Charlie went to retrieve it. As she did, a knock on the door startled her.
“Paul?” A gruff voice came from the hall.
Book in hand, Charlie went still. The door was slightly ajar and she saw the moment that it began to swing inward. She ducked down behind some boxes.
Someone in heavy work boots crossed the floor toward the desk. “Come on, man,” the person said in exasperation. “Paul! You owe me the goddamn rent. You can’t hide from me forever.”
He exited the room with a slammed door.
Charlie liked to think of herself as light-footed when she wanted to be, but in an old building, it was almost impossible to tell which floorboards were likely to creak and groan. She figured it would be the better part of valor to stay where she was for fifteen minutes, until she was sure Paul Ecco’s landlord had gone.
With nothing else to do, she opened up Umbramagists Through History and read it by the light of her cell phone.
It contained a collection of curated excerpts taken from other books. And although the introduction of misinformation was often a concern with reprints, there was an air of authenticity in the sheer neglect with which the author had put it together. Each page was clearly just scans of the original material, in the original font.
Charlie scanned through the excerpts from newspapers, histories, and other documents. Whatever she’d thought of how it had been put together, the actual information in the book was compelling.
A warrior in Thebes fell in a field of blood, but his shadow fought on until his killer died.
A member of a shadowy secret society operating around the time of the Order of the Golden Dawn claimed she was able to send her consciousness out of her body at night and discover her enemies in their most private moments. That same account suggested that while her shadow was on a mission, she was vulnerable to other shadows taking control of her body.
A mystic attempted to feed his shadow all of his blood and live on through it.
A woman had woken on a hillside to three elderly folks trying to cut off her shadow at her feet. She shouted and they ran. She never found out exactly what they’d been doing, but she had a sense that if they had succeeded, something terrible would have happened.
A man had nearly choked to death when a dark figure had turned to smoke and gone down his throat. A servant carrying a candle and entering the room by chance caused it to flee before its dread mission was accomplished.
By the time Charlie looked up from the book, the building was quiet. Tucking the book into her bag, she slipped out the door and down the stairs.
She’d have to talk to Liam Clovin, but there was someone she wanted to talk to first. If Red had really murdered Knight Singh, then what was Raven doing with his papers? And if Salt was the very wealthy puppeteer looking for them, why would he be scrambling to get the notes of someone from carapace when he was supposed to be obsessed with the return of the Liber Noctem?
In the car, Charlie turned to the empty seat beside her where her own shadow fell.
“Okay, kid,” she told it. “The universe belongs to the curious.”
23
BEAR CLAWS
Charlie pulled into the parking lot in front of Eclipse Piercing & Shadow Modifications in Amherst around ten that night. It was in a strip mall, positioned between a Korean chicken place and a laundromat. Charlie parked in the back, against a thin copse of trees. The chilly night air carried the scent of beer and fried things from a bar one lot over.
Grabbing a Dunkin’ Donuts bag from the back seat, she went to the door near the dumpster, a red bulb burning above it. She knocked, knuckles hard on the wood. A sliver of light peeked out the edge of blackout curtains hanging inside the window.
Moments later, a Black woman opened the door. She wore a tank top and ripped jean shorts. Her curls were dyed the color of flames, with yellow at the root, red for most of the way, and little licks of blue at the tips. Tattoos covered her arms, from a dark-skinned moon goddess new enough to be shiny with moisturizer to older and less well-rendered spiderwebs, roses, and a skull with a serpent snaking through its eyes.
Folding her arms across her chest, Raven regarded Charlie suspiciously. “I don’t take walk-in clients, especially at this hour.”
“You had something stolen from you recently,” Charlie said. “I want to talk to you about Knight Singh, and his book of observations. Tell me what I want to know, and you can have it back when I’m done with them—less than a week, I promise.”
Raven narrowed her eyes, then stepped back so that Charlie could come inside. As Raven closed the door, Charlie saw the words “El arte es largo y la vida breve” ran down the inside of her left arm in large gothic script.