Of course, that didn’t explain Red.
“Let go of me,” Charlie told her.
Adeline’s fingers dug into Charlie’s skin. “You think you know Remy, but you’re wrong.”
Charlie pulled her hand out of the woman’s grip and walked from the room as fast as she could. She wasn’t even sure where she was going, as long as it was away from the Salt family and their horrifying desires and demands. As she crossed the smooth tiles of the reception hall, she spotted a man leaning against the wall.
Charlie’s heart sped.
He was younger than most people walking through the country club, dark-haired with deep-set eyes and bruised skin underneath. Bullet holes, she’d thought of them that night when she first saw him in the alley. But up close, his eyes just seemed tired.
Then her gaze fell to the area between the edge of his gloves and the cuffs of his shirt. It didn’t show much, but she could see there was shadow where the skin of his wrist should have been.
“You’re the Hierophant,” she forced herself to say.
He smiled, but it was all wrong. Too many facial muscles were engaged. His mouth was pulled in too many directions.
“Yes,” he said, as though forcing the words out. “I am hun-ting a Blight.”
Charlie took an involuntary step back, alarmed more by the way he spoke than what he said. It reminded her, suddenly and horribly, of how she had sounded when Salt controlled her.
“Red?” she asked him.
A gleam appeared in his eye. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
She shook her head.
The Hierophant gave her one of those strange smiles. “I was a thief once. Like you.”
If she’d gotten caught in the wrong place, at the wrong moment, she could have wound up like him. Hands cut off, sent out to kill Blights. Had he been a gloamist before? Most thieves weren’t, if for no other reason than it was hard for a shadow to cross the onyx protections most gloamists put in place.
“Your shadow—” Charlie began, wanting to ask if it had quickened on its own, or if they’d bound him to something.
His eyes narrowed and he pushed off the wall, taking a step toward her. “Once they get their claws into you, they never let go.”
She scuttled back.
The Hierophant cocked his head to the side and began to speak, at first in a monotone, then in a rising shout. “Tell Red I want the book. Tell Red we can share. Tell Red that I will rip him to pieces.”
As he continued to advance toward her, Charlie turned and ran. Her flats slapped against the polished floor.
“No one can fight their own shadow,” he shouted after her.
She hit the doors with her shoulder, throwing them open. The matte black car was waiting for her, and she didn’t stop running until she was inside.
21
THE PAST
Remy Carver stood on a cobbled street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, trying to appear like a normal teenager instead of the conductor of a murder. He felt the pull of his shadow, as though there was a rope between them, thinning as Red floated up the stairs of the rowhouse.
Across the street, an elderly woman in a fur-collared coat walked a fat Chihuahua. She glanced toward Remy, and he turned away, moving deeper into the shadows, his heart hammering.
Maybe he should have come at two in the morning, instead of just past eleven at night. His grandfather argued for this hour, saying that he would be less conspicuous when there were other people on the street, but there was no time when it didn’t look a little suspicious for a fourteen-year-old boy to be hanging around with a couple of trash cans, waiting for his invisible friend to finish killing somebody.
Remy didn’t belong in a place like this, no matter who his grandfather was. The window boxes full of spring flowers and gleaming brass door knockers made him uncomfortable.
He tried to concentrate on something other than what was happening upstairs, even though part of him could see out of Red’s eyes. His shadow had made it to the man’s bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, no barrier at all. The man was asleep, wife beside him. She had one of those cannulas in her nose, the ones that supplied extra oxygen—
Remy shook his head, pressed his eyes shut as though that would stop the images from coming. No. No. Think about the last time he saw his mother and how much better she was doing. But that memory wasn’t so good, either, because she’d wanted him to come live with her and he couldn’t.
Think about the fancy private school he was attending and how Adeline had introduced him to her friends. They’d thought he was cool. He knew how to score drugs and how to spot a guy heading into a liquor store who’d buy them a bottle of Grey Goose for an extra twenty. They wanted him to come to their ski lodges this winter. They wanted him to come to their islands for spring break.