Page 14 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

Red had been taking experimental sips of the soup between answering her questions. To each, he’d added something. A noodle. A fleck of spinach. For all that he’d compared the flavor to sweat, he didn’t seem to dislike it. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about the cake.”

A parasite. A mimic. Was that how he saw himself? He said the words as though they didn’t hurt him, but could that be true? She didn’t recall any shift in expression when Mr. Punch had called him a monster either.

“You can eat whatever you want now,” she said, bending over her own bowl of ramen.

He smiled wryly at that. “It won’t make me more human,” he said. “Even if it helps you pretend.”

Charlie met his gaze and didn’t look away. “I was never the one pretending you were human.”

That afternoon, Charlie borrowed Posey’s laptop and looked up articles on what the press was calling the “Hatfield Cult Massacre.” Despite the sensational title, most serious reporting acknowledged that this group was casual, meeting every other week at the Grace Covenant Church. Not a cult.

She found an article detailing the victims, along with photographs.

Twelve people dead. Mostly older folk, a few teens.

The police had tracked down a few members of the group who weren’t dead, but there was no reason to think they’d been in attendance that night.

One of the victims had been found with drugs in her system, but that didn’t seem to mean much.

Hopefully she’d been high enough not to have felt much pain.

No mention was made of Rooster or the Cabals.

There seemed to be no leads, which resulted in wild speculation from the usual sources.

Some commentators on X and Reddit were certain the group had been targeted by someone who believed all gloamists were possessed by demons.

A few conservative pundits argued that the deaths were the result of an attempt on the part of the victims to quicken their shadows, an attempt that required bloodletting and got way out of hand.

Charlie hoped Mr. Punch didn’t count that kind of speculation as a failure on her part to hush things up.

People were interested. If he wanted this to go away, it was probably true that the murder would have to be solved.

And since the public wasn’t going to be okay blaming this on a Blight, because that would require the mainstream public’s acceptance of Blights as real, it meant someone was going to have to take the fall.

People were so interested, in fact, that Charlie found a link to leaked photos of the crime scene on a Reddit forum.

If these pictures were real—and they certainly looked that way—the murders had been shockingly brutal.

The slashes on the bodies were broad and deep, as though they came from an animal.

It looked as though some of them had died while huddling together.

One of the women had been covering the bodies of the students with her own, her back so shredded that her spine stuck out.

Blood spatter was high on the walls, although the amount of blood on the floor didn’t seem commensurate with the number of bodies.

What do you make of this? Charlie asked Red.

You asking because of all the murders I committed?

No, because you cleaned up crime sce— Charlie bit off the thought.

That had been Vince. Red didn’t remember his under-the-table job.

Didn’t recall the colleagues who had all liked him and the boss who told stories about taking his wife to free and freshly sanitized hotel rooms because he still had the keys. Never mind.

Red’s voice seemed to echo in her thoughts. I think Mr. Punch was being sloppy when he said they were exsanguinated. Desanguination would be more accurate.

Is desanguination even a real word? Charlie asked.

She could hear the amusement in his tone. Exsanguination can be minor, so long as it’s enough to be the cause of death. Desanguination is, well, more.

She remembered Remy’s friend, the doctor—the one she’d blackmailed into helping her. And she remembered Salt’s basement. She did not want to know from which of them Red had learned that fact. Okay, but do you notice anything else? Anything helpful?

Count the shadows, he said.

She squinted. She didn’t see what he was—oh. A girl, off to the left. She cast no shadow. It had looked like a trick of the light. Of course, there were lots of possible reasons a girl without a shadow would attend a discussion group for seekers.

Charlie remembered the chat that had been scrolling by when she’d been about to order pizza, the one that mentioned a Cabal speaker. And that one of the members had been a gloamist. Could that have been the girl, before she lost her shadow?

Red’s voice sounded as though he was speaking softly into her ear. It’s strange they didn’t all run for the door.

That was strange. Charlie sent the pictures to herself, so she could study them further.

Then, after hesitating for a moment, she closed the laptop.

She didn’t like the idea of Posey having anything to do with this, no matter how distant the connection, nor of looking through Posey’s private messages without permission.

Charlie went back to the photographs, now on her phone. It was easier to enlarge the images there anyway. The shadowless girl was still shadowless. But looking closer, she saw that one of the bodies had something that appeared like a shallow bite taken out of its calf.

The more carefully she studied the picture, the more it seemed that it had been made with blunt, human teeth.

Charlie showed up for that night’s shift at Rapture more distracted than ever.

The same DJ who’d been playing holiday music for the car dealers was back, setting up a karaoke machine near the stage.

A projector was on and aimed at the wall.

Currently an FKA Twigs video was playing silently.

The dancers all seemed to have snakes for shadows.

Don was at the chalkboard, writing out a menu with a lot of drinks with names involving the words “hair” and “scissors,” leading Charlie to believe that she should be expecting another holiday party, this time for a salon.

It also led her to believe that Don wanted to have his menu up before Charlie got there.

“You’re a real overachiever,” she told him as she tucked her jacket and purse in the nook behind the bar and grabbed her apron.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, glancing over his menu. It was heavy on the vodka, and lemon-forward, but there was nothing wrong with that. “Looks good.”

That seemed to mellow him. Or maybe he was thinking about how the last guy who hassled her got choked out. “How’s your eye?”

She touched it gingerly. The swelling had gone down a lot, though the bruising was dark enough that her concealer was struggling to mask it. She was looking forward to her day off, tomorrow. “Okay, I guess. Hopefully this party will go better. Is Odette around?”

“She’s in the back with some poor old gentleman who tried to sneak in earlier,” Don said, and raised his eyebrows.

“I hope that ‘poor old gent’ is paying handsomely for the privilege,” Charlie said and went to check the garnishes.

As she sliced limes, she thought about the bodies in the basement of the Hatfield church. Thought about the bite on the body in the photo, echoing the scratches on her own back. She didn’t think it could have been the same Blight—surely, she wasn’t that lucky—but it did make her believe it was one.

Which would make this her job, even if Mr. Punch hadn’t drafted her into it.

When she got to the maraschino cherries, she plunked two into a lowball glass and made a godmother with vodka and amaretto. Then she carried it past the velvet curtain and to the stairs of Balthazar’s shadow parlor.

The top step had onyx in it, so as she hit it, Red was forced to manifest. She heard his heavy step behind her as they went the rest of the way down.

At the bottom, when she turned, though, he wasn’t there.

Charlie sucked in her breath and looked around. The shadow parlor was low-ceilinged, with the same black walls as Rapture and lots of cocktail tables, over which gloamists and clients met to work out the details of their arrangements.

A Black boy in a parka had his hand touching the wrist of a middle-aged white man whose eyes were rolling back.

Rolling bliss, probably, although alterationists could also cut out parts of you that you didn’t like—addictions, uncontrollable rage, jealousy.

But that was less common, since whatever a person lost was gone .

Cut away too much and the person wound up effectively lobotomized.

More or less what Mr. Punch had threatened to do to Charlie.

Another girl with dyed black hair was crying quietly to two friends. “He stole it,” she was saying as Charlie passed. “He told me he loved me and then he stole my shadow.”

Joey Aspirins stood near the second curtain, this one demarcating Balthazar’s office. Aspirins had a fresh tattoo of a lobster shining with Aquaphor on his lower arm. He looked as sunken-cheeked and unwell as ever.

“He in?” she asked.

Aspirins nodded once, folding his arms over his chest. “For you.”

Charlie took that as a compliment. She parted the curtain.

Balthazar Blades sat in one of the leather club chairs.

Tall and skinny, Balthazar had dark eyes and messy dark waves, and wore a wrinkled burgundy velvet suit.

The top three buttons of the white and equally wrinkled shirt underneath were undone.

“Trouble is here, I see,” he said. “And she brought me a drink! What exactly are you trying to bribe me into doing this time?”

“I need your help,” she told him.

Balthazar looked as pleased as a shark scenting blood in the water. “Go on,” he practically purred.

Charlie took a deep breath. Although Posey wasn’t there, somewhere her ears must be ringing. “I need to know some things about how to be a gloamist.”