Page 54 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

People laughed. It was a good start. But some of the audience looked around, as though wondering why Archie wasn’t there to introduce his most important guest. Charlie cracked the door and peered out, but the hall was still clear.

Perhaps Archie, already worried about his convention attendees, was waiting until after the speech to confront Malhar.

Probably, if that was the case, Sean had gone to gather the two other puppeteers from the cottage.

The glass vial shoved beneath the underwire of her bra pressed hard against Charlie’s chest.

She slid out her phone and texted Posey: Archie knows .

Malhar continued to speak. “I asked several people what would be the best thing to talk about in front of you all. Everyone said the same thing—quickening shadows.” At that, the room became much more alert.

He went on, pacing. “There is a lot of conventional wisdom out there, but I am going to give you an underlying theory. First, I want to tell you a story. When I was in graduate school, I was living with a couple of roommates. One of them had a girlfriend in the psychology department. One night, we were all staying up late talking—and yeah, okay, shrooming—and I got to telling her about the bicameral mind and the bifurcated consciousness.”

Around the room, people were frowning. Most seekers would have heard of bifurcated consciousness, but not the bicameral mind.

Posey hadn’t so much as glanced at her phone.

“Okay, right, so does anyone know what the bicameral mind is?”

The room was silent. After a long, awkward moment, Red cleared his throat. Malhar swung his attention toward him gratefully.

“The early Greeks—and I guess other people—believed their thoughts were gods speaking to them in their minds,” Red said. A moment later, he seemed to realize the way Charlie and Malhar were staring at him. “It was in a reading on the origins of theater when Re—when I was at NYU.”

Malhar nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, exactly! The bicameral mind is thought to precede our modern idea of consciousness. In some ways, shadows really are in that state, right?” His gaze flickered to Red and then away.

“They act at the behest of the person controlling them. The voice they hear isn’t their own. ”

Malhar held up his hand. “I can see you all want to argue with me. But I’m obviously not saying that shadows can’t have individual consciousnesses—what I’m trying to trace is the path they take to arrive at that consciousness.”

“I think therefore I am,” Red said.

Malhar smiled, as though the words meant something different to him. “Green eggs and ham.”

This had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like something else, something more dangerous. A real theory .

“Where are we going here?” a guy in the audience interrupted. “You were shrooming and you talked about deep shit, just like everyone else who’s ever shroomed. So what?”

Charlie tried to catch Posey’s eye, to indicate that she needed to look at her phone. It didn’t work.

Malhar answered the man, not seeming at all nervous in the way he had the night before. “After I explained about the bifurcated consciousness that gloamists cultivate, she insisted that it sounded like what gloamists were doing was inducing mental illness. That pissed me off.”

“You were both so high, ” one the people in the crowd said, and a few more laughed.

Malhar laughed along with them, not seeming at all rattled. “She said that the bicameral mind sounded like people with schizophrenia and that the bifurcated consciousness was just disassociation. The argument went on. It was a wild night but that’s the part the stuck in my head. Disassociation.”

They were quiet as an indrawn breath.

Charlie glanced into the hall again; it was empty. If they could keep enough of these rich folks near them as they walked out, Archie might hesitate to stop them. Since he didn’t stop the speech, it stood to reason he would be loath to openly disavow the speaker.

Malhar paced back and forth. “Tell me how you’ve heard people attempt to trigger their own shadow quickening.”

“Swimming with sharks,” Lars said.

Malhar nodded. “Smart. In a cage, that’s scary, but not particularly dangerous. It might be more likely to work on someone with a phobia. But what does it mean? Why does it work sometimes on some people?”

Another person spoke up. “I did that thing where someone strangles you with a belt during sex. Highly recommend, but it didn’t work.”

That got a few murmurs and titters from the audience.

“It’s like looking death in the face,” that guy went on.

A person next to him spoke up. “I set part of my arm on fire with rubbing alcohol and then put it out fast. Oh, and got punched in the face.”

Red snorted.

Charlie shoved his shoulder.

“How about a demonstration?” someone called from the other side.

A couple of people laughed.

Malhar must be a very good teacher. In front of this “class,” he was animated. He made her believe that he was teaching them something secret.

“The other thing you can do—is drugs.”

More laughter.

“Yeah, man,” someone called out.

Sean walked into the room, alone.

Like a car crash in slow motion, Charlie saw Malhar look up. His gaze passed over Sean and then back to the crowd, with absolutely no sign of recognition. Her slight hope that she could convince him that Malhar was being puppeted by the real Mr. Punch went up in smoke.

“Mushrooms have worked for people. Acid. Benadryl. Massive amounts of hash,” Malhar said. “But the percentages are small. Please recall my own experience with shrooms, which led to a theory, but not any shadow quickening.

“We all understand in a vague way that trauma wakes up people’s shadows—but only some people’s shadows—and we all know about the bifurcated consciousness—but that’s considered something you need to cultivate once your shadow is quickened, not something that you need in order to quicken your shadow—so the connection between these two things isn’t obvious at first. To be honest, I think I lucked into it.

Trauma makes some people disassociate. And disassociation is what awakens the shadow. ”

Charlie blinked. The silence was so profound that she was both aware of it and part of it. Hope shone in the eyes of some seekers, confusion in others. Even Sean looked a little stunned.

This wasn’t a sales pitch, nor a con. It didn’t seem possible that her sister’s boyfriend had figured out the key to the world being more magical. But Charlie had never heard quickening explained this way before either.

“You’re taking that in,” Malhar said. “But the next step—and I can see from your expressions that some of you got to this question already—is how do you choose to disassociate?”

There was a murmuring from all around Charlie and she found herself as engaged as the rest of them.

“Good news. We all disassociate. You know how sometimes you’re driving a familiar route and you wind up at home, but don’t remember how you got there?

That’s disassociation! Unfortunately, not a deep enough disassociation to trigger shadow awakening, but a good start.

Your goal is to achieve the feeling of standing outside yourself.

So whether you engineer the stress or you experience it organically, when it happens, your objective will be to make yourself feel as though it’s happening to someone else. A different you.”

Charlie thought of the night her shadow awakened, recalled that feeling of seeing herself from a distance.

“Now I’ve given some thought to relatively harmless stressors and—”

A woman’s scream came from just outside the door.

Charlie was through it and into the hall before she could think.

Vera lay on the ground, her stomach ripped open and a woman’s indistinct shape crouched over her, licking her insides, the shadowy hands sharp-ended and covered in gore.

Vera was still alive, but mercifully, the light in her eyes was fading fast.

Then Mark turned the corner, his shirt stained red, dragging Archie’s limp body by the arm. When he saw Charlie, he laughed. He let go of Archie and spread his arms wide.

Shadows unfurled from both sides of him, like those sheets of paper that you cut into the shape of a single angel and then unfolded to show a string of them.

The Nine-Shadow Man from the fairy tale.

For a disorienting moment, all Charlie could do was stare, heart in her throat. Screams were all around her. People were shoving past her. One knocked into her hard enough to make her stumble.

You always think you know everything and you’re always wrong.

A moment later, two of the shadows flowed toward Sean. Three went at Red.

“I am going to kill every last person who wronged me,” Mark said, heading straight for Charlie. “And you, I am going to kill twice.”

With trembling hands, Charlie drew the onyx knife from her boot. She held it into the space between them, wishing once again that she knew how to fight beyond just trying to put the sharp part in whatever was coming at her. Mark stopped, glaring.

One thing she was sure of. If he got close enough, she wouldn’t hesitate to stab him.

To one side, Red grappled with a shadow that was recognizably female in shape. She had her hands around his throat. Another was on his back, biting and scratching. Red’s eyes were bright embers, burning with rage. “Get out of here,” he gritted out when he caught her eye.

Charlie took a step back automatically.

Sean lay on the floor, screaming, blood running down his arm. His shadow was in tatters. Puppeteers didn’t usually engage in open combat and the fear on his face was terrifying.

Behind him, Posey’s shadow grew larger and long-clawed, like a distorted, fiercer Charlie. It grappled with a third shadow. Her gaze snagged on that.

Distracted, Charlie hadn’t seen the approach of another shadow.

She didn’t realize it was behind her until she felt a hand grab her onyx necklace and pull so hard it snapped.

She whirled and brought up her knife, stabbing as a thick fog of shadow surrounded her, invading her throat.

She could taste it on her tongue. She choked on it.

Her lungs burned. She couldn’t breathe. Darkness edged in at the corners of her vision.

And then it eclipsed every bit of light.