Page 1 of Thief of Night
Prologue
Past a certain hour, the house got quiet. No one smoking cigars in the library. No one screaming in the basement.
Night after night, the shadow drifted through the walls of Salt’s mansion. Down from where Remy was sleeping, teeth grinding together like stones in a mill. Past Adeline’s room where she pressed pillows over her face to smother herself to sleep.
He would sit on the stone patio and try to feel the cold. He would repeat the things he knew to himself.The longest river in the world is the Nile. The largest river in the world is the Amazon. Two times two is four. Infinity minus one is still infinity.Then he might go into the parlor and page through Remy’s comics. Stories were good places to hide, but he couldn’t stop looking for himself in them. Hide-and-seek. Was he Batman? The Joker? What was his name?
Not Remy. Remy was still asleep.
Red.
Red as blood.
A line fromSnow White. Someone used to read him fairy tales then. He could almost remember her—gray hair, black-and-white checkerboard frames on her glasses—but he wasn’t given all of the pieces.
No, he wasn’t Remy. He was Remy’s shadow. Remy’smonster. A patchwork thing, held together with spit and sinew and spite.
Night after night he spent like that, until the evening when he’d come into the library and found the girl lying in a pool of her own vomit. It hadn’t been very late, the screaming in the basement was still going on and the scent of cigars lingered in the air.
Don’t look,he’d told her.
But part of him wanted her to turn around.
1The Hierophant
Most of the long-abandoned mill buildings of Easthampton were being slowly resurrected by developers. Out of their desiccated husks sprang apartments and offices, spaces for circus schools, hydroponic beer gardens, webcomic merchandise warehousing, weed dispensaries, and cement countertop artisan showrooms. But a few still remained untouched—brickwork skeletons towering over the trees and river, insides dark and worming with rusty nails and refuse.
Not the kind of places that Charlie Hall wanted to be picking her way through, searching for a dangerous Blight, armed with only a knife, a flashlight, and a lot of resentment.
She was a liar and a con artist. Not a fighter.
But now that she’d fast-talked her way into being the Hierophant, Charlie was expected to find and dispatch untethered shadows, and there’d been a report of one around the mill buildings. Shadows only achieved consciousness if the gloamist they were bound to allowed it. And only shadows with independent consciousness survived the death of their gloamist. But those that did became Blights, full of death energy, piss, and vinegar. Mostly, that meant they killed people, drank blood, and made shadow magic look bad.
Hunting them down really was a shit gig. As far as Charlie could tell, the only thing she currently had going for her was that the moon was high and round and bright, illuminating the filthy, scary rooms she was making her way across.
Of course, that meant there were shadows everywhere.
And at least one of those shadows was alive and hungry.
Her breath clouded in the air. The only noises in the room were a steady drip near the window and her own footsteps.
As she passed, something on the floor caught her eye and she swept the flashlight’s beam toward it. Bones, small and delicate. She took a quick stepback. A dead rat, she guessed from the shape of the jaw and the remaining scraps of gray fur.
Well, deadrats. Kicking at the refuse with a booted foot, she uncovered more bones. A lot more bones.
Instinctively, she moved closer to the open window and the moonlight. A droplet fell from the ceiling, splashing the arm of her coat. Another, dark and oily, hit her hand. She had a moment of incomprehension, though she’d seen plenty of it before. Not leaking oil or condensation from some ancient pipe. Blood.
The light of her torch strobed over the walls as her back hit the brick edge of an empty window. Panic made her whole body go still and stiff.
She needed to get the hell out of there. Leave and tell the Cabals that she’d searched the whole building but found nothing. Her real skill was in lying; she ought to lie.
But who’s going to stop the Blight if not you, Charlie Hall?
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to walk toward the stairs, testing each board with her foot as she went. There, she glanced down at her own shadow, the thin skein of darkness that tied her to a Blight even more terrifying than the one she was hunting. Red.
Not Red,she told herself.Vince.Vince, who’d loved her. Vince, who’d lied to her. Vince, who’d seemed like a normal boyfriend—with secrets, sure, but normal secrets, like a nasty fetish. Not secretly being the shadow of a dead man, alive only through blood magic.
Vince, who no longer remembered her since they’d been tethered together.
