“You wouldn’t have liked me,” Charlie told him, bumping the toe of her sneakers against the van door. “I was a weird kid.”
Her boobs came in at ten, cresting over the tops of her Walmart bras. Between that and her home life, she’d kept her head down until high school, when she found ways to make herself look scary. Oversized clothes, lots of eyeliner, and hair that hung in her face. Frankenstein boots that she wore until the soles peeled off.
Vince gave her a heavy-lidded look and she wondered if he was going to make a joke.
“I like weird,” he said instead, and went back to disconnecting something on the car.
He had no idea.
A few moments later, Odette’s shiny purple Mini Cooper pulled into the lot. She got out, a voluminous black caftan billowing around her. The faded facial tattoos on her papery skin and the heavy silver piercings along her lips, cheek, and all the way up her ears made it clear that she’d been a badass while they were still in diapers.
She strode over to them, giving a wave with a gloved hand that had metal claws attached to the tips of the cloth.
“You’re a tall drink of water,” Odette said, looking Vincent up and down. Her gaze didn’t travel to the asphalt, to his missing shadow.
Vince wiped a hand on his pants and stuck it out. “Vince,” he said. “You must be Odette. Heard a lot about you.”
Charlie wondered what her boss saw when she looked up at him. He had dirty fingernails from working on the car. A lot of dark blond hair covering his face. Gray eyes that looked hollow in the wrong light. Handsome, in that broad-shouldered, hard-jawed way that seems to defy decadence. Handsome enough to annoy her when people looked at him, and then at her, and drew unflattering conclusions.
After a beat, Odette gave him her hand as though she were a queen bestowing it to a knight. “All bad, I hope.”
“Awful,” he agreed, giving her a lopsided smile.
Odette winked at Charlie. “The quiet ones always do surprise you,” she said.
Then she headed inside.
Vince was almost done with the repair when a Lexus parked behind Rapture, as far from them as possible. A white-haired man in mirrored sunglasses got out. He had a sport coat on and immaculate boat shoes.
“Is that guy lost?” Vince asked.
“He’s probably a client,” Charlie told him. Odette still had a few.
“Huh,” Vince said.
The man had to pass by them on his way to the main entrance. He kept glancing in their direction nervously.
“Some of the guys have been tied up by her for four decades,” Charlie whispered. That was a decade and change longer than she’d been alive.
“Rich,” Vince said.
“No doubt,” Charlie agreed. “It’s funny. None of them are ever what I expect. He looks like a regular businessman, the kind of guy who’d have a winter house in Florida, brag about his grandkids, vote Republican. Have a puppeteer on staff for corporate espionage but be too nervous to look them in the eye.”
Vince squinted at the man. “He’s wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch. South of France, for the house. He can afford it.”
Charlie frowned. “I hope she hits him extra hard.”
Vince turned back to the engine, and Charlie watched flies buzz around the lot. As the afternoon stretched late, it came to her that it was odd for Vince to know about a watch so fancy that she’d never even heard of it.
Maybe his grandfather with the limo knew about rich people. Or maybe Vince took stuff people left in hotel rooms. The idea that he might have secrets bothered Charlie, even though she had plenty. But he wasn’t supposed to be like her.
“Tell me about some of Odette’s other clients,” he said. “While I work.”
Vince loved gossip, even about people he didn’t know. If you met him, silent and six-foot-whatever, you wouldn’t think it. But he’d listen, and comment, like the stories mattered. He remembered the details.
Sometimes she wished he wouldn’t. It made her worried he was going to see through her patter and figure out the real reason she’d left the game.
Charlie had spent so many years in it. Robbing libraries, museums, antiquarian book fairs. Lied and charmed and conned, picked pockets and locks, and even once trapped a Blight in an onyx binding box. She might not have been magic, but she’d cross-pollinated the magical world like a bee.
Gloamists didn’t have spells, per se, but they had notes on techniques and experiments done by glooms through the ages. At first, there was a movement to digitize and share them in a large online free library, until people began to upload hacked versions.
The library was formally dismantled after a copy of the Cosmometria Gnomonica was uploaded, detailing a way for gloamists to gain power by pushing past previous limits by feeding an open stream of life energy to their shadow. Thirty gloamists died before it became clear that the critical last part, which explained how to calculate how much was too much and cut off the supply, had been deleted from the PDF version.
Ever since, gloamists guarded what they had and were suspicious of anything they couldn’t authenticate. Which led to hiring people like Charlie to get originals.
It was scary work, dealing with people who could rip out a part of her. Once, caught, a gloamist altered Charlie’s shadow so that she was so filled with terror that she trembled in her closet for the better part of a week. Not only that, but cons required her to become other people. When she came up for air between jobs, Charlie wouldn’t quite know who she was. She’d get another tattoo, as though it could root her in place. She’d get drunk. Maybe she’d find someone to break her heart. Burn through a chunk of cash, squirrel the rest away, and then do it all over again.
It ended when she stole a volume for Vicereine, the head of a local gang of alterationists who called themselves the Artists. A nineteenth-century memoir, not easy to get off the puppeteer in Albany who’d lifted it from some guy in Atlanta. Charlie had taken a month to worm herself into the right position to get her hands on it.
Then, Charlie’s boyfriend, a cowardly shitlord named Mark, tried to sell it out from under her. He made a side deal with another gang for far less than the book was worth. Like Posey, he wanted a quickened shadow and was willing to believe that gloamists could help him.
Charlie could have told him that she’d discovered what he was trying to do and dumped his ass. But no, Charlie needed to make her point by circling it in fire.
When he tried to make the exchange, Mark discovered that the book was blank. Charlie had carefully removed the cover and replaced the insides with a college-ruled notebook from Target. For the insult, they cut off Mark’s shadow and all the fingers of his right hand.
He’d been a musician.
Charlie tried to tell herself that he deserved it, and that it wasn’t her fault. But that didn’t stop her from crashing hard into depression and self-loathing.
Back then she was working at Bar Ten, and after her shift, she’d lie in bed until she had to work again, too exhausted to move. Eventually, she lost her job. Started burning through her savings. A couple months later, Mark and his brother shot up her car while it was stopped at a light. Only one bullet hit her, but that was plenty. Two hit the guy in the passenger seat, a hookup, who died immediately.
It haunted her that Posey could have been sitting in his place.
Mark and his brother went straight to prison, where they were rotting to this day.
All of it because Charlie had needed to show off. To exact revenge. Charlie Hall, at her best when doing her worst. Whenever she tried to create something, it broke apart in her hands. But blowing something up? There, Charlie had an unerring instinct for greatness.