White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“It’s complicated,” she said. “Jennifer hates me because of something Lorraine and Margot told her. They’re always making up stuff. I don’t want to talk about them. I want ice.”

“You are kind of a bully,” I said.

“I have to be able to order people around someday,” she said, her gaze steady. “Like Dad does. Besides, you already knew I was a bully. You know me.”

“What makes you think I even want my ears pierced?”

“Girls think pierced ears are hot. Besides, I know you, too. You like to be bullied.”

“Maybe I did when I was nine,” I said, but I took the bucket into the hall and brought it back full of ice.

She walked over to the dresser, hopped up, and pushed a pile of CDs, underwear, and folded-up notes onto the floor.

“Come here,” she said, her voice hushed, dramatic. “First you light the match, and then you run the pin through the flame. See?” Lila struck the match and twirled the pin in its fire. Her eyes shone. “It goes black and iridescent. Now it’s sterile.”

I pushed up the shaggy black mop of my hair and tilted my head like a willing sacrifice. The press of the ice made me shiver. Her legs were slightly apart and I had to stand between her knees to get close enough.

“Hold still,” she said, her fingers cold on my skin. I watched melting ice running down her wrist to drip off her elbow. We both waited, quietly, as though this was a ceremonial rite. After a minute or so she dropped the cube and pressed the pin against my ear, slowly stabbing through.

“Ow!” I pulled away at the last moment.

She laughed. “Cassel! The pin’s sticking half out of your ear.”

“It hurt,” I said, half in astonishment. But it wasn’t that. It was too much sensation—the feel of her thighs holding me in place mixing with the sharp pain.

“You can hurt me worse if you want,” she said, and pushed the pin through with a sudden, savage thrust. I sucked in my breath.

She slid off the dresser to fetch new ice for her own ear from the bucket. Her eyes were glittering. “Do mine up high. You’re going to have to really press to get through the cartilage.”

I ran a safety pin above a match and lined it up above the ear holes she already had. Lila bit her lip, but she didn’t cry out, even though I saw her eyes water. She just dug her fingers into the corduroy striping of my pants as I pressed. The metal pin bent a little, and I wondered if I was going to be able to get it all the way through, when it suddenly went with an audible pop. She made a strangled sound, and I carefully closed the safety pin so that it hung like a fancy formal earring at the very top of her ear.

Then she dipped the cotton swabs in vodka to wipe away the blood and poured us a gagging shot apiece. Her hands were shaking.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

I heard steps outside the door, but Lila didn’t seem to notice them. Instead she leaned in. Her tongue was as hot as a match on my ear, and it made my body jerk in surprise. I was still trying to convince myself that it had really happened when she stuck out her tongue and showed me my own blood.

That was when the door opened and Lila’s mother walked in. She cleared her throat, but Lila didn’t step back. “What’s going on in here? Why aren’t you ready for your party?”

“I’ll be fashionably late,” Lila said, a smile threatening at the corners of her mouth.

“Have you been drinking?” Mrs. Zacharov looked at me like I was a stranger. “Get out.”

I walked past Lila’s mother and out the door.

The party was in full swing when I got there, full of people I didn’t know. I felt out of place as I stalked to my seat, and my ear throbbed like a second heart. Overcompensating, I tried to be funny in front of Lila’s friends and wound up being so obnoxious that some boy she went to school with threw a punch at me in the men’s room. I pushed him, and he gashed his head on one of the sinks.

The next day Barron told me he had asked Lila out. They’d started dating around the time I was being escorted from the hotel.

According to my GPS, Barron’s new place is a row house on a street with cracked sidewalks and a few boarded-up apartment buildings. One of his front windows is missing most of its glass and is partially covered with duct tape. I open the screen door and knock on the cheap hollow-core door beyond. Paint flakes off on my hands.

I knock, wait, and knock again. There’s no answer and no motorcycle parked nearby either. I don’t see any lights on through the newspaper taped up in place of blinds.

There’s a basic lock and a dead bolt on the door. Easy to get around. My driver’s license slid through the gap unlocks the first. The dead bolt is trickier, but I get a wire from the trunk of the car, thread it through the keyhole, and rake it over the pins until they all stick at the right height. Luckily Barron hasn’t upgraded to anything fancy. I turn the knob, pick up my license, and walk into the kitchen.

For a moment, looking at the laminate countertops, I think I’ve broken into the wrong house. Covering the white cabinets are sticky notes: “Notebook will tell you what you forgot,” “Keys on hook,” “Pay bills in cash,” “You are Barron Sharpe,” “Phone in jacket.” A carton of milk sits open on the counter, its curdled contents gray with cigarette ash. Butts float on the surface. There’s a pile of bills—mostly student loans—all of them unopened.

“You are Barron Sharpe” doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt.

His laptop and a pile of manila folders cover the card table in the center of the kitchen. I slump down on one of the chairs and glance over the files—legal briefs from my mother’s appeal. He’s made notes in ketchup red marker, and it finally occurs to me that this could be the reason he dropped out of school. He must be managing the case. That makes some sense, but not enough.

There’s a composition notebook sitting under one of the folders, marked February to April. I flip it open, expecting to see more notes on the case, but it looks a lot like a diary. At the top of each page is a date, and beneath it is an obsessively detailed list of what Barron ate, who he talked to, how he was feeling—and then at the bottom, a bulleted list of things to be sure to remember. Today started:

March 19

Breakfast: Protein shake

Ran 1 mile

Upon waking, experienced slight lethargy and soreness in muscles.

Wore: light green buttoned shirt, black cargo pants, black shoes (Prada)

Mom continues to complain about the other inmates, how much she’s suffering without us, and her fear that, basically, we’re out of her control. She needs to realize that we’re grown up, but I don’t know if she’s ready for that. As we get closer and closer to the trial, I worry more about what life’s going to be like when she comes home.

She says that she’s enticed some millionaire and is pinning a lot of her hopes on him. I have sent her clippings about him. I’m worried about her getting herself in trouble again and I honestly can’t believe that this man has no idea who she is—or that if he doesn’t, that he’s going to remain ignorant. When she does get out of jail, she is going to have to be more circumspect, something I’m sure she’s not going to be willing to do.

I can’t remember faces from high school. I ran into someone on the street who said he knew me. I told him that I was Barron’s twin and that I went to another school. I must study the yearbook.

Philip is as tedious as ever. He acts as though he is resolved to do what is necessary, but he isn’t. It’s not just weakness but a continual romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege. He sickens me more each day, but Anton trusts him in a way that Anton will never really trust me. But Anton believes I can deliver, and I doubt he can say that about Philip.

Maybe the money we get will be enough to control Mom for a while. By the time this is over, Anton’ll owe us everything.

The notes for today stop there, but glancing back over the past few weeks, I can see that he recorded random details, conversations, and feelings as though he expected to forget them. I open the laptop gingerly, not sure what other weirdness I’m going to discover, but it’s set to sleep, with the page showing my YouTube debut.

The raw footage was taken with a cell phone, so the quality is grainy and I don’t look like much more than a pale, shirtless blob, but I wince when I look like I’m losing my balance. I hear someone yell “jump” in the background, and the angle swings toward the crowd. In that moment I see her. A white shape near the scrubby bushes. The cat, licking her paw. The cat I was chasing in my dream. I stare at the video and stare at her, trying to make some sense of how a cat from my dream—a cat that looks a lot like the cat that has been sleeping at the foot of my bed—could have really been there that night.

I take the notebook off the table and flip to the day the video was uploaded.

March 15th

Breakfast: Egg whites

Ran 1 mile

Upon waking, felt fine. Clipped nose hair.

Wore: dark blue jeans (Monarchy), coat, blue dress shirt (HUGO)

Logged into C’s email and found video. Clearly shows L. but no clues as to where she is now. C is at the old house, but G there and keeping an eye on everything. P says he’s going to take care of it. This is all his fault.

Beware the ides of March. Some joke. I found her collar, but no clue as to how she got out of it. P must have not clipped it on correctly. I have to find a way to use this to wedge P and A further apart.

I have to control the situation.

“Control” is underlined twice, the second line so heavy that it ripped through the page.

I stare at the entry until the words blur in front of me. C is Cassel—the video must have been of me up on the roof. P must be Philip. A could be Anton, since Barron mentioned him before. I blink at G for a moment and then realize it’s for our grandfather. But L? I immediately think of Lila, even though it makes no sense.

I grab the laptop and play the video of me again, frame by frame. We barely see any of the crowd; the camera pans over people too fast to catch anything but blurs. The only faces I can pick out belong to students. No Lila. No dead girls. No one that doesn’t belong. No one wearing a collar.

The only thing in that video that could be wearing a collar is the cat.

Only you can undo the curse.

The thought is so absurd that it actually makes me grin.

I walk toward the bathroom to splash water on my face, but as I pass a door, the strong smell of ammonia stops me. It opens into a room, empty except for a metal cage that sits near the window. The hinged wire door is open. The newspaper stuffed into the cage and the wooden floor around it is stained with what, given the sharp smell and the yellowing, is probably cat piss. Thick crusted layers of it, like something was kept locked up for a long time and not cleaned up after.

I hold my breath and lean closer. Caught in a wire joint are a few short white hairs. I back out of the room.

Barron’s losing his memories. So’s Maura, and maybe me too. I don’t remember the details of Lila’s murder. I don’t remember how I got onto the roof. I don’t remember what happened to my memory charm.

Let’s say someone is taking those memories. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch.

Let’s also say someone gave me that dream, the one where the cat was begging for help. If I were cursed to have it, that would mean someone had to touch me, hand to skin. The cat—the one that slept on my bed, the one near my dorm room in the video—did touch me.

So maybe the cat gave me the dream.

Of course, that’s ridiculous. Cats are animals. They can no more perform curse work than they can perform a sonata or compose a villanelle.

Unless the cat was really a girl. A girl who was a dream worker. Lila.

Which would mean something far different—not just that some memories of murdering her were stolen from me. It would mean she’s not dead.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN BARRON’S BATHROOM the beige tile walls look too familiar, but like I’m seeing them from the wrong angle.

It’s crazy, the idea of Lila being a cat. The idea that Barron had her locked up in his house all this time is even crazier. And the idea that I might not have killed Lila throws me so off balance that I don’t know how to right myself.

I look in the mirror—staring at my face. Looking at the scraggly hair curling around my jaw and my ink-blot eyes, looking to see if I should be afraid. If I’m still a murderer. If I’m cracking up.

There’s a dizzy sense of déjà vu as I glance at the reflection of the tub behind me. I stumble and barely catch myself.

I thrashed in the water and my hands turned to arms turned to starfish curling like snakes. Everything went wrong and I was coming apart and water closed over my head and—

More things I half-remember.

I turn and crouch on the floor, touching the tile near the tub faucet. I can almost recall my fingers reaching for the same handle, but then the memory goes surreal and dreamlike and my fingers become scrabbling black claws.

Animal fear, instinctual and horrible, overwhelms me. I have to get out of here—that’s the only thing I can think. I head for the front door, barely smart enough to twist the knob so that the door locks behind me when it closes. I get into Grandad’s car and sit for a moment, waiting to feel like a stupid kid running from some pretend ghost. I eat one of the candy bars while I wait. The chocolate tastes like dust, but I swallow it anyway.

I have to sort things out.

My memories are full of shadows, and no amount of chasing them around my head seems to make them any more substantial.

What I need is a worker. One that’s going to give me answers without asking a lot of questions. One that can help me make these puzzle pieces fit together and show me the picture. I turn the ignition and head south.

>

“It’s complicated,” she said. “Jennifer hates me because of something Lorraine and Margot told her. They’re always making up stuff. I don’t want to talk about them. I want ice.”

“You are kind of a bully,” I said.

“I have to be able to order people around someday,” she said, her gaze steady. “Like Dad does. Besides, you already knew I was a bully. You know me.”

“What makes you think I even want my ears pierced?”

“Girls think pierced ears are hot. Besides, I know you, too. You like to be bullied.”

“Maybe I did when I was nine,” I said, but I took the bucket into the hall and brought it back full of ice.

She walked over to the dresser, hopped up, and pushed a pile of CDs, underwear, and folded-up notes onto the floor.

“Come here,” she said, her voice hushed, dramatic. “First you light the match, and then you run the pin through the flame. See?” Lila struck the match and twirled the pin in its fire. Her eyes shone. “It goes black and iridescent. Now it’s sterile.”

I pushed up the shaggy black mop of my hair and tilted my head like a willing sacrifice. The press of the ice made me shiver. Her legs were slightly apart and I had to stand between her knees to get close enough.

“Hold still,” she said, her fingers cold on my skin. I watched melting ice running down her wrist to drip off her elbow. We both waited, quietly, as though this was a ceremonial rite. After a minute or so she dropped the cube and pressed the pin against my ear, slowly stabbing through.

“Ow!” I pulled away at the last moment.

She laughed. “Cassel! The pin’s sticking half out of your ear.”

“It hurt,” I said, half in astonishment. But it wasn’t that. It was too much sensation—the feel of her thighs holding me in place mixing with the sharp pain.

“You can hurt me worse if you want,” she said, and pushed the pin through with a sudden, savage thrust. I sucked in my breath.

She slid off the dresser to fetch new ice for her own ear from the bucket. Her eyes were glittering. “Do mine up high. You’re going to have to really press to get through the cartilage.”

I ran a safety pin above a match and lined it up above the ear holes she already had. Lila bit her lip, but she didn’t cry out, even though I saw her eyes water. She just dug her fingers into the corduroy striping of my pants as I pressed. The metal pin bent a little, and I wondered if I was going to be able to get it all the way through, when it suddenly went with an audible pop. She made a strangled sound, and I carefully closed the safety pin so that it hung like a fancy formal earring at the very top of her ear.

Then she dipped the cotton swabs in vodka to wipe away the blood and poured us a gagging shot apiece. Her hands were shaking.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

I heard steps outside the door, but Lila didn’t seem to notice them. Instead she leaned in. Her tongue was as hot as a match on my ear, and it made my body jerk in surprise. I was still trying to convince myself that it had really happened when she stuck out her tongue and showed me my own blood.

That was when the door opened and Lila’s mother walked in. She cleared her throat, but Lila didn’t step back. “What’s going on in here? Why aren’t you ready for your party?”

“I’ll be fashionably late,” Lila said, a smile threatening at the corners of her mouth.

“Have you been drinking?” Mrs. Zacharov looked at me like I was a stranger. “Get out.”

I walked past Lila’s mother and out the door.

The party was in full swing when I got there, full of people I didn’t know. I felt out of place as I stalked to my seat, and my ear throbbed like a second heart. Overcompensating, I tried to be funny in front of Lila’s friends and wound up being so obnoxious that some boy she went to school with threw a punch at me in the men’s room. I pushed him, and he gashed his head on one of the sinks.

The next day Barron told me he had asked Lila out. They’d started dating around the time I was being escorted from the hotel.

According to my GPS, Barron’s new place is a row house on a street with cracked sidewalks and a few boarded-up apartment buildings. One of his front windows is missing most of its glass and is partially covered with duct tape. I open the screen door and knock on the cheap hollow-core door beyond. Paint flakes off on my hands.

I knock, wait, and knock again. There’s no answer and no motorcycle parked nearby either. I don’t see any lights on through the newspaper taped up in place of blinds.

There’s a basic lock and a dead bolt on the door. Easy to get around. My driver’s license slid through the gap unlocks the first. The dead bolt is trickier, but I get a wire from the trunk of the car, thread it through the keyhole, and rake it over the pins until they all stick at the right height. Luckily Barron hasn’t upgraded to anything fancy. I turn the knob, pick up my license, and walk into the kitchen.

For a moment, looking at the laminate countertops, I think I’ve broken into the wrong house. Covering the white cabinets are sticky notes: “Notebook will tell you what you forgot,” “Keys on hook,” “Pay bills in cash,” “You are Barron Sharpe,” “Phone in jacket.” A carton of milk sits open on the counter, its curdled contents gray with cigarette ash. Butts float on the surface. There’s a pile of bills—mostly student loans—all of them unopened.

“You are Barron Sharpe” doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt.

His laptop and a pile of manila folders cover the card table in the center of the kitchen. I slump down on one of the chairs and glance over the files—legal briefs from my mother’s appeal. He’s made notes in ketchup red marker, and it finally occurs to me that this could be the reason he dropped out of school. He must be managing the case. That makes some sense, but not enough.

There’s a composition notebook sitting under one of the folders, marked February to April. I flip it open, expecting to see more notes on the case, but it looks a lot like a diary. At the top of each page is a date, and beneath it is an obsessively detailed list of what Barron ate, who he talked to, how he was feeling—and then at the bottom, a bulleted list of things to be sure to remember. Today started:

March 19

Breakfast: Protein shake

Ran 1 mile

Upon waking, experienced slight lethargy and soreness in muscles.

Wore: light green buttoned shirt, black cargo pants, black shoes (Prada)

Mom continues to complain about the other inmates, how much she’s suffering without us, and her fear that, basically, we’re out of her control. She needs to realize that we’re grown up, but I don’t know if she’s ready for that. As we get closer and closer to the trial, I worry more about what life’s going to be like when she comes home.

She says that she’s enticed some millionaire and is pinning a lot of her hopes on him. I have sent her clippings about him. I’m worried about her getting herself in trouble again and I honestly can’t believe that this man has no idea who she is—or that if he doesn’t, that he’s going to remain ignorant. When she does get out of jail, she is going to have to be more circumspect, something I’m sure she’s not going to be willing to do.

I can’t remember faces from high school. I ran into someone on the street who said he knew me. I told him that I was Barron’s twin and that I went to another school. I must study the yearbook.

Philip is as tedious as ever. He acts as though he is resolved to do what is necessary, but he isn’t. It’s not just weakness but a continual romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege. He sickens me more each day, but Anton trusts him in a way that Anton will never really trust me. But Anton believes I can deliver, and I doubt he can say that about Philip.

Maybe the money we get will be enough to control Mom for a while. By the time this is over, Anton’ll owe us everything.

The notes for today stop there, but glancing back over the past few weeks, I can see that he recorded random details, conversations, and feelings as though he expected to forget them. I open the laptop gingerly, not sure what other weirdness I’m going to discover, but it’s set to sleep, with the page showing my YouTube debut.

The raw footage was taken with a cell phone, so the quality is grainy and I don’t look like much more than a pale, shirtless blob, but I wince when I look like I’m losing my balance. I hear someone yell “jump” in the background, and the angle swings toward the crowd. In that moment I see her. A white shape near the scrubby bushes. The cat, licking her paw. The cat I was chasing in my dream. I stare at the video and stare at her, trying to make some sense of how a cat from my dream—a cat that looks a lot like the cat that has been sleeping at the foot of my bed—could have really been there that night.

I take the notebook off the table and flip to the day the video was uploaded.

March 15th

Breakfast: Egg whites

Ran 1 mile

Upon waking, felt fine. Clipped nose hair.

Wore: dark blue jeans (Monarchy), coat, blue dress shirt (HUGO)

Logged into C’s email and found video. Clearly shows L. but no clues as to where she is now. C is at the old house, but G there and keeping an eye on everything. P says he’s going to take care of it. This is all his fault.

Beware the ides of March. Some joke. I found her collar, but no clue as to how she got out of it. P must have not clipped it on correctly. I have to find a way to use this to wedge P and A further apart.

I have to control the situation.

“Control” is underlined twice, the second line so heavy that it ripped through the page.

I stare at the entry until the words blur in front of me. C is Cassel—the video must have been of me up on the roof. P must be Philip. A could be Anton, since Barron mentioned him before. I blink at G for a moment and then realize it’s for our grandfather. But L? I immediately think of Lila, even though it makes no sense.

I grab the laptop and play the video of me again, frame by frame. We barely see any of the crowd; the camera pans over people too fast to catch anything but blurs. The only faces I can pick out belong to students. No Lila. No dead girls. No one that doesn’t belong. No one wearing a collar.

The only thing in that video that could be wearing a collar is the cat.

Only you can undo the curse.

The thought is so absurd that it actually makes me grin.

I walk toward the bathroom to splash water on my face, but as I pass a door, the strong smell of ammonia stops me. It opens into a room, empty except for a metal cage that sits near the window. The hinged wire door is open. The newspaper stuffed into the cage and the wooden floor around it is stained with what, given the sharp smell and the yellowing, is probably cat piss. Thick crusted layers of it, like something was kept locked up for a long time and not cleaned up after.

I hold my breath and lean closer. Caught in a wire joint are a few short white hairs. I back out of the room.

Barron’s losing his memories. So’s Maura, and maybe me too. I don’t remember the details of Lila’s murder. I don’t remember how I got onto the roof. I don’t remember what happened to my memory charm.

Let’s say someone is taking those memories. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch.

Let’s also say someone gave me that dream, the one where the cat was begging for help. If I were cursed to have it, that would mean someone had to touch me, hand to skin. The cat—the one that slept on my bed, the one near my dorm room in the video—did touch me.

So maybe the cat gave me the dream.

Of course, that’s ridiculous. Cats are animals. They can no more perform curse work than they can perform a sonata or compose a villanelle.

Unless the cat was really a girl. A girl who was a dream worker. Lila.

Which would mean something far different—not just that some memories of murdering her were stolen from me. It would mean she’s not dead.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN BARRON’S BATHROOM the beige tile walls look too familiar, but like I’m seeing them from the wrong angle.

It’s crazy, the idea of Lila being a cat. The idea that Barron had her locked up in his house all this time is even crazier. And the idea that I might not have killed Lila throws me so off balance that I don’t know how to right myself.

I look in the mirror—staring at my face. Looking at the scraggly hair curling around my jaw and my ink-blot eyes, looking to see if I should be afraid. If I’m still a murderer. If I’m cracking up.

There’s a dizzy sense of déjà vu as I glance at the reflection of the tub behind me. I stumble and barely catch myself.

I thrashed in the water and my hands turned to arms turned to starfish curling like snakes. Everything went wrong and I was coming apart and water closed over my head and—

More things I half-remember.

I turn and crouch on the floor, touching the tile near the tub faucet. I can almost recall my fingers reaching for the same handle, but then the memory goes surreal and dreamlike and my fingers become scrabbling black claws.

Animal fear, instinctual and horrible, overwhelms me. I have to get out of here—that’s the only thing I can think. I head for the front door, barely smart enough to twist the knob so that the door locks behind me when it closes. I get into Grandad’s car and sit for a moment, waiting to feel like a stupid kid running from some pretend ghost. I eat one of the candy bars while I wait. The chocolate tastes like dust, but I swallow it anyway.

I have to sort things out.

My memories are full of shadows, and no amount of chasing them around my head seems to make them any more substantial.

What I need is a worker. One that’s going to give me answers without asking a lot of questions. One that can help me make these puzzle pieces fit together and show me the picture. I turn the ignition and head south.