Page 105 of Thief of Night
What about Vera? Charlie typed back. And security?
Another email came in a few minutes later. Yellow for Vera. But I think she’s the *only* one with a yellow badge. Archie didn’t want her to feel bad so he didn’t give her a green one, but he also didn’t want to give anyone but us the red ones. Security is also green. Same deal.
The door opened and Red walked into the cottage, blurry around the edges, and eyes streaming something like smoke. She felt her whole body go hot with some combination of desire and shame.
Charlie held her phone toward Red and her voice only wavered a little as she spoke. “Why is Archie complaining about rich people? I thought this guy was rich?”
Red walked to sit beside Charlie. “Not rich enough,” he told her when he was finished reading. “His parents are wealthy, but not private-plane-second-house-in-the-Hamptons-third-house-on-the-Riviera wealthy. He has hustle and a quickened shadow.”
Interesting. When Archie was talking about gloamists, he hadn’t mentioned being one. That meant he could be stitching on the stolen shadows himself.
“Where did you meet him?” she asked, because focusing on profiling Archie as a mark was important. And if it allowed her to shove aside what had happened between them, so much the better.
Not that it was complicated. They wanted one another. They’d had freaky sex. They were fine.
“We ran into him in Mykonos during the summer break junior year,” Red said. “He spotted that Remy was a gloamist too. After that, he stayed in touch. He was good at making connections. He thought Remy was standoffish—a snob. He didn’t understand that if Remy brought Archie into his circle, Salt would have noticed him and that would have been a disaster.”
It must have been horribly lonely, keeping apart from people you liked for their protection. However much she thought Remy had been unfair to Red, it was clear there had been no one else for him to lean on.
“He seemed to like you tonight,” Charlie said.
“He did,” Red said, letting her draw whatever conclusion she would from that.
Charlie opened the screenshots that Malhar sent her and looked at the schedule:
7:30 a.m.—Check-in opens
9 a.m.—Breakfast and welcome
10:30 a.m.—Morning meditation led by Paula Essex
11:00 a.m.—Talk and Q&A with a prominent Cabal leader
1:00 p.m.—Lunch
2:00 p.m.—The Blight and the Shadow: Urban Legend and Belief
3:30 p.m.—Practical shadow demonstration
5:00 p.m.—The business of magic
9:00 p.m.—Cocktail party
Charlie had no way of knowing when appointments had been made for Archie to distribute the shadows, but he’d seemed relaxed at dinner, not like someone who had a night of alteration ahead of him. She suspected the appointments would begin on the first day of the conference.
The woman who’d left the message for Mr. Punch was probably Vera, but she might not have even known what she was asking about. Either way, it suggested that the shadows were being kept in Archie’s room.
What Charlie needed to do was get into room 210 after Archie joined the conference, get the shadows, and then go back like nothing happened. Leaving early was tempting, but they would need to stick it out if they didn’t want it to be incredibly obvious that they were the thieves.
And it would help if there was someone else to throw suspicion on.
Certainly, it would be satisfying to hang the whole thing on Mark. But he was a wild card, and it would be better to point Archie toward one of the puppeteer gloamists—anything to discredit them until Malhar was out of there. If that was impossible, then maybe it would be possible to make them believe that Malhar was being puppeted by Mr. Punch to further hide his identity. That wouldn’t work long term, but it might buy some time. And once they left, she’d have to discredit Archie to Mr. Punch.
But even then, she wasn’t sure if it would be possible just from him figuring out that he’d been impersonated. And Charlie had no idea what to do about that.
Her first step would be to get badges off Vera.I am coming to your cottage at 6:30 a.m., she texted her sister. Order coffee.
She heard the chime of her sister responding, then set her phone down.Told herself that she had to be brave. Took a last slug of wine and turned to Red.
