White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“Cassel!” Daneca yells, running up to me. “Are you all right?”

“We were worried,” Sam says. “You were in there for too long.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t I seem fine?”

“You’re covered in blood standing in the middle of a party,” Sam says. “No, you don’t seem fine.”

“This way,” Zacharov says, pointing toward the kitchens.

“We’re coming with you,” says Daneca.

I feel drained, and my cheek is throbbing. My ribs still hurt. And I don’t see Lila anywhere.

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

People nearly trip over themselves getting out of my way as I walk. I guess I really do look bad.

The kitchen looks smaller with people running around in it, carrying out trays of blini slathered in caviar, golden pastries leaking garlic butter, and tiny cakes topped with crystallized lemon.

My stomach growls, surprising me. I shouldn’t be hungry after watching another person be killed, but I’m starving.

Philip is standing in the back flanked by two burly men who appear to be restraining him. I don’t know if Lila brought him to the party or if Zacharov sent to have him escorted over from wherever she was keeping him.

When he sees me, his eyes narrow.

“You took everything from me,” he shouts. “Maura. My son. My future. My friend. You took everything.”

I guess I did.

I could tell him that I didn’t mean for it to happen.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” I say.

He struggles against the bodyguards holding him. I’m not worried. I let Daneca steer me to the area by the pantry and sinks.

“I’m going to make you regret the day you were born,” Philip shouts to my back. I ignore him.

Lila is waiting with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a rag in the other. “Get up on the counter,” she says.

I do, pushing aside a bowl of flour and a spatula. Philip’s still yelling, but his voice seems to come from far away. I smile. “Lila, this is Daneca. I think you met Sam. They’re my friends from school.”

“Did he actually admit we’re his friends?” Sam asks, and Daneca laughs.

Lila pours some vodka onto the napkin.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the rest of my plan,” I say to Lila. “About Barron.”

“The notebooks, right? You fixed them somehow.”

When I look surprised, she smiles. “I lived with him for years, remember? I saw the notebooks. Clever.” She presses the cloth against my cheek, and I hiss. It stings like crazy.

“Ow,” I say. “You ever think you’re kind of a bully?”

Her smile goes wide. If it could, I think it would curl up at the corners. She leans close to me. “Oh, I know I am. And I know you like it.”

Sam snickers. I don’t care.

I do like it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I SPEND THE NEXT TWO weeks slammed, making up all the homework I missed. Daneca and Sam help me, sitting with me in the library until in-room curfew, when I have to head home and they have to go back to the dorms. I spend so much time at school that Grandad gets me my own car. He takes me to some friend of his who hooks me up with a 1980 Mercedes-Benz Turbo for two grand.

It runs like crap, but Sam promises to help convert it to grease. He won some kind of state science fair with the conversion of his hearse, and he thinks we can make it all the way to an international science fair with the tinkering he’s got planned for my ride. Until then, I keep my fingers crossed that the engine keeps turning over.

When I go out to my car to drive myself home that Tuesday, I find Barron leaning against it, twirling keys around one black-gloved finger. His motorcycle is parked next to my car in the lot.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Pizza night,” he says.

I look at him like he’s lost his mind.

He returns the look. “It’s Tuesday.”

The problem with forging an entire year of someone’s life very quickly is that your fantasies creep in. Maybe you meant to just get in the stuff that you needed, but that leaves a lot of space to fill. I filled the space with the relationship I wished we had.

It’s a little embarrassing now that Barron is standing here, really believing we go out for pizza every other Tuesday and talk about our feelings.

“I’ll drive,” I say finally.

We order a pizza heaped with cheese and sauce and sausage and pepperoni at a little place with booths, and miniature jukeboxes above each linoleum tabletop. I cover my slice with hot pepper flakes.

“I’m going back to Princeton to finish school,” he says, biting into a chunk of garlic bread. “Now that Mom’s getting out. Something tells me she’s going to need a lawyer again soon.” I wonder if he can go back, if he can fill the holes in his brain with law books and remember them as long as he doesn’t work anymore. That’s a big “as long as.”

“Do you know when her actual release happens?”

“They say Friday,” he says. “But they’ve already changed the date twice, so I don’t know how seriously to take it. But I guess we should get a cake or something, in case. Worst case scenario: We eat the cake anyway.”

Memory is funny. Barron seems relaxed, like he really likes me, because he doesn’t remember hating me. Or maybe he remembers the feeling of dislike but he assumes that he liked me more than he hated me. But I’m not relaxed. I can’t stop remembering. I want to leap up out of the chair and choke him.

“What do you think is the first thing she’s going to do when she gets out?” I ask.

“Meddle,” he says, and laughs. “What do you think? She’s going to start trying to get everything to go the way she wants it to go. And we all better pray that’s the way we want it to go too.”

I suck soda through my straw, lick grease off my glove, and contemplate transforming Barron into a slice of pizza and then feeding him to the kids at the next table.

Still, it’s nice to have a brother I can talk to.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

That’s what Zacharov says when he explains that he’s keeping Philip working for the family, where he can keep an eye on him. People don’t usually leave crime families alive, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I ask Grandad if he’s seen Philip, but all he does is grunt.

* * *

Lila calls me on Wednesday.

“Hey,” I say, not recognizing the number.

“Hey, yourself.” She sounds happy. “You want to hang out?”

“I do,” I say, my heart slamming. I switch my messenger bag over to the other shoulder with suddenly clumsy hands.

“Come up to the city. We can get hot chocolate, and maybe I’ll let you beat me at a video game. I’m four years out of practice. I might be a little rusty.”

“I’ll beat you so bad your own avatar will laugh at you.”

“Jerk. Come up on Saturday,” she says, and hangs up.

I smile all the way through dinner.

On Friday at lunch I head out onto the quad. It’s warm out and lots of kids have brought their food to eat on the grass. Sam and Daneca are sitting with Johan Schwartz, Jill Pearson-White, and Chaiyawat Terweil. They wave me over.

I hold up my hand and turn toward a small copse of trees. I’ve been thinking through everything that happened, and there’s one thing still bothering me.

I take out my phone and punch in a number. I don’t expect anyone to pick up, but she does.

“Dr. Churchill’s office,” says Maura.

“It’s Cassel.”

“Cassel!” she says. “I was wondering when you’d call. You know what the best feeling in the world is? Just driving down the road with the music blasting, the wind in your hair, and your baby gurgling happily in his car seat.”

I smile. “You know where you are headed?”

“Not yet,” she says. “I guess I’ll know when we get there.”

“I’m glad for you,” I say. “I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

“You know what I miss most?” she says.

I shake my head, and then realize she can’t see me. “No.”

“The music.” Her voice drops, low and soft. “It was just so beautiful. I wish I could hear it again, but it’s gone. Philip took the music with him.”

I can’t help shuddering.

Daneca is walking toward me when I hang up the phone. She looks annoyed.

“Hey,” she says. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

I must look shell-shocked or something, because she hesitates. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that. I want to,” I say. I’m not sure I mean it, but I am sure that Daneca and Sam were there for me when I really needed them. Maybe the point of real friendship isn’t that you have to repay kindness, but whatever. At least I should try.

As Daneca, Sam, and I cross the quad, I see Audrey eating an apple near the entrance to the arts center.

She’s smiling at me the way she used to. “Where are you guys going?”

I take a deep breath. “HEX meeting. Learning about worker rights.”

“For real?” She looks toward Daneca.

“What can I say?” I shrug. “I’m trying new things.”

“Can I come?” She doesn’t stand up, like she’s expecting me to say no.

“Of course you can,” Daneca says, before I can get past the idea that she wants to come. “HEX meetings are for us all to better understand one another.”

“They have free coffee,” Sam says.

Audrey chucks her apple toward the shrubs by the entrance. “Count me in.”

The meeting is being held in Ms. Ramirez’s music room; she’s the adviser. A piano sits in one corner, and a few drum toms rest near the back wall, against a bookshelf filled with thin folders of sheet music. A cymbal balances on the low shelf near a wall of windows, near a gurgling coffeemaker.

Ms. Ramirez is sitting the opposite way on the piano bench in a circle of students. I come in and pull up four more chairs. Everyone scoots politely aside, but the girl who’s standing doesn’t stop talking.

“The thing is that it’s really hard to stop discrimination when something’s illegal,” the girl says. “I mean, everybody thinks of workers as being criminals. Like, people use the word ‘worker’ to mean criminals. And, well, if we work a work, even once, we are criminals. So most of us are, because we had to figure it out somehow and that was usually by making something happen.”

I don’t know her name, just that she’s a freshman. She doesn’t look at anyone when she speaks, and her voice is affectless. I am a little awed by her bravery.

“And there are lots of workers who never do anything bad. They go to weddings and hospitals and give people good luck. Or there’s people who work at shelters and they give people hope and make them feel confident and positive. And that word—‘cursing.’ Like all we can do is bad magic. I mean, why would you even want to do the bad stuff? The blowback’s awful. Like, if all a luck worker ever does is make people have good luck, then all he has is good luck too. It doesn’t have to be bad.”

She pauses and raises her gaze to look at us. At me.

“Magic,” the girl says. “It’s just all magic.”

When I get home that night, Grandad is making a cup of tea in the kitchen. We’ve cleaned up a lot. The counters are mostly clear and the stove is no longer crusted with old food. There’s a bottle of bourbon on the table, but the cap’s still on it.

“Your mother called,” he says. “She’s out.”

“Out?” I repeat dumbly. “Out of prison? Is she here?”

“No. But you do have a guest,” he says, turning back to wipe the faucet. “That Zacharov girl is in your room.”

I look up, like I can see through the ceiling, surprised and happy. I wonder what she thinks of the house, and then I remember she’s been here before, lots of times. She’s even been in my room before—just as a cat. Then the rest of what Grandad said hits me. “Why are you calling Lila ‘that Zacharov girl’? And where’s Mom? She can’t have gotten far. Jail has to slow you down a little.”

“Shandra rented a hotel room. She says she doesn’t want us to see her the way she is. Last I heard, she was ordering champagne and french fries drenched in ranch dressing up to her bubble bath.”

“Really?”

He laughs, but it sounds hollow. “You know your mother.”

I walk past him and the remaining boxes of unsorted stuff in the dining room, up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I don’t understand his mood, but my need to see Lila overwhelms other concerns.

“Cassel,” he calls, and I turn, leaning over the banister. “Go up there and bring her down. Lila. There’s something I need to tell you both.”

“Okay,” I say automatically, but I don’t really want to hear whatever it is. Two quick steps down the hall and I open the door to my bedroom.

Lila is sitting on the bed, reading one of the old collections of ghost stories I never returned to the library. She turns to give me a sly smile. “I really missed you,” she says, reaching out a hand.

“Yeah?” I can’t stop looking at her, at the way the sunlight from the dirty window catches on her lashes, making them gleam like gold, the way her mouth parts slightly. She looks like the girl I remember climbing trees with, the one who pierced my ear and licked my blood, but she looks unlike that girl too. Time has hollowed her cheeks and made her eyes feverishly bright.

>

“Cassel!” Daneca yells, running up to me. “Are you all right?”

“We were worried,” Sam says. “You were in there for too long.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t I seem fine?”

“You’re covered in blood standing in the middle of a party,” Sam says. “No, you don’t seem fine.”

“This way,” Zacharov says, pointing toward the kitchens.

“We’re coming with you,” says Daneca.

I feel drained, and my cheek is throbbing. My ribs still hurt. And I don’t see Lila anywhere.

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

People nearly trip over themselves getting out of my way as I walk. I guess I really do look bad.

The kitchen looks smaller with people running around in it, carrying out trays of blini slathered in caviar, golden pastries leaking garlic butter, and tiny cakes topped with crystallized lemon.

My stomach growls, surprising me. I shouldn’t be hungry after watching another person be killed, but I’m starving.

Philip is standing in the back flanked by two burly men who appear to be restraining him. I don’t know if Lila brought him to the party or if Zacharov sent to have him escorted over from wherever she was keeping him.

When he sees me, his eyes narrow.

“You took everything from me,” he shouts. “Maura. My son. My future. My friend. You took everything.”

I guess I did.

I could tell him that I didn’t mean for it to happen.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” I say.

He struggles against the bodyguards holding him. I’m not worried. I let Daneca steer me to the area by the pantry and sinks.

“I’m going to make you regret the day you were born,” Philip shouts to my back. I ignore him.

Lila is waiting with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a rag in the other. “Get up on the counter,” she says.

I do, pushing aside a bowl of flour and a spatula. Philip’s still yelling, but his voice seems to come from far away. I smile. “Lila, this is Daneca. I think you met Sam. They’re my friends from school.”

“Did he actually admit we’re his friends?” Sam asks, and Daneca laughs.

Lila pours some vodka onto the napkin.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the rest of my plan,” I say to Lila. “About Barron.”

“The notebooks, right? You fixed them somehow.”

When I look surprised, she smiles. “I lived with him for years, remember? I saw the notebooks. Clever.” She presses the cloth against my cheek, and I hiss. It stings like crazy.

“Ow,” I say. “You ever think you’re kind of a bully?”

Her smile goes wide. If it could, I think it would curl up at the corners. She leans close to me. “Oh, I know I am. And I know you like it.”

Sam snickers. I don’t care.

I do like it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I SPEND THE NEXT TWO weeks slammed, making up all the homework I missed. Daneca and Sam help me, sitting with me in the library until in-room curfew, when I have to head home and they have to go back to the dorms. I spend so much time at school that Grandad gets me my own car. He takes me to some friend of his who hooks me up with a 1980 Mercedes-Benz Turbo for two grand.

It runs like crap, but Sam promises to help convert it to grease. He won some kind of state science fair with the conversion of his hearse, and he thinks we can make it all the way to an international science fair with the tinkering he’s got planned for my ride. Until then, I keep my fingers crossed that the engine keeps turning over.

When I go out to my car to drive myself home that Tuesday, I find Barron leaning against it, twirling keys around one black-gloved finger. His motorcycle is parked next to my car in the lot.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Pizza night,” he says.

I look at him like he’s lost his mind.

He returns the look. “It’s Tuesday.”

The problem with forging an entire year of someone’s life very quickly is that your fantasies creep in. Maybe you meant to just get in the stuff that you needed, but that leaves a lot of space to fill. I filled the space with the relationship I wished we had.

It’s a little embarrassing now that Barron is standing here, really believing we go out for pizza every other Tuesday and talk about our feelings.

“I’ll drive,” I say finally.

We order a pizza heaped with cheese and sauce and sausage and pepperoni at a little place with booths, and miniature jukeboxes above each linoleum tabletop. I cover my slice with hot pepper flakes.

“I’m going back to Princeton to finish school,” he says, biting into a chunk of garlic bread. “Now that Mom’s getting out. Something tells me she’s going to need a lawyer again soon.” I wonder if he can go back, if he can fill the holes in his brain with law books and remember them as long as he doesn’t work anymore. That’s a big “as long as.”

“Do you know when her actual release happens?”

“They say Friday,” he says. “But they’ve already changed the date twice, so I don’t know how seriously to take it. But I guess we should get a cake or something, in case. Worst case scenario: We eat the cake anyway.”

Memory is funny. Barron seems relaxed, like he really likes me, because he doesn’t remember hating me. Or maybe he remembers the feeling of dislike but he assumes that he liked me more than he hated me. But I’m not relaxed. I can’t stop remembering. I want to leap up out of the chair and choke him.

“What do you think is the first thing she’s going to do when she gets out?” I ask.

“Meddle,” he says, and laughs. “What do you think? She’s going to start trying to get everything to go the way she wants it to go. And we all better pray that’s the way we want it to go too.”

I suck soda through my straw, lick grease off my glove, and contemplate transforming Barron into a slice of pizza and then feeding him to the kids at the next table.

Still, it’s nice to have a brother I can talk to.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

That’s what Zacharov says when he explains that he’s keeping Philip working for the family, where he can keep an eye on him. People don’t usually leave crime families alive, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I ask Grandad if he’s seen Philip, but all he does is grunt.

* * *

Lila calls me on Wednesday.

“Hey,” I say, not recognizing the number.

“Hey, yourself.” She sounds happy. “You want to hang out?”

“I do,” I say, my heart slamming. I switch my messenger bag over to the other shoulder with suddenly clumsy hands.

“Come up to the city. We can get hot chocolate, and maybe I’ll let you beat me at a video game. I’m four years out of practice. I might be a little rusty.”

“I’ll beat you so bad your own avatar will laugh at you.”

“Jerk. Come up on Saturday,” she says, and hangs up.

I smile all the way through dinner.

On Friday at lunch I head out onto the quad. It’s warm out and lots of kids have brought their food to eat on the grass. Sam and Daneca are sitting with Johan Schwartz, Jill Pearson-White, and Chaiyawat Terweil. They wave me over.

I hold up my hand and turn toward a small copse of trees. I’ve been thinking through everything that happened, and there’s one thing still bothering me.

I take out my phone and punch in a number. I don’t expect anyone to pick up, but she does.

“Dr. Churchill’s office,” says Maura.

“It’s Cassel.”

“Cassel!” she says. “I was wondering when you’d call. You know what the best feeling in the world is? Just driving down the road with the music blasting, the wind in your hair, and your baby gurgling happily in his car seat.”

I smile. “You know where you are headed?”

“Not yet,” she says. “I guess I’ll know when we get there.”

“I’m glad for you,” I say. “I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

“You know what I miss most?” she says.

I shake my head, and then realize she can’t see me. “No.”

“The music.” Her voice drops, low and soft. “It was just so beautiful. I wish I could hear it again, but it’s gone. Philip took the music with him.”

I can’t help shuddering.

Daneca is walking toward me when I hang up the phone. She looks annoyed.

“Hey,” she says. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

I must look shell-shocked or something, because she hesitates. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that. I want to,” I say. I’m not sure I mean it, but I am sure that Daneca and Sam were there for me when I really needed them. Maybe the point of real friendship isn’t that you have to repay kindness, but whatever. At least I should try.

As Daneca, Sam, and I cross the quad, I see Audrey eating an apple near the entrance to the arts center.

She’s smiling at me the way she used to. “Where are you guys going?”

I take a deep breath. “HEX meeting. Learning about worker rights.”

“For real?” She looks toward Daneca.

“What can I say?” I shrug. “I’m trying new things.”

“Can I come?” She doesn’t stand up, like she’s expecting me to say no.

“Of course you can,” Daneca says, before I can get past the idea that she wants to come. “HEX meetings are for us all to better understand one another.”

“They have free coffee,” Sam says.

Audrey chucks her apple toward the shrubs by the entrance. “Count me in.”

The meeting is being held in Ms. Ramirez’s music room; she’s the adviser. A piano sits in one corner, and a few drum toms rest near the back wall, against a bookshelf filled with thin folders of sheet music. A cymbal balances on the low shelf near a wall of windows, near a gurgling coffeemaker.

Ms. Ramirez is sitting the opposite way on the piano bench in a circle of students. I come in and pull up four more chairs. Everyone scoots politely aside, but the girl who’s standing doesn’t stop talking.

“The thing is that it’s really hard to stop discrimination when something’s illegal,” the girl says. “I mean, everybody thinks of workers as being criminals. Like, people use the word ‘worker’ to mean criminals. And, well, if we work a work, even once, we are criminals. So most of us are, because we had to figure it out somehow and that was usually by making something happen.”

I don’t know her name, just that she’s a freshman. She doesn’t look at anyone when she speaks, and her voice is affectless. I am a little awed by her bravery.

“And there are lots of workers who never do anything bad. They go to weddings and hospitals and give people good luck. Or there’s people who work at shelters and they give people hope and make them feel confident and positive. And that word—‘cursing.’ Like all we can do is bad magic. I mean, why would you even want to do the bad stuff? The blowback’s awful. Like, if all a luck worker ever does is make people have good luck, then all he has is good luck too. It doesn’t have to be bad.”

She pauses and raises her gaze to look at us. At me.

“Magic,” the girl says. “It’s just all magic.”

When I get home that night, Grandad is making a cup of tea in the kitchen. We’ve cleaned up a lot. The counters are mostly clear and the stove is no longer crusted with old food. There’s a bottle of bourbon on the table, but the cap’s still on it.

“Your mother called,” he says. “She’s out.”

“Out?” I repeat dumbly. “Out of prison? Is she here?”

“No. But you do have a guest,” he says, turning back to wipe the faucet. “That Zacharov girl is in your room.”

I look up, like I can see through the ceiling, surprised and happy. I wonder what she thinks of the house, and then I remember she’s been here before, lots of times. She’s even been in my room before—just as a cat. Then the rest of what Grandad said hits me. “Why are you calling Lila ‘that Zacharov girl’? And where’s Mom? She can’t have gotten far. Jail has to slow you down a little.”

“Shandra rented a hotel room. She says she doesn’t want us to see her the way she is. Last I heard, she was ordering champagne and french fries drenched in ranch dressing up to her bubble bath.”

“Really?”

He laughs, but it sounds hollow. “You know your mother.”

I walk past him and the remaining boxes of unsorted stuff in the dining room, up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I don’t understand his mood, but my need to see Lila overwhelms other concerns.

“Cassel,” he calls, and I turn, leaning over the banister. “Go up there and bring her down. Lila. There’s something I need to tell you both.”

“Okay,” I say automatically, but I don’t really want to hear whatever it is. Two quick steps down the hall and I open the door to my bedroom.

Lila is sitting on the bed, reading one of the old collections of ghost stories I never returned to the library. She turns to give me a sly smile. “I really missed you,” she says, reaching out a hand.

“Yeah?” I can’t stop looking at her, at the way the sunlight from the dirty window catches on her lashes, making them gleam like gold, the way her mouth parts slightly. She looks like the girl I remember climbing trees with, the one who pierced my ear and licked my blood, but she looks unlike that girl too. Time has hollowed her cheeks and made her eyes feverishly bright.