It had to be somewhat tempting.
For ten years, she’d stolen things for one gloamist or another. Books and scrolls and occasionally other, worse things. For ten years, she’d kept her identity secret. Kept a low profile, worked off and on in restaurants and bars to give her cover, and used Balthazar as her go-between. A little over a year ago, she’d put down a deposit on a house. Convinced Posey to apply to colleges.
Then she’d blown it all up.
It seemed like there’d been a furnace inside Charlie, always burning. A year ago she’d seen how easily she could turn everything to ash.
Adam wasn’t writing back. Maybe he was asleep. Or high. Or just not interested. She shoved the burner back into her bag.
Out of the corner of her eye, Charlie thought she saw the oily slide of something in the space between one building and the next.
It took her mind off her past, but not in a good way.
People talked about disembodied shadows walking the world the way they talked about Slender Man or the girl with the cheek full of spiders, but Charlie knew Blights were more than a story. They were what was left over when the gloamist died and the shadow didn’t. Quite real, and very dangerous. Onyx worked on them, and fire, but that was about it unless you were a gloamist yourself.
Her real phone chimed, drawing her thoughts back to the present with a start. It was a text from Vince: All okay?
Home soon, she texted back.
She should have called him, back at Rapture. He would have picked her up. He probably would have been nice about it too. But she didn’t like the idea of leaning on him. It would only make things worse when he was gone.
A sound came from down the street, by where Nashawannuck Pond ran into Rubber Thread Pond, across from the abandoned mill buildings. Someone was there.
She walked faster, shoving her hand into her pocket to wrap around the handle of a folding tactical knife attached to her keys. It had kept an edge despite her using it to open cereal boxes and chip putty off old windows. She didn’t have much of an idea how to use it to defend herself, but at least it was sharp and had an onyx handle to weaken shadows.
A flicker of movement drew her gaze down an alley. A light on outside one of the shop doors illuminated a heap of stained clothing, white bone, and a wall spattered with black spots of blood.
Charlie stopped, muscles tensing, her stomach lurching, as her mind tried to catch up. Her brain kept supplying her with alternatives to what she saw—a discarded prop from a haunted house, a mannequin, an animal.
But no, the remains were human. Raw flesh torn open, shredded along with clothing as though whoever did this was desperate to get to the person’s insides. Charlie stepped closer. The cold contained the smell, but there was still a charnel sweetness to the air. The man’s face was turned to one side, eyes glassy and open. His rib cage was broken and partially removed, jagged pale bones rising above the mess of flesh like a circle of silver birch trees.
And against the wall, there was the movement again. His shadow, which ought to have been as still as his corpse, was shredded and wafting in the breeze, as though it was torn laundry on a line. As though a strong gust might blow it free.
The man’s face was so changed by death that it was the clothes she noticed first, tweed, wrinkled and a little dirty, as though he’d been living rough in them. This was the man Balthazar had thrown out of Rapture’s parlor. The guy who’d proposed selling something of Salt’s back to him.
Two hours ago, she’d been setting a Four Roses in front of him. Now—
There was a sound at the opposite end of the alley, and Charlie looked up with a sharp inhalation of breath. A man in a long dark coat and hat, with eyes as dark as bullet holes, was staring at her.
There was something wrong with his hands.
Really wrong.
They were entirely made of shadow, right to the scarred nubs of his wrists.
He began to walk toward Charlie, his footsteps sharp and distinct on the asphalt. Half her instincts were telling her to run, the other half wanting her to freeze because running would ignite the predator’s desire to give chase. Was she really going to fight? The knife in her hand seemed ridiculously small, little better than cuticle scissors.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
At the sound, the man paused. They watched one another, the corpse between them. Then he stepped back, slipping around the corner and out of her line of sight. Charlie felt light-headed with shock and horrifyingly sober.
Forcing herself to move, she stumbled out of the alley and fast-walked toward Union. If she was near the body when the police arrived, they were going to have a lot of questions—and weren’t likely to believe a story about some guy with shadow hands. Especially not from Charlie, who had been hauled in twice before the age of eighteen for confidence schemes.
Her legs were carrying her forward, but her mind was reeling.
Ever since the Boxford Massacre twenty years ago, when the world had become aware of gloamists, Western Massachusetts had been lousy with them. The Silicon Valley of shadow magic.
From Springfield with its shuttered gun factories and boarded-up mansions to the universities and colleges to the idiosyncratic farms of the hill towns, polluted rivers, and the marshy beauty of the Quabbin Reservoir, the Valley was cheap enough and close enough to both New York and Boston to be a draw. Plus, it had an already high tolerance for weirdos. There were goats available for mowing lawns. A gun club that ran an annual Renaissance faire. You could buy an eighteenth-century bedframe and a hand-thrown pot in the shape of a vagina and score heroin from a guy at a bus station—all within a fifteen-minute travel window.
These days you could add on stumbling into a shadow parlor and getting an alterationist to remove your desire for any of the aforementioned vices, or adding on a new one. Rolling bliss was skyrocketing in popularity. The more gloamists there were, the more the towns were changing, and there wasn’t enough onyx in the world to stop it.
And yet, for all that, this murder seemed uniquely awful. Whoever or whatever had done it would have needed incredible strength to crack open a body like a walnut.
She shoved her trembling hands deep into her pockets. Her familiar route had become strange to her, full of jagged shadows that moved with each gust of wind. Her nose seemed to catch the scent of spoiling meat.
Two more breathless blocks, and then she was heading up her driveway, hands trembling.
The bell over the door jangled as she entered into the ugly yellow kitchen of their rental house. A frying pan and two dirty dishes sat in the sink. There was a plate domed with another near the microwave. Their cat, Lucipurrr, nosed it hopefully.
Heading toward the living room, she found Vince asleep in front of a television turned down low, his big body sprawled on their scavenged couch, a paperback resting on his stomach. When she looked at him, she felt a stab of longing, the uncomfortable sensation of missing someone who hadn’t yet gone.
Her gaze went to where his shadow ought to have fallen. But there was nothing at all.
When Charlie had first met him, her eye had noted something off, as though he was always a little out of focus, a little blurred at the edges. Maybe she’d been distracted by being drunk, or by his being hard-jawed and clean-cut in a way guys attracted to her never were. It wasn’t until she saw him the next morning, silhouetted in a doorway, seeming as though light was streaming through him, that she realized he didn’t have a shadow.