White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“Inside,” I say.

The two big guys in long coats seem relieved to have something to do.

“People are looking,” one of them says, putting his hand on Mr. Zacharov’s back and steering him into the casino.

The other glances at me warily. Lila takes my gloved hand and gives him a cold look that I’m grateful for. He backs off, hanging behind us as we head into Taj Mahal.

I raise my eyebrows at Lila.

“You have a real talent for getting your ass kicked,” she says.

No one questions us as we walk across the casino floor and get into the elevator.

The raw emotion on Zacharov’s face is something private—something I know he wouldn’t want me to see. I wonder if I should try to leave, but Lila’s gloved hand is clutching mine hard enough to hurt. I try to keep my gaze trained above the elevator doors, watching the numbers go up and up and up.

In the suite there’s a wood-paneled wall with a single flat screen, a leather divan, and a bowl of fresh hydrangeas on a low table. The place is enormous, cavernous, with massive windows open to show the expanse of ink black ocean beyond. One of the big guys throws his coat over a chair and lets me see the guns strapped underneath his arms and across his back. More guns than he’s got hands.

Zacharov pours pale liquid into cut glass and throws it back. “You two want a drink?” he says to us. “Minibar is full of Cokes.”

I get up.

“No,” he says. “I am your host.” He nods to one of his men. The man grunts and moves to the refrigerator.

“Just water,” Lila says.

“Some aspirin,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” the guy says as he hands over the glasses and the pills. “I didn’t hurt you that bad.”

“Nope,” I say. “You didn’t.” I chew three aspirins and try to lean back against the pillows in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream.

“You go down to the casino,” Zacharov tells the guys. “Win some money.”

“Sure thing,” one says. He gets his coat again and they head slowly for the door. Zacharov looks at me like he wants to ask me to join them.

“Cassel,” he says, “how long have you known the location of my daughter?”

“About three days,” I say.

Lila narrows her eyes, but I figure there’s no point in hiding that.

He pours himself another drink. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“Lila just showed up out of nowhere,” I say, which is basically true. “I thought she was dead. I haven’t seen her since we were both fourteen. I was just following her lead.”

Zacharov takes a sip from his glass and winces. “Lila, are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”

She shrugs slim shoulders and avoids his gaze.

“You’re protecting someone. Your mother? I always thought she’d taken you away from me. Tell me you got fed up with the old—”

“No!” Lila says.

He’s still lost in the thought. “She practically accused me of having you murdered. She told the FBI that I said you were better off dead than with her. The FBI!”

“I wasn’t with Mom,” Lila says. “Dad, Mom had nothing to do with this.”

He stops and stares at her. “Then what? Did someone do . . .” He leaves the sentence unfinished and turns toward me. “Did you? Did you hurt my daughter?”

I hesitate.

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Lila says.

Zacharov touches a gloved hand to my shoulder. “Your mother’s appeal is coming up, isn’t it, Cassel?”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“I’d hate to see anything go wrong with that. If I find out—”

“Leave him alone,” says Lila. “Listen to me, Dad. Just listen for a minute. I’m not ready to talk about what happened. Stop trying to find someone to blame. Stop with the interrogation. I’m home now. Aren’t you glad I’m home?”

“Of course I’m glad,” he says, clearly stricken.

I touch my sore ribs without thinking. I want another aspirin, but I don’t know where the guy put the bottle.

“I’m trusting you for her sake,” he says to me, and then his voice softens. “My daughter and I need to talk. We need to be alone—you understand that, right?”

I nod my head. Lila is looking out at the black water. She doesn’t turn.

Zacharov takes his wallet from inside his jacket and counts out five hundred dollars. “Here,” he says.

“I can’t take that,” I say.

“I’d feel better if you did,” he says.

I stand up and try not to wince while doing it. I shake my head. “I hope you didn’t have your heart set on feeling better.”

He snorts. “One of the boys will see you home.”

“I can go? Really?”

“Don’t kid yourself. I can pick you up like a dime off the sidewalk anytime I want.”

I want to say something to Lila, but her back is still to me. I can’t guess her thoughts.

“I’m having a little party on Wednesday at a place called Koshchey’s. A fund-raiser. You should come,” Zacharov says. “Do you know why I like Koshchey’s?

I shake my head.

“Do you know who Koshchey the Deathless is?”

“No,” I say, thinking of the strange mural on the ceiling of the restaurant.

“In Russian folklore Koshchey is a sorcerer who can become a whirlwind and destroy his enemies.” Zacharov touches the glittering pin on his chest. “He hides away his soul in a duck’s egg so he can’t be killed. Don’t cross me, Cassel. I am not a safe man to make your enemy.”

“I understand,” I say, and open the door. What I understand is that Lila and I are on our own and we don’t even have a plan.

“And, Cassel?”

I turn.

“Thank you for bringing my daughter back.”

I walk out the door. As I wait for the elevator to come, my phone rings. I am so tired that it seems a huge effort to take it out of my pocket.

“Hello?” I say.

“Cassel?” says Dean Wharton. He doesn’t sound happy. “I’m sorry to be calling so late, but we just got the final call from one of our board members on the West Coast. Welcome back to Wallingford. We got the report from your doctor and the whole board voted. We’d like you to remain a day student on a probationary basis, but so long as you don’t get into any more trouble, we may consider letting you return to the dorms for your senior year.”

I smother the ironic laughter that threatens to crawl up my throat. My con worked. I can go back to school. But I can’t go back to being the person I thought I was. “Thank you, sir,” I manage to say.

“We’ll expect to see you tomorrow morning, Mr. Sharpe. Since you’ve paid through the end of the year, please feel free to eat breakfast and dinner in the cafeteria.”

“Monday morning?” I echo.

“Yes, tomorrow, in the morning. Unless you have other plans,” he says dryly.

“No,” I say. “Of course not. See you tomorrow, Dean. Thank you, Dean.”

One of Zacharov’s guys drives me home. His name turns out to be Stanley. He’s from Iowa and doesn’t know practically any Russian. He’s not good with languages, he says.

He tells me all that when he lets me out in front of my house. Even though he made me sit in the back of the town car with the tinted privacy divider up, I guess he could see more than I thought. I guess he watched me unbutton my shirt and brush my fingers over the bruises purpling the skin over my ribs, testing each bone for give. I’m not guessing that just because he was so friendly when we got to the house—he also gave me his entire bottle of aspirin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MY GRANDFATHER’S NOT at home when I get there, but there’s a note scratched in pen on the back of a receipt and stuck to the fridge with an I ♥ CHIHUAHUAS magnet.

Gone to Carney for a few days.

Call me when you get in.

I stare at the note, trying to decipher what it means, but I can’t quite think beyond the fact that there won’t be a car for me to borrow tomorrow. I stumble upstairs, set the alarm on my phone, push a chair up against the door, and chew up another handful of aspirin. I don’t even bother kicking off my shoes or getting under the covers; I just smother my face in the pillow and drop down into sleep like a dead man finally returning to his grave.

For a moment after my alarm goes off and I’m jolted awake, I don’t know where I am. I look around the bedroom that I slept in when I was a kid and it seems that it must have belonged to someone else.

I lean over and switch off my phone, blink a few times.

My head feels clearer than it has in days.

The pain has abated some—maybe because I finally got some sleep—but the reality of what’s happened and what’s about to happen seems to finally be sinking in. I don’t have a lot of time—three days—to plan.

And I need to stay away from my brothers long enough to do it. Wallingford will be good for that. They don’t know I’ve been let back in, and even if they figure it out, at least being at school isn’t obviously hiding. At least I can continue to act like I’m a killer robot waiting for them to utter a command word.

I fumble in my closet for my scratchy shirt and uniform pants. I didn’t bring my jacket or shoes with me when I packed up the stuff in my dorm, but I have a bigger problem than that. I don’t have a ride to school.

I put on sneakers and call Sam.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he says groggily.

“I need you to pick me up,” I tell him.

“Dude, where are you?”

I give him the address and he hangs up. I hope he doesn’t just roll over and go back to sleep.

In the bathroom, as I brush my teeth, I see that my cheek is purpled with bruising above the thin beard that’s grown in. My hair was getting too long before and it’s even shaggier now, but I wet it down and try to comb it into shape.

I don’t shave, even though it’s against the rules to be anything but as smooth as a baby’s bottom, because I can just guess how bad that bruise would look if they could see the rest of it.

Downstairs, as I brew the coffee and watch the black liquid drip down, I think of Lila looking out at the sea. I think of her with her back to me as I’m walking out the door.

Mom says that when you’re scamming someone, there needs to be something at stake, something so big that they’re not going to walk away, even if things get sketchy. They have to go all in. Once they’re all in, you win.

Lila’s at stake. She’s not walking away, which means I can’t walk away either.

I’m all in.

They’re winning.

All the teachers are really nice to me. They mostly—with the exception of Dr. Stewart, who gives me a whole bunch of zeros, enunciating the numbers carefully as he puts each one in the grade book—understand that I failed to keep up with the homework, even though they emailed me assignments daily. They tell me they’re happy I’m back. Ms. Noyes even hugs me.

My fellow students look at me like I’m a dangerous lunatic with two heads and a nasty communicable disease. I keep my head down, eat my Tater Tots at lunch, and try to look interested in my classes.

All the while I’m daydreaming schemes.

Daneca sits down next to me in the lunchroom and pushes her civics notebook in my direction. “You want to copy my notes?”

“Copy your notes?” I say slowly, looking at the book.

She rolls her eyes. Her hair is in two braids, each one tied with rough string. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“No,” I say. “I do. I definitely do.” I look at the notebook in front of me, flipping the pages, seeing her looping handwriting. I outline the marks with my gloved finger, an idea starting to form in my mind.

I start to grin.

Sam sets down a tray on the other side. It’s piled with a gooey lump of delicious-smelling mac-n-cheese.

“Hey,” he says. “Prepare to be very happy.”

That’s the last thing I expect him to say. “What?” I ask. My fingers are tracing new words in the margin of Daneca’s notebook. Plans. I’m writing in a familiar style, but not my own.

“Nobody thought you were coming back. Nobody. Noooooobody.”

“Thanks. Yeah, I can see how you’d think I’d find that thrilling.”

“Dude,” he says. “A lot of people just lost a lot of money. We made up for that bad bet. We’re kings of finance!”

I shake my head in amazement. “I always said you were a genius.”

We punch each other in the shoulder and punch fists and just keep smiling like morons.

Daneca wrinkles her brow, and Sam stops. “Uh,” Sam says. “There were some other things we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Less fun things, I’m guessing,” I say.

“I’m sorry about losing your cat,” she says to me after a few moments.

“Oh,” I say, looking up. “No. The cat’s fine. The cat’s back where she belongs.”

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head. “Too complicated.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Sam asks. “Because if you were in some kind of trouble, maybe you could tell us. Dude, no offense, but you seem like you’re losing it.”

Daneca clears her throat. “He told me what you told him when he found you in bed with that girl. About being a—”

>

“Inside,” I say.

The two big guys in long coats seem relieved to have something to do.

“People are looking,” one of them says, putting his hand on Mr. Zacharov’s back and steering him into the casino.

The other glances at me warily. Lila takes my gloved hand and gives him a cold look that I’m grateful for. He backs off, hanging behind us as we head into Taj Mahal.

I raise my eyebrows at Lila.

“You have a real talent for getting your ass kicked,” she says.

No one questions us as we walk across the casino floor and get into the elevator.

The raw emotion on Zacharov’s face is something private—something I know he wouldn’t want me to see. I wonder if I should try to leave, but Lila’s gloved hand is clutching mine hard enough to hurt. I try to keep my gaze trained above the elevator doors, watching the numbers go up and up and up.

In the suite there’s a wood-paneled wall with a single flat screen, a leather divan, and a bowl of fresh hydrangeas on a low table. The place is enormous, cavernous, with massive windows open to show the expanse of ink black ocean beyond. One of the big guys throws his coat over a chair and lets me see the guns strapped underneath his arms and across his back. More guns than he’s got hands.

Zacharov pours pale liquid into cut glass and throws it back. “You two want a drink?” he says to us. “Minibar is full of Cokes.”

I get up.

“No,” he says. “I am your host.” He nods to one of his men. The man grunts and moves to the refrigerator.

“Just water,” Lila says.

“Some aspirin,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” the guy says as he hands over the glasses and the pills. “I didn’t hurt you that bad.”

“Nope,” I say. “You didn’t.” I chew three aspirins and try to lean back against the pillows in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream.

“You go down to the casino,” Zacharov tells the guys. “Win some money.”

“Sure thing,” one says. He gets his coat again and they head slowly for the door. Zacharov looks at me like he wants to ask me to join them.

“Cassel,” he says, “how long have you known the location of my daughter?”

“About three days,” I say.

Lila narrows her eyes, but I figure there’s no point in hiding that.

He pours himself another drink. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“Lila just showed up out of nowhere,” I say, which is basically true. “I thought she was dead. I haven’t seen her since we were both fourteen. I was just following her lead.”

Zacharov takes a sip from his glass and winces. “Lila, are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”

She shrugs slim shoulders and avoids his gaze.

“You’re protecting someone. Your mother? I always thought she’d taken you away from me. Tell me you got fed up with the old—”

“No!” Lila says.

He’s still lost in the thought. “She practically accused me of having you murdered. She told the FBI that I said you were better off dead than with her. The FBI!”

“I wasn’t with Mom,” Lila says. “Dad, Mom had nothing to do with this.”

He stops and stares at her. “Then what? Did someone do . . .” He leaves the sentence unfinished and turns toward me. “Did you? Did you hurt my daughter?”

I hesitate.

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Lila says.

Zacharov touches a gloved hand to my shoulder. “Your mother’s appeal is coming up, isn’t it, Cassel?”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“I’d hate to see anything go wrong with that. If I find out—”

“Leave him alone,” says Lila. “Listen to me, Dad. Just listen for a minute. I’m not ready to talk about what happened. Stop trying to find someone to blame. Stop with the interrogation. I’m home now. Aren’t you glad I’m home?”

“Of course I’m glad,” he says, clearly stricken.

I touch my sore ribs without thinking. I want another aspirin, but I don’t know where the guy put the bottle.

“I’m trusting you for her sake,” he says to me, and then his voice softens. “My daughter and I need to talk. We need to be alone—you understand that, right?”

I nod my head. Lila is looking out at the black water. She doesn’t turn.

Zacharov takes his wallet from inside his jacket and counts out five hundred dollars. “Here,” he says.

“I can’t take that,” I say.

“I’d feel better if you did,” he says.

I stand up and try not to wince while doing it. I shake my head. “I hope you didn’t have your heart set on feeling better.”

He snorts. “One of the boys will see you home.”

“I can go? Really?”

“Don’t kid yourself. I can pick you up like a dime off the sidewalk anytime I want.”

I want to say something to Lila, but her back is still to me. I can’t guess her thoughts.

“I’m having a little party on Wednesday at a place called Koshchey’s. A fund-raiser. You should come,” Zacharov says. “Do you know why I like Koshchey’s?

I shake my head.

“Do you know who Koshchey the Deathless is?”

“No,” I say, thinking of the strange mural on the ceiling of the restaurant.

“In Russian folklore Koshchey is a sorcerer who can become a whirlwind and destroy his enemies.” Zacharov touches the glittering pin on his chest. “He hides away his soul in a duck’s egg so he can’t be killed. Don’t cross me, Cassel. I am not a safe man to make your enemy.”

“I understand,” I say, and open the door. What I understand is that Lila and I are on our own and we don’t even have a plan.

“And, Cassel?”

I turn.

“Thank you for bringing my daughter back.”

I walk out the door. As I wait for the elevator to come, my phone rings. I am so tired that it seems a huge effort to take it out of my pocket.

“Hello?” I say.

“Cassel?” says Dean Wharton. He doesn’t sound happy. “I’m sorry to be calling so late, but we just got the final call from one of our board members on the West Coast. Welcome back to Wallingford. We got the report from your doctor and the whole board voted. We’d like you to remain a day student on a probationary basis, but so long as you don’t get into any more trouble, we may consider letting you return to the dorms for your senior year.”

I smother the ironic laughter that threatens to crawl up my throat. My con worked. I can go back to school. But I can’t go back to being the person I thought I was. “Thank you, sir,” I manage to say.

“We’ll expect to see you tomorrow morning, Mr. Sharpe. Since you’ve paid through the end of the year, please feel free to eat breakfast and dinner in the cafeteria.”

“Monday morning?” I echo.

“Yes, tomorrow, in the morning. Unless you have other plans,” he says dryly.

“No,” I say. “Of course not. See you tomorrow, Dean. Thank you, Dean.”

One of Zacharov’s guys drives me home. His name turns out to be Stanley. He’s from Iowa and doesn’t know practically any Russian. He’s not good with languages, he says.

He tells me all that when he lets me out in front of my house. Even though he made me sit in the back of the town car with the tinted privacy divider up, I guess he could see more than I thought. I guess he watched me unbutton my shirt and brush my fingers over the bruises purpling the skin over my ribs, testing each bone for give. I’m not guessing that just because he was so friendly when we got to the house—he also gave me his entire bottle of aspirin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MY GRANDFATHER’S NOT at home when I get there, but there’s a note scratched in pen on the back of a receipt and stuck to the fridge with an I ♥ CHIHUAHUAS magnet.

Gone to Carney for a few days.

Call me when you get in.

I stare at the note, trying to decipher what it means, but I can’t quite think beyond the fact that there won’t be a car for me to borrow tomorrow. I stumble upstairs, set the alarm on my phone, push a chair up against the door, and chew up another handful of aspirin. I don’t even bother kicking off my shoes or getting under the covers; I just smother my face in the pillow and drop down into sleep like a dead man finally returning to his grave.

For a moment after my alarm goes off and I’m jolted awake, I don’t know where I am. I look around the bedroom that I slept in when I was a kid and it seems that it must have belonged to someone else.

I lean over and switch off my phone, blink a few times.

My head feels clearer than it has in days.

The pain has abated some—maybe because I finally got some sleep—but the reality of what’s happened and what’s about to happen seems to finally be sinking in. I don’t have a lot of time—three days—to plan.

And I need to stay away from my brothers long enough to do it. Wallingford will be good for that. They don’t know I’ve been let back in, and even if they figure it out, at least being at school isn’t obviously hiding. At least I can continue to act like I’m a killer robot waiting for them to utter a command word.

I fumble in my closet for my scratchy shirt and uniform pants. I didn’t bring my jacket or shoes with me when I packed up the stuff in my dorm, but I have a bigger problem than that. I don’t have a ride to school.

I put on sneakers and call Sam.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he says groggily.

“I need you to pick me up,” I tell him.

“Dude, where are you?”

I give him the address and he hangs up. I hope he doesn’t just roll over and go back to sleep.

In the bathroom, as I brush my teeth, I see that my cheek is purpled with bruising above the thin beard that’s grown in. My hair was getting too long before and it’s even shaggier now, but I wet it down and try to comb it into shape.

I don’t shave, even though it’s against the rules to be anything but as smooth as a baby’s bottom, because I can just guess how bad that bruise would look if they could see the rest of it.

Downstairs, as I brew the coffee and watch the black liquid drip down, I think of Lila looking out at the sea. I think of her with her back to me as I’m walking out the door.

Mom says that when you’re scamming someone, there needs to be something at stake, something so big that they’re not going to walk away, even if things get sketchy. They have to go all in. Once they’re all in, you win.

Lila’s at stake. She’s not walking away, which means I can’t walk away either.

I’m all in.

They’re winning.

All the teachers are really nice to me. They mostly—with the exception of Dr. Stewart, who gives me a whole bunch of zeros, enunciating the numbers carefully as he puts each one in the grade book—understand that I failed to keep up with the homework, even though they emailed me assignments daily. They tell me they’re happy I’m back. Ms. Noyes even hugs me.

My fellow students look at me like I’m a dangerous lunatic with two heads and a nasty communicable disease. I keep my head down, eat my Tater Tots at lunch, and try to look interested in my classes.

All the while I’m daydreaming schemes.

Daneca sits down next to me in the lunchroom and pushes her civics notebook in my direction. “You want to copy my notes?”

“Copy your notes?” I say slowly, looking at the book.

She rolls her eyes. Her hair is in two braids, each one tied with rough string. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“No,” I say. “I do. I definitely do.” I look at the notebook in front of me, flipping the pages, seeing her looping handwriting. I outline the marks with my gloved finger, an idea starting to form in my mind.

I start to grin.

Sam sets down a tray on the other side. It’s piled with a gooey lump of delicious-smelling mac-n-cheese.

“Hey,” he says. “Prepare to be very happy.”

That’s the last thing I expect him to say. “What?” I ask. My fingers are tracing new words in the margin of Daneca’s notebook. Plans. I’m writing in a familiar style, but not my own.

“Nobody thought you were coming back. Nobody. Noooooobody.”

“Thanks. Yeah, I can see how you’d think I’d find that thrilling.”

“Dude,” he says. “A lot of people just lost a lot of money. We made up for that bad bet. We’re kings of finance!”

I shake my head in amazement. “I always said you were a genius.”

We punch each other in the shoulder and punch fists and just keep smiling like morons.

Daneca wrinkles her brow, and Sam stops. “Uh,” Sam says. “There were some other things we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Less fun things, I’m guessing,” I say.

“I’m sorry about losing your cat,” she says to me after a few moments.

“Oh,” I say, looking up. “No. The cat’s fine. The cat’s back where she belongs.”

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head. “Too complicated.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Sam asks. “Because if you were in some kind of trouble, maybe you could tell us. Dude, no offense, but you seem like you’re losing it.”

Daneca clears her throat. “He told me what you told him when he found you in bed with that girl. About being a—”