Book of Night

Charlie dresses up to sneak into Adam’s hotel and steal his book. She assesses her environment like a professional thief and manages to steal a maid’s keycard. Inside Adam’s room, she finds a pawn shop receipt for a ring that belonged to Doreen and a notebook belonging to Knight Singh. As she prepares to leave, Adam returns, talking on the phone with someone about a horse race. Charlie hides in the bathroom. She tries to will her shadow to defend her, but it stays silent. When she hears Adam say he’ll take a shower, she texts Doreen and tells her about the ring. Doreen calls Adam and convinces him to meet her. He leaves, and Charlie is able to escape. Charlie goes to the pawn shop and trades the race tip she overheard from Adam for Doreen’s ring.

Before going home, Charlie goes to the address on Edmund Carver’s driver’s license and rings the buzzer. A man answers and acts afraid of Carver’s name. Charlie goes to the trash and finds discarded junk mail belonging to one of the apartments.

Remy’s shadow remembers his relationship with Remy.

Remy taught the shadow to feel human emotions. Sometimes they went to the supermarket with their mother, and she ordered them to steal things. Then they went to Remy’s grandfather, who forced the shadow to kill. Taking lives changed it and made it stronger. The shadow experimented with moving farther away and becoming more independent.

Charlie goes to an all-night bar to meet Doreen. When Doreen arrives, she tries to defend Adam’s theft. Charlie offers Doreen her ring back in exchange for Doreen using her connections to push Posey’s tuition debt repayment back three months. Doreen is annoyed but agrees. However, she returns shortly to say that Charlie’s account was blocked and she wasn’t able to alter it. Charlie relents and returns the ring anyway, feeling sorry for herself. She drinks the night away until she’s ejected for violence.

Later, she wakes in her car feeling ashamed. When she emerges, she meets a man beside her car: Lionel Salt, who offers her a job.

Lionel Salt coerces Charlie into his car, where a young woman named Adeline is waiting. Charlie recognizes her from the photo Vince always carries around in his wallet. Salt wants Charlie to retrieve his stolen Book of Night.

They go to a spa where Charlie and Adeline freshen up and talk about Edmund, whom Adeline calls Remy. Afterward, they join Salt for lunch, where he expands on his plan to retrieve the book before he joins the Cabal. Salt explains that Edmund fed his shadow, cared for it too much, and named it Red. Eventually, Red was freed and is now loose in the world. Edmund wants the Book of Night to turn Red into a living person, but Salt is trying to get the book back before the process is complete.

When Charlie refuses to steal the book for him, Salt uses his shadow to possess her. He implies that if she doesn’t do as he asks, he’ll force her to hurt Posey. Charlie reluctantly agrees. On her way out of the restaurant, she meets the Hierophant, who tells her that he’s looking for Red.

The narrative flashes back to Remy’s childhood. Remy stood on a street at night alone, waiting for his shadow, Red, to kill someone for Lionel Salt. While Red approached a sleeping man inside a building, Remy tried to convince himself his new wealth was worth his actions. After murdering the people inside, Red returned to Remy. As Remy reminded himself that Red was only an extension of his subconscious, a place where he put his anger and fear, Red asked to be cut loose, promising to always return.

The narrative returns to the present. Charlie receives a gift from Salt: a book of fairy tales bookmarked to “The Shadow”—a story about a scholar who sent his shadow away and only reconnected with it years later. The shadow forced the scholar to be his servant, and eventually, the scholar was killed. Charlie takes it as a message that Vince is in danger from Red.

She arrives home and tells Posey that Vince is gone. They talk about Rand, whom Posey and their father thought was sexually grooming Charlie.

Hoping to find more clues, Charlie goes to Paul Ecco’s bookshop. She digs through his files and discovers a secret list of occult books and paraphernalia, from which she learns about instances of shadow magic throughout history. She also sees a book of collected records and letters about the bookshop’s business transactions. In it, she discovers that the Liber Noctem was sold to Paul Ecco by a man named Liam Colvin, who lives at the apartment that Charlie visited looking for Vince. She considers what to do next.

Charlie follows a lead to a shadow alterationist named Raven, who might have information about Knight Singh. Before he died, Singh gave Raven the notebook Charlie found in Adam’s apartment. Singh told Raven to keep it safe. While the Liber Noctem was at auction, Singh was able to view it and copied out some information on binding Blights.

As Raven fills a mug with blood and leaves it for her collected shadows to feed on, she explains to Charlie how independent shadows work. Raven knew the Hierophant before he was changed—he used to be a thief; now he is being controlled by a Blight. Raven says the trick to controlling shadows that could become Blights is to view them as extensions of yourself and never give them a name or feed them the blood of another person. Finally, a person with no shadow can’t be controlled by another.

Later, Charlie and Posey practice exercises to enhance Charlie’s shadow but without success. Charlie finds an article on Rose, the girl that Edmund Carver was supposedly found dead with, and tabloid rumors about Edmund and Adeline’s incestual relationship. Posey reads tarot cards for Charlie and draws the Magician, the Fool, and the Hierophant.