“I suppose you wanted it to be Remy who saved you,” the shadow said, voice soft. “Not Red.”
Charlie wasn’t about to answer that. Yes, she had a naive desire for the sort of romance a palm reader would trace on the inside of a hand. A fated love, begun in childhood. Love was a family religion, passed down to her when she’d been too young to protect herself from belief. “Even back then, you were already a Blight?”
The shadow nodded, allowing her to turn the subject.
“And you killed people for Salt.” She kept her voice stiff.
“Yes,” it said.
She had to remind both of them that she wasn’t some fool who was going to trust it just because they had a weird past together. “Tell me—the way you killed Adam, was that special? Cracking his ribs open like you were going to spatchcock a turkey, and painting the walls with his blood? Or is that how you did them all?”
It stepped closer to the bars. “Adam?”
“You’ve got to remember the guy you murdered on my couch. In a very gross way.”
The shadow stared at her with what appeared to be real horror. “I’d never do that to you. Never.”
Charlie hated how much it looked like Vince, and how much that made her want to trust it. “Okay, tell me about all the other people you didn’t murder.”
“You’re clever,” it said, with a small rueful smile. “And I’m not used to explaining things. I didn’t do much talking, before. I don’t think I’m very good at it.”
“Try,” Charlie said.
“You shouldn’t have had to come back here.” It seemed sad, and tired. She had no way to know if that was something it was putting on, or if flesh conferred weakness. “You should go and never come back, like I told you that night.”
“So, what, I’m supposed to grab my sister and mother and blow town? Let Salt win? Do whatever he wants to Vince?”
“Yes,” it said, with more heat than she expected. “He can handle himself.”
“He shouldn’t have to,” Charlie said.
“He left you,” the shadow said.
“And you as well, didn’t he?” Charlie asked. “Must piss you off, to have him create you and then shed you like he was crawling out of a chrysalis. Leave you behind.”
Red looked at her with Vince’s eyes, but there was a little amusement in them. “I’m made of his anger. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, refusing to be distracted. “I don’t know anything about you.”
The shadow turned its face from her, the amusement gone. “I was always the part of him that took care of things when he wasn’t able to manage. I was given everything that made him uncomfortable—the desire to cause pain, the terror at what Salt made us do, the ability to intuit how other people felt when the bad stuff happened. I was made to be strong, so he didn’t have to be. So yes, I was angry when he was gone, but I loved Remy, no matter what he did and no matter what he made me do.”
A shiver went through Charlie’s shoulders.
Red went on. “He wanted to block out what was happening when I was on his grandfather’s missions, so I asked him to try untethering me. We didn’t understand about Blights then; all we knew was that it worked. Each time I returned to him, I was stronger than before. More solid, and for longer. We hid it from Salt,” he said. “Adeline knew, but she kept our secret.”
“Because she and Vince were close,” Charlie offered.
His lashes brushed his cheek as he looked down and away. “We all three were, once. Too close, maybe. We only had each other.”
It came to her, one of the things she’d heard that night. The boy’s voice. He doesn’t like you.
And then the girl. That’s not true. We have games we play that he would never play with you.
There was something bad there, lurking beneath the surface, but Charlie was too much a coward to ask.
She glanced into the room with the monitors. On the screens, Charlie could see that speeches were underway. She was running late.
“Where’s Vince?” Charlie asked.
The shadow stared back at her with Vince’s pale eyes and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck begin to stand. The itch of wrongness was back, worse than ever.
“I know this house,” Red said. “I could help you get out without anyone knowing you were ever here.”
“Not without Vince,” Charlie said. “You say you care about him. Help me save him. Help me find him.”
“I’d do anything for you, Char,” he told her. “But don’t ask me for that.”
There was only one person who called her Char. “No. You’re not him. Stop acting like him.”
“Char,” he cautioned.
“Where is he?” she demanded, heart thundering.
“You already know,” he said.
She didn’t want to put the pieces together. Vince had snapped Hermes’s neck and gotten rid of the body. He cleaned up crime scenes awash in blood for a living. None of that sounded like Remy. But it sounded a lot like Red.
“Vince faked his death,” Charlie protested. “Or Salt faked it for him. He was on the run. And two days ago, he was in a hotel room…”
The shadow didn’t speak.
It was hard to fake a death. There were dental records. There was evidence of past surgeries or fractures. Forensics could tell a lot from bones—sex, ancestry, age, height.
Salt could have paid someone, or several someones, to cover all that up. There was another answer, though: that the burnt body found in the car had belonged to Edmund Carver, and the person she had known wasn’t him at all.
The shadow wasn’t a malevolent entity taking the shape of Vince. It was Vince. He was Vince. And Vince had always only been the lost parts of Edmund Carver, the scraps from his table, his upside-down self, his mirror self, his night self.
He was right, part of her had known from the moment he’d been horrified about Adam. She hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. Charlie Hall, flinching, finally discovering the puzzle she hadn’t wanted to solve.
“When Remy was dying,” Vince said. “After his grandfather stabbed him. While Adeline screamed. Remy grabbed hold of me, and pulled me to him, so I would have all his blood, all his strength. As it left him, it became mine. He breathed his last breath into my mouth.
“For a moment, I didn’t understand how I could be naked, how I could feel the cold floor under me. Then I ran. Hours later, I woke up beneath an underpass, lying on asphalt and broken glass, with no idea how I got there. And then I had to learn how to be a person all the time. I tried to be, for you.”
Charlie recalled his words during their last fight, their only real fight: I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth.
If this was what was behind the mask, she understood why he hadn’t wanted to remove it.
“And called yourself Vincent,” Charlie said.
“The one thing Remy didn’t give me that I took anyway,” the shadow said, lifting his chin, as if daring her to judge him for it.
Down the hall, gears shifted in the wall, making a soft but distinct noise. Someone had entered the secret room beyond the library. In moments, they’d enter the corridor where Charlie was standing.
“Vince,” she said. Their eyes met.
“Hide,” he told her.
Charlie made it to the shadows of the security room, crawling under the leather couch at the same time she heard steps in the hall. How many times had Salt sat on that couch, watching something awful on the screens? Rand might have died in one of these cells. Charlie herself could have died there.
Could still, if she wasn’t careful.
“Red.” A woman’s voice, soft and worried. Adeline, Charlie realized. “He didn’t tell me you were here until now. Did he hurt you?”
Only silence answered her.
“I know. I should have left when you did,” she said, with a big huffing sigh. “You must be very angry with me.”