Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

There is a black car idling next to the driveway when I return.

I pull past it, park, and get out. As I start toward the house, the passenger-side door opens and Yulikova steps onto the grass. She’s got on a tan suit with her signature chunky necklaces. I wonder how many of the stones are charms.

I walk a little ways toward her but stop, so that she has to close the distance on her own.

“Hello, Cassel,” she says. “We’ve got some things to talk about. Why don’t you get into the car?”

I hold up the milk. “Sorry,” I say. “But I’m a little busy right now.”

“What you did—you can’t think there are no consequences.” I’m not sure if she means the speech or something worse, but I don’t much care.

“You set me up,” I say. “One big con. You can’t blame me because I turned out not to be gullible enough. You can’t blame the mark. That’s not how it works. Have some respect for the nature of the game.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “How did you find out?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I never meant to betray your trust. It was for your safety as much as anything else that I agreed we should implement—”

I hold up one gloved hand. “Just spare me the justifications. I thought you were the good guys, but there are no good guys.”

“That’s not true.” She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying. “You would never have spent a single night in jail. We weren’t going to lock you up, Cassel. My superiors felt that we needed a little leverage over you, that’s all. You haven’t exactly been trustworthy yourself.”

“You were supposed to be better than me,” I say. “Anyway, that’s done.”

“You think you know the truth, but there are more factors in play than you’re aware of. You don’t understand the larger picture. You can’t. You don’t know what chaos you’ve created.”

“Because you wanted to get rid of Patton, but you also wanted proposition two to pass. So you decided to make a martyr out of him. Two birds, one stone.”

“It’s not about what I want,” she says. “It’s bigger than that.”

“I think we’re done here.”

“You know that’s not possible. More people are aware of you now, people high up in the government. And everyone is very eager to meet you. Especially my boss.”

“That and a dollar will almost buy me a cup of coffee.”

“You signed a contract, Cassel. That’s binding.”

“Did I?” I say, smirking. “I think you should check again. I’m pretty sure you’re going to find out that I never signed anything. My name is nowhere. My name is gone.” Thank you, Sam, I think. I would have never thought a disappearing-ink pen could come in so handy.

Her irritation shows on her face for once. I feel oddly triumphant. She clears her throat. “Where’s Agent Jones?”

She says it like that’s her trump card.

I shrug. “Beats me. Did you lose him? I hope you find him, even though—Let’s face it, he and I were never close.”

“You’re not this person,” she says, waving her hand in the air to indicate me. I don’t know what she was expecting. Clearly she’s frustrated by my reaction. “You’re not this—this cold. You care about making the world a better place. Snap out of it, Cassel, before it’s too late.”

“I’ve got to go,” I say, jerking my head toward the house.

“Your mother could be brought up on charges,” she says.

Fury makes my mouth curl. I don’t care if she sees it. “So could you. I hear you used a worker kid to frame a governor. You can ruin my life, but you’ll have to destroy your own to do it. I promise you that.”

“Cassel,” she says, her voice rising several decibels. “I am the least of your worries. Do you think that if you were in China you would be free?”

“Oh, give me a break,” I say.

“Right now you’re a bigger problem than Patton was, and you saw how my superiors handled that problem. The only way this can be over is if you—”

“This is never going to be over,” I shout. “Someone will always be after me. There’s always consequences. Well, BRING IT. I am done with being afraid, and I am done with you.”

With that, I stalk back to the house. But on the porch I hesitate. I look back at Yulikova. I wait until she walks back to the gleaming black car, gets in, and is driven away. Then I sit down on the stoop.

I stare out at the yard for a long time, not really thinking about anything, mostly just shaking with anger and adrenaline.

The government is big, bigger than any one person can game. They can come after the people I care about, they can come for me, they can do something that I haven’t thought of yet. They could make their move now or a year from now. And I’m going to have to be ready. Always and forever ready, unless I want to give up everything I have and everyone I love.

Like, they could go after Lila, who shot and killed someone in cold blood. If they ever managed to figure that out, to charge her with Agent Jones’s murder, I would do anything to keep her free.

Or they could go after Barron, who works for them.

Or—

As I’m thinking, I realize I am looking out at our old barn. No one’s gone in there in years. It’s full of old furniture, rusted tools, and a bunch of stuff my parents stole and then didn’t want.

It’s where my dad taught me how to pick locks. He kept all his equipment out there, including the supersecure box. I vividly recall my father, cigarillo resting in one corner of his mouth as he worked, oiling the gears of a lock. My memory adds in the spool pins, the mortis sets, and the bolts.

I remember that no one could get into that box. Even knowing there was candy inside, we were still hopeless.

The barn is the one place that Grandad and I didn’t clean out.

I leave the milk on the stoop and walk over to the big, worn double doors, then lift the latch. The last time I was inside was in a dream. It feels dreamlike now, dust rising up with my footfalls, the only light coming through gaps in the planks, and windowpanes shaded gray with cobwebs and dirt.

It smells like rotten wood and animal habitation. Most of the furniture is covered with moth-eaten blankets, giving everything a ghostly appearance. I spot a garbage bag filled with plastic bags, and several worn cardboard boxes overstuffed with milk glass. There’s an old safe—so rusted that the door is ossified open. Inside I find only a pile of pennies, greenish and stuck together.

Dad’s worktable is covered with a cloth too. Pulling it back with a single sweep of my hand, I see the piled mess of his tools—a vise, cylinder remover, sesame decoder, hammer with interchangeable heads, the supersecure box, a bundle of twine, and a bunch of rusted picks.

If my father had the Resurrection Diamond, if he wanted to keep it, if he couldn’t sell it, then I can picture him tucking it away where no outsider would think to look and no family member was skilled enough to get into. I cast about for a few minutes and then do what I never would have thought to do as a kid.

I clamp the box in the vise. Then I plug in a reciprocating saw and slice it open.

Metal filings are scattered across the floor, curled in glittering piles, by the time I’m done. The box is destroyed, the top cut completely off.

There’s no diamond inside, just a bunch of papers and a very old half-melted lollipop. I would have been extremely disappointed, had I ever managed to open it as a kid.

I’m disappointed now.

I unfold the papers, and a photo falls out into my hands. A bunch of very blond boys standing in front of a huge house—one of those old-money Cape Cod mansions with a widow’s walk and columns, looking right onto the ocean. I turn it over and see three names in a spidery hand I don’t recognize: “Charles, Philip, Anne.” Guess one of them wasn’t a boy after all.

For a moment I wonder if I’m looking at the research for an old con. Then I unfold another piece of paper. It’s a birth certificate for a Philip Raeburn.

Not Sharpe, a name I always knew was as fake as the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Raeburn. My dad’s real last name. The one he gave up, the one he hid from us.

Cassel Raeburn. I try it out in my head, but it sounds ridiculous.

There’s a newspaper clipping too, one about how Philip Raeburn died in a boating accident off the shore of the Hamptons at the age of seventeen. A ridiculously expensive way to die.

The Raeburns could afford to buy anything. Certainly they could afford to buy a stolen diamond.

The door creaks open, and I turn around, startled.

“I found the milk by the door. What are you doing out here?” Barron asks. “And—what did you do to Dad’s lockbox?”

“Look,” I say, holding up the lollipop. “There really was candy in there. Go figure, right?”

Barron gapes at me with the horrified expression of someone realizing that he might be the stable brother after all.

I am back at Wallingford just after dinner. My hall master, Mr. Pascoli, gives me an odd look when I try to hand him the note my mother wrote me.

“You’re fine, Cassel. The dean already explained that you might be out for a few days.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.” I’d nearly forgotten about the deal Dean Wharton made with Sam and me. There was so much about to happen back then that taking advantage of it was a dim hope. Now that I am at Wallingford again, though, I wonder what I can really get away with.

I wonder if I could stay in bed and just sleep until I wasn’t tired anymore, for instance.

Probably not.

I don’t know what I expect when I walk into my room, but it’s not Sam, lying on the bed, his left leg wrapped with gauze. Daneca is sitting beside him and they’re playing what appears to be a very intense game of gin rummy.

Clearly Sam is already getting away with having a girl in our dorm room. I admire his gumption.

“Hey,” I say, leaning against the door frame.

“What happened to you?” Daneca asks. “We were worried.”

“I was worried,” I say, looking at Sam. “Are you okay? I mean—your leg.”

“It still hurts.” He lowers it gingerly to the floor. “I have a cane for right now, but I might have a limp, the doctor said. It might not go away.”

“That quack? I hope you got a second opinion.” The wash of guilt I feel makes the words come out harsher than I intend.

“We did the right thing,” Sam says, taking a deep breath. There is a seriousness in his face that I don’t remember being there before. Pain shows. “I don’t regret it. I almost ruined my whole future. I guess I took it for granted before—everything. The good college, the good job. I thought what you were doing seemed so exciting.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. I am very, very sorry if that’s what he thought.

“No,” he says. “Don’t be. I was stupid. And you saved me from getting into a lot of trouble.”

I look over at Daneca. Sam is always too generous, but I can trust her to tell me if she thinks I’ve done something wrong. “I never wanted you—I never wanted either of you to get hurt because of me.”

“Cassel,” Daneca says, in the exasperated affectionate tone she reserves for us when we’re being complete idiots. “You can’t blame yourself for Mina Lange. She’s not someone you brought into our lives. She goes to school here, remember? You didn’t make this happen. And you can’t blame yourself for—for whatever else you’re thinking of. We’re your friends.”

“That might be your first mistake,” I say, half under my breath.

Sam laughs. “In a good mood, are we?”

“Did you see?” Daneca asks me. “Proposition two isn’t going to pass. And Patton resigned. Well, he was arrested, so I guess he had to. You must have seen it. He even admitted that your mother hadn’t done anything wrong.”

I think about telling Daneca the truth. Of all the people I know, she’s the one who would be the most proud of me. But it feels unfair to get them involved—no matter what they say, especially since this is something far bigger and more dangerous than anything I’ve been in the middle of before.

“You know me,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not much for politics.”

She looks at me slyly. “Too bad you didn’t see it, because if I am made valedictorian of our class, I’d love to have help writing my speech, and Patton’s is the perfect model. It sets the exact right tone. But I guess if you really don’t care about that kind of thing—”

“You want to tell everyone that today’s the day you speak from your heart and confess all your crimes? Because I didn’t think you had all that much to confess.”

“So you did see it!” Sam says.

“You’re a liar, Cassel Sharpe,” Daneca says, but there’s no heat in it. “A lying liar who lies.”

“I guess I heard someone talking about it somewhere.” I smile up at the ceiling. “What do you want? A leopard can’t change his spots.”

“If the leopard was a transformation worker, he could,” Sam says.

I get the sense that maybe I don’t have to say anything. They appear to have put a theory together on their own.

Daneca grins at Sam.

I try not to think of the photo in Barron’s wallet or of the way she was smiling at my brother in the picture. I especially try not to compare it to her smile now.

>

There is a black car idling next to the driveway when I return.

I pull past it, park, and get out. As I start toward the house, the passenger-side door opens and Yulikova steps onto the grass. She’s got on a tan suit with her signature chunky necklaces. I wonder how many of the stones are charms.

I walk a little ways toward her but stop, so that she has to close the distance on her own.

“Hello, Cassel,” she says. “We’ve got some things to talk about. Why don’t you get into the car?”

I hold up the milk. “Sorry,” I say. “But I’m a little busy right now.”

“What you did—you can’t think there are no consequences.” I’m not sure if she means the speech or something worse, but I don’t much care.

“You set me up,” I say. “One big con. You can’t blame me because I turned out not to be gullible enough. You can’t blame the mark. That’s not how it works. Have some respect for the nature of the game.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “How did you find out?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I never meant to betray your trust. It was for your safety as much as anything else that I agreed we should implement—”

I hold up one gloved hand. “Just spare me the justifications. I thought you were the good guys, but there are no good guys.”

“That’s not true.” She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying. “You would never have spent a single night in jail. We weren’t going to lock you up, Cassel. My superiors felt that we needed a little leverage over you, that’s all. You haven’t exactly been trustworthy yourself.”

“You were supposed to be better than me,” I say. “Anyway, that’s done.”

“You think you know the truth, but there are more factors in play than you’re aware of. You don’t understand the larger picture. You can’t. You don’t know what chaos you’ve created.”

“Because you wanted to get rid of Patton, but you also wanted proposition two to pass. So you decided to make a martyr out of him. Two birds, one stone.”

“It’s not about what I want,” she says. “It’s bigger than that.”

“I think we’re done here.”

“You know that’s not possible. More people are aware of you now, people high up in the government. And everyone is very eager to meet you. Especially my boss.”

“That and a dollar will almost buy me a cup of coffee.”

“You signed a contract, Cassel. That’s binding.”

“Did I?” I say, smirking. “I think you should check again. I’m pretty sure you’re going to find out that I never signed anything. My name is nowhere. My name is gone.” Thank you, Sam, I think. I would have never thought a disappearing-ink pen could come in so handy.

Her irritation shows on her face for once. I feel oddly triumphant. She clears her throat. “Where’s Agent Jones?”

She says it like that’s her trump card.

I shrug. “Beats me. Did you lose him? I hope you find him, even though—Let’s face it, he and I were never close.”

“You’re not this person,” she says, waving her hand in the air to indicate me. I don’t know what she was expecting. Clearly she’s frustrated by my reaction. “You’re not this—this cold. You care about making the world a better place. Snap out of it, Cassel, before it’s too late.”

“I’ve got to go,” I say, jerking my head toward the house.

“Your mother could be brought up on charges,” she says.

Fury makes my mouth curl. I don’t care if she sees it. “So could you. I hear you used a worker kid to frame a governor. You can ruin my life, but you’ll have to destroy your own to do it. I promise you that.”

“Cassel,” she says, her voice rising several decibels. “I am the least of your worries. Do you think that if you were in China you would be free?”

“Oh, give me a break,” I say.

“Right now you’re a bigger problem than Patton was, and you saw how my superiors handled that problem. The only way this can be over is if you—”

“This is never going to be over,” I shout. “Someone will always be after me. There’s always consequences. Well, BRING IT. I am done with being afraid, and I am done with you.”

With that, I stalk back to the house. But on the porch I hesitate. I look back at Yulikova. I wait until she walks back to the gleaming black car, gets in, and is driven away. Then I sit down on the stoop.

I stare out at the yard for a long time, not really thinking about anything, mostly just shaking with anger and adrenaline.

The government is big, bigger than any one person can game. They can come after the people I care about, they can come for me, they can do something that I haven’t thought of yet. They could make their move now or a year from now. And I’m going to have to be ready. Always and forever ready, unless I want to give up everything I have and everyone I love.

Like, they could go after Lila, who shot and killed someone in cold blood. If they ever managed to figure that out, to charge her with Agent Jones’s murder, I would do anything to keep her free.

Or they could go after Barron, who works for them.

Or—

As I’m thinking, I realize I am looking out at our old barn. No one’s gone in there in years. It’s full of old furniture, rusted tools, and a bunch of stuff my parents stole and then didn’t want.

It’s where my dad taught me how to pick locks. He kept all his equipment out there, including the supersecure box. I vividly recall my father, cigarillo resting in one corner of his mouth as he worked, oiling the gears of a lock. My memory adds in the spool pins, the mortis sets, and the bolts.

I remember that no one could get into that box. Even knowing there was candy inside, we were still hopeless.

The barn is the one place that Grandad and I didn’t clean out.

I leave the milk on the stoop and walk over to the big, worn double doors, then lift the latch. The last time I was inside was in a dream. It feels dreamlike now, dust rising up with my footfalls, the only light coming through gaps in the planks, and windowpanes shaded gray with cobwebs and dirt.

It smells like rotten wood and animal habitation. Most of the furniture is covered with moth-eaten blankets, giving everything a ghostly appearance. I spot a garbage bag filled with plastic bags, and several worn cardboard boxes overstuffed with milk glass. There’s an old safe—so rusted that the door is ossified open. Inside I find only a pile of pennies, greenish and stuck together.

Dad’s worktable is covered with a cloth too. Pulling it back with a single sweep of my hand, I see the piled mess of his tools—a vise, cylinder remover, sesame decoder, hammer with interchangeable heads, the supersecure box, a bundle of twine, and a bunch of rusted picks.

If my father had the Resurrection Diamond, if he wanted to keep it, if he couldn’t sell it, then I can picture him tucking it away where no outsider would think to look and no family member was skilled enough to get into. I cast about for a few minutes and then do what I never would have thought to do as a kid.

I clamp the box in the vise. Then I plug in a reciprocating saw and slice it open.

Metal filings are scattered across the floor, curled in glittering piles, by the time I’m done. The box is destroyed, the top cut completely off.

There’s no diamond inside, just a bunch of papers and a very old half-melted lollipop. I would have been extremely disappointed, had I ever managed to open it as a kid.

I’m disappointed now.

I unfold the papers, and a photo falls out into my hands. A bunch of very blond boys standing in front of a huge house—one of those old-money Cape Cod mansions with a widow’s walk and columns, looking right onto the ocean. I turn it over and see three names in a spidery hand I don’t recognize: “Charles, Philip, Anne.” Guess one of them wasn’t a boy after all.

For a moment I wonder if I’m looking at the research for an old con. Then I unfold another piece of paper. It’s a birth certificate for a Philip Raeburn.

Not Sharpe, a name I always knew was as fake as the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Raeburn. My dad’s real last name. The one he gave up, the one he hid from us.

Cassel Raeburn. I try it out in my head, but it sounds ridiculous.

There’s a newspaper clipping too, one about how Philip Raeburn died in a boating accident off the shore of the Hamptons at the age of seventeen. A ridiculously expensive way to die.

The Raeburns could afford to buy anything. Certainly they could afford to buy a stolen diamond.

The door creaks open, and I turn around, startled.

“I found the milk by the door. What are you doing out here?” Barron asks. “And—what did you do to Dad’s lockbox?”

“Look,” I say, holding up the lollipop. “There really was candy in there. Go figure, right?”

Barron gapes at me with the horrified expression of someone realizing that he might be the stable brother after all.

I am back at Wallingford just after dinner. My hall master, Mr. Pascoli, gives me an odd look when I try to hand him the note my mother wrote me.

“You’re fine, Cassel. The dean already explained that you might be out for a few days.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.” I’d nearly forgotten about the deal Dean Wharton made with Sam and me. There was so much about to happen back then that taking advantage of it was a dim hope. Now that I am at Wallingford again, though, I wonder what I can really get away with.

I wonder if I could stay in bed and just sleep until I wasn’t tired anymore, for instance.

Probably not.

I don’t know what I expect when I walk into my room, but it’s not Sam, lying on the bed, his left leg wrapped with gauze. Daneca is sitting beside him and they’re playing what appears to be a very intense game of gin rummy.

Clearly Sam is already getting away with having a girl in our dorm room. I admire his gumption.

“Hey,” I say, leaning against the door frame.

“What happened to you?” Daneca asks. “We were worried.”

“I was worried,” I say, looking at Sam. “Are you okay? I mean—your leg.”

“It still hurts.” He lowers it gingerly to the floor. “I have a cane for right now, but I might have a limp, the doctor said. It might not go away.”

“That quack? I hope you got a second opinion.” The wash of guilt I feel makes the words come out harsher than I intend.

“We did the right thing,” Sam says, taking a deep breath. There is a seriousness in his face that I don’t remember being there before. Pain shows. “I don’t regret it. I almost ruined my whole future. I guess I took it for granted before—everything. The good college, the good job. I thought what you were doing seemed so exciting.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. I am very, very sorry if that’s what he thought.

“No,” he says. “Don’t be. I was stupid. And you saved me from getting into a lot of trouble.”

I look over at Daneca. Sam is always too generous, but I can trust her to tell me if she thinks I’ve done something wrong. “I never wanted you—I never wanted either of you to get hurt because of me.”

“Cassel,” Daneca says, in the exasperated affectionate tone she reserves for us when we’re being complete idiots. “You can’t blame yourself for Mina Lange. She’s not someone you brought into our lives. She goes to school here, remember? You didn’t make this happen. And you can’t blame yourself for—for whatever else you’re thinking of. We’re your friends.”

“That might be your first mistake,” I say, half under my breath.

Sam laughs. “In a good mood, are we?”

“Did you see?” Daneca asks me. “Proposition two isn’t going to pass. And Patton resigned. Well, he was arrested, so I guess he had to. You must have seen it. He even admitted that your mother hadn’t done anything wrong.”

I think about telling Daneca the truth. Of all the people I know, she’s the one who would be the most proud of me. But it feels unfair to get them involved—no matter what they say, especially since this is something far bigger and more dangerous than anything I’ve been in the middle of before.

“You know me,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not much for politics.”

She looks at me slyly. “Too bad you didn’t see it, because if I am made valedictorian of our class, I’d love to have help writing my speech, and Patton’s is the perfect model. It sets the exact right tone. But I guess if you really don’t care about that kind of thing—”

“You want to tell everyone that today’s the day you speak from your heart and confess all your crimes? Because I didn’t think you had all that much to confess.”

“So you did see it!” Sam says.

“You’re a liar, Cassel Sharpe,” Daneca says, but there’s no heat in it. “A lying liar who lies.”

“I guess I heard someone talking about it somewhere.” I smile up at the ceiling. “What do you want? A leopard can’t change his spots.”

“If the leopard was a transformation worker, he could,” Sam says.

I get the sense that maybe I don’t have to say anything. They appear to have put a theory together on their own.

Daneca grins at Sam.

I try not to think of the photo in Barron’s wallet or of the way she was smiling at my brother in the picture. I especially try not to compare it to her smile now.