So when Charlie tried to complain about Travis or tell her father any of her worries or fears, he got annoyed and transferred his attention to her sister. And if Posey chimed in, he took them both straight home.
Their father’s affection was entirely conditional, and he made no secret of it.
Those houses he’d brought her to way back when, though? Those were the houses she broke into when she was alone.
Charlie’d look through their refrigerators, making sandwiches out of whatever was there. Tuna and pickle. Kimchi and leftover pork loin. Tofu and Brie. She’d try on the clothes from their closets, lie down in their beds, and sometimes, when she was sure the people who lived there were away on vacations, she’d swim in those crystalline pools her father built, staring up at the clouds.
She’d pretend that those families were her families. That soon someone would call her inside to do her homework, scold her for not wearing sunscreen and dripping on the carpet.
It was in one of those places she watched a television program that had a gloamist on as a guest. She was explaining about shadow magic, with three models to show off her alterations. One had the shadow of a bird. The second shadow had a heart cut out of its chest. And the third wore a crown, the points rising high off the shadowed head.
When the host asked about other uses for magic, the gloom laughed. “Isn’t this enough?”
“Why were you hidden from the world for so long?” the man on the television asked.
Charlie, stolen ice cream on her lap, soup spoon in her hand, listened as the woman explained how early gloamists weren’t aware of one another. Each one discovered the discipline anew and lost those discoveries with their deaths. A few letters existed as proof that some found one another, and stray telegrams were exchanged in the 1940s. But things didn’t truly change until the BBSs of the 1980s. Much of the contemporary practice of gloaming was developed on message boards and locked forums, when finally people all over the world with quickened shadows realized they weren’t alone.
Charlie had stared at the model whose shadow had a heart-shaped hole in the chest. She wondered how it felt to be him.
When she left those houses she broke into alone, she didn’t take anything at all.
10
FULL-TILT BOOGIE
Looking at the dead man on the floor of Rapture, Charlie knew she had to do something, but the shock of violence rooted her in place.
Vince—her Vince, so even-keeled that he didn’t react even when he got shoved—had murdered someone.
And he didn’t realize she’d seen him.
If she sank back down to the floor, lying in the wet and the glass, she could pretend she’d been unconscious the whole time. Only when he touched her would she blink up at him like Snow White, the chunk of apple dislodged from her throat. Then he could make up any lie he liked about what had happened and she could nod along. Oh, that dead guy? He must have slipped on a banana peel.
Charlie pulled herself to her feet instead, holding on to the bar top. Made herself appear surprised he was there. “Vince? How did you get…”
The light turned his features hard-edged and she remembered how she’d found him frightening that first night in the bar, before he’d spoken.
He watched her gaze go from him to the dead man, take in the way Hermes’s neck was at the wrong angle. Vince’s face seemed horribly washed of expression.
Keep looking surprised, she told herself. Everything is very surprising.
“He’s gone,” Vince said, crossing the floor to her. “You’re bleeding.”
Funny that he could kill Hermes but wasn’t going to call him dead. Went for the polite euphemism. Gone.
Very, very far gone.
“I’m fine,” Charlie insisted, although she wasn’t at all sure. Her body hurt from being struck with bottles. She could feel the sharp sting of shallow cuts and there was very probably glass in her bra. Her thoughts were absurd.
Also, there was a corpse in the middle of the floor.
A corpse whose shadow was still moving, squirming and pulling against the connection to the bearded man as if it wanted to be free.
Charlie shuddered, a visceral horror moving through her. “What … is that?”
“It’ll settle after a couple of minutes,” he said after a pause where they both stared at the struggling shadow.
“Is it a Blight?”
Charlie didn’t understand the details of how energy exchange worked for gloamists, but she understood enough to know that the more of themselves they put into their shadow, the more it could do. A gloamist could let their shadow draw their energy directly, but they could also put pieces of themselves—memories they no longer wanted, desires that shamed them, emotions that stood in their way—into their shadow. Upon a gloamist’s death, that could become a Blight. Detached shadows, cut off not just from a human, but from their own humanity. Most were little better than animals, and the gloamists made it their business to hunt them down. Others could think and reason. Charlie had seen very few, and never expected to witness the birth of one.