Page 34 of Thief of Night
“I like the wings,” she said. It still seemed incredible to her that magic had turned out to be real.
“If we were gloamists, we could steal books for ourselves.” Mark said it as though Charlie had never thought of that before.
She remembered the games of pretend she’d played growing up, and where that had gotten her. Thought about Posey and her obsession with all of the different ways people became gloamists—asphyxiation, hypothermia, extreme pain. Nothing guaranteed to work and everything incredibly dangerous. Charlie was forever afraid for her. “We’re not gloamists, though,” she said. “People like us don’t get magic.”
It wasn’t long afterward that the Artists—a gang of alterationists run by Vicereine, before she went respectable—wanted a memoir that had been lifted off a guy in Atlanta by a puppeteer who was supposed to be living in Albany, New York. Charlie and Mark were tasked to steal from another thief.
“No problem,” Charlie told her and went home to scheme.
But as she made and remade her plan, Mark kept talking about how it wasn’t fair that the gloamists were always going to be the ones in charge. He didn’t want to do the job. He wanted to focus on quickening his shadow.
“That’s fine,” she told him. “I’ll do this one alone.”
He was lying on the bed in their apartment, playing a video game on his Switch. “They don’t respect you, you know.”
She put her head on his shoulder. “I thought we weren’t supposed to give a shit about anyone’s opinion, as long as we got our money.”
He made an unhappy grunt.
“I put down a deposit on a house,” Charlie said. If she’d been a different person, she would’ve been trying to avoid the fight that was coming. But being Charlie, she wanted to hasten it along.
“That’s stupid,” he said, putting down his game and looking at her. “You’re a thief. The taxman is going to catch you, if someone you’ve fucked over doesn’t first.”
“No one is going to catch me.” They could both be equally unreasonable.
Mark laughed. “You want to be a faaaancy lady. Your sister’s going to go to college and you’re going to get yourself a picket fence.”
“And you want to lie in bed and cry about how your shadow is as lazy as you are.” Any mention of Charlie’s sister got under her skin.
While Charlie packed up, Mark stomped around, obviously pissed off. But before she left, he apologized.
“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is with me lately,” he told her, reaching to give her a hug. He kissed the top of her head. “I’m going to miss you.”
And Charlie, afflicted by the family curse, a sucker for love, had believed every word.
As soon as she got back, he’d stolen the book from right under her nose.
Mark had gotten the idea that he could trade it for a quickened shadow. Charlie didn’t know his plan, but she wasn’t going to let him play the same trick she’d played on him the day they met. She switched the book back, acting all unknowing.
Bad enough that Mark had demanded a payment that was taboo in gloamist circles. A quickened shadow could only be cut from another gloamist; asking for one was asking them to betray one of their own.
That was probably why, when Vicereine discovered he didn’t have the book, she cut off each of the fingers of his right hand. She told him that he was lucky she hadn’t taken the whole hand, right to the wrist. That was, after all, the traditional punishment for thieves.
No more making music for Mark. Just like that, he lost the one thing he really loved.
Charlie hadn’t known Vicereine would do that. That’s not what she’d meant to happen. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t care. He hated her. He hatedher so much that he and Brian shot up her car, putting two bullets in her and killing the guy in the passenger seat. Josh Ford, whose last name Charlie hadn’t even known when he died.
Mark was the worst boyfriend. The worst of the worst.
But as far as she knew, the only person Mark had ever killed was by accident. And the only person he’d evertriedto kill was still alive.
And he wasn’t a monster.
If she’d ignored red flags with Mark, now she was a bull running straight for them.
15Carrot and Stick
As Charlie poured water into the coffeepot, she waited for Red to tell her about Rose’s visit. She waited through cooking eggs, through getting dressed and then imagining Adeline judging her clothes, then changing into ripped jeans and a t-shirt with the wordsGIVE ME COFFEE OR GIVE ME DEATHacross her chest so that she could be sure Adeline hated it.
