Thief of Night

The second installment in Holly Black's Book of Night series unfolds in a world where gloamists can quicken their shadows into sentient, conscious extensions of themselves. When a gloamist dies, their conscious shadow can survive as a Blight, a dangerous, blood-hungry entity untethered from any living person.

A prologue introduces Red, the shadow of Remy Carver, grandson of the wealthy and sinister Lionel Salt. Red drifts through Salt's mansion at night, trying to piece together an identity separate from his creator. He describes himself as a patchwork thing made of spit, sinew, and spite. One night he finds a girl lying in a pool of her own vomit in the library and tells her not to look at him. That girl is a young Charlie Hall.

In the present, Charlie, a self-described liar and con artist, serves as the Hierophant, a punitive role assigned by the Cabals, the secretive factions governing gloamist society. She fast-talked her way into the position as part of a desperate bargain: in exchange for hunting rogue Blights, she secured Red as her tethered shadow rather than letting the Cabals destroy him. The cost is devastating. During the binding ceremony, the Cabal leaders tore a piece of Red's shadow from him, stripping away his memories of being Vince, the human-seeming boyfriend Charlie loved. Red now regards Charlie as a stranger with dangerous power over him.

Charlie hunts a Blight in an abandoned mill building, narrowly surviving its attack by burning it to ash. Red arrives only after the fight, slow to respond through their tether. He feeds from her wounds to maintain their bond, a process that is intensely physical and leaves Charlie shaken. Their dynamic is fraught: Red sees her as another controller in a line that began with Salt, while Charlie refuses to command him, honoring a promise that he would never be a tool in anyone's hands.

A new threat emerges when Cabal enforcers drag Charlie before Mr. Punch, the new head of the puppeteer faction, who conceals his identity by speaking through the bodies of others. He assigns Charlie to investigate the massacre at Grace Covenant Church in Hatfield, where 12 people were slaughtered and drained of blood. A Cabal speaker named Rooster Argent, who was supposed to be present that night, has vanished. Mr. Punch promises to free Charlie and Red from the Hierophant role if she succeeds and threatens horrific consequences if she fails.

Meanwhile, Adeline Salt, Lionel Salt's daughter, maneuvers to establish Red as the legally alive Remy Carver so he can claim his inheritance. Her paperwork includes power of attorney that would give her control over him, and Red refuses to sign. Fiona Carver, Salt's first ex-wife and Remy's grandmother, appears and embraces Red, apologizing for failing to protect him from Salt. Charlie also discovers that Adeline has been sexually exploiting Red since he inhabited Remy's body as a teenager, a pattern of abuse Red endures because, in Salt's house, vulnerability was always weaponized.

Charlie's investigation takes her to the church, where claw marks and the pattern of death suggest multiple attackers. A boy near the cemetery describes seeing "the Nine-Shadow Man," a figure from a fairy tale about someone who steals neighbors' shadows and must kill endlessly to feed them. She finds a matchbook from Solaluna, an upscale wellness retreat, connecting it to the case. At Rooster's apartment, she discovers recordings implicating Mr. Punch in a shadow-trafficking operation, with Rooster likely dead.

Complications multiply. Rose Allaband's shadow, the woman Remy was accused of killing, visits Red and asks him to murder her gloamist, offering to kill Charlie in return. Red tells Charlie nothing. When the sisters move into a new apartment, Red asks Charlie to sever their tether. She refuses, revealing she followed him to Rose's meeting and heard the assassination offer. Red drugs her lemonade and cuts the tether himself, going to Rose's meeting alone.

Charlie wakes and tracks Red to a house where she finds him barely substantial after an ambush by multiple shadows. She feeds him her blood and resolves to steal the missing piece of his shadow from the mask Cabal's underground vault, the fragment that might restore his memories of being Vince. At the vault, she runs a street con, palming the glass vial containing his stolen shadow. When she opens it beside him, the shadow pours into Red and his eyes fly open. After recovering, Red confesses that the trap was aimed at Charlie because she is the Hierophant investigating the murders. He promises never to keep things from her again.

Charlie identifies Mr. Punch as a professor named Frank and confronts him. He confirms the harvesting operation and offers Charlie the harvester's job. She refuses and resolves to steal the shadows at Solaluna before they can be sold at the upcoming Umbral Elevation Retreat. She books a cottage under the name Remy Carver. Her sister Posey, who has secretly joined the alterationist Cabal, insists on coming with Malhar, a researcher and ally who impersonates Mr. Punch at the retreat.

At Solaluna, Charlie and Red break into the organizer's hotel room and steal over a dozen vials containing captured shadows. That night they share their first kiss, which escalates into an encounter where Red shifts into half-shadow form. Their connection deepens, but the crisis arrives when Mark Lord, Charlie's ex-boyfriend and the man who once shot her, appears dragging a body with shadows unfurling from both sides of him. Mark is the harvester. After Salt hired him to dispose of bodies, the Cabals broke him out of prison and forced him to steal shadows. He discovered he could bind multiple shadows by rapidly cycling between their consciousnesses, but the process has driven him mad. His shadows attack, and Charlie loses consciousness.

Charlie wakes zip-tied in an apartment, surrounded by Mark's stolen shadows. He forces her to feed them with her blood. She proposes a deal to lure Mr. Punch into a trap, but instead calls Red using a coded signal and fashions an improvised flamethrower from a stolen lighter and body spray. She also frees the last shadow from a vial hidden under her clothes and sends it to find Red. He arrives with the freed shadows from the stolen vials as reinforcements. Charlie burns through Mark's tethers one by one, turning his shadows into unbound Blights that close in on him as they escape.

Before the Cabal leaders, Charlie secures Red's freedom by making a private deal with Mr. Punch, then immediately exposes his trafficking operation to the other leaders. Red is freed, though Charlie must remain the Hierophant. She is soon arrested in connection with the drifter's murder from the mill building. Red, now legally Remy Vincent Carver after accepting his inheritance, uses his wealth to secure her release.

At a black-tie New Year's Eve gala at Salt's mansion, Red reveals he has used his own lawyers, backed by Fiona, to undo Adeline's control over him. After the guests depart, he presents Charlie with a silver lighter and proposes they burn Salt's mansion to the ground. The fire starts slowly but spreads fast. The novel closes with the declaration that Charlie Hall has finally met her match.