Outside in the garden, three men were arguing. One had the other by the shirt, their shadows looming large behind them like the spread plumes of fighting peacocks.
Salt was walking through the rooms with purpose, a drink in one hand, looking as though everything was going his way. He glanced up, for a heart-stopping moment, peering directly into the camera. The time in the upper right-hand corner read 7:52.
“Charlie?” Vince’s voice came out of the darkness.
She whirled around.
He was in the cell, standing just behind the bars. Broad-shouldered, hair like old gold. A small smile turning up the corner of his mouth. As familiar as her own heart.
“What happened to your eye?” he asked.
“Hold on,” she said, so relieved at the sight of him that her voice broke. “I can get you out of there.”
Before Charlie could pick the lock, she had to disable whatever the gas line running along the seam beneath the bars was supposed to do. She guessed it was on some kind of trip wire that would send up a burst of flames when the cell door opened. There had to be a way to turn it off.
Charlie hesitated. The wrongness of the scene bothered her, like an itch in the mind.
Pale, hollow eyes followed her movements. She wanted to believe it was Vince in the cell, behind bars of onyx, with a gutter of fire between them. But those weren’t restraints meant for a human.
“You’re not Vince, are you?” she asked softly, walking to the bars.
The silence from the cell was her answer.
Charlie met the Blight’s gaze. “You’re his shadow. You’re Red.”
31
THE FOOL, THE MAGICIAN, AND THE HIEROPHANT
Only when her back hit the wall did she realize how far she’d moved from the cell. “You found the Liber Noctem,” she managed to choke out. “You did the ritual.”
“Because I look like a person?” the shadow asked. “It was Edmund who made me like this.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” Her voice came out too high. She didn’t know how to comprehend the being in front of her. It was a doppelg?nger. A mirror reflection come to life. A thing Frankensteined together from discarded parts of Vince: slime and snails and puppy dog tails. “Is he here? Is Vince all right?”
The shadow shrugged. Even its expression was one that Vince would make, slightly chagrined. The tailored suit it wore was the color of its eyes. “We met before. Do you remember?”
Don’t look behind you.
Charlie didn’t speak for a long moment. It wasn’t as though the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but she’d had a hard time believing it. “In the library.”
“I suppose you wanted it to be Remy who saved you,” the shadow said, voice soft. “Not Red.”
Charlie wasn’t about to answer that. Yes, she had a naive desire for the sort of romance a palm reader would trace on the inside of a hand. A fated love, begun in childhood. Love was a family religion, passed down to her when she’d been too young to protect herself from belief. “Even back then, you were already a Blight?”
The shadow nodded, allowing her to turn the subject.
“And you killed people for Salt.” She kept her voice stiff.
“Yes,” it said.
She had to remind both of them that she wasn’t some fool who was going to trust it just because they had a weird past together. “Tell me—the way you killed Adam, was that special? Cracking his ribs open like you were going to spatchcock a turkey, and painting the walls with his blood? Or is that how you did them all?”
It stepped closer to the bars. “Adam?”
“You’ve got to remember the guy you murdered on my couch. In a very gross way.”
The shadow stared at her with what appeared to be real horror. “I’d never do that to you. Never.”
Charlie hated how much it looked like Vince, and how much that made her want to trust it. “Okay, tell me about all the other people you didn’t murder.”
“You’re clever,” it said, with a small rueful smile. “And I’m not used to explaining things. I didn’t do much talking, before. I don’t think I’m very good at it.”
“Try,” Charlie said.
“You shouldn’t have had to come back here.” It seemed sad, and tired. She had no way to know if that was something it was putting on, or if flesh conferred weakness. “You should go and never come back, like I told you that night.”
“So, what, I’m supposed to grab my sister and mother and blow town? Let Salt win? Do whatever he wants to Vince?”