Gloamists didn’t have spells, per se, but they had notes on techniques and experiments done by glooms through the ages. At first, there was a movement to digitize and share them in a large online free library, until people began to upload hacked versions.
The library was formally dismantled after a copy of the Cosmometria Gnomonica was uploaded, detailing a way for gloamists to gain power by pushing past previous limits by feeding an open stream of life energy to their shadow. Thirty gloamists died before it became clear that the critical last part, which explained how to calculate how much was too much and cut off the supply, had been deleted from the PDF version.
Ever since, gloamists guarded what they had and were suspicious of anything they couldn’t authenticate. Which led to hiring people like Charlie to get originals.
It was scary work, dealing with people who could rip out a part of her. Once, caught, a gloamist altered Charlie’s shadow so that she was so filled with terror that she trembled in her closet for the better part of a week. Not only that, but cons required her to become other people. When she came up for air between jobs, Charlie wouldn’t quite know who she was. She’d get another tattoo, as though it could root her in place. She’d get drunk. Maybe she’d find someone to break her heart. Burn through a chunk of cash, squirrel the rest away, and then do it all over again.
It ended when she stole a volume for Vicereine, the head of a local gang of alterationists who called themselves the Artists. A nineteenth-century memoir, not easy to get off the puppeteer in Albany who’d lifted it from some guy in Atlanta. Charlie had taken a month to worm herself into the right position to get her hands on it.
Then, Charlie’s boyfriend, a cowardly shitlord named Mark, tried to sell it out from under her. He made a side deal with another gang for far less than the book was worth. Like Posey, he wanted a quickened shadow and was willing to believe that gloamists could help him.
Charlie could have told him that she’d discovered what he was trying to do and dumped his ass. But no, Charlie needed to make her point by circling it in fire.
When he tried to make the exchange, Mark discovered that the book was blank. Charlie had carefully removed the cover and replaced the insides with a college-ruled notebook from Target. For the insult, they cut off Mark’s shadow and all the fingers of his right hand.
He’d been a musician.
Charlie tried to tell herself that he deserved it, and that it wasn’t her fault. But that didn’t stop her from crashing hard into depression and self-loathing.
Back then she was working at Bar Ten, and after her shift, she’d lie in bed until she had to work again, too exhausted to move. Eventually, she lost her job. Started burning through her savings. A couple months later, Mark and his brother shot up her car while it was stopped at a light. Only one bullet hit her, but that was plenty. Two hit the guy in the passenger seat, a hookup, who died immediately.
It haunted her that Posey could have been sitting in his place.
Mark and his brother went straight to prison, where they were rotting to this day.
All of it because Charlie had needed to show off. To exact revenge. Charlie Hall, at her best when doing her worst. Whenever she tried to create something, it broke apart in her hands. But blowing something up? There, Charlie had an unerring instinct for greatness.
No more stealing magic, she told herself as she recovered. No more gloamists. No more cons. No more living her life with the volume turned up to eleven. No more putting the people she loved in danger. She’d lost her nerve.
Not long after the bandages came off, she hooked up with Vince. When she’d noticed him next to her at the bar, her first impulse had been to move as far away as possible. He had a hard jaw, big hands, and angry eyebrows. He was hunched over his drink like he wanted to punch it. She’d had a bad day in a bad month in a worse year and was exhausted by the idea of getting hassled.
But he waved down the bartender when she was being ignored and interposed himself between her and the press of the evening crowd. When he spoke, it was to ask her the sort of questions that didn’t demand much.
She liked his deep voice and the strangeness of his eyes, so pale a gray that they seemed barely a color at all. She appreciated that he hadn’t hit on her. And he wasn’t bad looking. Objectively, he was far hotter than the guys to whom she was usually attracted—pretty, sad, skinny, whippet-faced fast-talkers. Objectively, he looked like he could snap them in half.
Maybe she needed something different. A nicotine patch of a man. Something to draw off her worst impulses, at least for one night.