Page 15 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

“And there’s no better teacher than Balthazar.”

“Despite the fact that he talks about himself in the third person.”

He grinned, undaunted. “Of course, there’s a price.”

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

“Get me one of those Blights you’re supposed to kill. A good one, not some little thing that Raven would use for stitching.”

“They don’t send the Hierophant after those,” she reminded him.

“I want a real shadow again,” he said, gesturing toward the floor. “Not this dormant nothing.”

Just what she needed. Another person who wanted her to catch a Blight.

“Done and done,” she said, swallowing her frustration. “But I expect an advance on my services. You start teaching, I start hunting on your behalf.”

“After so many years of acquaintance, I think we can trust one another to honor a bargain,” he said with a grin.

Charlie put her hand on her hips. “When you say it that way, you know it sounds like just the opposite, right?”

“Don’t worry,” Balthazar said, taking an envelope out of his desk. “I’ve got something else to bargain with. I got what you were looking for.”

Charlie ripped the corner of the flap so eagerly that the paper tore across. Inside was a handwritten description and map, crudely made but workable, of an underground area, beneath the mask stronghold, full of treasures. “How—”

She met Balthazar’s gaze. “I told you I’d get it,” he said, looking impossibly smug. “Somebody always needs something. Apparently, rumor has it they hired a company to excavate a new space and then stole the workers’ memories.”

“Did you ask—” she began.

“Yes, the part of Red they took is there, in an onyx vial. It’s marked with numbers: 335.”

She folded the pages and slid them into her apron. “I’ll get you that shadow,” she vowed.

“See that you do.” Balthazar smiled and took a sip of his drink. “And I suppose I can throw in a little training. Show you a few tricks. Come to my place. Afternoons are best. Or late nights, after Rapture shuts down. Though I may not be entirely sober.”

By the time Charlie got back upstairs, the hairstylists had arrived. It was obviously a small salon and even with their significant others, the lounge seemed empty. Don was on his phone, distracted, texting someone.

Up on the stage, the karaoke had gotten started and a stylist with a glitter beard and cat ears belted their way through “Animal In Me.”

Charlie poured chardonnay for a man wearing perfectly applied black lipstick, none of which came off on the glass when he took a sip.

She poured a whole line of tequila shots for three young women in wolf cuts with nose rings.

An older lady with an enormous white-and-yellow snake around her shoulders settled at one end of the bar. The woman’s shadow had horns.

“May I have an espresso martini?” she asked. “Black.”

“Considering the size of your snake, you can have whatever you want,” Charlie told her.

“Flatterer,” said the woman.

Charlie poured more drinks, her fingers sliding into her apron from time to time, checking that the pages were there.

Her distraction was the only possible reason why she didn’t notice the man until he was standing right against the bar.

Beanie pulled low on his head, he was skinnier than she remembered. Hollow-cheeked.

Still handsome in that skinny, dark-haired, sad-boy way that all her boyfriends before Vince had been. Mark, who had nearly been the death of her. Mark, who was supposed to be in prison.

For a moment, Charlie just stared at him. Her mind stuttered. She felt as if she blinked, he might turn out to be some trick of the light. Surely, if he was free, someone should have told her. Someone should have warned her.

“You,” she said, the small of her back hitting the counter the only thing that made her realize she’d moved. “You cannot be here.”

Mark’s nails were dirty. He looked hungry. “I came to apologize.”

Who is that? Red’s voice was in her head.

She’d done such a good job of not thinking about Mark since the bandages from the bullet wounds came off. Not letting her fingers rub over the scars in the shower, not looking at them when she was staring at herself in a mirror.

And when she’d met Vince, a good guy, he was supposed to be the proof that Charlie Hall could make good decisions. He was supposed to blot out her past with his unwillingness to talk about his own. None of it had worked.

My ex, she told Red.

I’ll kill him. After a pause, he amended his words. If you want.

She tried to ignore that incredibly tempting offer. “What, did someone bake you a cake with a file in it?” she asked Mark instead. “How did you break out of prison?”

“I didn’t,” he answered. He really did look pathetic. Still, she couldn’t help thinking of the hole in the glass of her window, the confusion before she realized what had happened. The blood.

I’ve met him before, Red said.

She really couldn’t deal with that right then. He was a thief. Like me. Salt might have used him.

“How are you here?” Charlie demanded, hand on her hip. A few of the stylists glanced over. Maybe that had come out a little loud.

“My conviction got overturned,” he said, a grin slowly moving over his face. “My brother submitted an affidavit that I didn’t know he was going to shoot you. He even took a lie detector test. It’s the truth. I hated you, but I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

That was not even a little bit true. “What about the guy he murdered?” Charlie asked.

Mark blinked, as though he’d forgotten that his brother had also shot the person sitting in her passenger seat. A hookup, not someone Charlie had known well. A man who had made her laugh at a bar, and died for it. “I thought there were blanks in the gun.”

“Bullshit.” Charlie met his gaze, determined to show him that she didn’t care. “Get out of here. This is a private party.”

“Does that mean the booze is free?” he asked, his grin turning into the same smile that had persuaded a lot of people to make a lot of mistakes.

“ Get out, ” Charlie repeated. “Before I call the cops and tell them you’re harassing me.”

“You’re not going to do that,” he said, smirking. “I know you’ve got some game going. You always do.”

“I’m retired,” she told him.

“Sure you are.” He smiled, looking more certain with every minute. “Look, I’ll see you around, okay? We can talk more.”

Charlie put her hands on the bar top and lowered her voice. “If I see you again, I am going to bury you.”

His smile flagged. He’d never been the tough guy; that had been his brother. Mark was just a grifter. She hoped he was canny enough to disappear into the world like a drop of water into the ocean.

But Charlie’s hands were still shaking as she poured a line of shots.

An elderly, white-haired man in a gray pin-striped suit walked out of Odette’s office, looking deeply uncomfortable.

He was almost certainly the gentleman Don had told her about, the one her boss had been entertaining in the back.

She hoped the stylists wouldn’t mind yet another stranger crashing their party.

For her part, Charlie was glad for the distraction. She glanced toward Don, who was shaking up a martini. On the shelf next to him, his phone buzzed over and over.

When she walked past, she saw the name “Erin” light up the screen.

Don’s girlfriend. The last time Charlie had seen them together was at Barb and Aimee’s place.

She’d been there for a late-night hang-out and stumbled into an intense argument that they were having in the kitchen about which of them had been mean to the other first. Don had been crying and trying to hide it.

Charlie had sympathized. She’d cried at parties plenty of times herself.

But she was still reeling from Mark’s visit, and the buzzing phone felt like an alarm.

The elderly man in the pin-striped suit stood expectantly at the bar.

She knew him, she realized. It wasn’t his face she recognized.

It was his watch—the Vacheron Constantin that Vince had spotted on his wrist back when the man had scuttled into the bar the month before, trying to avoid being spotted by parking in the back.

He was one of Odette’s longtime clients, one of the reasons she was only a semi -retired dominatrix.

“What do you have back there that’s expensive?” he asked.

Charlie raised her eyebrows. They had nice liquor, but given he was wearing an accessory that cost as much as a new car, she wasn’t sure what would impress him.

“We have a twenty-five-year Macallan for two hundred dollars a pour.” They had a few scotches and bourbons that were about fifty or sixty dollars per, but nothing close to the Macallan.

“I’ll have a double,” the man said, peeling off four hundred-dollar bills and two twenties. “She told me to tell you that it should be straight up, in the dish, please.”

Charlie hadn’t been asked for that in a while. Reaching under the cabinet, she brought out a stainless steel dog bowl. The woman with the snake looked intrigued.

Charlie poured two generous shots of scotch directly into the dog bowl and swished them around before placing the whole thing on the floor just outside the bar.

A few of the stylists noticed something interesting going on and crowded around.

The man slowly went down on his hands and knees and began lapping up the scotch. Charlie could see spots of color bloom on his cheeks. He must be humiliated, given how uncomfortable he’d been already. Truly, Odette was evil.

Most of the onlookers appeared amused, a few seemed horrified, and at least one was definitely intrigued. Charlie caught a few eyes, shrugged, and took some drink orders.

“Can I have my beer like that ?” one of the women with a wolf cut asked.

“Costs extra,” Charlie told her.

“Is he going to bark like a dog next?” a guy with bleached hair asked, nudging his friend.

“If she tells him to,” Charlie answered, nodding to Odette, who’d come out of the back and was heading to the bar in a neoprene black dress and red boots that laced to her knees.

“Damn,” the guy said.

“Damn,” the woman with the snake agreed.

Charlie poured more drinks. When the bleached-hair guy was done, he and his friend left her a generous tip, as though they were hoping to ward off the evil eye.

“So, how are we doing, Marni?” Odette asked the woman with the snake. She—Marni—must have been the salon owner.

“It’s a good party,” Marni said, with a nod toward the man on the floor. “But not as good as the one you were having.”

After finishing the scotch, the elderly man in the suit got slowly to his feet, brushed his jacket off with dignity, and, with a bow of his head to Odette, walked toward the door.

“Good puppy,” she called after him.

“Can I get you an aviation?” Charlie asked her boss, already reaching for the gin.

Odette smiled at her. “Perfect, darling.”

On the stage, the stylist with the black lipstick was singing along to “Anti-Hero,” impressively off-key. Charlie placed the pale purple drink in front of Odette, the coupe glass frosted with cold.

“You’ve got everybody well trained around here,” Marni said. “Well, except for him.”

Charlie and Odette followed her gaze to Don, who’d given up texting and was now huddling in a corner of the bar, yell-whispering into the phone.

“Oh?” Odette swirled a finger in her drink.

“It’s his girlfriend,” Charlie said. “I think they’re fighting.”

Odette sighed. “Well, so long as they like it.”

“He doesn’t seem the type, does he?” Charlie would have expected Don to just break things off when they were hard, given how little patience he seemed to have in general.

“Oh, I don’t know. He argues with you plenty. Maybe he likes to fight,” Odette said. “Hopefully, she likes it too. True love can be ugly.”

“You’re a cynic,” Marni said, gesturing toward the door the elderly man had recently gone through. “Maybe you only see the ugly side.”

“No,” Odette told her. “Love should be ugly.”

Charlie frowned in confusion. She couldn’t help thinking of Mark and the scarred knot of skin where the bullet had struck her.

Odette finished off her drink, then pointed the empty glass at Charlie. “You’re young. You probably still think relationships are all about being careful not to bruise one another.” Then she turned the glass to Marni. “ You have no excuse.”

“Aren’t they?” Charlie asked. Perhaps, as a dominatrix, this was an area where metaphors about bruising got a little complicated. “Or at least, shouldn’t they be?”

The laugh Odette gave was harsh. “And what happens when you can’t live up to that?”

Charlie’s thoughts shifted to Vince and how careful she’d been around him, how much she tried to hide herself.

How thoroughly he’d hidden himself from her.

How they might have loved one another, but never actually knew one another.

Then she thought of Red, and felt out of her depth. “I honestly don’t know.”

Odette sighed. “You imagine yourself like actors, Vaseline on the lens, hiding your flaws. But you should want someone to kiss your scars. Someone who’ll catch your vomit in their hands.

Who’ll love you just as much if you get so drunk you piss the bed—or if you need a fucking catheter and a piss bag.

True love has to take stink along with sweetness. ”

Charlie’s heart sped with nameless panic. “People aren’t like that.”

Odette gave her a puzzled look. Marni was watching them, not weighing in.

“Everything costs something,” Charlie clarified, searching for solid ground. She felt unreasonably panicked by Odette’s words.

Odette shrugged as though that were obvious, but not particularly meaningful. “You give and get.”

No, Charlie wanted to insist. People only love you if you make it worth their while.

No one loves you once they see your weaknesses.

No one loves your flaws. No one loves your ugly, broken parts.

No one loves you and expects nothing more than your love in return.

Instead she blurted, “Who goes first?” As soon as the words left her mouth, she wondered if they made sense.

Especially since they’d started this conversation talking about Don and Erin.

Odette didn’t look confused, though. “Ah,” she said. “Now that is the tricky part.”