanted a quickened shadow and was willing to believe that gloamists could help him.

  Charlie could have told him that she’d discovered what he was trying to do and dumped his ass. But no, Charlie needed to make her point by circling it in fire.

  When he tried to make the exchange, Mark discovered that the book was blank. Charlie had carefully removed the cover and replaced the insides with a college-ruled notebook from Target. For the insult, they cut off Mark’s shadow and all the fingers of his right hand.

  He’d been a musician.

  Charlie tried to tell herself that he deserved it, and that it wasn’t her fault. But that didn’t stop her from crashing hard into depression and self-loathing.

  Back then she was working at Bar Ten, and after her shift, she’d lie in bed until she had to work again, too exhausted to move. Eventually, she lost her job. Started burning through her savings. A couple months later, Mark and his brother shot up her car while it was stopped at a light. Only one bullet hit her, but that was plenty. Two hit the guy in the passenger seat, a hookup, who died immediately.

  It haunted her that Posey could have been sitting in his place.

  Mark and his brother went straight to prison, where they were rotting to this day.

  All of it because Charlie had needed to show off. To exact revenge. Charlie Hall, at her best when doing her worst. Whenever she tried to create something, it broke apart in her hands. But blowing something up? There, Charlie had an unerring instinct for greatness.

  No more stealing magic, she told herself as she recovered. No more gloamists. No more cons. No more living her life with the volume turned up to eleven. No more putting the people she loved in danger. She’d lost her nerve.

  Not long after the bandages came off, she hooked up with Vince. When she’d noticed him next to her at the bar, her first impulse had been to move as far away as possible. He had a hard jaw, big hands, and angry eyebrows. He was hunched over his drink like he wanted to punch it. She’d had a bad day in a bad month in a worse year and was exhausted by the idea of getting hassled.

  But he waved down the bartender when she was being ignored and interposed himself between her and the press of the evening crowd. When he spoke, it was to ask her the sort of questions that didn’t demand much.

  She liked his deep voice and the strangeness of his eyes, so pale a gray that they seemed barely a color at all. She appreciated that he hadn’t hit on her. And he wasn’t bad looking. Objectively, he was far hotter than the guys to whom she was usually attracted—pretty, sad, skinny, whippet-faced fast-talkers. Objectively, he looked like he could snap them in half.

  Maybe she needed something different. A nicotine patch of a man. Something to draw off her worst impulses, at least for one night.

  Outside the bar, he’d traced the tattoo of roses and winged beetles along her throat, his fingers gentle. But when she’d twined her arms around his neck and kissed him, he’d pressed her against the rough bricks with all the fervor she could want, his height and the strength of his arms suddenly a real and previously unknown advantage.

  She took him home, and in the morning, he was still there. He made coffee and brought it to her on the mattress, along with toast that was only slightly burnt at the edges. Maybe she loved him a little right then, although she would have never admitted it to herself. He was looking for a place, he said. Did she know anyone with a room to rent?

  But Charlie never let herself forget that Vince’s life with her was a kind of exile. He kept a picture of himself with another woman, one he never talked about, in his wallet. That first night she’d looked through it and found ten dollars, a driver’s license from Minnesota, and the photo, worn thin from the touch of his fingers.

  Every now and again she’d pickpocket him again, to check. It was always there.

  5

  INSIDE OUT

  Although they managed to drive the Corolla home—slowly—it made an alarming clunking noise, and Vince thought he needed a part that it was too late to get. He offered to drop her back at Rapture for her shift, but he wasn’t likely to be back from his cleaning job in time to pick her up.

  Charlie arranged for her friend Barb to give her a lift home, not wanting to be alone on the street again. Barb was a line cook at a vegan restaurant in Northampton that stopped seating at eleven on Fridays; by the time they got the last table turned over, the kitchen clean, and the next day’s food prepped, it was close enough to one in the morning for the timing to work out.

  Standing outside, huddled in her coat, Charlie watched Balthazar leave with Joey Aspirins. She couldn’t help thinking of the nameless murdered man and his tattered shadow. Couldn’t help wondering if Balthazar had ratted the guy out to Salt. She hoped not. She wanted to keep on liking Balthazar.

  When she was a kid, she’d imagined making Salt pay for what he’d done to her. But the idea of revenge was childish, and it died with her childhood. Charlie was pragmatic. People like her didn’t get back at people like Salt.

  Still, she couldn’t help wondering about the Liber Noctem, this book he was apparently desperate to get back. Wondered what it would be like to have something he wanted. To have the power to take something from him.

  Then Charlie reminded herself that she didn’t want to wind up a corpse in an alley, and definitely not the alley just around the corner from her rental house. If she was going to get murdered, she’d like to do it in Paris. Or Tokyo.

  What she did want was her sister in college and her debts paid.

  Well, that was what she wanted to want.

  You can’t quit, Balthazar had told her when she informed him she wasn’t taking jobs. You’re too good. This is the only thing you’re good at. Sometimes Charlie worried he was right about that second part.

  Idly, she took out her phone and tapped out “Liber Noctem” into the search window. An auction notice from Sotheby’s came up:

  LIBER NOCTEM. Colloquially called The Book of Blights, each letter individually stamped into pages comprised of a nickel alloy. Created in 1831 in Scotland by its anonymous author, the book is one of the most significant documents related to the phenomenon of disembodied shadow manifestations. Rumors of an actual Blight being involved in the writing of the book are unconfirmed but add to its historical significance.

  Catalogue Note: Sotheby’s does not endorse carrying out any of the rituals in this book and will ask the buyer to sign papers indemnifying Sotheby’s from any and all related damages.

  Bidding begins at 520,000 GBP.

  The picture that accompanied it was of a silvery book with elaborate clasps, like an old bible. Not exactly an easy thing to hide.

  Could that be what Adam had and was trying to move? What he wanted Amber to take the fall for?

  Barb pulled up in her slightly dented electric-blue minivan, startling Charlie out of her thoughts. Barb powered down the window and cracked a huge smile. “Get in, babycakes.”

  Charlie tossed her bag onto the floor of the passenger side and climbed up after it. Barbara Panganiban was easily her favorite of the people she’d met in the course of getting, and then losing, bartending jobs all over the Valley.

  “A bunch of people are at my house tonight,” Barb told her, throwing the car into reverse. Her thick black hair was pulled into an olive-colored headscarf and her cook’s jacket hung open over a singlet. “I thought about saying something earlier, but I figured it’d be easier to kidnap you.”

  Several times a month, usually on the weekends, Barb and her girlfriend, Aimee, played host to a rotating crew of restaurant workers and other people with shifts that finished after midnight. Barb would make a giant pot of pancit with the recipe her grandmother handed down to her mom back in the Philippines, or defrost arroz caldo, and everyone else would either bring something (mostly liquor) or make something (often experimental).

  Charlie used to show up regularly, back when she and Barb worked together. But then there’d been a con in Worcester, then the even weirder thing in Albany, and then she’d gotten shot. By the time she’d met Vince, her attendance had grown spotty. Still, Charlie should have thought to check the Slack where the dates were posted. If she had, she wouldn’t have been caught by surprise.

  “Oh, come on,” Barb said. “Aimee misses you.”

  That seemed unlikely. Aimee was about ten years older than Barb, skinny, and so quiet that even when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Charlie couldn’t tell if she secretly enjoyed the extreme extrovert energy of these gatherings, or if Aimee just loved Barb so much that she was willing to put up with her girlfriend’s nightmarish idea of fun. Either way, Charlie had never gotten the impression that Aimee had fully committed her to memory.

  “If you don’t mind me being empty-handed.” Maybe it would do her some good to have a night out. If she went home, she’d just think about whether Adam had Salt’s book and if she could get it, or argue with Posey about acquiring DMT. “Vince can pick me up when he gets off work.”

  “Tell him to come in,” Barb said. “I want to meet this mystery guy. Do you know how hard it is to find someone in the Valley that a friend hasn’t already gotten with?”

  Charlie sure did.

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the crowded driveway of an old farmhouse in the shadow of Mount Tom and backing into the Oxbow part of the Connecticut River. It had been in Aimee’s family and come to her after the death of a great-aunt. The place was sprawling, with the last significant updates having been done in the fifties. A finicky mustard-colored electric stove occupied a corner of the kitchen, and a burnt-orange shag rug ran through everywhere else, including the bathrooms.

  They entered to music from a Sonos that at least three people were trying to control at the same time. The air smelled like ginger, fried onions, and pizza.

  Aimee, in leggings and a tank that showed off tattoos of koi running down both her arms, half hiding behind butt-length brown hair, drifted over to kiss Barb. She whispered to Charlie that the drinks and food were in the dining room, and that they were out of ice.

  Charlie thanked her and, deciding that she couldn’t follow Barb around like a duckling, wove through the main area toward the booze. She passed Angel and Ian on the rug, playing what appeared to be chess with a mix of snack food for the pieces. Ian had a vape pen hanging on one corner of his mouth as though it were an old-timey cigar. Both of them worked over at Cosmica, a diner-style restaurant that served buffalo-meat burgers and a lot of cocktails. When Ian noticed her, his mouth opened far enough for the vape pen to fall on the board and send a cheese puff rolling into a potato chip.

  She and Ian had slept together late one night, when neither of them were making good decisions. She hoped that wasn’t going to make the evening awkward.

  A guy was sitting on the couch, head buried in his sketchbook. She recognized him as a webcomic artist. He’d been creating a surprisingly explicit and sprawling story of a mouse warrior for years, but it had only recently started gaining a big readership. There was a rumor that he’d begun making serious money.

  The long-haired man sitting next to him must have thought he was doing well, since he was trying to convince him to invest in a weed truck, like an ice cream truck but selling edibles and joints and creams. It would drive around neighborhoods and, Long Hair Man insisted, be really good for older people with mobility issues. There was some question from the people sitting nearby about whether this was legal, but the really heated debate was around which celebratory weed song the truck should play.

  That led to the subject of rolling bliss, which several of them had done. “I went to this alterationist, Raven, out in Pittsfield,” Long Hair Man said. “And she got me so joyed up, I almost walked out in front of a semi. Worth it, though. It was like that feeling you get when you’re a kid and summer’s just started combined with all the optimism of first love.”

  In the kitchen, Don argued with his girlfriend, Erin. They were a dramatic couple, prone to tears and shouting about which had been mean to the other first. Don was a bartender at Top Hat, a nice place, one of the first Charlie had been fired from.

  She poured four fingers of Old Crow bourbon into a plastic cup and sidled past Don and Erin to get some ice from the freezer before she remembered there wasn’t any. She settled for a little cold water to cut the burn. Don bent his head to hide that he was wiping his eyes.

  At least it wasn’t her crying in the kitchen this time.

  “Charlie Hall!” José called. “Long time. You don’t like us anymore?”

  He was standing in a little knot with Katelynn and Suzie Lambton, who had made that comment to Doreen about Charlie being like the devil.

  “Have you heard from him?” José demanded as she approached them. He worked at a tiny gay bar called Malebox, where he’d met his ex, the one who’d moved to Los Angeles for a guy and stuck Charlie with double shifts.