Inside, the air was warm, humid, and scented heavily with eucalyptus. A woman behind a desk took two towels from the shelves behind her and placed them on the counter. She smiled at them as though it was utterly normal to have a hungover client in a spangly dress with makeup all over her face. The steadiness of her gaze didn’t so much as flicker.
“We’d like a private sauna room,” Adeline said. “And we need some clothing in a size … twelve?”
“Fourteen,” Charlie corrected.
The woman continued to smile. “There are towels and robes waiting for you. Would you like some cucumber water?”
“Absolutely.” Charlie felt dehydrated enough to drink a bathtub of cucumber water. “Do you have aspirin?”
“Of course. Anything else?”
Charlie wondered if there was anything they could ask for that would dent her smile. A giraffe? A hot-air balloon? The loan of a crossbow so she could shoot Salt in the back?
Still making that mental list, Charlie followed Adeline into the sauna room. White lockers lined the left wall, robes hanging on attached hooks. The door to the sauna itself was shut, with a lot of dials on the door meant to, she supposed, optimize the heat and moisture levels, as though she and Adeline were lizards in an extremely fancy tank.
And there was a shower room.
Charlie grabbed a robe. “Back in a minute,” she called to Adeline.
Under the steady heat and excellent water pressure, Charlie scrubbed her face with body wash, ignoring the way it stung her eyes. She shampooed her hair twice, then shrugged on the robe.
Adeline stood waiting for her, hair twisted up in a tortoiseshell clip. “The sauna really is the best thing for a hangover. You sweat out the liquor.”
Charlie spotted a pitcher of cucumber water and a bottle of aspirin sitting on a silver tray. She took a generous helping of both before following Adeline into the steam.
The air inside the little room was scented even more strongly of eucalyptus than the front desk, and so thick she seemed to be drinking it as much as breathing it in. Charlie hadn’t been in a sauna before, so she wasn’t sure if that was normal. The combination of heat and moisture created a claustrophobic but not entirely unpleasurable sensation. She sat on a bamboo bench and stretched out her bare toes.
“You’ve got a bruise,” Adeline said, pointing to where Charlie’s calf had come up black and blue after being knocked around by Hermes’s shadow only three days before.
Charlie decided the best thing she could do was ignore that and redirect the conversation. “You and Edmund are almost the same age, right?”
Adeline hesitated, as though the question bothered her. “We were close from the time he first came to live with us. My half sister was so much older than I was that I never knew her well, so it was easier to think of Remy as a brother, more than anything else.”
Her half sister. Right. Edmund’s mother. “What about your mom? Did she mind having another kid in the house?”
“She was a model from the Netherlands. Used to children behaving differently than American kids. She thought there was something wrong with him.” Adeline smiled as though recalling a fond memory. “Edmund cursed. A lot.”
“What about now?”
Adeline sighed. “She lives in New York since the divorce. My mother found Father’s obsession with gloaming … distasteful.”
The painkillers must have kicked in, because Charlie’s head hurt less. It was a little easier to think and it bothered her even more that this whole situation didn’t add up. “Why did Edmund decide to take off?”
“He didn’t want to do what Father said anymore.” Something in Adeline’s face made Charlie wonder if Adeline wasn’t feeling a little rebellious herself. “Father asked a lot from Edmund.”
She could imagine. His grandson was the one with the magic, after all. Even once Salt got himself a quickened shadow, he still wouldn’t have the years of experience his grandson had. That was impossible to buy, and Charlie could only imagine how much that would grind Salt’s gears. A man who was used to buying anything, unable to buy the power a kid had.
“What was he like with you?” Adeline asked. The question was inflected oddly, as if one of the words meant something else.
Perhaps Adeline thought of Edmund as a shape-shifter, the way his grandfather had described him, changing to suit the person he was with. It was hard to argue with that. After all, if he was different with everyone, then how could she know?
But Charlie did have one way to describe him. “You ever been to the Quabbin?”
“The reservoir?” Adeline looked slightly horrified.
“You know there’s a whole town down there,” Charlie said. “Buried under the waves. That’s what Vince was like. A drowned town. Still along the surface. Everything’s hidden underneath.”
“You can’t know—” Adeline started, then cut herself off. Looking down at the slim gold watch with the diamond case on her wrist, still miraculously running despite the heat and the moisture of the room, she cleared her throat. “It’s almost time to meet Father for lunch. We ought to go.”
She stood. Charlie followed her lead, rising and stretching until she got a satisfyingly audible crack from her shoulder blades.
In the changing room, Adeline regarded her speculatively. “I know you’re not going to think this is nice of me to say, but I’m glad you’re not with Edmund anymore.”
She was right. It wasn’t nice. But it was interesting.
The spa had left an outfit for Charlie hanging from one of the lockers. It had the look of coming from a golf shop, one that she imagined was probably in the main building. Pants in a stretchy navy material, a white collared shirt, and a navy chevron zip-up jacket. They’d brought her white tennis shoes and socks, but her flats were fine, with just a little dried mud at the edges. She got dressed and braided her hair, but without a clip, it immediately began to unravel.
Charlie’s gaze fell on her shadow.
In all this talk, no one had quite explained how Vince lost his—or when.
“Charlie?” Adeline called.
She blinked, coming out of her thoughts.
A golf cart idled in front of the spa, the driver waiting to take them to the main building. Charlie didn’t have to go to lunch. She could head back inside, insist that someone call her a cab. Put on her own clothes back at home.
But if Salt wanted to find her again, he had the resources to do it. He could tail her to and from work in his Rolls. For all she knew, he might be able to send a cop to her house to pick her up for him.
Maybe that nice Detective Juarez.
Enough money bought anything.
The grass was wet against her ankles as she walked to the golf cart. Then she hung on as they crossed the parking lot, past Bentleys and Lexuses. Charlie wondered how many of Odette’s clients were members here.
Inside the main building, Charlie followed Adeline across a gleaming stone floor to the restaurant. The host didn’t ask their names, just led them to a private room where the walls were covered in yellow silk, and paintings of horses, coats gleaming like polished mahogany, hung atop the cloth.
Lionel Salt was already waiting for them at the table, nursing a lowball glass of whiskey with an ice globe sitting in it. She took in his wrinkles, his faded age spots and too-pale skin, as though he’d tried to bleach them away. The smoothness of his forehead from injections. He wore a black turtleneck and dark gray pants. On his finger, a gold ring marked with an unfamiliar arcane symbol gleamed. Charlie noted that neither he nor Adeline wore any onyx.
“This is a lot of trouble to go to for a conversation,” Charlie said as the host hastened to pull out her seat for her.
“You look refreshed.” Salt exchanged a look with Adeline, who nodded. Maybe there had been some kind of two-part poison in her cucumber water. If she started to feel woozy, she was going to stab Salt in the chest with whatever knife there was, even if it was a butter knife.
He leaned over to a waiter. “We will have the smoked pheasant confit salad, the Kanzan cherry blossom tea–cured salmon, and the grilled lamb loin.” He looked at Charlie. “I assume you’re not a vegetarian?”