Page 32 of Thief of Night
“What made you come here?” he asked.
“Oh, everyone’s talking about the new Hierophant and her shadow. When they called you Red, I knew.” She was talking fast. “The only reason I was able to get to you tonight is that he’s gone to a bar nearby—meeting with Mr. Punch—but we might not be here for long. We move around a lot.”
Mr. Punch. It figured that everything creepy washed up on his shores. Charlie wondered how long he’d planned to take Malik’s place as the head of the puppeteers.
“If you move around, how am I supposed to find this guy? Unless you want me to go back with you to the bar now? Kill him together.”
“No, there are other gloamists with him. It’s too dangerous,” she said, slight panic in her voice. “I’ll leave word. There’s a convenience store he goes to on the edge of town. They sell the brand of cigarettes he likes. Look in the bathroom for a message on the wall about where and when to attack. Give me two days.”
“I’ll look for it,” Red said.
“Bring her.” Rose gestured to the house. “Charlie. That’s her name, right? We can murder them together and be free.” She looked up at him, hand on his arm, longing in her eyes. In the moonlight, she was translucent, a ghost in love, planning to spend eternity with her betrothed.
Or a ghost planning on dragging her enemy down into death.
Abruptly, Charlie realized she needed to get back inside before Red did. She didn’t wait to hear his answer, but crept toward the door, her hands shaking, her thighs numb and stinging with cold.
And then she saw her pillow. It had been ripped open, the pillowcase slashed into pieces, stuffing spilling out. If Charlie hadn’t followed Red onto the lawn, if she really had been asleep, that could have been her throat. And since Rose was still outside, she had no idea what had come looking for her.
By the time she collapsed on the bed, she was shaking so hard that she didn’t know how to stop. She got herself under control before he returned, but when the mattress dipped beneath his weight, she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming.
14The Past
Mark had been the worst boyfriend Charlie had ever had.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that her relationship with him was also the only one that had started out honest. He knew exactly what she was—a con artist, just like him—and he told her that he liked her that way. He admired her scams, kissed her pickpocket fingers, and wrapped his lying tongue around her own.
When Rand had first taken Charlie under his wing, he’d described the life of the swindler in glowing terms. Laughing hyenas, prowling the edges of society, looking for the weak and the slow. With Mark, that’s really how it had been.
She’d met him competing for the same score. A gloamist named Edith wanted a book that an antiquarian dealer refused to sell for what Edith believed was a reasonable price. Personally, Charlie thought Edith’s haggling made her a prime suspect, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. Her problem was how to get the book.
She set up an appointment with the antiquarian dealer. Then she covered her tattoos, and put on glasses and a black vintage dress. Cosplaying a sexy librarian. If the bookseller remembered Charlie at all, she’d hoped he would remember her outfit more than her face.
When she got to the bookstore, she spotted a thin man in an ill-fitting suit leaving in a rush. And while Charlie leafed through an illustrated collection of Japanese folktales—the volume she’d asked about so that she could check out the shop security—she talked the book dealer into telling her what the guy had been looking at: the book she’d come to steal.
Dread twisted her guts.
Charlie found Mark an hour later, at a bar across the street, nursing a beer. He’d traded in the blazer he’d been wearing for a leather jacket.
“You’re not great at this,” she’d said, sitting down next to him.
His mouth slid into a boyish, mischievous grin. He wasn’t bad-looking.He had the face of someone who could disappear into a crowd, except for the startling sky blue of his eyes. “And who might you be?”
She sat down. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
He turned to examine her lingeringly, head to toe. He had a pale, slightly bruised under the eyes look she found compelling—as though he was nursing some secret pain. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Why not?Charlie thought. She knew other thieves, but most of them were of a different generation. “Whiskey, please.”
“Rocks?” he asked as he got up.
“A big one if they’ve got it.”
They didn’t, but that was fine. She took a sip. Wild Turkey, she guessed, trying to decide what that choice meant about him. “So,” she said. “You want to make a bet?”
“That you can get it first?” he asked.
She nodded, swirling around the brown liquor in her glass, making the chips of ice melt faster.
