Page 8 of Thief of Night
“You don’t need to disguise your lecture as sympathy,” Charlie said. “This is like live action concern trolling.”
Splitting the tongue woke dormant muscles in it. Learning how to control those—so that you could move both halves at the same time—supposedly helped to trigger what gloamists called a bifurcated consciousness, the ability to control your body and your shadow simultaneously. Controlling a shadow as though it were a separate limb was the “ethical” way to be a gloamist.
The easier and less ethical way was to put pieces of yourself into your shadow. Memories were especially good for that. Enough pieces created a powerful shadow that could operate with limited instruction. And if that eventually resulted in a Blight, well, wasn’t there some saying about omelets and breaking eggs?
“Being a gloamist is abig deal. I just want you to fulfill your potential,” Posey told her, which made Charlie think of their mother and how, once she believed Charlie’s lies about being a medium, she hadn’t wanted Charlie to give it up. She’d given the same reason. A waste of potential.
“I’m not like you,” Charlie told her sister firmly. “I’m acharlatan. I’ve been a fake magician, a fake medium, a fake ghost—but always a fake. Once this is over, that’s what I am going to go back to being, because that’s what I’m good at.”
“And if they won’t let you?” Posey asked.
“What was it you said before? Fuck the Cabals,” Charlie reminded her.
The computer was still open on the table and she could see that the chat had moved on to discussing the murders in the church basement in Hatfield.
quirky_fraud00:they were all seekers right?
LoutishProgressive:not all I know a gloamist who was part of that group
SkepticalChili82:wasn’t some cabal guy supposed to be speaking there that night? Is he dead too?
Butzzzzzz:nothing on rooster’s tiktok
Charlie got up. “I am going to take a nap.”
“Wait! We’re not done talking,” Posey said. “You’ve got to do something.”
“Iamdoing something,” Charlie said.
“Abouthim,” Posey said, lowering her voice, as though that was going to stop Red from hearing. “What if he never gets his memories back?”
“Malhar says it’s possible he’ll remember.” She managed to sound calm, but was worried her distress bled through their tether. Madurai Malhar Iyer was a graduate student who’d been studying Blights for his thesis. He believed a lot of things were possible.
“Whatever he says,” Posey said, “he still thinks what you’re doing is—as he put it, ‘tantamount to gambling with your life.’”
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Malhar lately,” Charlie observed. “Anythingyouwant to tellme?”
Posey put a hand on her hip. “Yes. That you need to learn more about being a gloamist because one day you might need to… stop him. Stop Red.”
Stop him from draining her. That’s what Posey was worried about.
“Posey—” Charlie held up a hand to try to forestall whatever was coming next.
“You’re bound together,” Posey reminded her. “Stuck with one another. Like a marriage, but more permanent. And he’s an actualmurderer! Again, I am not saying he’s a bad person, because it wasn’t like he had a choice, but—”
“Don’t talk like that,” Charlie snapped, feeling the change in the air, like an electric charge.
Posey frowned. “Like how?”
Red appeared in the doorway, the way he might have if he had merely stepped in from the other room, rather than stepping out of shadow.
Posey sucked in a startled breath.
“Like he’s not here,” Charlie told her.
6Holiday Party
The alarm on Charlie’s phone woke her in the late afternoon. The clock beside her mattress was blinking uselessly since she’d failed to reset it after the last power outage. Fumbling, she found her beeping cell in the pocket of her coat, screen spiderwebbed with cracks after last night’s bout with the Blight. There were two missed calls from Adeline and a bunch of texts that no amount of tapping on the message icon would let her see.
