Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

Now it’s her turn not to meet my gaze. “I wouldn’t let Daneca work me,” she says, slowly and carefully, putting every word together as if having one out of place will make everything fall apart. “But I didn’t stop loving you. Because I always have, Cassel. Since we were kids. You have to remember: I paraded around in my underwear at my own birthday party.”

That startles a laugh out of me. I touch the ear she pierced that night, the hole closed now, and try to imagine a world where I wasn’t the only one who felt something. “I didn’t think that meant—”

“Because you’re an idiot,” she says. “An idiot. When the curse wore off, I couldn’t let you see that I still had feelings. I thought I was the only one who’d ever had them.”

She has woven her fingers together and is clenching them tight, the leather taut over her knuckles. “You were kind. You’re always kind. I figured you pretended to love me until you couldn’t pretend anymore. And I couldn’t let you think you still had to. So I’d jab myself in the hand with scissors, or pens—with anything sharp in reach—whenever I thought of you. Until when I saw you I could concentrate on that moment of pain. . . . And despite that, I still wanted to see you.”

“I haven’t been pretending, Lila,” I say. “I never was. I know how it looked, me asking Daneca to make you not feel anything. But I kissed you before I knew what my mother had done, remember? I kissed you because I had wanted to for a very long time.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“That night, in your dorm room—Lila, you were cursed,” I say. “And I almost didn’t care. It was awful, because you acted like you really felt all these things, and I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t real—and sometimes I was overwhelmed by the awfulness. I wanted to blot out how bad I felt. I knew it wasn’t right and I still didn’t stop myself.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“But I would never want—”

“I know that, Cassel,” she says. “You could have explained.”

“And said what? That I did want to be with you?” I demand. “That I just couldn’t trust myself enough? That I—”

She leans forward and brings her mouth to mine. I have never been so profoundly glad to be forced to shut up.

I close my eyes, because even seeing her is too much right now.

I feel like a man who’s been living on bread and water and is now overwhelmed by a feast. I feel like someone chained in the dark for so long that the light has become terrifying. My heart wants to beat its way out of my chest.

Her lips are soft, sliding against mine. I am lost in kiss after drowning kiss. My gloved fingers trace the skin of her cheek and the hollow of her throat until she moans into my mouth. My blood is boiling, pooling low in my gut.

She unknots my tie with quick fingers. When I pull back to look at her, she grins and tugs the cloth free from my collar in a single motion.

I raise both eyebrows.

With a laugh Lila pushes herself off the floor and reaches out her gloved hand to haul me to my feet. “Come on,” she says.

I stand up. Somehow my shirt has gotten untucked. Then we’re kissing again, staggering up the stairs. She stops to kick off her boots, bracing herself against me and the wall. I shrug out of my jacket.

“Lila,” I say, but that’s all I can manage as she begins to unbutton my white dress shirt.

It falls to the floor of the hallway.

We lurch into my bedroom, where I imagined her a thousand times, where I thought I had lost her forever. Those memories seem blurred now, hard to count as important beside the vividness of her cool leather-clad hand brushing over the hard planes of my stomach and the corded muscles of my arms. I suck in my breath.

She steps away to bite the end of her glove, pulling it off her hand that way. When she drops it, my gaze tracks its fall.

I catch her bare hand and kiss her fingers, which makes her stare at me, wide-eyed. I bite down on the heel of her hand, and she groans.

When I pull off my own gloves, my hands are shaking. The taste of her skin is on my tongue. I feel feverish.

If I have to die tomorrow when the Feds come for me, then this is the last request of my heart. This. The sight of lashes brushing her cheek as her eyes flutter closed. The pulse in her throat. Her breath in my mouth. This.

I have been with girls I cared about and girls I didn’t. But I have never been with a girl I loved more than anything else in all the world. I am staggered by it, overwhelmed with the desire to get everything right.

My mouth dips low to trace the scar on her neck. Her nails dig into my back.

Lila breaks away to yank her shirt over her head, and throws it onto the floor. Her bra is blue and covered in lace butterflies. Then she comes back into my arms again, her lips opening, her skin impossibly soft and warm. When I run my bare hands over it, her body arches against me.

She starts to unbuckle my belt with fumbling fingers.

“Are you sure?” I say, pulling away.

In answer she steps back, reaches around, and unclasps her bra, tosses it in the direction of her shirt.

“Lila,” I say helplessly.

“Cassel, if you make me talk about this, I will kill you. I will literally kill you. I will strangle you with your own tie.”

“I think that tie’s downstairs,” I say, fighting to remember why in the world I wanted to talk as she comes forward to kiss me again. Her fingers thread through my hair, tugging my mouth down to hers.

A few short steps and we sprawl backward onto the bed, knocking pillows to the floor.

“Do you have anything?” She’s speaking against my shoulder, her bare chest against mine. I shudder with each word and force myself to focus.

It still takes me a moment to realize what she means. “In my wallet.”

“You know I haven’t done this a lot.” There’s a tremble in her voice, as if she’s suddenly nervous. “Like, once before.”

“We can stop,” I say, stilling my hands. I take an unsteady breath. “We should—”

“If you stop,” she says, “I will also kill you.”

So I don’t.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I WAKE UP WITH SUNLIGHT streaming in through the dirty windowpane. I reach out my bare fingers, expecting them to brush warm skin, but they close on a tangle of bedsheets instead. She’s already gone.

I didn’t stop loving you, Cassel.

My skin is alive with the memory of her hands. I stretch, bones all down my spine popping languorously. My head feels clearer than I can ever remember.

I grin up at the cracked plaster of my ceiling and picture her creeping out of the room while I’m sleeping, hesitating to kiss me good-bye, not leaving a note or any other normal-person thing. Of course not. She wouldn’t want to seem sentimental. She’d dress in the bathroom and splash water on her face. Carry her boots and run across the lawn in stocking feet. Sneak back into that fancy penthouse apartment before her criminal mastermind of a father could realize that his daughter spent the night at a boy’s house. At my house.

I can’t stop grinning.

She loves me.

I guess I can die happy.

I head into my parents’ room and dig around, find a beat-up leather duffel bag into which I stuff a couple of T-shirts and my least favorite pair of jeans. No point in packing anything I like, since I have no idea where Yulikova is taking me or whether I’ll ever see any of this stuff again. I stash my wallet and identification under my mattress.

My objectives are simple—figure out if Yulikova’s going to double-cross me, do the job so Patton can’t hurt my mother, and come home.

After that I guess we’ll see. I didn’t sign any papers, so I’m not an official member of the LMD. I can still get out if I want. At least I think I can. This is the federal government we’re talking about, not some crime family with blood oaths and slashed throats.

Of course, even if I’m not an agent, I’ll still have to deal with everyone else who’s looking for someone with my particular talents.

I imagine for a moment being on my own after high school, living in New York, waiting tables and meeting Lila for espressos late at night. No one would need to know what I am. No one would need to know what I can do. We’d go back to my tiny apartment, drink cheap wine, watch black-and-white movies, and complain about our jobs. She could tell me about gang wars and all the new things that fell off trucks, and I could—

I shake my head at myself.

Before I get too involved in fantasies about an impossible future, I better show up for detention. Otherwise I’m not even going to graduate from Wallingford.

Glancing at the clock on my phone, I see that I have about a half hour. That gives me time to go back to my dorm, pick up Sam, and figure out what we’re going to say on Mina’s behalf. Barely enough time, but still.

I’m walking out to my car, duffel bag over one shoulder, when my phone rings.

It’s Barron. I flip it open. “Hey,” I say, surprised.

His voice is carefully neutral. “I did some digging.”

I stop, leaning against the front of my Benz, keys still in my hand. “What kind of digging?”

“After what you said about the Patton job, I persuaded one of my friends to let me use her ID card and rifle through some files. You were right. It’s a setup, Cassel. You’re supposed to get pinched.”

I feel cold all over. “They want to arrest me?”

He laughs. “The really hysterical part is that they’re getting you to turn Patton into a toaster or whatever to cover their own screwup. They could go in, guns blazing, if they weren’t the reason Patton’s so unstable in the first place. This is their mess.”

I look out at the lawn. The leaves have almost all fallen, leaving behind barren trunks of trees, their black branches reaching for the sky like the long fingers of endless hands. “What do you mean?”

“Patton’s aides called the Feds once they realized Mom had worked him. If she hadn’t been so sloppy, you wouldn’t be in the lurch.”

“She didn’t have time to do a better job,” I say. “Anyway, politics isn’t exactly her thing.”

“Yeah, well, my point is that I read the reports and they tell a fabulous tale of fuckupitude. After the aides call the Feds, they bring in a state-sanctioned emotion worker to “fix” Patton. But, see, the government is full of hyperbathygammic idiots who have been taught not to use their powers unless they really have to, so the emotion worker agent they sent in didn’t exactly have a deft touch.

“He works Patton to hate and fear Mom, thinking that strong emotions are the only way to negate what she did. But instead Patton gets completely unhinged. Like, no hinge in sight. All violent outbursts and crying jags.”

I shudder, thinking about what it would be like to be made to feel two contradictory things at the same time. It’s worse when I realize that’s what I was asking Daneca to do to Lila. Love and indifference warring together. I don’t know what might have happened. Thinking about it is like looking down into the deep ravine you somehow missed stepping into in the dark.

Barron goes on. “Now, the backbone of getting proposition two passed is having workers who are also upstanding citizens endorse it. Prominent members of the community coming forward and submitting themselves for voluntary testing makes the rest of us look bad, but it makes the program look good. Safe. Humane. Problem was, Patton decided that now was the time to be crazy. He got everyone with a positive HBG test fired.

“Then he started asking federal employees to get tested. He managed to put a lot of pressure on them. He wanted the federal units with hyperbathygammic agents disbanded.”

“Like the LMD,” I say, thinking of Yulikova and Agent Jones. “But he’s got no authority over them.”

“I told you this was a comedy of errors,” says Barron. “Sure, he can’t do a thing to make that happen. But he can threaten to embarrass them by telling the press how they worked him against his will. So, in all their wisdom, what do you think Team Good does?”

“I have no idea,” I say. Another call makes my phone buzz, but I ignore it.

“They send another worker so that he can fix the first botched job on Patton’s brain.”

I laugh. “I bet that went real well.”

“Oh, yeah. Patton killed him. That’s how well it went.”

“Killed him?” Since this is Barron, it’s possible he’s embellishing the truth, if not outright lying. But the story he’s telling adds up in a way that the story Yulikova told me doesn’t. Barron’s story is messy, full of coincidences and mistakes. As a liar myself, I know that the hallmark of lies is that they are simple and straightforward. They are reality the way we wish it was.

“Yeah,” Barron says. “The agent’s name was Eric Lawrence. Married. Two kids. Patton strangled him when he figured out that Agent Lawrence was trying to work him. Amazing, right? So they have a homicidal governor on their hands and the higher-ups tell them they need to clean up the mess before there’s a huge scandal.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So after I transform Patton, what? They arrest me, I guess. I have a motive, because of Mom. Then I’d get put in jail. What’s the use of that if they want me to work for them? I can’t work for them in prison—or at least whatever I could do would be pretty limited. Transform other inmates. Make cigarettes into bars of gold.”

“That’s the brilliant part, Cassel,” Barron says. “You’re not getting it. Not only would they have a scapegoat, but once you become a criminal who is no longer protected by an immunity deal, you’d have a lot fewer civil liberties. They could control you. Totally. They’d have exactly the weapon they want.”

>

Now it’s her turn not to meet my gaze. “I wouldn’t let Daneca work me,” she says, slowly and carefully, putting every word together as if having one out of place will make everything fall apart. “But I didn’t stop loving you. Because I always have, Cassel. Since we were kids. You have to remember: I paraded around in my underwear at my own birthday party.”

That startles a laugh out of me. I touch the ear she pierced that night, the hole closed now, and try to imagine a world where I wasn’t the only one who felt something. “I didn’t think that meant—”

“Because you’re an idiot,” she says. “An idiot. When the curse wore off, I couldn’t let you see that I still had feelings. I thought I was the only one who’d ever had them.”

She has woven her fingers together and is clenching them tight, the leather taut over her knuckles. “You were kind. You’re always kind. I figured you pretended to love me until you couldn’t pretend anymore. And I couldn’t let you think you still had to. So I’d jab myself in the hand with scissors, or pens—with anything sharp in reach—whenever I thought of you. Until when I saw you I could concentrate on that moment of pain. . . . And despite that, I still wanted to see you.”

“I haven’t been pretending, Lila,” I say. “I never was. I know how it looked, me asking Daneca to make you not feel anything. But I kissed you before I knew what my mother had done, remember? I kissed you because I had wanted to for a very long time.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“That night, in your dorm room—Lila, you were cursed,” I say. “And I almost didn’t care. It was awful, because you acted like you really felt all these things, and I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t real—and sometimes I was overwhelmed by the awfulness. I wanted to blot out how bad I felt. I knew it wasn’t right and I still didn’t stop myself.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“But I would never want—”

“I know that, Cassel,” she says. “You could have explained.”

“And said what? That I did want to be with you?” I demand. “That I just couldn’t trust myself enough? That I—”

She leans forward and brings her mouth to mine. I have never been so profoundly glad to be forced to shut up.

I close my eyes, because even seeing her is too much right now.

I feel like a man who’s been living on bread and water and is now overwhelmed by a feast. I feel like someone chained in the dark for so long that the light has become terrifying. My heart wants to beat its way out of my chest.

Her lips are soft, sliding against mine. I am lost in kiss after drowning kiss. My gloved fingers trace the skin of her cheek and the hollow of her throat until she moans into my mouth. My blood is boiling, pooling low in my gut.

She unknots my tie with quick fingers. When I pull back to look at her, she grins and tugs the cloth free from my collar in a single motion.

I raise both eyebrows.

With a laugh Lila pushes herself off the floor and reaches out her gloved hand to haul me to my feet. “Come on,” she says.

I stand up. Somehow my shirt has gotten untucked. Then we’re kissing again, staggering up the stairs. She stops to kick off her boots, bracing herself against me and the wall. I shrug out of my jacket.

“Lila,” I say, but that’s all I can manage as she begins to unbutton my white dress shirt.

It falls to the floor of the hallway.

We lurch into my bedroom, where I imagined her a thousand times, where I thought I had lost her forever. Those memories seem blurred now, hard to count as important beside the vividness of her cool leather-clad hand brushing over the hard planes of my stomach and the corded muscles of my arms. I suck in my breath.

She steps away to bite the end of her glove, pulling it off her hand that way. When she drops it, my gaze tracks its fall.

I catch her bare hand and kiss her fingers, which makes her stare at me, wide-eyed. I bite down on the heel of her hand, and she groans.

When I pull off my own gloves, my hands are shaking. The taste of her skin is on my tongue. I feel feverish.

If I have to die tomorrow when the Feds come for me, then this is the last request of my heart. This. The sight of lashes brushing her cheek as her eyes flutter closed. The pulse in her throat. Her breath in my mouth. This.

I have been with girls I cared about and girls I didn’t. But I have never been with a girl I loved more than anything else in all the world. I am staggered by it, overwhelmed with the desire to get everything right.

My mouth dips low to trace the scar on her neck. Her nails dig into my back.

Lila breaks away to yank her shirt over her head, and throws it onto the floor. Her bra is blue and covered in lace butterflies. Then she comes back into my arms again, her lips opening, her skin impossibly soft and warm. When I run my bare hands over it, her body arches against me.

She starts to unbuckle my belt with fumbling fingers.

“Are you sure?” I say, pulling away.

In answer she steps back, reaches around, and unclasps her bra, tosses it in the direction of her shirt.

“Lila,” I say helplessly.

“Cassel, if you make me talk about this, I will kill you. I will literally kill you. I will strangle you with your own tie.”

“I think that tie’s downstairs,” I say, fighting to remember why in the world I wanted to talk as she comes forward to kiss me again. Her fingers thread through my hair, tugging my mouth down to hers.

A few short steps and we sprawl backward onto the bed, knocking pillows to the floor.

“Do you have anything?” She’s speaking against my shoulder, her bare chest against mine. I shudder with each word and force myself to focus.

It still takes me a moment to realize what she means. “In my wallet.”

“You know I haven’t done this a lot.” There’s a tremble in her voice, as if she’s suddenly nervous. “Like, once before.”

“We can stop,” I say, stilling my hands. I take an unsteady breath. “We should—”

“If you stop,” she says, “I will also kill you.”

So I don’t.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I WAKE UP WITH SUNLIGHT streaming in through the dirty windowpane. I reach out my bare fingers, expecting them to brush warm skin, but they close on a tangle of bedsheets instead. She’s already gone.

I didn’t stop loving you, Cassel.

My skin is alive with the memory of her hands. I stretch, bones all down my spine popping languorously. My head feels clearer than I can ever remember.

I grin up at the cracked plaster of my ceiling and picture her creeping out of the room while I’m sleeping, hesitating to kiss me good-bye, not leaving a note or any other normal-person thing. Of course not. She wouldn’t want to seem sentimental. She’d dress in the bathroom and splash water on her face. Carry her boots and run across the lawn in stocking feet. Sneak back into that fancy penthouse apartment before her criminal mastermind of a father could realize that his daughter spent the night at a boy’s house. At my house.

I can’t stop grinning.

She loves me.

I guess I can die happy.

I head into my parents’ room and dig around, find a beat-up leather duffel bag into which I stuff a couple of T-shirts and my least favorite pair of jeans. No point in packing anything I like, since I have no idea where Yulikova is taking me or whether I’ll ever see any of this stuff again. I stash my wallet and identification under my mattress.

My objectives are simple—figure out if Yulikova’s going to double-cross me, do the job so Patton can’t hurt my mother, and come home.

After that I guess we’ll see. I didn’t sign any papers, so I’m not an official member of the LMD. I can still get out if I want. At least I think I can. This is the federal government we’re talking about, not some crime family with blood oaths and slashed throats.

Of course, even if I’m not an agent, I’ll still have to deal with everyone else who’s looking for someone with my particular talents.

I imagine for a moment being on my own after high school, living in New York, waiting tables and meeting Lila for espressos late at night. No one would need to know what I am. No one would need to know what I can do. We’d go back to my tiny apartment, drink cheap wine, watch black-and-white movies, and complain about our jobs. She could tell me about gang wars and all the new things that fell off trucks, and I could—

I shake my head at myself.

Before I get too involved in fantasies about an impossible future, I better show up for detention. Otherwise I’m not even going to graduate from Wallingford.

Glancing at the clock on my phone, I see that I have about a half hour. That gives me time to go back to my dorm, pick up Sam, and figure out what we’re going to say on Mina’s behalf. Barely enough time, but still.

I’m walking out to my car, duffel bag over one shoulder, when my phone rings.

It’s Barron. I flip it open. “Hey,” I say, surprised.

His voice is carefully neutral. “I did some digging.”

I stop, leaning against the front of my Benz, keys still in my hand. “What kind of digging?”

“After what you said about the Patton job, I persuaded one of my friends to let me use her ID card and rifle through some files. You were right. It’s a setup, Cassel. You’re supposed to get pinched.”

I feel cold all over. “They want to arrest me?”

He laughs. “The really hysterical part is that they’re getting you to turn Patton into a toaster or whatever to cover their own screwup. They could go in, guns blazing, if they weren’t the reason Patton’s so unstable in the first place. This is their mess.”

I look out at the lawn. The leaves have almost all fallen, leaving behind barren trunks of trees, their black branches reaching for the sky like the long fingers of endless hands. “What do you mean?”

“Patton’s aides called the Feds once they realized Mom had worked him. If she hadn’t been so sloppy, you wouldn’t be in the lurch.”

“She didn’t have time to do a better job,” I say. “Anyway, politics isn’t exactly her thing.”

“Yeah, well, my point is that I read the reports and they tell a fabulous tale of fuckupitude. After the aides call the Feds, they bring in a state-sanctioned emotion worker to “fix” Patton. But, see, the government is full of hyperbathygammic idiots who have been taught not to use their powers unless they really have to, so the emotion worker agent they sent in didn’t exactly have a deft touch.

“He works Patton to hate and fear Mom, thinking that strong emotions are the only way to negate what she did. But instead Patton gets completely unhinged. Like, no hinge in sight. All violent outbursts and crying jags.”

I shudder, thinking about what it would be like to be made to feel two contradictory things at the same time. It’s worse when I realize that’s what I was asking Daneca to do to Lila. Love and indifference warring together. I don’t know what might have happened. Thinking about it is like looking down into the deep ravine you somehow missed stepping into in the dark.

Barron goes on. “Now, the backbone of getting proposition two passed is having workers who are also upstanding citizens endorse it. Prominent members of the community coming forward and submitting themselves for voluntary testing makes the rest of us look bad, but it makes the program look good. Safe. Humane. Problem was, Patton decided that now was the time to be crazy. He got everyone with a positive HBG test fired.

“Then he started asking federal employees to get tested. He managed to put a lot of pressure on them. He wanted the federal units with hyperbathygammic agents disbanded.”

“Like the LMD,” I say, thinking of Yulikova and Agent Jones. “But he’s got no authority over them.”

“I told you this was a comedy of errors,” says Barron. “Sure, he can’t do a thing to make that happen. But he can threaten to embarrass them by telling the press how they worked him against his will. So, in all their wisdom, what do you think Team Good does?”

“I have no idea,” I say. Another call makes my phone buzz, but I ignore it.

“They send another worker so that he can fix the first botched job on Patton’s brain.”

I laugh. “I bet that went real well.”

“Oh, yeah. Patton killed him. That’s how well it went.”

“Killed him?” Since this is Barron, it’s possible he’s embellishing the truth, if not outright lying. But the story he’s telling adds up in a way that the story Yulikova told me doesn’t. Barron’s story is messy, full of coincidences and mistakes. As a liar myself, I know that the hallmark of lies is that they are simple and straightforward. They are reality the way we wish it was.

“Yeah,” Barron says. “The agent’s name was Eric Lawrence. Married. Two kids. Patton strangled him when he figured out that Agent Lawrence was trying to work him. Amazing, right? So they have a homicidal governor on their hands and the higher-ups tell them they need to clean up the mess before there’s a huge scandal.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So after I transform Patton, what? They arrest me, I guess. I have a motive, because of Mom. Then I’d get put in jail. What’s the use of that if they want me to work for them? I can’t work for them in prison—or at least whatever I could do would be pretty limited. Transform other inmates. Make cigarettes into bars of gold.”

“That’s the brilliant part, Cassel,” Barron says. “You’re not getting it. Not only would they have a scapegoat, but once you become a criminal who is no longer protected by an immunity deal, you’d have a lot fewer civil liberties. They could control you. Totally. They’d have exactly the weapon they want.”