“Don’t lie to me,” Hermes said.
Charlie was conscious of many things at once—the stickiness of the floor; the overripe stink of spoiled liquor; the pins-and-needles feeling of her slapped cheek; her horror of what was happening; the baseball bat that Odette insisted they keep behind the bar, under the ice maker, just out of her reach.
Time seemed to slow and speed at once as Charlie crawled to the bat.
The bearded man’s shade flickered above her, an etheric hand striking the shelf of bottles and sending them down in a rain of shattering glass.
Charlie covered her head automatically. A half-full bottle smacked her shoulder as more bottles smashed around her. Little chips of splintered glass flew up from each crash, lodging on her clothes and stinging her skin. Spilled liquor flowed over her knees in a torrent.
Charlie’s fingers closed around the bat and she pushed herself to her feet, shaking with adrenaline and fear and rage.
With no good ideas, she was going to go for the bad one.
They better carve that on her tomb. The Charlie Hall credo.
She swung hard at the shade. The bat passed straight through, as though it were a ghost. The momentum made her stagger forward. She almost fell right on her ass.
Hermes cackled. He had stepped back from the bar, as though he were a spectator in what was happening and not its architect. “You’re a real firecracker, aren’t you? Last chance. The truth this time. Who gave Ecco the pages from that book?”
The air seemed to thicken around her.
“You wouldn’t know the truth if it stuck its tongue up your ass,” she told him with the best sneer she could summon up.
This time the shade went right down her throat.
She felt as though she were drowning. As though her lungs were filled with something heavier than air, something she couldn’t cough up.
Panicked, she scratched at her throat, choking on shadow, her screams soundless.
Wisps of it blew from her mouth and nose, from behind her eyes. Darkness was crowding in the edges of her vision and she wasn’t sure if it was the lack of air or the shadow.
For a moment, she felt as though she were standing outside herself, noting the way the edges of her lips were turning blue. Watching as she gasped, tipping her chin up as though drowning and seeking the top of the wave.
When Charlie opened her eyes, she found herself on the tiles. She could breathe again, although inhaling hurt.
Charlie looked up at the mirrored ball on the ceiling and saw a figure standing behind Hermes, arm pressed to his throat. But from their blurred shape, she couldn’t identify the new person. Their arrival must have been what made Hermes call his shadow back.
She began crawling slowly over the glass-covered floor, telling herself that when she made it to the open area of the lounge, she was going to run for the back doors, hit them hard with her shoulder, and not look back.
“You’ve let your shadow feed for too long tonight.” Impossibly, it was Vince’s voice she heard. But it had gone all wrong. Soft and menacing. As oblivious to Hermes’s squirming as if it were irrelevant. “There’s not much of you left. Can you feel the strain, like something spooling out of you?”
The man made a choking sound, twisting his body, trying desperately to break free.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
Charlie almost couldn’t recognize this Vince, standing in the middle of the empty club. Tightening his grip.
Then came a sound like a wet branch breaking.
She caught her breath.
Reflected in a dozen tiny mirrors, the bearded man hung limply in Vince’s arms.
9
THE PAST
Charlie took to pickpocketing like it was what her fingers were made to do. At twelve, Rand set her up to study with a retired magician who had learned to lift wallets and watches as part of her act, and every Tuesday and Thursday after school, he would drop her off at Ms. Presto’s house. He told Charlie’s mom that it was for piano lessons.
Ms. Presto smoked, and her whole house reeked of it. It was a small place, over in Leeds, with barely any backyard. Inside, it was stuffed with antique memorabilia, including an automaton that had once graced a department store but now stood in a corner wearing a top hat, with half its face missing. “The only magicians people have heard of are men, but some of the greats were women,” Ms. Presto would say, waving her cigarette around. “And let me tell you something, the best grifters were always the females. We know how people think. We’ve got the nerve. And we don’t get caught.”
Charlie liked the way Ms. Presto included her in that declaration. We. And she especially liked the idea that she might dodge any consequences.
“So the first thing you have to understand is the tap. You tap somewhere on the body of the mark while you make the lift. Maybe you bump into them if you’re walking or touch their shoulder if they’re sitting in a crowded restaurant. People think the tap is misdirection, but that’s not it. The brain can’t process the feeling of being touched in two places at once, so it only alerts the mind to the harder hit.
“Tap ’em on the shoulder and they don’t feel your hand in their pocket or purse. There’s no real finesse. Just grab.”
Charlie thought about that. Ms. Presto gave her a cardamom hard candy out of a silver skull on her coffee table. “What if you stick your hand in a purse and there’s too much stuff? Or what if it’s zippered?”
“Ah, now, that’s where misdirection comes in,” she said. “Surprise them. Razzle-dazzle them. Or just pick an easier mark. Lots of fish in the sea. And some of them are wearing solid-gold chains.”
“What about clasps?” When Ms. Presto had first started talking, it had seemed simple. But the more Charlie thought about it, the harder it seemed. It took her three tries to put a necklace on, much less take one off of someone with one hand, all while razzle-dazzling them.
“Hand on the back of the neck, a little pressure, and clever fingers,” said Ms. Presto. “It’s all the same. Let’s start practicing.”
First they hung jackets on the automaton and strapped watches onto the arms of chairs. Then, when Charlie had mastered that, Ms. Presto would walk around her house so that Charlie could pretend to bump into her, or be walking up to her in a crowd.
Finally, they were ready to go out.
One afternoon, Rand drove her to the Holyoke Mall instead of Ms. Presto’s house.
“We going shopping?” Charlie asked.
Rand didn’t even seem to mind her tone. He grinned like the joke was on her. “Your lesson is here today.”
Ms. Presto met her in Macy’s, where she was buying a pair of sneakers. “Never hurts to have a bag on you,” she told Charlie. Then she smiled. “Or an old woman with you.”
They walked out into the main mall.
“Am I going to watch you first?” Charlie asked hopefully.
Ms. Presto shook her head. “No point delaying the inevitable. Let’s go toward the Starbucks. There’s always a crowd there.”
And so Charlie started the first day of on-the-job training. She slid past people in narrow aisles with an “excuse me” and a touch on the arm. It worked in Sephora, and the Apple Store. Easier than she would have thought too, but not particularly precise. She did manage to lift a wallet from a guy, but all the forays into handbags resulted in her getting random things. A key ring. A lipstick. And once, a balled-up tissue.
After five lifts, Ms. Presto bought her a Frappuccino.
“Two things,” she said. “Once you got the thing, you put it in your pocket. What did you do after that?”
Charlie shrugged. “Walked away?”
“In the future,” Ms. Presto said, eyeing her seriously, “you’re going to take out a candy. Or some money. Whatever it is you want people to think you put your hand into your pocket for. Always keep something in there to pull out. Always. Otherwise, you’re giving them two things to notice. The lift itself and the hand coming out of the pocket empty.”