Page 24 of Thief of Night
His expression shifted, as though searching through his memories. “Birthday cake.”
She gave him a curious look.
“Remy said it wasourbirthday, not just his.” There was a shyness to Red in that moment. “He wanted me to eat, so I learned how. His grandfather thought I was a parasite. A mimic. He didn’t like when Remy let me do nice things.”
Charlie wondered if that was because Salt was very invested in Red doing not-nice things for him. “And you could taste the cake?”
“It was too sweet. Especially the icing.”
Red had been taking experimental sips of the soup between answering her questions. To each, he’d added something. A noodle. A fleck of spinach. For all that he’d compared the flavor to sweat, he didn’t seem to dislike it. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about the cake.”
A parasite. A mimic. Was that how he saw himself? He said the words as though they didn’t hurt him, but could that be true? She didn’t recall any shift in expression when Mr. Punch had called him a monster either.
“You can eat whatever you want now,” she said, bending over her own bowl of ramen.
He smiled wryly at that. “It won’t make me more human,” he said. “Even if it helps you pretend.”
Charlie met his gaze and didn’t look away. “I was never the one pretending you were human.”
That afternoon, Charlie borrowed Posey’s laptop and looked up articles on what the press was calling the “Hatfield Cult Massacre.” Despite the sensational title, most serious reporting acknowledged that this group was casual, meeting every other week at the Grace Covenant Church. Not a cult.
She found an article detailing the victims, along with photographs. Twelve people dead. Mostly older folk, a few teens. The police had tracked down afew members of the group who weren’t dead, but there was no reason to think they’d been in attendance that night. One of the victims had been found with drugs in her system, but that didn’t seem to mean much. Hopefully she’d been high enough not to have felt much pain.
No mention was made of Rooster or the Cabals.
There seemed to be no leads, which resulted in wild speculation from the usual sources. Some commentators on X and Reddit were certain the group had been targeted by someone who believed all gloamists were possessed by demons. A few conservative pundits argued that the deaths were the result of an attempt on the part of the victims to quicken their shadows, an attempt that required bloodletting and got way out of hand.
Charlie hoped Mr. Punch didn’t count that kind of speculation as a failure on her part to hush things up. People were interested. If he wanted this to go away, it was probably true that the murder would have to be solved. And since the public wasn’t going to be okay blaming this on aBlight,because that would require the mainstream public’s acceptance of Blights as real, it meant someone was going to have to take the fall.
People were so interested, in fact, that Charlie found a link to leaked photos of the crime scene on a Reddit forum. If these pictures were real—and they certainly looked that way—the murders had been shockingly brutal. The slashes on the bodies were broad and deep, as though they came from an animal. It looked as though some of them had died while huddling together. One of the women had been covering the bodies of the students with her own, her back so shredded that her spine stuck out. Blood spatter was high on the walls, although the amount of blood on the floor didn’t seem commensurate with the number of bodies.
What do you make of this?Charlie asked Red.
You asking because of all the murders I committed?
No, because you cleaned up crime sce—Charlie bit off the thought. That had been Vince. Red didn’t remember his under-the-table job. Didn’t recall the colleagues who had all liked him and the boss who told stories about taking his wife to free and freshly sanitized hotel rooms because he still had the keys.Never mind.
Red’s voice seemed to echo in her thoughts.I think Mr. Punch was being sloppy when he said they were exsanguinated. Desanguination would be more accurate.
Is desanguination even a real word?Charlie asked.
She could hear the amusement in his tone.Exsanguination can be minor, so long as it’s enough to be the cause of death. Desanguination is, well, more.
She remembered Remy’s friend, the doctor—the one she’d blackmailed into helping her. And she remembered Salt’s basement. She did not want to know from which of them Red had learned that fact.Okay, but do you notice anything else? Anything helpful?
Count the shadows,he said.
She squinted. She didn’t see what he was—oh. A girl, off to the left. She cast no shadow. It had looked like a trick of the light. Of course, there were lots of possible reasons a girl without a shadow would attend a discussion group for seekers.
Charlie remembered the chat that had been scrolling by when she’d been about to order pizza, the one that mentioned a Cabal speaker. And that one of the members had been a gloamist. Could that have been the girl, before she lost her shadow?
Red’s voice sounded as though he was speaking softly into her ear.It’s strange they didn’t all run for the door.
Thatwasstrange. Charlie sent the pictures to herself, so she could study them further. Then, after hesitating for a moment, she closed the laptop. She didn’t like the idea of Posey having anything to do with this, no matter how distant the connection, nor of looking through Posey’s private messages without permission.
Charlie went back to the photographs, now on her phone. It was easier to enlarge the images there anyway. The shadowless girl was still shadowless. But looking closer, she saw that one of the bodies had something that appeared like a shallow bite taken out of its calf.
The more carefully she studied the picture, the more it seemed that it had been made with blunt, human teeth.
