Charlie stretched, rolling her shoulders. “I think I am going to go inside and see about the air mattress.”
“Think about what I said,” her mother told her as she stood.
As Charlie walked away, a memory came to her of when she was very little and her parents were still together. She was sitting in the back seat of the car, the window down. Wind whipped her hair. The radio was on, Charlie’s little legs swinging along with the music, and Mom and Dad were laughing together. Golden sunlight had turned the world dazzlingly bright, and it seemed as though night would never come.
As she and Posey took turns pumping up their bed, Bob and Mom moved comfortably around the room. They seemed contented. It was weird, but nice. Like there was no curse, just a casual family inheritance of bad relationships, in a cycle that no one was doomed to repeat.
Charlie and Posey lay down next to one another, trying not to bounce the mattress. Charlie remembered a whole childhood of sharing beds with Posey, whispering to one another, back when they had the same secrets.
Back when they had the same gifts.
Charlie thought of the moment when her consciousness split, when she understood how to be in two places at once. Even now when she closed her eyes, she could feel her shadow. If she concentrated hard enough, she could see herself from its vantage.
As soon as she did, though, panic sent her spiraling back to her own body.
Charlie didn’t have a goldfish or a turtle, because she worried she’d forget to feed anything that couldn’t yowl for its dinner. She forgot to take her birth control pills at least twice every month, sometimes for two days at a time. When she’d downloaded an app to help her remember to drink water, it had come with a pixelated plant you were supposed to tap when you drank a glass. She killed the plant over and over—sometimes she’d drink the water but forget to tap the plant, and sometimes she’d just forget to drink the water. How was she going to remember to give blood to a shadow every day?
How was she going to keep from accidentally letting it drink up all her energy until she withered away? How was she going to keep it from becoming her own personal monster?
Lying on the mattress, the soft susurrations of breath surrounded her as the others succumbed to sleep. But Charlie’s mind couldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop worrying, wouldn’t stop assembling and reassembling the information she had.
Once Salt realized his grandson had magic, he would have wanted to control him. Kiara’s situation was rife with opportunities for exploitation. Salt could easily get custody of Vince in court. He had the money to feed Kiara’s habit; she might not even contest it.
And for Vince, the promise that his mother would be sent to rehab, that she might get better. And then doling out access to her as a reward for good behavior, the promise of reuniting hanging forever over his head. And the fear of her being punished for his missteps motivating him further.
If Charlie could come up with that plan, she had no doubt that Salt had concocted a worse version.
And so Vince does what Salt tells him, and Red, whatever he was before, becomes a reflection of those things they do together. But controlling an adult is much harder than controlling a child. Especially one with a long education in manipulation and cruelty.
So Vince plans to leave and join his mother, but something goes horribly wrong. Possibly Salt realized that he didn’t need Vince if he had Red, and cut off his grandson’s shadow.
But if he planned to have it sewn to him, that didn’t happen. It became a Blight, the talking kind, so he had to make a deal. He could have been the one who offered the ritual from the Liber Noctem, and Vince the one who stole the book to keep Red from walking the world.
There was no way Salt would mind making a monster, so long as it served his interests. And in the meantime, Red keeps on killing for him. Keeps on doing his bidding. Together, they get him accepted into the Cabal.
But if he’d promised Red his reward by the time of the announcement, then she could see why he needed the book. The problem with monsters is that you need to keep them leashed, or they turn on you.
The Hierophant wanted the book as much as Salt did. Had the Blight tied to him made him some kind of promise, some arrangement to get the same ritual? Or was he working on behalf of the Cabal, trying to keep Red from becoming a new and more terrible form of Blight?
And, more importantly, what was Charlie going to do? Salt expected her to bring him the Liber Noctem by the weekend, and the weekend was coming up fast.
Charlie’s head hurt and her eye hurt and her ribs hurt.
Her gaze rested on the refrigerator, with its dozens of magnets. And as she looked at them, a thought came to her, about the little magnetic silver thingy dangling off her keys. The one she’d found among Vince’s belongings.
Maybe that’s all it was, a magnet. A magnet for holding a metal-covered book.
She got up as quietly as she could and, clad in a borrowed shirt of Bob’s, slid on her shoes. Put on one of her mother’s coats. Slipped out the door as quietly as she’d slid into plenty of other homes.
In the parking lot, the angle of the streetlight gave everything long shadows. The hiss of cars on the highway was distant, the streaks of the lightning farm barely visible.
She popped the hood of her Corolla and looked at the puzzle of the engine and spark plugs and other things she didn’t really understand. Rich people never performed their own oil changes, or rotated their tires. They never even vacuumed their own seats. And Vince had spent a lot of time working on her car.
But the Liber Noctem wasn’t stuck in the guts of the Corolla, and though she crawled underneath, the only thing she discovered was an oil leak.
* * *
In the morning, Charlie’s neck felt hot against the press of her fingers. She went into the bathroom and splashed cold water in her face, combing it back through her hair. Her mother’s dire predictions hadn’t proved accurate. The swelling had gone down around her eye. It had, however, turned a magnificently dark purple, with plenty of yellow and green bruising at the edges.
“I’m heading out to Rite Aid,” she announced over breakfast, drinking down the sweet milk in her cereal bowl.
“You can’t go to work like that,” their mother said.
“I know,” Charlie told her. “That’s why I need to go to the drugstore first.”
Posey snorted indelicately.
A few minutes later, Charlie was out the door.
According to the YouTube tutorials she’d watched while the air mattress slowly deflated beneath her, Halloween makeup was her best chance to fix her face. Luckily, some remained in the clearance section. She got herself a cheap palette that consisted of white, lime green, royal blue, bright yellow, and cherry red. Charlie was concerned she was going to look like a clown.
She added to that some regular stuff—a full-coverage concealer, liquid eyeliner, distractingly red lipstick, new deodorant, a three-pack of panties, and the only black t-shirt in her size. Unfortunately, it was emblazoned with a red-nosed reindeer below IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FUCK THIS in puffy letters. Still, it was a fine opportunity to break Salt’s hundred-dollar bill.
Back at the motel room, Charlie poured the stuff out on her mother’s bed and sprawled on the comforter to put it on.
After a lot of googling of color wheels and watching that video again, she mixed bright yellow with a little red and dabbed it on the purpling parts. Then she waited for it to dry.
Surprisingly, by the time she applied the concealer in careful dabs, the only thing that showed she’d been hit was the swelling—and even that was less obvious next to a red lip and a little bit of gold dusted on her eyelids.
“You look good,” her mother said with a frown. “But I still think you should call out sick and go talk to the police.”
“I’ll think about it,” Charlie lied.