Page 56 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

“New habit?” she asked, thinking of the filters piled up on plates in the house where Red had nearly died. The ones left at the edge of the Hatfield graveyard. Thought of the liberally applied cologne he’d worn at Solaluna, obscuring the stale scent of nicotine.

“Helps with the jitters,” he said. “And curbs the hunger. I am always so hungry, Charlie. I even tried eating what they eat, but it didn’t help.”

She thought of the mouth-shaped bites on the corpses and felt ill.

Mark held out the pack to her. “Smoke?”

“The one vice I haven’t picked up,” she told him. “Besides, you’d need to free my hands.”

“I could bring the cigarette to your mouth instead,” he told her.

Charlie shook her head. The scent of the smoke made her think of her childhood, going to her aunt’s house on her father’s side before the divorce.

She hadn’t thought of being there in years.

It made her remember standing outside of restaurants where she worked, with dishwashers and cooks grabbing a smoke between shifts.

It was an unpleasant smell, but the memories it evoked weren’t.

Charlie tried to hang on to those as he ran the edge of the razor through the flame.

She closed her eyes.

“You know what I always liked about you?” he asked her and then went on without the need for encouragement. “You didn’t make a fuss. I’m so tired of all the screaming. I’ve gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s so dramatic.”

She felt his hand on her arm and then the sting of the razor blade. It was sharp, she’d give him that, so it didn’t hurt as much as it could have. She tried to focus on anything but the wetness on her skin.

Keep him talking, Charlie thought. “I didn’t think people could have more than one shadow. How do you manage to split your consciousness more than two ways?”

His hand caught hold of her ankle and she tried not to tense up, but she couldn’t help it. She felt the glide of the razor again.

“Not many people could, I bet,” he said. “Maybe no one can but me. After I got my third and my fourth, I practiced until I came up with a way. You have to move between them, sliding in and out of different consciousnesses and you have to do it fast. Sometimes I get lost.”

She shuddered at madness in his voice.

“Don’t move,” he said. “I want to hurt you, not kill you. Not yet.”

Shadows had gathered in the corners of the room, as though waiting for his signal. The more blood he spilled, the more eager their movements.

“What about a deal?” she asked. The drag of the razor was a horrible distraction and she didn’t have a lot to work with to start. But if necessity was the mother of invention, then she needed to start inventing. “I could get you Mr. Punch.”

She felt the pause of his movements and opened her eyes. He was watching her warily. All around him were shadows. They’d flocked hungrily to her spilling blood. Still, she felt the rightness of saying what she had in the way his eyes met hers.

“How?” he demanded.

“You probably heard he was at the conference. He’ll be looking for you. And I’m the Hierophant. He trusts me.”

Mark laughed. “Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

“Exactly. I can do it,” Charlie insisted, half a plan forming in her head.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why should I trust you?”

“I’m terrified!” she admitted. “I want to survive. And I know you believe everything has a price—what’s the price for me to get out of this?” They’d both believed that. Everything had a price. Nothing was free. Certainly not loyalty. Definitely not love. In the end, you were on your own.

And yet if she was going to get out of this, she didn’t see a way that didn’t involve gambling on both love and loyalty.

“Aren’t you afraid that no matter what I say, I’ll kill you anyway?” Mark asked. As though to punctuate the question, he drew another line of fire down her arm with the razor. “Maybe you shouldn’t trust me.”

He was 1,000 percent going to kill her anyway. “What choice do I have?”

He grinned as though he liked that answer.

“Okay,” he said, fishing out a burner phone. “Call him.”

She shook her head. “If I use that, he’s going to guess you’re making me do it. I should use my number.”

He seemed to be weighing her words. “What are you going to say?”

“That I got away from you and I need him to pick me up. I’ll promise to lead him to you if he does.”

“How will that make him come alone?” Mark cut another line in her leg. This one hurt more, as though he’d pressed down harder.

“I’m thinking!” she said. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell him that if he doesn’t come within the next fifteen minutes that my next call will to be to Vicereine and I will tell her about his whole shadow operation.”

“He won’t do it,” Mark said. “He’s a coward.”

“You know how convincing I can be.” Charlie hoped she was convincing him .

He nodded along with that, mouth twisting with memory. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll unbind your hands, then you call. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Charlie sighed. “Are you done bleeding me for your shadows? I think I’ll wait until they’ve fed.”

“You don’t trust me, after all?” he asked, but he didn’t sound displeased.

“I trust you,” she said.

All cons are based on desire. Money, sure, but other stuff too—sex, power, status, validation. Mark hated her, but that made him believe he wouldn’t fall for her tricks.

He made a final cut with the razor, then made a signal. The shadows crowded in.

Misty tongues, dry and barely there, lapped at her skin. The suggestion of solidity, without being at all solid. She knew it wasn’t just blood they were drawing out of her—with each lick they took something more.

Her concentration blurred and a dragging weight pulled her limbs.

“This is why I wanted you to call before,” Mark muttered, kicking his foot into a shadow. Archer. That one was Archer. “Now you’re going to be useless.”

Her eyes had fluttered closed. Nothing he was saying seemed important enough to make her open them. Nothing seemed important enough to argue.

“Off her!” Mark shouted. “Get away.”

Charlie heard their sad moans and hisses of complaint. And despite her horror at those sounds, her exhaustion was too great to stop her from sliding into unconsciousness.

When she woke, her hands were unbound and she was lying on her side on the couch, head propped up by a pillow. She still felt fuzzy-headed. The scent of cigarettes and boiled ramen filled the air.

Rose’s shadow stared down. The dog shadow, Archer, sat beside her.

“He lets us go sometimes, if he gets a better one,” Rosalva said. “He would have let me go if I brought him Red.”

“You did bring him Red,” Charlie reminded her muzzily.

“But if Red had killed him, I wouldn’t have been sad. So you shouldn’t let it bother you that you traded someone’s life for yours either.”

Charlie nodded, even though she wasn’t sure she followed. “I’ll try not to.”

“He says that now that you’re awake you have to make the call. And that I have to hurt you a lot if you warn Mr. Punch.” Rosalva held out Charlie’s phone.

“Noted.” She powered it on and message after message chimed. They flashed on the screen, one after the other. Her sister texting and calling. Malhar texting and calling.

Her brain felt fuzzy and her thoughts would need to be sharp to get through this call.

Rosalva shrugged. “Mark changes his mind a lot.”

Of course he did, cycling through control of so many different shadows. She thought of the fairy tale, of the real Nine-Shadow Man shouting at his shadows for all whispering to him at the same time, because it left no room for his own thoughts.

“What does he change his mind about with you?” Charlie asked.

It was hard to read Rosalva’s expression, made of shadows as it was. “Setting me free,” she said, after a pause. “Now, call Mr. Punch.”

“I need to tell him where to meet me,” Charlie said. “A place good for an ambush. I am going to pull up a map on my phone, okay?”

Rosalva nodded.

Charlie did, sweating through the time it took to load. It turned out they weren’t far from Solaluna—perhaps ten miles, in an apartment complex.

She went into her contacts, repeated the number in her head a few times until she was sure she’d committed it to memory. Then she deleted it.

“What did you do?” Rosalva asked suspiciously.

“I’m looking for Mr. Punch’s contact information,” Charlie told her. Then she shook her head. “Before I call, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Why?” Beside Rosalva, Archer got up and paced around, then settled again.

Charlie scowled. “Why do you think?”

“Fine,” said the shadow. “Leave the phone here.”

That was unfortunate, but reasonable. “Will you cut the ties on my feet?”

Rosalva changed the end of her finger into a knife and sliced it through the zip tie, scratching Charlie’s skin. As a few beads of blood welled up, an unmistakable hunger showed in Rosalva’s demeanor.

Charlie had been bound like that for hours and as soon as the bonds snapped, pins and needles started to prickle her calves. She stood and nearly fell, stiffness taking her by surprise. Holding on to the wall, she tried to walk it off.

There weren’t a lot of rooms off the one she was in, but any mistake would tell her something about where she was, so she didn’t ask for directions.

The first door she opened led to a bedroom, the blankets covered with gore.

Probably, somewhere in this apartment, was the blood-drained corpse of the former resident, starting to rot.

Charlie closed that door, moving to the next one. A bathroom, electric razor in its charging station. Spray cologne beside it. A scum of toothpaste in the sink. A Star Wars shower curtain hung around the tub, featuring Boba Fett.

Despair hit her in the chest. The person who had lived and died here hadn’t done anything to bring the Nine-Shadow Man to their door. Mark had been a shitty boyfriend and a bad person, but he hadn’t been murdering people every day of the week and twice on Sunday.