If someone had put a marshmallow in front of her as a child, she would have eaten it straightaway, because adults couldn’t be trusted to keep their promises.

  At ten, Charlie got a half-hour dinner break. It was her chance to pee and scarf something down before she was back on until one, with just one more fifteen-minute break between. Usually, she went a few blocks over to Daikaiju for ramen, but tonight she walked to the convenience store on the corner and got microwavable mac ’n’ cheese, a container of sad-looking grapes, and a coconut water.

  She drank the coconut water on the way back, tossing the container in the garbage before she passed through the large black double doors of Rapture. She headed straight to the break room. Although technically part of the backstage, it had a microwave and a place to sit.

  Since the performers were on stage, there was no one to object to her being there. She made her way to a satiny pink sofa that looked only slightly moth-eaten. Makeup cluttered a long mirrored counter. Shimmery stage outfits hung on a garment rack that bowed in the middle as though about to collapse beneath their weight. A hook on the wall held a few abandoned garments, including a deep red satin pantsuit that Charlie coveted, waiting for their owners to come and retrieve them. A small side table next to the sofa held a dirty cream landline phone.

  The main area of Rapture, including the bar and the stage, wasn’t all that large. You could get perhaps a hundred people in, packed tightly together—although if you counted Balthazar’s basement shadow parlor, you could probably cram in thirty more. Only one hall ran into the back, leading to the dressing room where Charlie’s mac ’n’ cheese spun on the glass microwave plate. Directly across from it was the large metal door that led to Odette’s office.

  Just one quick peek at the receipt, she told herself. His name wasn’t a secret. Charlie had run his card through the machine. She’d given him the paper to sign and the pen to sign with. If she’d been paying more attention, she’d already know.

  Crossing the hall, Charlie knocked. When no one answered, she let herself inside.

  Wallpaper with a pattern of gleaming golden knives covered the room. A powder-coated neon purple steel desk rested in the center, a brass lamp glowing atop it. An art deco–style bookshelf ran along the back wall, piled with stacks of papers. Beside it was a second steel door. This one was ajar, revealing Odette’s dungeon.

  From where Charlie was standing, it appeared to be small and well organized, with a dog cage in one corner and a Saint Andrew’s cross dominating the rest of the space.

  Charlie liked Odette. She liked working at Rapture. Odette let her order in dry ice, infuse vodka with Meyer lemons or ginger or peppercorns in big glass vats they kept in a cool spot beneath the stage. Charlie got paid and got decent tips, and if someone gave her a hard time, they got removed.

  It was stupid to risk a good job for something that couldn’t really matter. Even if she found the book, so what? So she’d take something away from Salt—but it would be nothing like what he took from her.

  But even as she thought that, her fingers were digging through the receipts on Odette’s desk. Charlie Hall, failing the marshmallow test. No impulse control. Curious as a cat on crack.

  And there it was, Four Roses, $4.25. He’d added a fifty-cent tip, which sucked, but whatever, speak no ill of the dead. Paul Ecco. Charlie stuffed the receipts back into the neon purple envelope and zipped it up, repeating his name in her head. She grabbed a pen and was about to retreat back to the break room to write it on her hand when Odette came in. She startled to see Charlie.

  Fuck, Charlie thought. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Charlotte?” Odette asked, stern as a schoolmistress. This must be the exact tone of voice she used before she slapped the shit out of someone and then charged them for it.

  “Sorry,” Charlie said, holding up what was in her hand. “I was looking for a pen.”

  “These are my pens, my dear.” Odette looked no less irritated but seemed to believe Charlie’s crime was exactly what she’d said it was.

  “Sorry,” Charlie mumbled again.

  “And I’d prefer you didn’t come back here without my explicit permission. We’re decadent here at Rapture, and informal, but that doesn’t mean there are no rules.”

  “Of course.” Charlie nodded.

  “Good,” Odette said, in a way that made it clear Charlie was dismissed.

  She slunk from the room, entirely aware of how lucky she’d been.

  As she ate her sad food in the greenroom, slathered in hot sauce from a packet, she googled “Paul Ecco” on her phone. No obituary, nothing in the local news. She added “book” to the search and was surprised to find that the third hit listed him as a “rare and antiquarian book dealer” at a place called Curiosity Books. The website boasted a large online inventory and some kind of physical store in one of the Easthampton mill buildings that saw customers “by appointment only.” It featured some first editions, mostly science fiction and comics, and a whole section devoted to antique magic tomes.

  Rare book dealers occupied an interesting position in the ecosystem of gloaming. They were the ones willing to comb through out-of-the-way used bookstores, going through piles of old musty boxes, looking for the one hidden gem. They might discover volumes that no one else even knew existed. Or they could be fences for thieves looking for the highest bidder.

  Of course, it was possible that Paul Ecco was both a rare book dealer and a thief, but it seemed more likely that he’d been who Adam cut a deal with, to move the Liber Noctem. After Ecco’s death, Adam would need someone else, which would have been why he’d sounded out Charlie.

  If that was true, Adam had probably hung on to the book, which was good news. But why was Ecco bringing around a few pages if he’d had access to the whole thing? Had he been playing Balthazar?

  Maybe she better plan to hit his place after all. Which meant finding out if anyone was home.

  The old corded phone had a dial tone when Charlie brought it to her ear. She punched in the number of the bookshop. Two rings and someone answered.

  “Curiosity Books.” The voice was gruff, and a little too eager.

  “Is Paul there?” Charlie asked, wondering what answer they’d give.

  “This is him. You looking for a book?”

  “An illustrated edition of The Witch and the Unlucky Brother,” Charlie improvised, heart pounding. Unless this was a different Paul Ecco, the person on the other end of the line was posing as a dead man. “We spoke about it yesterday?”

  Yesterday, a day after he would have been murdered.

  “Ah yeah,” the man said. “Some boxes just came in, so I’ll have to look through the inventory and get back to you. Why don’t you give me your name and number…?”

  He paused, waiting for Charlie to supply the rest.

  The problem with phones and caller ID was that he very probably had Rapture’s number already, so the only thing left to lie about was her name.

  “Ms. Damiano,” she said, giving him Vince’s surname instead of her own. “And you can ask for me at this number.”

  “I will get back to you very soon,” he said ominously. “Good evening, Ms. Damiano.”

  Because that wasn’t creepy at all.

  She checked her cell. Seven minutes before she had to be behind the bar. Not a lot of time. But there was one other person who knew something worth knowing about Paul Ecco.

  Charlie pushed aside the velvet curtain, took that first step onto the onyx top step—mirrored by the onyx lintel over the threshold—and then down the stairs into Balthazar’s shadow parlor.

  Although weakening the power of shadows for the brief period of passing over the step wasn’t particularly useful, the other property of onyx was more so—it made quickened shadows solid. That was what made onyx attached to weapons particularly valuable; it meant that gloamists’ shadows could be struck.

  The space was low-ceilinged, with the same black, light-sucking walls as the rest of Rapture. A few people sat at tables with their drinks, heads bent in conference. One girl had her eyes shut as the gloom beside her did something to her shadow that looked a lot like stitching. A boy with a skateboard slouched low in a chair, resting his head against the wall, eyes rolling up into his head.

  Toward the back was another velvet curtain. Inside, a pair of club chairs—for clients—were arranged opposite a small beat-up wooden desk where Balthazar sat. Joey Aspirins leaned against the far wall, arms folded over his chest.

  “You got an appointment?” Joey Aspirins demanded, louder than was necessary.

  Balthazar waved airily. “Oh, don’t be silly. That’s the girl from the bar. What’s your name again—Shar? Cher?”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  “Charlie!” He snapped his fingers as though it had been on the very tip of his tongue. “You’ve reconsidered taking on jobs. I knew you would. Welcome back into my good graces.”

  Balthazar had wavy black hair and long eyelashes and wore a messy black suit with a messy black tie over a wrinkled shirt. An onyx tiepin was stuck into his lapel. Word was, he used to be an alterationist and had burned up his shadow by using it too hard. He still had the cleaved tongue of a gloom and wore a silver stud at the apex of the split. He came in late, left early, and often forgot to pay the rent to Odette. He was the exact sort of skinny fast-talker that Charlie usually got involved with and then regretted.

  Joey Aspirins, by contrast, was small, wiry, and sunken-cheeked in a way that spoke of ill health, maybe addiction, in his past. He wore his gray hair military-short. He had a lot of tattoos, including a few crawling across his throat, combat boots, and a wardrobe that seemed to consist entirely of white t-shirts with short-sleeve button-ups over them. When he looked at Charlie, she knew he didn’t expect her to be smart. Well, she didn’t think he was some kind of genius either.

  Charlie put her hand on her hip. “I’m headed off break. I thought I’d ask if I could get you anything from the bar?”

  “Aren’t you thoughtful,” Balthazar said, skeptical but not about to turn down a drink. “Perhaps that old-fashioned you make with amaro?”

  “Orange peel and a cherry?”

  “A couple of cherries,” he said. “I like a lot of sweet with my bitter.”

  Nice line. With great force of will, Charlie didn’t roll her eyes. “And I wanted to ask you something.”

  “You don’t say.” Balthazar was the picture of innocence.

  She sighed. “There was a man I saw the other night on the street. He had shadows for hands. Do you know him?”

  “You’ve met the new Hierophant,” he said.

  The Hierophant. The magician in a tarot deck and a position among the gloamists. Locally, shadow magicians came together to choose representatives from each discipline to sit in what they—perhaps not incorrectly—called a Cabal.

  The representatives were well-known. Vicereine, famous for causing a washed-up actor to win an Oscar with his post-altered-shadow performance and having altered her influencer ex-boyfriend so that his shadow’s head looked like a pig. Her gang of Artists had grown over the years to be highly influential, in part because alterations were so lucrative.

  Malik was rumored to have puppeted his shadow to steal an extremely large ruby from the British Museum before they installed onyx, while Bellamy of the masks had no reputation so to speak of, which was a reputation in itself for those of the masked discipline.

  Then there was Knight Singh. After his murder, they were going to have to find someone else.

  The Cabal oversaw whatever adjudication was needed outside of the law among gloamists, and all of them put in a little money to hunt and trap the one thing that no gloamist wanted the daylight world to know too much about: Blights.

  Whatever unlucky fucker crossed the Cabal was given the position of Hierophant.

  “He didn’t look very friendly when I saw him,” Charlie said. “But I guess none of them are.”

  If the Hierophant was in the alley with the body, it was very likely Paul Ecco had been murdered by a Blight.

  “That guy who came in the other night trying to get you to sell something for him,” Charlie said. “How come you tossed him out?”

  “You know why they call this guy Joey Aspirins?” Balthazar cut her off, nodding to his companion.

  Charlie shrugged.

  Balthazar’s easy smile faded and she had a sense of the menace underneath. “Because he makes headaches go away. And you are one. You were good, Charlie. One of the best. Come back to work and we’ll talk. Otherwise, get out.”

  As she went back to the bar and made Balthazar his cocktail, Charlie reminded herself Paul Ecco’s murder shouldn’t matter to her. His choice of a drink wasn’t that interesting and his tip sucked. He was dead, sure, but lots of people died. Probably Adam was the one with the book, anyway.

  As she got back from delivering the booze, she was flagged down by a guy wearing a neatly trimmed goatee and locs. He wanted to do the whole absinthe thing, with the water and the sugar cube on fire, and wanted five of his friends to do it too. Then there was a scotch drinker on the other side of the bar who wanted to debate the relative smokiness and saltiness of Speysides.

  By the time Rapture was closing, Charlie had pulled her hair into two sweaty pigtails and slung a wet towel across her neck. Balthazar and Joey Aspirins were gone. The performers were sitting together in the corner with Odette, drinking pale purple aviations while Charlie pocketed her tips for the night and counted out the till.

  “Is this what you thought you’d be doing with your life?” Odette was asking.

  “Oh no, honey,” said one. “My mother wanted me to be a doctor.”

  The three of them laughed as Charlie loaded the dishwasher. One of the bar-backs, Sam, swept up broken glass.

  That’s when the doors opened. A bearded guy in a deep green fisherman’s jacket walked in, his shadow in the shape of wings at his back.

  “We’re closed,” Odette called, turning in her chair and making a grand gesture with one hand. “Come back on another night, dear.”

  The bearded man’s gaze went to Odette and her table, then over to Charlie. “Ms. Damiano?” he asked, and for a moment, Charlie didn’t understand. Then she did, and felt a flush of horror. This was the man on the other end of the phone, the one who’d pretended to be the late Paul Ecco.

  “Charlie Hall,” she said, pointing to herself.

  This was a lounge, after all. People passed through. Used phones. She told herself there was no way her voice was so distinct that he could be sure she was the one who’d called.

  But as he crossed the room, heading toward the bar, she could tell he’d made his decision. And as he walked, his shadow began to grow, feathers lengthening and then rolling toward Charlie like fog.

  On the other side of the room, the performers gasped and Odette stood up so quickly that her chair fell over.

  Charlie stopped moving.

  The dark reached toward her with suddenly knifelike fingers. She threw herself against the shelves, making the bottles behind her shake dangerously.

  And then it slid away, as though they’d all imagined it. As though nothing had happened. The man’s shadow looked utterly normal, unaltered. No longer even in the shape of wings.

  “Abracadabra, bitch,” he said with a grin, leaning his arm on the scratched wood of the bar top.

  7

  THE PAST

  Charlie hadn’t thought there was anyone she could like less than Travis, until Rand came along.

  He was one of Mom’s crystals-and-tarot friends and had been particularly skeptical when she was channeling Alonso. He hadn’t thought much of her, so she was surprised when one day Mom told her that he was waiting for her in the main room of their apartment.

  “What does he want?” Charlie had asked.

  “He said that he’d been doing a reading and there was something that concerned you. He wanted to tell you himself.” Mom was boiling green tea in a regular pot with several pieces of quartz at the bottom, for clarity of thought. “Go on in. I’ll join you in a minute.”

  Rand was sitting on the couch. His mustache looked even longer than it had before, twisted up with wax on both sides into a style he called “imperial” and everyone else called “hipster.” He had on a tweed jacket and slacks, only slightly worn at the elbows and knees. It all combined to give him an affable look that fell somewhere between professor, old-timey saloon owner, and Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly.

  One of his main gambits was convincing older women that he was special and that they were special through their connection to him. Charlie had no idea that Alonso was stepping on his game.

  She also didn’t know that Rand was a con artist.

  “Sit down,” he said, patting the couch beside him.

  She chose the chair that was as far as she thought she could go without seeming rude.

  He gave her the fake smile that adults give kids—too broad. “Your mother probably told you that I have a message for you.”

  She just kept looking at him. The only good thing that living with Travis had done for her was free her from wanting to please adults.

  He cleared his throat, leaned forward, and kept going. “But it isn’t really a message from me, it’s a message from Alonso.”

  Charlie opened her mouth to object, before she realized that she couldn’t. If she did, she’d be admitting Alonso wasn’t real.

  “You see,” Rand said, looking her right in the eye, like he knew exactly what she was thinking. “He came to me in a dream and revealed that it was important you help me. You believe in Alonso, don’t you?”

  Later, she would wish that she’d said many things. She wished she’d been clever enough to tell him that since Alonso spoke through her, she’d never met him. She wished she’d tearfully told Rand that she hated Alonso speaking through her and that he’d taken enough from her already. Basically, she wished she’d already become the con artist he was going to turn her into.

  But in that moment, she was too scared. She felt cornered, caught. And so she just nodded.