Page 5 of Thief of Night
“Yeah, with his family,” Charlie had lied. “Maybe next year he’ll spend it with us.”
It stung, the way her mother had looked at her after she said that. Pityingly. As though Charlie had become the one who didn’t understand how the world worked. Her mother, who had been a fool over men and believed their bullshit since before Charlie was born.
Yeah, Christmas was going to suck.
Charlie passed by some glitter-encrusted angels. She threw a lipstick and a bottle of Gatorade into her basket. Then she headed for the checkout counter.
“You’ve got some…” the clerk said worriedly, making a motion at her face.
Looking up, Charlie caught her distorted reflection in the overhead mirror. A red streak ran over her forehead and down one cheek. Reaching up, she ran her fingers through her hair. It was sticky, like honey crystalizing in a jar, and a place just over her ear stung. Another scrape from the shadow. Not as bad as the claw mark on her back, but head wounds bled more.
“Thanks,” she told the clerk, then sighed. “Give me a scratch-off while you’re ringing that through. My luck can’t stay this bad forever.”
The Hall women were born to hard breaks and bad decisions. They fell in love with the wrong people so consistently it was as though an ancestral curse doomed them to heartbreak, from a grandmother married to a guy so terrible she killed him, to Charlie’s last boyfriend, who shot her. Posey said that a man had to have a hole in his head, his heart, or his pocket for one of the Hall women to go head-over-heels for him—and Posey told people’s futures for a living.
Scratch-off in one hand and bag swinging in the other, Charlie left the drugstore, trying to pretend she didn’t notice that the shadow following her looked nothing like one she ought to have cast.
Even by the standards of Hall women, Charlie was in trouble.
3Tame
Bellamy had explained how it was going to go once he’d accepted that Charlie would be the next Hierophant.
They’d been in the abandoned watchtower in Holyoke. That’s the place where the faction of the Cabals who called themselves masks and focused on obscure theories of shadowcraft used as their stronghold. Malik had been there, representing the puppeteers, Cabal members who used their shadows to control people. So had Vicereine, of the alterationists, who could reshape shadows—along with the nature of those bound to them. And Bellamy, of course, the mask leader. Three factions, representing three of the four aspects of shadow magic. The last, carapace, masters of physical shadow magic, went unrepresented.
Five years she’d be the Hierophant, they’d told her. Three if she did particularly good work or if someone else pissed them off enough to be up for the position. “You’ll be happy to see the back of me faster than that,” Charlie had said, figuring some swagger never hurt.
“Don’t push your luck,” Malik had told her.
They’d give her the necessary supplies for the job, and she’d even earn a bounty on every Blight. A bit of cash for cat-sized ones and enough money for the human-sized ones that if she dispatched one every month and a half, she could probably afford to quit Rapture. Of course, if there was a human-sized one terrorizing the locals every month and a half, it was possible she had a bigger problem.
“Give us your oath,” he’d said. “And we’ll give you the Blight.”
So Charlie had looked into their eyes and promised to serve out her sentence for past wrongs by hunting down rogue shadows.
Moments after, they’d brought out Vince, wrapped in chains of onyx. His eyes burned like living coals. She hadn’t been afraid of him then. She’dthought he was only angry because he hadn’t wanted her to tie herself to him, to the Cabals, to that mess.
Back then, she thought she’d won. Outwitted them all. Stolen her lover back from under their noses. And she’d been certain she’d go on winning. That whatever bargain the Cabals made with her was going to be like one of those deal-with-the-devil ballads, where the fiddler triumphed in the end through talent and cleverness.
Charlie Hall, drunk on love.
Vicereine had formed a needle from her own shadow, pinching off a little at the edge. Then she seemed to reach into Vince and pulled on a piece of him. He gave a hiss when she touched him, as though what she’d done hurt. He was the sort of person who hid discomfort, so it must havereallyhurt.
“What are you doing?” Charlie demanded. “Stop it.”
“Preparing to bind him to you,” Vicereine told her, rolling a little bit of what she took into thread and handing over the rest to Bellamy. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Charlie said.
“Ah, but it does,” Bellamy said, rolling the piece of shadow into a scroll-like stone tube. “With what we took of your Blight, we can track him should he ever attempt to disappear. And we can use it against him in other ways if that’s necessary.”
“It will keep you safer, us having it,” said Malik. “Remember, he has only ever been bound to his creator. He might chafe at being yours. He might even come to wish you harm.”
“Not everyone is like you,” Charlie had told him.
“No one is like me,” said Malik, with a self-important smile. “Now, remember, he will be able to hear you when you speak, even if he isn’t manifested. As a shadow, he’s always present. Never forget that.”
“Right,” Charlie said uneasily.
