White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“Who you phoning?” my grandfather asks, wiping his face with his T-shirt.

“No one.”

“Good thing,” he says, “since we got so much work to do.”

I straddle one of the kitchen chairs and rest my chin on the back frame. “You think there’s something wrong with me, or what?”

“Here’s what I think: I’m cleaning out this house. I’m not young, so you’re supposed to help. You don’t want to be some kind of useless pretty boy.”

I laugh. “I might be young, but I wasn’t born yesterday. That’s no answer.”

“If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.” He grins after he says it, like verbal wrangling is his idea of fun. Being with him makes me think of being a kid, running around his yard in Carney, safe and free for the summer. He didn’t need us to help him chat up a mark or shove some stolen item down our pants. He made us mow the lawn instead.

I decide I’ll try a different tactic to show him I’m paying attention. “What’s going on? I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s definitely something wrong with Maura.”

He stops grinning. “What do you mean?”

“Did you see her? She looks terrible. And she thinks she’s hearing music. And I heard you say that Philip was working her.”

Grandad shakes his head and dumps his sweaty shirt on the table. “He’s not—”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “I saw her. Do you know what she said to me?”

He opens his mouth, but there’s a banging before he can speak, and we both turn. Audrey’s face is framed in the dirty glass of the back door. She frowns, as though sure she’s in the wrong place, but then she twists the knob and pushes the door hard enough to unstick it.

“How did you find me?” I ask, shock making me as cold-sounding as I ever hoped to be.

“All our addresses are printed in the student directory,” she says, shaking her head like I’m a total idiot.

“Right,” I say, because I am a total idiot. “Sorry. Come in. Thanks for—”

“Did they kick you out?” She puts one blue-gloved hand on her hip. She’s talking to me, but she’s staring at the piles of papers and ashtrays, mannequin hands and tea strainers that litter the countertops.

“For now,” I say, willing my voice not to crack. I thought I was familiar with the sick feeling of missing someone, of missing Audrey, but right now I realize how much more I’ll miss her if I can’t see her every day in class or sitting on the grass in the quad. All of a sudden I don’t care about the proper amount of ignoring. “Come into the living room.”

“I’m his grandfather.” Grandad holds out his left hand. The rubber glove hangs limply where his fingers are missing. I’m just glad she can’t see the stumps. Nothing but death-magic rotted flesh.

Audrey blanches, holding her gloved hand against her stomach as though she’s just realized what he is.

“Sorry,” I say. “Gramps, this is Audrey. Audrey, my grandfather.”

“A pretty girl like you can call me Desi,” he says, slicking back his hair and grinning like he’s a rascal daring to be reprimanded.

He’s still grinning as we walk past him into the living room.

I sit down on the ripped cushion of our couch. I wonder what she thinks of the house and if she’s going to say anything about it or about my grandfather. When I was a kid and brought friends over, I was defiantly proud of the chaos. I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled. Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain.

She reaches into her shiny black pocketbook and takes out a handful of printouts.

“Here,” she says, dumping the papers on my lap and flopping down beside me. Her red hair’s slightly damp—as though she’s just come from the shower—and cold against my arm.

Lila’s hair was blond, soaked red with blood the last time I saw her.

I press my eyes shut hard, press my fingers over them until I see nothing but black. Until I push the images away. When I was Audrey’s boyfriend, I thought that by making her like me, by making her think I was like everyone else, I’d become like everyone else.

I think about winning her back, wondering if I could do it. Wondering how long before I screw up and she leaves me again. I’m just not a good enough con man to keep her.

“Some ‘sleep aid’ pills can cause sleepwalking,” Audrey says, pointing to the papers. “Unofficially. I brought some articles from the library. Some guy was even driving in his sleep. I was thinking you could just say—”

“That I was medicating myself for insomnia?” I ask, rolling over and pressing my face against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her, filtered through sweater fabric.

She doesn’t push me away. I consider kissing her right there on the dirty couch, but some instinct of self-preservation stops me. Once someone’s hurt you, it’s harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn’t stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.

“It doesn’t have to be true. You can just say you were taking sleeping pills,” she says, like I don’t understand lying, which is sort of sweet and sort of humiliating.

It’s not a bad plan, really. If I had been smarter and had thought of it myself earlier, I’d probably still be at school. “I already told them I had a history of sleepwalking as a kid.”

“Crap,” she says. “Too bad. There’s this other pill in Australia that’s made people binge eat and paint their front doors while asleep.” She tilts her head, and I see six tiny protective amulets slide across her collarbone. Luck. Dreams. Emotion. Body. Memory. Death. The seventh one—transformation—is caught on the edge of her sweater.

I imagine crushing her throat in my hands and am relieved to be horrified. I feel guilty when I think of killing girls, but it’s the only way I know to test myself, to make sure that whatever terrible thing is inside of me isn’t about to get out.

I reach out and unhook the little stone pendant, letting it fall against her neck. Hematite. Probably a fake. There aren’t enough transformation workers around for there to be many real amulets. One worker every generation or two. That charm makes me wonder if the rest are fake too. “Thanks. For trying. It was a good idea.”

She bites her lip. “Do you think this has something to do with your dad dying?”

I shift abruptly, so that my back’s against the armrest. Real smooth. “Do I think what has to do with it? He was in a car accident in the middle of the day.”

“Sleepwalking can be triggered by stress. What about your mom being in jail? That’s got to be stressful.”

My voice rises. “Dad’s been dead for almost three years and mom’s been locked up practically as long. Don’t you think—”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not mad!” I rub my hand over my face. “Okay, look. I almost fall off a roof, I’m getting kicked out of school, and you think I’m a head case. I’ve got reasons to be pissed.” I take a deep breath and try to give her my most apologetic smile. “But not at you.”

“That’s right,” she says, shoving me. “Not at me.”

I catch her gloved hand in mine. “I can handle Northcutt. I’ll be back at Wallingford in no time.” I hate having her here in the middle of my messy house, already knowing more about me than is comfortable. I feel turned inside out, the raw parts of me exposed.

I don’t want her to leave, either.

“Look,” she whispers with a glance in the direction of the kitchen. “I don’t want to set you off again, but do you think you could have been touched? You know, heebeegeebies?”

Touched. Worked. Cursed. “To sleepwalk?”

“To throw yourself off a roof,” she says. “It would have looked like suicide.”

“That’s a pretty expensive work.” I don’t want to tell her I’ve thought about it, that my whole family thought about it so much they even had a secret meeting to discuss the possibility. “Plus, I lived. That makes it less likely.”

“You should ask your granddad,” she says softly.

If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.

I nod, barely noticing as she puts the papers back into her purse. Then she hugs me lightly, and I can’t help but notice that. My hands rest on the small of her back and I can feel her warm breath against my neck. With her, I could learn to be normal. Every time she touches me, I feel the heady promise of becoming an average guy.

“You better go,” I say, before I can do something stupid.

At the door, as she leaves, I turn to look at my grandfather’s face. He’s twisting a screwdriver into the stove to pop off a crusted burner, without any apparent concern that the entire Zacharov family might be after me. He’s worked for them, so it’s not like he doesn’t know what they’re capable of—he knows better than I do.

Maybe that’s why he’s here.

To protect me.

The thought makes me need to lean against the sink from a combination of horror, guilt, and gratitude.

* * *

That night, in my old room with the ratty Magritte posters taped to the ceiling and bookshelves stuffed with robots and Hardy Boys novels, I dream of being lost in a rainstorm.

Even though it’s a dream, and I’m pretty sure it’s a dream, the rain feels cold against my skin and I can barely see with the water in my eyes. I hunch over and run for the only visible light, shading my face with one hand.

I come to the worn door of the barn behind the house. Ducking through the doorway, however, I decide I was mistaken about it being our barn. Instead of the old tools and discarded furniture, there’s only a long hallway, lit by torches. As I get closer, I realize that the torches are held by hands too real to be plaster. One hand shifts its grip on a metal shaft, and I leap back from it. Then, stepping closer, I see how the wrist of each has been severed and stuck on the wall. I can see the uneven slice of the flesh.

“Hello,” I call, like I did from the roof. This time, no one answers.

I glance back. The barn door is still open, sheets of rain forming puddles on the wooden planks. Because it’s a dream, I don’t bother to go back and close the door. I just head down the hall. After what seems like a disproportionately long time walking, I come to a shabby door with a handle made from the foot of a stag. The coarse fur tickles my palm as I pull it.

Inside sits a futon from Barron’s dorm room and a dresser I’m sure I recall Mom buying off of eBay, intending to paint it apple green for the guest room. I open the drawers and find several pairs of Philip’s old jeans. They’re dry, and the top pair fits me perfectly when I pull them on. There’s a white shirt that was Dad’s hanging on the back of the door; I remember the cigarillo burn just below the elbow and the smell of my father’s aftershave.

Since I know I’m dreaming, I’m not frightened, just puzzled, when I walk back into the hall and this time find steps going up to a painted white door with a hanging crystal pull. The pull looks like the kind that summons servants in grand houses on PBS shows, but this one is made from glittering parts of an old chandelier. When I pull it, a series of bells rings loudly, echoing through the space. The door opens.

An old picnic table and two lawn chairs rest in the middle of a large gray room. Maybe I’m still in the barn after all, because the spaces between the planks in the walls are wide enough that I can see rain against a storm-bright sky.

The table is draped with some kind of embroidered silk cloth and topped with silver candlesticks, two silver chargers, and gilt-edged plates, the center of each covered by a silver dome. Cut glass goblets stand at each place setting.

Out of the gloom, cats come, tabbies and calicos, marmalade cats and butterscotch cats and cats so black I can barely tell them from their shadows. They creep toward me, hundreds of them, swarming over one another to get close.

I jump up onto one of the chairs, snatching a candlestick, not sure what sick thing my brain is about to conjure next when a small, veiled creature walks into the room. It’s wearing a tiny gown, like the kind that expensive dolls wear. Lila had a whole row of dolls in dresses like that; her mother would yell at her if she touched them. We played with the dolls anyway when her mother wasn’t looking. We dragged the princess one through Grandad’s backyard pretending she was being held captive by one of my Power Rangers, with a broken Tamagotchi as an interstellar map—until its dress was streaked with grass stains and torn along the hem. This dress is torn too.

The veil slips and falls. Underneath is a cat’s face. A cat, standing on two legs, her triangle head tilted to one side, almost like her neck’s been broken, her body covered in the dress.

I can’t help it, I laugh.

“I need your help,” says the tiny figure. Her voice is sad and soft and sounds like Lila’s, but with an odd accent that might just be how cats sound when they talk.

“Okay,” I say. What else can I say?

“A curse was placed on me,” the Lila cat says. “A curse that only you can break.”

The other cats watch us, tails flicking, whiskers twitching. Still silent.

“Who cursed you?” I ask, trying to smother my laughter.

“You did,” says the white cat.

At that my smile becomes more of a grimace. Lila’s dead and cats shouldn’t stand, shouldn’t press their paws together in supplication, shouldn’t talk.

>

“Who you phoning?” my grandfather asks, wiping his face with his T-shirt.

“No one.”

“Good thing,” he says, “since we got so much work to do.”

I straddle one of the kitchen chairs and rest my chin on the back frame. “You think there’s something wrong with me, or what?”

“Here’s what I think: I’m cleaning out this house. I’m not young, so you’re supposed to help. You don’t want to be some kind of useless pretty boy.”

I laugh. “I might be young, but I wasn’t born yesterday. That’s no answer.”

“If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.” He grins after he says it, like verbal wrangling is his idea of fun. Being with him makes me think of being a kid, running around his yard in Carney, safe and free for the summer. He didn’t need us to help him chat up a mark or shove some stolen item down our pants. He made us mow the lawn instead.

I decide I’ll try a different tactic to show him I’m paying attention. “What’s going on? I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s definitely something wrong with Maura.”

He stops grinning. “What do you mean?”

“Did you see her? She looks terrible. And she thinks she’s hearing music. And I heard you say that Philip was working her.”

Grandad shakes his head and dumps his sweaty shirt on the table. “He’s not—”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “I saw her. Do you know what she said to me?”

He opens his mouth, but there’s a banging before he can speak, and we both turn. Audrey’s face is framed in the dirty glass of the back door. She frowns, as though sure she’s in the wrong place, but then she twists the knob and pushes the door hard enough to unstick it.

“How did you find me?” I ask, shock making me as cold-sounding as I ever hoped to be.

“All our addresses are printed in the student directory,” she says, shaking her head like I’m a total idiot.

“Right,” I say, because I am a total idiot. “Sorry. Come in. Thanks for—”

“Did they kick you out?” She puts one blue-gloved hand on her hip. She’s talking to me, but she’s staring at the piles of papers and ashtrays, mannequin hands and tea strainers that litter the countertops.

“For now,” I say, willing my voice not to crack. I thought I was familiar with the sick feeling of missing someone, of missing Audrey, but right now I realize how much more I’ll miss her if I can’t see her every day in class or sitting on the grass in the quad. All of a sudden I don’t care about the proper amount of ignoring. “Come into the living room.”

“I’m his grandfather.” Grandad holds out his left hand. The rubber glove hangs limply where his fingers are missing. I’m just glad she can’t see the stumps. Nothing but death-magic rotted flesh.

Audrey blanches, holding her gloved hand against her stomach as though she’s just realized what he is.

“Sorry,” I say. “Gramps, this is Audrey. Audrey, my grandfather.”

“A pretty girl like you can call me Desi,” he says, slicking back his hair and grinning like he’s a rascal daring to be reprimanded.

He’s still grinning as we walk past him into the living room.

I sit down on the ripped cushion of our couch. I wonder what she thinks of the house and if she’s going to say anything about it or about my grandfather. When I was a kid and brought friends over, I was defiantly proud of the chaos. I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled. Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain.

She reaches into her shiny black pocketbook and takes out a handful of printouts.

“Here,” she says, dumping the papers on my lap and flopping down beside me. Her red hair’s slightly damp—as though she’s just come from the shower—and cold against my arm.

Lila’s hair was blond, soaked red with blood the last time I saw her.

I press my eyes shut hard, press my fingers over them until I see nothing but black. Until I push the images away. When I was Audrey’s boyfriend, I thought that by making her like me, by making her think I was like everyone else, I’d become like everyone else.

I think about winning her back, wondering if I could do it. Wondering how long before I screw up and she leaves me again. I’m just not a good enough con man to keep her.

“Some ‘sleep aid’ pills can cause sleepwalking,” Audrey says, pointing to the papers. “Unofficially. I brought some articles from the library. Some guy was even driving in his sleep. I was thinking you could just say—”

“That I was medicating myself for insomnia?” I ask, rolling over and pressing my face against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her, filtered through sweater fabric.

She doesn’t push me away. I consider kissing her right there on the dirty couch, but some instinct of self-preservation stops me. Once someone’s hurt you, it’s harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn’t stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.

“It doesn’t have to be true. You can just say you were taking sleeping pills,” she says, like I don’t understand lying, which is sort of sweet and sort of humiliating.

It’s not a bad plan, really. If I had been smarter and had thought of it myself earlier, I’d probably still be at school. “I already told them I had a history of sleepwalking as a kid.”

“Crap,” she says. “Too bad. There’s this other pill in Australia that’s made people binge eat and paint their front doors while asleep.” She tilts her head, and I see six tiny protective amulets slide across her collarbone. Luck. Dreams. Emotion. Body. Memory. Death. The seventh one—transformation—is caught on the edge of her sweater.

I imagine crushing her throat in my hands and am relieved to be horrified. I feel guilty when I think of killing girls, but it’s the only way I know to test myself, to make sure that whatever terrible thing is inside of me isn’t about to get out.

I reach out and unhook the little stone pendant, letting it fall against her neck. Hematite. Probably a fake. There aren’t enough transformation workers around for there to be many real amulets. One worker every generation or two. That charm makes me wonder if the rest are fake too. “Thanks. For trying. It was a good idea.”

She bites her lip. “Do you think this has something to do with your dad dying?”

I shift abruptly, so that my back’s against the armrest. Real smooth. “Do I think what has to do with it? He was in a car accident in the middle of the day.”

“Sleepwalking can be triggered by stress. What about your mom being in jail? That’s got to be stressful.”

My voice rises. “Dad’s been dead for almost three years and mom’s been locked up practically as long. Don’t you think—”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not mad!” I rub my hand over my face. “Okay, look. I almost fall off a roof, I’m getting kicked out of school, and you think I’m a head case. I’ve got reasons to be pissed.” I take a deep breath and try to give her my most apologetic smile. “But not at you.”

“That’s right,” she says, shoving me. “Not at me.”

I catch her gloved hand in mine. “I can handle Northcutt. I’ll be back at Wallingford in no time.” I hate having her here in the middle of my messy house, already knowing more about me than is comfortable. I feel turned inside out, the raw parts of me exposed.

I don’t want her to leave, either.

“Look,” she whispers with a glance in the direction of the kitchen. “I don’t want to set you off again, but do you think you could have been touched? You know, heebeegeebies?”

Touched. Worked. Cursed. “To sleepwalk?”

“To throw yourself off a roof,” she says. “It would have looked like suicide.”

“That’s a pretty expensive work.” I don’t want to tell her I’ve thought about it, that my whole family thought about it so much they even had a secret meeting to discuss the possibility. “Plus, I lived. That makes it less likely.”

“You should ask your granddad,” she says softly.

If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.

I nod, barely noticing as she puts the papers back into her purse. Then she hugs me lightly, and I can’t help but notice that. My hands rest on the small of her back and I can feel her warm breath against my neck. With her, I could learn to be normal. Every time she touches me, I feel the heady promise of becoming an average guy.

“You better go,” I say, before I can do something stupid.

At the door, as she leaves, I turn to look at my grandfather’s face. He’s twisting a screwdriver into the stove to pop off a crusted burner, without any apparent concern that the entire Zacharov family might be after me. He’s worked for them, so it’s not like he doesn’t know what they’re capable of—he knows better than I do.

Maybe that’s why he’s here.

To protect me.

The thought makes me need to lean against the sink from a combination of horror, guilt, and gratitude.

* * *

That night, in my old room with the ratty Magritte posters taped to the ceiling and bookshelves stuffed with robots and Hardy Boys novels, I dream of being lost in a rainstorm.

Even though it’s a dream, and I’m pretty sure it’s a dream, the rain feels cold against my skin and I can barely see with the water in my eyes. I hunch over and run for the only visible light, shading my face with one hand.

I come to the worn door of the barn behind the house. Ducking through the doorway, however, I decide I was mistaken about it being our barn. Instead of the old tools and discarded furniture, there’s only a long hallway, lit by torches. As I get closer, I realize that the torches are held by hands too real to be plaster. One hand shifts its grip on a metal shaft, and I leap back from it. Then, stepping closer, I see how the wrist of each has been severed and stuck on the wall. I can see the uneven slice of the flesh.

“Hello,” I call, like I did from the roof. This time, no one answers.

I glance back. The barn door is still open, sheets of rain forming puddles on the wooden planks. Because it’s a dream, I don’t bother to go back and close the door. I just head down the hall. After what seems like a disproportionately long time walking, I come to a shabby door with a handle made from the foot of a stag. The coarse fur tickles my palm as I pull it.

Inside sits a futon from Barron’s dorm room and a dresser I’m sure I recall Mom buying off of eBay, intending to paint it apple green for the guest room. I open the drawers and find several pairs of Philip’s old jeans. They’re dry, and the top pair fits me perfectly when I pull them on. There’s a white shirt that was Dad’s hanging on the back of the door; I remember the cigarillo burn just below the elbow and the smell of my father’s aftershave.

Since I know I’m dreaming, I’m not frightened, just puzzled, when I walk back into the hall and this time find steps going up to a painted white door with a hanging crystal pull. The pull looks like the kind that summons servants in grand houses on PBS shows, but this one is made from glittering parts of an old chandelier. When I pull it, a series of bells rings loudly, echoing through the space. The door opens.

An old picnic table and two lawn chairs rest in the middle of a large gray room. Maybe I’m still in the barn after all, because the spaces between the planks in the walls are wide enough that I can see rain against a storm-bright sky.

The table is draped with some kind of embroidered silk cloth and topped with silver candlesticks, two silver chargers, and gilt-edged plates, the center of each covered by a silver dome. Cut glass goblets stand at each place setting.

Out of the gloom, cats come, tabbies and calicos, marmalade cats and butterscotch cats and cats so black I can barely tell them from their shadows. They creep toward me, hundreds of them, swarming over one another to get close.

I jump up onto one of the chairs, snatching a candlestick, not sure what sick thing my brain is about to conjure next when a small, veiled creature walks into the room. It’s wearing a tiny gown, like the kind that expensive dolls wear. Lila had a whole row of dolls in dresses like that; her mother would yell at her if she touched them. We played with the dolls anyway when her mother wasn’t looking. We dragged the princess one through Grandad’s backyard pretending she was being held captive by one of my Power Rangers, with a broken Tamagotchi as an interstellar map—until its dress was streaked with grass stains and torn along the hem. This dress is torn too.

The veil slips and falls. Underneath is a cat’s face. A cat, standing on two legs, her triangle head tilted to one side, almost like her neck’s been broken, her body covered in the dress.

I can’t help it, I laugh.

“I need your help,” says the tiny figure. Her voice is sad and soft and sounds like Lila’s, but with an odd accent that might just be how cats sound when they talk.

“Okay,” I say. What else can I say?

“A curse was placed on me,” the Lila cat says. “A curse that only you can break.”

The other cats watch us, tails flicking, whiskers twitching. Still silent.

“Who cursed you?” I ask, trying to smother my laughter.

“You did,” says the white cat.

At that my smile becomes more of a grimace. Lila’s dead and cats shouldn’t stand, shouldn’t press their paws together in supplication, shouldn’t talk.