Posey wrinkled her nose. “I’m going to pass.”
“I’ll take the roach coffee,” said Charlie. The buzz of Balthazar’s candy coffee was starting to wear off, and she needed something to keep going.
“I’ll grab you some,” he said, and then hesitated. “I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, lots of people drink it.”
He came back with three cups. Two coffees and a hot chocolate. She supposed he felt obligated to have one himself, like a host taking the first sip of wine to show they aren’t poisoning their guests.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat. “Posey, I’d like you to tell your story again, and I’d like to record it. Does that sound okay?”
Posey pushed back her shoulders. “It was my sister, really. I told you it happened to me, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it. But I convinced her that it was important.”
His gaze went to Charlie. She shrugged.
“So you’re the one with the quickened shadow?” Malhar looked flummoxed.
Charlie didn’t blame him. She turned to Posey. “The what?”
Posey looked sheepish. “It is. Or at least, it’s something. You know how weird it was acting last night.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Charlie said, standing. “Straight-up murder. No one would blame me. I can’t believe I let you drag me over here—”
Malhar held up his hands, forestalling violence. “We could do a few tests.”
Posey had told her in the car that she’d exaggerated the story, but Charlie still hadn’t seen this coming. “No way. We’re out of here. She’s wasting your time. All she wants is for you to tell her how to wake up her shadow. She’d say anything if she thought it would convince you to do that.”
“Wait,” Posey said, grabbing for her arm. “Let him look at it. Tell him the story.”
Charlie shook her off. She wanted to knock over her coffee. She wanted to throw a chair.
And yet, another part of her wondered—could her shadow be magic? Wasn’t it worth letting her sister get away with an extremely annoying scam, if some of the information they got was actually helpful?
“Fine,” Charlie said, and threw herself back into the chair. “Go ahead. Test my shadow. Whatever. But when all this turns out to be bullshit, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Malhar held up his phone. “So it’s okay if I record this?”
“Nope. It sure isn’t,” Charlie said.
“Come on,” Posey said.
“You won’t have to give your names on the recording,” Malhar said. “I’ll keep your identities secret in my notes. This is just for me to go back over, so I’m sure I have everything right. No one else is going to hear this.”
Charlie looked between him and Posey. “Okay. No names.”
Pressing a button, he put the cell down between them. “Okay, well, we’re rolling. We’ll figure this out. First, tell me a little bit about yourself. Age. Any other details that seem important.”
“I’m twenty-eight.” None of the rest was anything Charlie was going to put on a recording. “Not much more to know.”
“How about you?” He turned to Posey.
“Me?” She had been nervously picking the skin around her thumbnail. She bit the edge of it and then seemed to notice what she was doing. She folded her hands on the table.
“You’re going to be speaking on the recording.” He smiled in a reassuring way.
Posey raised her voice a little, as though afraid the recording wouldn’t pick her up. “I’m twenty-five. I’m her sister and I read tarot cards for people over the internet.”
“Really?” Malhar asked.
She nodded, tilting her head. “I could do a spread for you.”
“Yeah, maybe I could use one.” He looked as though he was regretting everything about tonight. “Let me explain a little bit about the project you’re going to be a part of. It started as an ethnography—a cultural study of gloamists. You know, a deep dive into that community. It seemed important when there were still people around with living memory of it being secret and others who only knew it primarily through seeing altered shadows in magazines.
“But the more people I talked to, the more I became interested in quickened shadows, and their own ethnography. I was surprised by how differently shades were viewed in different eras, and among different groups. Which didn’t fit the original concept of the thesis. So, uh, my thesis ballooned. I started collecting historical references and comparing them with modern accounts. And then I needed more interviews. I’ve been spending a lot of time defending my work to my professors. And my classmates. And my parents.”
“They should be glad you’re doing it,” Charlie said. “Isn’t the University of Massachusetts interested in, like, founding a school for witchcraft and wizardry someday?”
Malhar snorted. “There are physicists experimenting with aphotic shadows. And folklorists collating stories. Biologists sewing cat shadows onto mice. But I am supposed to be an ethnographer, and everyone seems to think that I am in too deep.”
“Ah,” Charlie said. “You’re the one interested in founding the school of witchcraft and wizardry.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling. “You know I am going to edit anything embarrassing that I say out of the transcript, right?”
“What if I say something I want off the record?” Charlie asked.
“I’ll stop the tape for the duration of any comment you want to make and restart when we’re done,” he said. “Is there something you want to say that you don’t want on the tape?”
“Maybe,” she said.
Malhar waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, nodded encouragingly, as though he was used to interviewing paranoid weirdos. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Can you give me an account of what led to the change in your shadow?”
Charlie took a sip of the coffee, trying to figure out how to tell this story in a way that wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. “A man came into my job and used his shadow to rough me up. His shadow was like a fog one minute, and then something that was sorta like a paper doll cutout of a person crossed with a black hole. A shape made from a lack of light. It could become solid enough to knock over some bottles of liquor. And it—”
Charlie stopped at the memory of the thing flooding her lungs, the helplessness of that moment. She drank the rest of the coffee in a gulp, hoping the bite of bitterness would help. Unfortunately, it was bland and watery all the way to the bottom.
“Then the shadow went down my throat. It felt thick and heavy, like I had swallowed a storm cloud. I couldn’t breathe.” She looked down at the chipped nail polish on her thumb so she didn’t have to look at either of them. “I was unconscious, although not for long.”
She thought of hearing Vince’s voice when she woke. The softness in it when he’d spoken to Hermes. The softness in his voice when he spoke to her on the steps. I wish he was alive so I could kill him again.
“Just some clarifications,” Malhar said. “Can you tell me how far the shadow was able to move from the person’s body?”
“Probably about twenty-five feet,” Charlie told him, glad to focus on the technical details instead of how she’d felt. “But usually less than ten.”
He went through a series of questions like that. How often had it become solid, how solid had it become. Had it seemed connected to the gloamist. Had the gloamist seemed strained in any way or stopped to provide it blood. Had Charlie bled, and if she had, did the shadow seem distracted or interested in the blood.
He made a note. “And did the shadow speak at any time?”
Charlie shook her head, surprised by the question. Blights spoke, or at least some of them did. The very powerful ones, like Rowdy Joss, who’d been responsible for the Boxford Massacre, or Xiang Zheng, who dictated many observations about the world to scholars around 220 A.D. and had been thought of as a ghost. Most Blights were less clever than animals—a little low cunning borrowed from their human memories, mixed with the madness that afflicted most of them.