With very little power, glooms could make a puppeted shade pick a penny up off the ground. With more, they could crush your heart by reaching down your throat. Charlie’s entire career as a con artist and a thief had been about avoiding facing one directly.
The performers rose and scuttled toward the back exit that led to the dumpsters, past the stage. As Odette followed them, she looked back and mouthed something to Charlie. Unfortunately, she had no idea what Odette was trying to tell her. Hopefully it was that she planned to call the police. Not that Charlie had a high opinion of their bravery in the face of magic, but maybe body cameras might rattle this guy.
“Call me Hermes. What do you got on draft?” He had a little South Boston in his voice. She guessed he was in his thirties, with dark hair and pale skin flushed red in the cheeks from wind. He had the look of a practical guy, not someone interested in magic. Not someone with magic.
“I guess you didn’t hear the owner say we were closed,” Charlie told him firmly. At the moment, his shadow was insubstantial as a moonbeam. She knew it cost them something to manipulate it, she just wasn’t entirely sure what.
“The owner’s gone,” he said. “Just us now.”
The etheric shape moved toward her again, so large that the whole room seemed to darken. Charlie crossed her arms over her chest.
Hermes slammed his hand down on the bar, making her jump. “Do you know what I could do to you?”
Her adrenaline spiked, making it hard to think, but she reminded herself that he had no idea who she was. Whatever had driven him to confront her, he didn’t think he was talking to Charlie Hall, thief of magic. He saw only Charlie Hall, overcurious bartender. And that was how she was going to play this, with the arrogance of ignorance.
“Do to me? I don’t know, what can you do with your scaaaary shadow?” she asked. “Hover a little? Look two inches taller if I don’t squint? Better sense of smell?”
For a moment, she had the satisfaction of Hermes looking flummoxed. Then he snorted. “You really don’t know, do you? You know nothing about nothing.”
“That’s me, an ignoramus,” Charlie told him, proud of how even her voice sounded. “For instance, I have no idea why you’re here harassing me.”
The man’s shade stretched like taffy—toward Charlie and then through a slender seam in the wood of the bar, over the sink and spare glasses and plastic containers of grenadine and simple syrup.
In all the time she’d stolen from them, she’d dreaded the thought of being caught by one of their shadows. To find out the limits of gloamist powers in the worst way possible. Ironic, to have avoided it then, only to have it happen now.
She took a step away, but the narrowness of the bar prevented her from escape. She was trapped with mirrored shelves of booze behind her, along with a register and finicky cappuccino machine.
“Paul Ecco,” Hermes said, into that silence. “You might be the last person he spoke with on earth. Pretty girl like you, I bet he bragged about how rich he was going to be. Maybe showed you a rare object he was intending on selling. But, you see, that object belonged to Mr. Salt. Tell us how Ecco got it. Tell us and you can go back to your sad little life and pretend you never had a brush with death.”
Lionel fucking Salt.
This was a fishing operation. Hermes had no idea Charlie knew anything. But she’d lied on the phone to test him, and that had made her look suspicious. In a year away from the work, she’d gotten sloppy. “All I did was pour the guy a shot.”
He has no reason to hurt me, she told herself, although she doubted anyone who worked for Salt would need a reason. The room was quiet, as though she and the man shared a single indrawn breath.
“You know what I feed this thing?” the man demanded, stepping away from her and his shadow. “Blood. Maybe yours.”
Hermes’s shade congealed somehow. For a moment, it seemed as though he was in two places at once, so convincingly did the shadow re-create him. It appeared solid, although the umbilical cord–like connection to the bearded man’s feet remained visible but blurry.
A shadow finger reached toward her and Charlie braced. When it brushed her skin, she had the sensation of something cold and a little electric, as though she was being touched by a storm. She stiffened, stumbling back as a wave of fear crested over her—too great and too paralyzing to be her own.
Charlie’s heart skittered, the unreality of the moment making her dizzy.
“Okay, get that thing away from me. You win.” Charlie’s voice shook as she held up her hands in surrender, backing away. She bit the inside of her cheek to steady herself. “You convinced me. I’ll pour you a beer, even though we’re closed.”
The shade didn’t move. “You’re a real joker, aren’t you?” Hermes said.
Reaching onto the mirrored shelf, Charlie took down a pint glass. It was slippery in her fingers, her palms sweating. The shade hung in the air, drifting beside her, as she pulled a draft of their nicest IPA.
Maybe she could try the truth. Well, some of the truth. “I was walking home and I saw him. Paul Ecco, dead. I recognized him from Rapture. It looked bad, what happened to him. And then when it wasn’t in the news, I guess I got curious.”
“You’re lying,” he told her. “You knew him. You called looking for him.”
“I didn’t expect anyone to answer,” she said. “And then I thought that if I asked for Paul, the person on the other end of the line would tell me what happened. I didn’t expect that you would pretend to be him.”
“I don’t believe it.” His anger had the edge of desperation to it, as though going back to his boss empty-handed was something to worry about.
“I never met Paul before that night,” Charlie insisted, knowing it was futile as she saw Hermes’s expression. He didn’t want her to be unconnected.
She didn’t think she could make it to the doors in the back, but she might have to try anyway. She wished for the stupid onyx-handled knife in her purse. Wished for anything.
“Stop trying to play me,” he growled at her. His shadow seemed to be flickering at the edges, as though it was made from some dark fire. “You’re in this somehow. The next time you open your mouth, you better be very careful what comes out.”
He’d already decided what he wanted to hear, and he wasn’t willing to listen to anything else. Either she was going to have to make a doomed run for it, or she was going to have to make him believe a good story.
Hermes wanted the Liber Noctem for his boss and believed that he had more than just the pages he wanted to sell, pages that she assumed Ecco’s murderer had acquired. Charlie could talk about how he’d been asking Balthazar to fence the part he had, but she suspected that he’d already spoken with Balthazar, and that he’d thrown her at least halfway under the bus. After all, Hermes had seemed very certain she was the caller.
Charlie pushed the beer across the bar and made a show of sighing. “When Paul came into Rapture, he wasn’t alone,” she lied. “There was another man, and I heard him say something about ‘a whole book.’ Does that help?”
Hermes hadn’t mentioned the book directly, so maybe that would convince him. That could have happened, if he really was moving the book for Adam.
“Are you sure the thing with him was a man?” Hermes asked.
“I think so,” she hedged, wondering if there was someone else he was expecting to find involved. Had anyone actually talked to Ecco that night?
“Edmund Carver,” Hermes said. “Was that what Paul called him?”
Charlie hesitated. If she said yes, she could tell he’d be pleased. But she had no idea who that person was, and she’d have to supply details that she didn’t have. She shook her head again. “I didn’t hear a name, and his shadow didn’t seem—”
His shade struck Charlie in the face, hard enough to knock her off balance. Her hip hit the sink and her feet went out from under her. She fell to her hands and knees on the tile.