Page 115 of Thief of Night
Charlie could easily imagine what Mark had felt like. He must have believed he was making a great deal, until he was deep in it. And then the frustration, the despair, the growing hatred. The desperate desire for a way out.
“At first, I just wanted a new shadow. It’s not easy when yours looks like a girl—no offense. But I worried the new shadow wouldn’t be very powerful, so I thought maybe I could wear them both for a while.” When he looked at Charlie, she could see the madness blooming behind his eyes. “Then I realized that I could do so much with two shadows. And I knew I needed more.”
“And you had to feed them,” Charlie prompted. “Killing Rooster Argent was one thing. But those people at the church…”
“There are reasons for mysteries. For annunciations.” He licked dry lips. “For magic to have a price, one that must be paid in blood. I have so much power, Charlie. I am like a god now.”
He’d always been dramatic. It had been one of the things she’d been drawn to, along with his cheekbones. He’d been a skinny guy in a leather jacket with long hair in his face and a sadness that she was sure she could fix.
She thought of the fairy tale of the Nine-Shadow Man, how greed and jealousy had consumed him until in the end there was nothing left but the Sisyphean task of getting enough blood for shadows he’d never needed.Mark might think he was approaching godhood because of the shadows, but it was obvious that they were killing him.
He was too skinny, his eyes bruised. He looked harrowed. She couldn’t help thinking of the last Hierophant and how he’d looked toward the end.
“Any chance you could untie my hands?” she asked. “My wrists hurt.”
“Funny, Charlie,” he said.
The temptation to beg was very strong. “Please don’t do this.”
“Having you here is even more fun than I thought it would be,” he told her eagerly. “How about this? Let’s have you feed my shadows.”
Charlie met his gaze. “If I die, it’ll ruin your fun.”
“Don’t worry. I know how to make a lot of shallow cuts.”
Charlie told herself that he was never going to let her go unharmed. He’d prefer her harmed and humbled, but wouldn’t kill her. Not yet, anyway. After all, as long as she could heal, he could make it last.
I am going to kill you twice.
“I’m scared,” she confessed.
He smiled as though he liked that a lot. “You should be.”
Charlie took a breath. “Can you sit me up on the couch?”
He leaned down and hauled her up from the floor. Together they stumbled to the couch. He cleared some cigarette-filled cups before letting her drop onto the cushions. Then he reached among the detritus on the coffee table, where he hunted up razor blades, a pack of smokes, and a lighter.
He lit a cigarette between cupped palms.
“New habit?” she asked, thinking of the filters piled up on plates in the house where Red had nearly died. The ones left at the edge of the Hatfield graveyard. Thought of the liberally applied cologne he’d worn at Solaluna, obscuring the stale scent of nicotine.
“Helps with the jitters,” he said. “And curbs the hunger. I am always so hungry, Charlie. I even tried eating what they eat, but it didn’t help.”
She thought of the mouth-shaped bites on the corpses and felt ill.
Mark held out the pack to her. “Smoke?”
“The one vice I haven’t picked up,” she told him. “Besides, you’d need to free my hands.”
“I could bring the cigarette to your mouth instead,” he told her.
Charlie shook her head. The scent of the smoke made her think of her childhood, going to her aunt’s house on her father’s side before the divorce. She hadn’t thought of being there in years. It made her remember standing outside of restaurants where she worked, with dishwashers and cooksgrabbing a smoke between shifts. It was an unpleasant smell, but the memories it evoked weren’t.
Charlie tried to hang on to those as he ran the edge of the razor through the flame.
She closed her eyes.
“You know what I always liked about you?” he asked her and then went on without the need for encouragement. “You didn’t make a fuss. I’m so tired of all the screaming. I’ve gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s so dramatic.”
