Page 41 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

They came to a door inset with a mosaic made up of thousands of pieces of onyx forming an ouroboros, a dragon eating its own tail between a moon and a sun.

Three holes were visible. Sally stuck her fingers in and turned something inside in a sequence.

First the second, then the first. Then she reached into the third. The door swung open.

“Good luck re-creating that,” she told Charlie, sounding snide.

Charlie bit her tongue. After all, there was no need to re-create it; Sally was escorting her straight inside.

Allowing people to think they were smarter than you while convincing them to play into your hands was one of the most important skills of a con artist, and one that was surprisingly difficult to cultivate.

It wasn’t easy to eat shit and pretend to like it.

But Charlie stayed in character, focusing on the next step. Focusing on the minutes slipping by.

Inside the vault, the chamber carried the scent of dust and a jumble of old cabinets and bookshelves stuffed with folios, tomes, manuscripts, and even what looked like an incunabulum.

Odd objects rested beside them—silver scroll cases, glass vials, and a row of onyx urns.

Charlie wondered how many had shadows sealed inside.

Then she got back to business, rubbing her eye hard enough to irritate it and make sure she could cry. It was tempting to ease up on an act once things went your way. But she needed to stay visibly upset until they got out of the room.

“Where can I put it?” As Charlie took a slow spin, her eye caught on the thing she needed—right where Balthazar’s informant said it would be. The small black glass vial, stoppered in onyx, trapping the piece of Red the Cabals had taken.

If he needed more of himself to heal, then this could heal him.

But it might also bring back his memories.

She’d been counting on that when she planned this heist, but as she stood on the precipice, she felt a little sad at how different Red might become once he had them.

Red, who was wounded and angry and hiding none of it.

Red, who she’d seen only glimpses of when he was Vince.

“Over here,” said Sally, pointing to a shelf on the other side from where Charlie needed to be.

She put the box in the place that Sally indicated. Then, she headed for a book along the far wall, near the glass vial.

“What are you—” Sally started.

Charlie grabbed a volume right beside to the vial. “I think I stole this.”

Sally jerked it from her grip. “You did not. Bellamy acquired that himself.”

As the woman shoved it back onto the shelf, Charlie palmed the vial.

“Let’s go,” Sally snapped.

Charlie slid the vial up her sleeve as she turned her hands upward, showing off how she had nothing in them.

Her heart thundered as she climbed the stairs.

That whole fiasco had taken more than fifteen minutes.

A piece of Red’s shadow was useless if she couldn’t reunite them.

She made up her mind that if Bellamy was waiting in the scarlet-curtained room she’d find a way to get rid of him, no matter what it took.

But when Sally led her back, she was relieved to find Red alone with Milo. Better, Sally waved Milo into the hall, probably to complain about Charlie.

“Hold on,” she whispered to Red, leaning down. “You’re going to get better.”

Sliding the vial out from her sleeve, she pulled out the stopper. A cloud of shadow poured out, flowing toward Red, drawn to him as though like recognizes like.

Red gave a gasp, eyes flying open.

“What have we here?” said Bellamy, head of the masks, as he entered the room.

“He’s hurt,” Charlie said, trying to keep her voice even. She didn’t turn, shielding Red’s body as the shadow settled into him, palming vial and stopper. “I wasn’t sure where else to take him.”

Bellamy walked around Red, as though he were a particularly fascinating object. Charlie doubted he would have looked at a dying human like that, but only because he wouldn’t have found them interesting.

And she very much hoped that Red was no longer dying. “Can you help him?”

“Felix can do nice, neat shadow stitches,” Bellamy said. “That might help the tatters seal.”

“Get him.” As Charlie spoke, she slipped the vial into her pocket.

Bellamy pressed a finger to his mouth consideringly. “The Blight will still need more blood—more vigor.”

Charlie pushed up the cuff of her sleeve.

Bellamy shook his head. “He’s taken quite a bit from you. I am not sure you’re the one best suited to give him more. Especially since your tether has been cut.”

“That wasn’t his fault,” Charlie lied. “It happened during the fight.”

Bellamy shrugged. “You could leave him here. We’d take good care of him.”

“Absolutely not,” Charlie said.

“It’s not like you’re even a gloamist,” he reminded her. “No magic now. We can find a new Hierophant.”

“I’m not leaving Vince,” Charlie said. “Set another price.”

Bellamy raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have a lot of options. You came here for my help.”

Downstairs, Charlie heard a banging on the door of the watchtower. Fucking finally . Now the last part of her plan—getting out—was on.

“Just help Vince,” she said, letting her shoulders sag.

“So you’ll leave him with me?” He smiled benevolently, now that he thought he had her where he wanted her. “You ought to know that this is the moment when the negotiation is most likely to go my way, so don’t try to get me to pity you, Charlie Hall. I respect you too much for that.”

She folded her arms. “If he dies, you’ll have nothing to show for all this.”

“And you’ll have less.” Bellamy’s gaze on her was steady.

“My friend has been trying to restore his memory, interviewing him. I’ll give you access to the recordings.” Malhar wouldn’t be happy with her for that bargain, but at the end of this, it would be good to leave Bellamy with something.

“You’re in my stronghold,” he said. “What’s to stop me from simply separating him from you?”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs.

“Her.” Charlie would look like either a badass or a dumbass, depending on whether her calculations about who’d been at the door were correct. “Her and her collection of rare books, that is.”

Bellamy’s gaze sharpened. “And I didn’t think you liked one another much.”

Charlie turned to smile at Adeline Salt. Adeline, who she’d phoned from the van. Adeline, who rushed to kneel at Red’s side as soon as she came into the room.

“We have a shared desire,” Charlie said. “To see Vince survive.”

“I brought three volumes of Brecht’s Anatomy of Shadow, ” Adeline said. “I will give you the remaining volumes when he leaves here.”

There were only three copies of Brecht’s Anatomy of Shadow in the world. There had been four, but a gloamist in Los Angeles had burned a full set in a bonfire, immortalizing the event on his TikTok for the ultimate ragebait.

“Fine,” Bellamy agreed after a long moment, turning from Adeline to Charlie. “But since she likes him so much, she can donate the blood.”

He stalked out of the room and Adeline sat down.

She put her hand on Red’s forehead, smoothing his hair out of his face. “It’s odd,” she said, looking up at Charlie. “He feels so alive.”

Charlie sat down on one of the couches. She was panicked and resentful and wanted to shout take your hands off of him, but she needed Adeline to stay. Charlie had made a truly monstrous bargain, bringing her here. “He is alive.”

Adeline stood as a young man with blue hair and sad eyes entered the room. “This is Felix,” Bellamy said. “He used to be with the alterationists before he was with us, so he’s good at healing shadows.”

Felix moved to Red’s side, displacing Adeline.

“You think you know his true nature,” she said to Charlie, low-voiced, so that Bellamy wouldn’t hear, “but you don’t.”

“I think he’s still learning about himself.

” When Charlie had first been bound to Red, she’d thought him disturbingly unlike Vince, a doppelg?nger wearing the same face.

But Red had been newly untethered from Remy and raw, as Vince must have been in the time before he learned how to pass as human.

And as angry as Charlie was with Red for drugging her, she couldn’t miss that he’d broken their tether, wrapped her in blankets, and left her with her phone and keys to protect her.

Red was the person Charlie had known as Vince, she was just meeting him in reverse.

From the inside out, instead of the outside in.

Adeline laughed. “He tells you what he wants you to know.”

“Isn’t that what we all do?” Charlie countered, but this conversation was starting to feel pointed. Less like Adeline was trying to get under her skin and more as though Adeline was toying with her.

“You want to know something he would never tell you?”

“No,” Charlie said automatically.

Adeline laughed. “Of course you would.”

Charlie kept her eyes on Felix, on the tiny stitches he was making at the edges of Red where he was most translucent. “You’re obviously going to tell me.”

Adeline’s smile was smug. “He needs blood to be like he is. He was powerful before Remy died, perhaps not like he is now, not so… whole, but as powerful as some ancient Blights. Did you wonder how he got that way?”

“Salt killed a lot of people,” Charlie said, thinking of his words. There was a lot of blood.

“Including your friend—what was his name?” Adeline stuck the knife in, her satisfaction obvious.

“Rand.” Charlie’s voice was a croak.

Adeline’s smile was her real one. “Have you wondered what Red was doing that night?”

No, she hadn’t wondered. He’d saved her. But he’d known that Rand was beyond saving—he’d said as much.

Charlie’s stomach churned, thinking of the boy’s voice. Don’t look at me . Had he come straight from gorging on Rand’s blood? Had he helped Charlie escape out of guilt? And Rose—had he had her blood too? Was that why Rose’s shadow thought that she was owed something?

But it was Rand that she couldn’t stop thinking of, the idea that Red had been the last thing he saw. The horror he must have felt.

She tasted bile in the back of her throat. Felt wetness at the corners of her eyes.

And Adeline had been there. Remy too. A family of ghouls.

Charlie’s hand slid into her pocket, past the vial, closing on her phone. She ducked her head, hiding her tears. “You’re just saying that to upset me. You have no idea what happened that night.”

“I know your friend died,” Adeline said. “I know that Salt bled him like a pig for Red.”

A shudder went through Charlie. A tear fell, splashing her jeans. “That’s a horrible thing to say, when you have no idea. Were you there?”

“Salt was desperate to find another quickened shadow, or make one. I know how things went.”

Charlie remembered that night and the old men laughing. The scent of their cigars. “You knew he killed people?”

“I knew they usually wound up dead in the end,” Adeline said.

“But you weren’t there,” Charlie insisted.

She remembered waking on the rug in the library, her vomiting-up-beet-juice scam the only reason she hadn’t ingested enough poison to die.

Recalled Red’s voice in her ear as she snuck past a room with Remy and Adeline in it, giggling to one another.

“You don’t know. I remember you were upstairs, not in the basement. ”

“None of our hands were clean,” Adeline snapped.

“You’re just trying to upset me,” Charlie said, shaking her head as if she could shake off everything she’d heard. “You can’t possibly know that he was there when Rand died.”

“I do!” Adeline said. “I watched. I watched plenty of people die so shadows could eat. Maybe I even cut a few throats myself. We bathed Red in their blood. Are you ready to do that for him?”

“If you glutted him on Rand’s blood and misery, then I hate you even more than I did before,” Charlie said, her voice shaking. The thought of Red hunched over Rand’s body—a boy, licking a fresh cut made by Salt—disgusted her. “You’re all monsters.”

Adeline smiled. “Now you’re finally getting it.”