Page 84 of Thief of Night
“Rand.” Charlie’s voice was a croak.
Adeline’s smile was her real one. “Have you wondered what Red was doing that night?”
No, she hadn’t wondered. He’dsavedher. But he’d known that Rand was beyond saving—he’d said as much.
Charlie’s stomach churned, thinking of the boy’s voice.Don’t look at me. Had he come straight from gorging on Rand’s blood? Had he helped Charlie escape out of guilt? And Rose—had he had her blood too? Was that why Rose’s shadow thought that she was owed something?
But it was Rand that she couldn’t stop thinking of, the idea that Red had been the last thing he saw. The horror he must have felt.
She tasted bile in the back of her throat. Felt wetness at the corners of her eyes.
And Adeline had been there. Remy too. A family of ghouls.
Charlie’s hand slid into her pocket, past the vial, closing on her phone. She ducked her head, hiding her tears. “You’re just saying that to upset me. You have no idea what happened that night.”
“I know your friend died,” Adeline said. “I know that Salt bled him like a pig for Red.”
A shudder went through Charlie. A tear fell, splashing her jeans. “That’s a horrible thing to say, when you have no idea. Were you there?”
“Salt was desperate to find another quickened shadow, or make one. I know how things went.”
Charlie remembered that night and the old men laughing. The scent of their cigars. “You knew he killed people?”
“I knew they usually wound up dead in the end,” Adeline said.
“But you weren’t there,” Charlie insisted. She remembered waking on the rug in the library, her vomiting-up-beet-juice scam the only reason she hadn’t ingested enough poison to die. Recalled Red’s voice in her ear as she snuck past a room with Remy and Adeline in it, giggling to one another. “You don’t know. I remember you were upstairs, not in the basement.”
“None of our hands were clean,” Adeline snapped.
“You’re just trying to upset me,” Charlie said, shaking her head as if she could shake off everything she’d heard. “You can’t possibly know that he was there when Rand died.”
“I do!” Adeline said. “I watched. I watched plenty of people die so shadows could eat. Maybe I even cut a few throats myself. WebathedRed in their blood. Are you ready to do that for him?”
“If you glutted him on Rand’s blood and misery, then I hate you even more than I did before,” Charlie said, her voice shaking. The thought of Red hunched over Rand’s body—a boy, licking a fresh cut made by Salt—disgusted her. “You’re all monsters.”
Adeline smiled. “Now you’re finally getting it.”
26Solaluna
when Charlie got back to the new, fancy apartment, she led a barely conscious Red into the elevator and then into their place. Posey wasn’t home, although the pizza boxes and bottles from the previous night’s move-in party still littered the large, marble kitchen island.
After settling Red in her bed, Charlie ate an entire loaf of bread, all the slices of cheddar cheese, most of a jar of peanut butter, and six apples. Giving Red so much of her energy had left her with a ravenous hunger. When she was done, she filled a pitcher with water from the tap, drank the whole thing, then refilled it and did it again.
Finally, she felt satiated enough to sit down and put together what she knew.
The person who’d nearly killed Red had to have been the same person who slaughtered those people in the basement of Grace Covenant. There were filters from the same brand of cigarette she’d found at the edge of the church graveyard and victims similarly bitten and desanguinated. The killer was moving around, hunting for more blood—to feed Rose? To feed some other Blights he’d charmed or shadows he’d stolen?
At least Charlie could see why Rose was so desperate to get away from him.
So where was Rooster? Dead, she’d theorized, but then where was his body? Charlie considered the question from another angle. If she’d slaughtered a lot of people, including Rooster, and wanted to hide only one of the bodies—leaving aside the question of why only hide the death of Rooster—how would she do it? The murderer didn’t seem super organized, and she doubted the killer was a person who made complicated plans.
Nearby, then.
Charlie recalled hanging out at the Moose Lodge in Chicopee with a bunch of retired racketeers and scammers. Remembered drinking burnt coffee and learning card counting from Willy Lead, whose late wife, to hear him tell it,was the greatest stickup artist to ever knock over a liquor store. Listening to Benny brag about seducing rich widows and give instructions on making the perfect old-fashioned. A story told by a guy named Fishtail John had come into her mind. It was about three bank robbers back in the 1960s. According to John, they were brothers on the run from the cops. One had been shot and was unconscious, without long to live. The other two knew that if the body of one brother was found, it would be obvious that the other two had been involved. But where could they hide a body forever?
When she’d said she didn’t know, John gave her the answer like it was a punch line—they buried the dead brother in a graveyard, because who’d look for a body there?
Charlie took her phone, engaged the app that hid her number, and called the anonymous tip line for the police. She opened another app to disguise her voice. “There’s another body outside the church,” Charlie said. “In the graveyard. In a grave.”
