Prologue
Past a certain hour, the house got quiet. No one smoking cigars in the library. No one screaming in the basement.
Night after night, the shadow drifted through the walls of Salt’s mansion. Down from where Remy was sleeping, teeth grinding together like stones in a mill. Past Adeline’s room where she pressed pillows over her face to smother herself to sleep.
He would sit on the stone patio and try to feel the cold. He would repeat the things he knew to himself. The longest river in the world is the Nile. The largest river in the world is the Amazon. Two times two is four. Infinity minus one is still infinity. Then he might go into the parlor and page through Remy’s comics. Stories were good places to hide, but he couldn’t stop looking for himself in them. Hide-and-seek. Was he Batman? The Joker? What was his name?
Not Remy. Remy was still asleep.
Red.
Red as blood.
A line from Snow White. Someone used to read him fairy tales then. He could almost remember her—gray hair, black-and-white checkerboard frames on her glasses—but he wasn’t given all of the pieces.
No, he wasn’t Remy. He was Remy’s shadow. Remy’s monster. A patchwork thing, held together with spit and sinew and spite.
Night after night he spent like that, until the evening when he’d come into the library and found the girl lying in a pool of her own vomit. It hadn’t been very late, the screaming in the basement was still going on and the scent of cigars lingered in the air.
Don’t look, he’d told her.
But part of him wanted her to turn around.
1The Hierophant
Most of the long-abandoned mill buildings of Easthampton were being slowly resurrected by developers. Out of their desiccated husks sprang apartments and offices, spaces for circus schools, hydroponic beer gardens, webcomic merchandise warehousing, weed dispensaries, and cement countertop artisan showrooms. But a few still remained untouched—brickwork skeletons towering over the trees and river, insides dark and worming with rusty nails and refuse.
Not the kind of places that Charlie Hall wanted to be picking her way through, searching for a dangerous Blight, armed with only a knife, a flashlight, and a lot of resentment.
She was a liar and a con artist. Not a fighter.
But now that she’d fast-talked her way into being the Hierophant, Charlie was expected to find and dispatch untethered shadows, and there’d been a report of one around the mill buildings. Shadows only achieved consciousness if the gloamist they were bound to allowed it. And only shadows with independent consciousness survived the death of their gloamist. But those that did became Blights, full of death energy, piss, and vinegar. Mostly, that meant they killed people, drank blood, and made shadow magic look bad.
Hunting them down really was a shit gig. As far as Charlie could tell, the only thing she currently had going for her was that the moon was high and round and bright, illuminating the filthy, scary rooms she was making her way across.
Of course, that meant there were shadows everywhere.
And at least one of those shadows was alive and hungry.
Her breath clouded in the air. The only noises in the room were a steady drip near the window and her own footsteps.
As she passed, something on the floor caught her eye and she swept the flashlight’s beam toward it. Bones, small and delicate. She took a quick step back. A dead rat, she guessed from the shape of the jaw and the remaining scraps of gray fur.
Well, dead rats. Kicking at the refuse with a booted foot, she uncovered more bones. A lot more bones.
Instinctively, she moved closer to the open window and the moonlight. A droplet fell from the ceiling, splashing the arm of her coat. Another, dark and oily, hit her hand. She had a moment of incomprehension, though she’d seen plenty of it before. Not leaking oil or condensation from some ancient pipe. Blood.
The light of her torch strobed over the walls as her back hit the brick edge of an empty window. Panic made her whole body go still and stiff.
She needed to get the hell out of there. Leave and tell the Cabals that she’d searched the whole building but found nothing. Her real skill was in lying; she ought to lie.
But who’s going to stop the Blight if not you, Charlie Hall?
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to walk toward the stairs, testing each board with her foot as she went. There, she glanced down at her own shadow, the thin skein of darkness that tied her to a Blight even more terrifying than the one she was hunting. Red.
Not Red, she told herself. Vince. Vince, who’d loved her. Vince, who’d lied to her. Vince, who’d seemed like a normal boyfriend—with secrets, sure, but normal secrets, like a nasty fetish. Not secretly being the shadow of a dead man, alive only through blood magic.
Vince, who no longer remembered her since they’d been tethered together.
Who she might be able to summon through the tether, but doubted she could control if he fought against it. Not that she planned to control him.
She’d promised he wouldn’t be a tool in her hands, the way he’d been with Salt. He didn’t believe her, though. To prove the point, he’d made it
very clear that he wasn’t going to help her unless she forced him.
Which meant she was in this alone. Again. Typical Charlie Hall, willing to cut her throat to spite the knife.
Trust is earned, she reminded herself. Just like wealth, love, kindness, and friendship. And if most of the time it wasn’t earned honestly, well, so much the better. She was a cheater by nature. She just needed to find her angle and make him trust her, before he discovered how to turn his immense power against her.
With that uncomfortable thought in mind, she gripped the stone knife more tightly and forced herself to climb the stairs instead of running out of the building.
The third level was as covered in filth and refuse as the second. Charlie passed cabinets, the dirt and dust on them so thick that she couldn’t tell the color underneath. Ahead, the floorboards had given out and a hole gaped along one wall. She approached it gingerly. When she looked over the edge, she expected to be able to see all the way down to the basement, but instead there was only darkness.
As she stepped into the next room, she saw a heap of a man in a dirty coat, lying on an even dirtier sleeping bag. Drawing closer, she saw the bag was stained dark with blood. She leaned down, but the brightness of her flashlight did nothing to disturb him. His chest didn’t rise or fall. No breaths clouded the air.
The dead man wore a camo jacket and filthy work boots. Near his feet rested a grocery bag with most of a six-pack of Schlitz and a half-eaten sandwich inside. He must have snuck in to sleep in the building and discovered there was something else already there.
The distinct scent of spilled beer mingled unpleasantly with that of a butcher shop. No smell of decomposition, though. The blood hadn’t even had time to coagulate. His death was so recent that she might have interrupted the Blight during its feeding.
It would be nearby. Maybe still in the room.
“Vince?” she called softly, under her breath, but no answer came. She could feel the thin thread of her connection to him, but nothing else.
A shuffling on the floorboards behind her made her turn, thrusting out her obsidian dagger and sweeping the flashlight after it.
t.
“You should get out of here,” she told it, thinking of all the rat bones on the floor below.
The rodent sniffed the air, still watching her. Its whiskers twitched.
“I know. I should get out of here too,” she continued conversationally. “But I historically only make bad decisions.”
The rat gave a surprised squeak before racing off into the maze of debris. Charlie barely had time to turn before the Blight swept over her, washing her in inky darkness.
Her whole body went cold as the thing tried to thrust its way down her throat. Burrow into her chest. She choked, the small discs of onyx she had strung around her neck and braceleting her arms the only things keeping the shadow from smothering her right there.
She stabbed wildly with her knife, no technique at all. Thankfully the blade connected, hitting something solid. With no idea if she was even really hurting the thing, she stabbed again, a cornered animal, fighting only because flight was off the table.
The Blight flowed away, turning solid in front of her, only visible as a deeper darkness, a hole ripped out of the fabric of the world. Its mouth, like a jagged slash, opened wide and then wider.
She should have brought a lot more onyx.
She should have listened to everyone who ever told her that she was a fool and that she was going to get herself killed.
She should have never made that promise to Red.
Charlie turned and ran. She’d faced small Blights before, but they were laughable when compared to this one, full of fresh blood and raw power. She had no idea how to fight this monster made from darkness—in darkness, no less.
She only made it a few steps before the Blight dropped down onto her back. She staggered under the improbable weight as shadow claws sank into her shoulder.
Careening to one side, she attempted to knock the thing against the wall and off her. Instead the shadow dissipated so quickly that all she managed was to slam her own shoulder against the brick.
The Blight re-formed in the shape of a too-tall, spindly man blocking her path, its monstrous fingers reaching toward her.
She jumped to the side, only narrowly evading its grasp. Her breaths had become ragged. The back of her throat felt dry as sandpaper.
The shadow rushed at her once more and she ducked under its arm to sink the onyx dagger into its stomach before twisting away. The Blight twitched, as though trying to shift form again, but the onyx blade in its belly kept it solid, unable to change.
Charlie panted, backing away, out of breath and almost out of ideas.
Red, she thought at him, not sure if he could even hear her. Help! I’m not forcing you, but please.
The Blight stalked toward her, barely slowed by the dagger sticking out of its side.
Charlie didn’t have another onyx weapon. Instead, she dropped her flashlight, the beam spinning wildly on the ground, and grabbed for a splintery plank of wood.
The long shadow was almost to her again as her thumb flicked over the wheel of her lighter. Old, half-rotted, and soaked in something oily, the wood caught fast.
At the sight of the fire, the Blight paused in its approach.
The flames licked downward over the plank, toward her hand. Whatever had caused the wood to catch so easily also made it burn too fast. She felt heat lick at her fingers, then scorch.
With a desperate shout, she hurled the plank at the Blight.
The shadow monster caught fire, an enormous torch in the night. It gave an inhuman howl that sounded half like an owl screech, half like an infant cry, and Charlie staggered back. Flames licked the ceiling before burning up like flash paper. Bright enough to blister the eyes, then gone.
Charlie’s fingers hurt. She put them in her mouth as she stamped out the embers. She noted the oily substance, darker than char. The remains of the shadow.
Then another shadow dropped down from the empty windowsill, landing softly, catlike. Charlie screamed.
When he came into focus, though, it was only Red.
Red.
She wanted to think of him as Vince, but she couldn’t.
Tall and broad-shouldered, with bronze hair and eyes like smoking craters.
Nicely done. The words echoed in her mind.
e couldn’t help bracing her hands on her thighs and leaning over to take several steadying breaths, then several more.
“I came when you called. If you needed me, you should have called sooner.” She could feel the whisper of his emotions, prickly and intense enough to bleed through their tether. “You can make me do whatever you want, Charlie.”
Ash smoldered at her feet and her fingers still stung from the fire. Charlie reached down and took her knife from the remains. With it, she scraped up some of the dark substance she’d need to present to the Cabal to claim the bounty. “You were slow.”
He only watched her with those terrifying eyes.
Charlie stuck her hands in her pockets and started to pick her way out of the building, toward the white van that she’d been driving. She tried to ignore her sore shoulder and burnt fingers and throbbing head. Ignored that Red hadn’t followed her. Tried to convince herself this had been a success.
She was the Hierophant. She’d gotten rid of a dangerous Blight and come one step closer to working off her debt to the Cabals.
She was three darkened blocks away before Red caught up. His eyes looked more human—no hollows and no smoke. She thought about the body of the man on the third floor, the one whose blood had still been wet, whose skin had still perhaps even been warm.
She wondered if there was any blood left in him now. ...
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