Page 39 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

Missing Parts

Charlie Hall woke on the floor of a van, a familiar couch cushion underneath her head. Two sleeping bags had been wrapped around her. Pushing herself into a sitting position, adrenaline flooded her body as her breath clouded in the cold. Where was she? Dizziness made it hard to orient herself.

Oh, right. This was Vince’s van .

It came back to her then. Moving into the too-nice apartment. Lemonade in Red’s hand. Him, asking her to cut the tether that bound them. She blinked at the walls of the vehicle. Everything looked simultaneously too sharp and fuzzy around the edges. Her tongue was a little numb.

He’d drugged her.

Fuck. Fuck . He’d gone to free Rose’s shadow. To murder in her name.

I want you, he’d said the night before. I’ve always wanted you. And I can’t have you. Had he already planned what he would do to her today? Was that the reason he held himself back?

Well, he’d badly miscalculated what it took to drug Charlie Hall, who’d been drinking for years and had the tolerance of a small elephant. And he’d badly miscalculated how petty Charlie could be when she was crossed. He was going to be very sorry he fucked with her.

Wrapping one of the sleeping bags around her shoulders in lieu of a coat, Charlie opened the back door of the van and slid out. She didn’t recognize the street.

Something metallic slid off her body as she moved, hitting the road with the tinkle of metal on icy asphalt. She reached down and picked up a familiar ring of keys. He’d left the keys to the van?

A growing fear punched a hole in her fury.

He’d obviously left her the keys in case he didn’t return.

Which meant he thought that was a possibility.

Charlie still wanted to scream at him, to snarl in his face, to make him pay.

But she needed to find him and make sure he was all right before she could do any of that.

That was when she recognized the dizzy emptiness swirling inside her, the lack of a warmth she hadn’t realized was present. The tether was gone.

And without being bound to him, there was no thin line of shadow to follow.

He must have gone on foot, so she suspected he couldn’t be far, but that didn’t help her know which direction.

And while Charlie had followed him into the gas station bathroom and seen the address, she’d only taken a photo, assuming she’d have access to her phone.

She only sort of remembered—the street started with an M and was something found in nature. Mulberry? Maple?

Fumbling through her pockets, she was relieved to find her phone where she left it. Another sign that he had intended her to get away easily when she woke. She looked up the photo of the address, then plugged it into a map app.

Less than a ten-minute walk, her phone informed her.

She exchanged the sleeping bag she was using as a coat for three onyx knives from her emergency Blight-hunting kit.

Three turns down three streets later, she came to a nondescript house. It was small, with a scrubby lawn and no lights on behind the closed blinds. Down the street, she could see garbage cans set out at all the houses but this one.

Charlie went around the back, listening intently.

From a few doors over, music was playing, too faint at this distance for her to be able to pick out anything more than a pounding bass. The swipe of tires through slush came occasionally from the road where Charlie had left the van.

The house was silent.

A back door gaped open, though the screen door had shut, as though someone had left in a hurry. Behind it was only darkness. She pulled open the screen door, wincing at the creak of rusty hinges.

The smell hit her first. Spoiled meat, left to rot for days. It made the air feel thick in her throat.

She couldn’t go farther without some kind of light. After hesitating, she flicked on the flashlight of her phone. Then she sucked in a sharp breath.

The kitchen floor was smeared with wet blood, looking as though someone had tried to mop it, then gave up.

Charlie stepped to one side, levering herself over with her palms on the messy, food-covered countertop, sleeves pulled down over her fingers so she wouldn’t leave prints. Then she slipped into the living room.

Two bodies rested on the couch. A dead couple. Middle-aged, and purpled with rot. Shallow slashes covered their arms and chests. The cushions beneath them were black with blood and covered in flies.

Nausea turned Charlie’s stomach.

She forced herself to look around the room.

Dark spatter decorated the walls, bringing her viscerally back to months ago when she’d walked into her house to find a dead man and walls streaked with blood.

Dizziness hit her hard, the memory of that terror overlaying the terror she felt now.

Despite it, she forced herself to get closer to the bodies.

A series of what looked like human bites ran along the woman’s lower arms. Indentations braceleted both the victims’ wrists, as though from restraints.

She moved into the next room, where the splintered wood of a dining room table littered the floor. A fine black powder coated everything, suggesting that more than one Blight had died there. Slivered shards of wood had hit the walls with such force that they were buried in them.

Moving around her flashlight, Charlie saw a shadow on the ground, lit at the wrong angle. Holding an onyx knife in front of her, she squatted down and pushed back debris to see the shadow better.

Nearly insubstantial, Red appeared little more than smoke.

“Char,” he whispered, the words sounding like something caught by the wind. “They’re looking for you. Go, you’ve got to go .”

Her gaze went to the stairs, to the hall, but she saw nothing and no one.

“Not without you, you monstrous idiot,” she told him.

“He—” Red started. “They—” But he didn’t seem able to say any more.

Charlie bent down, and pressed the blade of the onyx knife to the side of her hand. It hurt more than a razor blade, requiring her to stab her own skin. She gritted her teeth. Blood beaded up and began to drip.

She didn’t have to worry about her DNA being discovered at the crime scene, though. Not a single drop hit the floor—it ran over her wrist to her elbow, then disappeared into his shadow.

Leaving him barely more substantial than before.

She shifted closer.

“Don’t,” he rasped. “I will drink you dry.”

She ignored him and stabbed her hand again. At least she could give him something.

The darkness rose up and fastened itself around her hand. She could feel the laving of his tongue against her wound. The press of his open mouth, drinking. And as he drew her blood, she felt something else being pulled out of her, parts of herself that she wasn’t sure she could get back.

Drowning people often killed their rescuers by pushing them under water, scrambling up their bodies for a breath. Even untethered from him as she was, she could sense the vastness of his hunger.

She recalled Vince whispering to the gloamist who’d come looking for her in Rapture. You’ve let your shadow feed for too long tonight, Vince had told the man right before he snapped his neck. There’s not much of you left. Can’t you feel the strain, like something spooling out of you?

“Enough,” Charlie snapped, trying to pull her arm free.

“I need you,” he said tightening his grip. “Please. I need—”

She yanked away, stumbling to her feet, then took three steps from him. “You’re lucky I’m helping you at all.”

Though he had a disturbing translucence, she could make out his features. He had never before so resembled a ghost.

“Can you get up?”

“There’s not much of me left,” he said.

For a moment, despair closed over Charlie. “You’ll be okay.” It wasn’t fair to lose him before she got to yell at him and make him grovel.

He couldn’t die. And with her trickster’s habit of looking for a way out, her con artist’s belief that everything, even death itself, could be swindled, she thought of a possible angle. Looking at the fine black powder on the floor, she swept a handful into her pocket.

“Not enough of you?” she asked. “Fine. Then I’ll steal some more.”

“Char,” he said in warning.

She leaned down to help him up, afraid her fingers would pass right through his skin. He was solid enough for her to pull him to his feet. He leaned against her and she was reassured by his weight though the draining of her energy left her lightheaded.

“You need more blood,” she said as they made their way to the door. “Just not mine.”

Charlie tried not to look into the living room, at the macabre sight of the corpses, sitting on the couch of their gore-covered living room like abandoned toys.

They made her think of Mr. Punch and the homeowners he’d puppeted, standing on stairs with their eyes closed.

For the first time, she noticed how tidy the living room was if she ignored the bloodbath, in contrast to the kitchen, where dirty dishes stuffed the sink, pots covered the stove, garbage spilled out over the tops of trash cans, and cigarette butts filled cups and plates.

Whoever had murdered those people had stayed here with their corpses, cooking food. Eating takeout. Smoking. Not just Blights, then.

Charlie led Red through the house. “Remember when I promised I’d never order you to do anything? When this is over, I am going to make you do everything . I am going to make you pick up trash by the side of the road.”

He was stumbling like a drunk. “Whatever you want.”

“I’ve got you,” she said, pushing open the screen with her shoulder. “You asshole.” Her eyes snagged on one of the cigarette butts in the sink, gold lines on the filter.

“I didn’t kill them,” he told her.

“No shit.” They stepped onto the street, cold air making her shiver now that she had less blood to keep herself warm.

They managed the three blocks to the van. She opened the back and helped him inside where she settled him on the sleeping bags.