Page 53 of Thief of Night
“Yeah,” she said, hoping that her backpack didn’t lurch abruptly and give her boss a reason to ask questions. “And I appreciate that. But I needed to come in and see Balthazar, plus I thought I should check if Don wanted to leave.”
“Balthazar isn’t here tonight,” Odette said apologetically.
“My luck seems to be holding,” Charlie said ruefully.
Odette gave a soft laugh. “Well, since you’re here, put your things down and we’ll send Don home.”
Don gave Charlie a contemptuous look when she returned from the greenroom, having shoved her backpack far enough under the couch that she hoped any movement inside of it wouldn’t draw attention. The last thing she needed was someone thinking they were saving an ill-treated cat, and having a Blight pop out at them.
“Decided to finally turn up,” Don said. Since he’d already volunteered to cover her whole shift—and been pretty smug about it—she didn’t understand his attitude. He couldn’t have been expecting her.
“Why don’t you like me?” Charlie asked. “Seriously.”
He appeared surprised by the question, as though it took some kind of sorceress to divine his feelings about her.
“It’s not that I don’t like youpersonally,”he said. “It’s just that I take my job seriously and you don’t.”
“I was going to be late,” she said. “So I called.”
“The other day—”
“I gotpunched. You can hardly call that a dereliction of duty.”
“If you hadn’t talked to that guy the way you had, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten hit. I know how you are with people.”
Charlie could feel her skin flush with indignation. “He was pissed becauseyoutold him he was overserved. He didn’t think he could bully you, so he came after me.”
“That’s not my fault.”
Charlie pointed her finger at him to punctuate her words. “Maybe, but that doesn’t make it mine either.”
Don grabbed his coat. “Well, since you’ve decided to actually do your job now, I guess I can finally go home.”
“You’ll be missed, I’m sure,” Charlie said. “The place will fall apart without your manly shoulders to ride on. You’re the Atlas of the goth bars.”
She must have hit a nerve or Don must have disliked her even more than she thought; the look he turned on her was chilling.
Down the bar, a guy in a long leather coat and greasy hair chuckled. She turned and he held up his empty lowball glass. “Since Atlas is gone, how about you pour me a little more bourbon.”
For the rest of the night, as she made drinks, Charlie thought of the Blight squirming in her backpack. Thought of Red, forced to watch the world over her shoulder, pinned to her feet and tied to her fate.
Halfway through her shift, she texted Malhar:Have you ever heard of Blights acting like animals, hunting in packs?
He texted back a moment later, as though he had his phone nearby:No. They’re more like ghosts.
???she sent back.
He didn’t answer.
She shook up an extra-dirty martini for a woman with a chipped tooth and a sly smile, made Manhattans for two tattooed ladies and a man with curly silver hair, all of whom were absorbed in an intense conversation about comic book industry gossip, and louched absinthe for an elderly guy who took it downstairs to Balthazar’s shadow parlor without a word.
“Stories teach us to hope for what has yet not been but still could be,” one of the tattooed ladies said to the other.
Charlie would like to have hope like that.
“Stories are baloney,” said the man with the silver hair. “But who doesn’t like baloney?”
“Who even says ‘baloney’?” asked the third.
