White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

Philip drugged him. The reason eludes me, but I think of the sludge and I know Philip must have done it.

“You should just stay,” Barron says for the millionth time.

“You’re going to drop him,” Philip says. “Careful.”

“Then help me,” I say, grunting.

Philip puts out his cigarette on the aluminum siding and slips his shoulder under Grandad’s arm to lift him up.

“Just bring him back into the house,” Barron says, and a look passes between them. Barron’s frown deepens. “Cassel, how are you going to get him into the house on the other end if you need Philip’s help getting him into the car?”

“He’ll have sobered up some by then,” I say.

“What if he doesn’t?” Barron calls, but Philip walks toward the car door.

For a moment I think he’s going to block my way, and I have no idea what I’ll do if he does. He opens the door, though, and holds it while I heave Grandad inside and belt him in.

As I pull out of the driveway, I look back at Philip, Barron, and Maura. Relief floods me. I’m free. I’m nearly gone.

My phone rings, startling me. Grandad doesn’t stir, even though it’s loud; the sound is turned all the way up. I watch for the rise and fall of his chest to make sure he’s still breathing.

“Hello?” I say, not even bothering to check who’s calling. I wonder how far the hospital is and whether I should go.

Philip and Barron wouldn’t kill Grandad. And if they were planning on killing him, Philip wouldn’t poison him in his own kitchen. And if he did, he sure as hell wouldn’t try and get me to put the body to bed in his guest room.

I repeat that thought to myself over and over.

“Can you hear me? It’s Daneca,” she says, whispering. “And Sam.”

I don’t know how long she’s been speaking.

I look at the clock on the dashboard. “What’s wrong? It’s, like, three in the morning.”

She tells me but I’m barely listening to her answer. My mind is going through all the possible things you can give someone to knock them out. Sleeping pills are the most obvious. They go great with booze too.

I realize the other end of the line is expectantly silent. “What?” I ask. “Can you say that again?”

“I said your cat’s disgusting,” she says slowly, clearly annoyed.

“Is she okay? Is the cat okay?”

Sam starts laughing. “The cat’s fine, but there’s a little brown mouse on Daneca’s floor with its head ripped off. Your cat killed our mouse.”

“Its tail looks like a piece of string,” Daneca says.

“The mouse?” I ask. “The mouse of legend? The one everyone’s been betting on for six months?”

“What happens if everybody loses a bet?” Sam asks. “Nobody got it right. Who the hell do we pay?”

“Who cares about that? What do I do?” Daneca says. “The cat is just staring at me, and I think there’s blood on her mouth. I look at her and see the deaths of hundreds of mice and birds. I see them just lining up to march into her mouth along an unfurling carpet of tongue like in an old cartoon. I think she wants to eat me next.”

“Pet the cat, dude,” says Sam. “She brought you a present. She wants you to tell her how badass she is.”

“You are a tiny, tiny killing machine,” Daneca coos.

“What’s she doing?” I ask.

“Purring!” says Daneca. She sounds delighted. “Good kitty. Who’s an amazing killing machine? That’s right! You are! You are a brutal, brutal tiny lion! Yes, you are.”

Sam laughs so hard he chokes. “What is wrong with you? Seriously.”

“She likes it,” Daneca says.

“I hate to be the one to have to point this out to you,” he says, “but she doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Maybe she does,” I say. “Who can tell, right? She’s purring.”

“Whatever, dude. So, do we keep the money?”

“It’s either that or release another mouse into the walls.”

“Right, then,” Sam says. “We keep the money.”

I drive the rest of the way home, unbuckle Grandad, and shake him. When that doesn’t work, I slap him in the face hard enough that he grunts and opens his eyes a little.

“Mary?” he says, which freaks me out because that’s my grandmother’s name and she’s been gone a long time.

“Hold on to me,” I say, but his legs are rubbery and he’s not much help. We go slowly. I bring him right into the bathroom and let him slouch on the tiles while I mix up a cocktail of hydrogen peroxide and water.

When he starts puking, I figure that my Wallingford’s AP chemistry class was good for something. I wonder if this would be a good argument to give Dean Wharton in favor of letting me back in.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“HEY, GET UP,” SOMEONE is saying. I blink in confusion. I am lying on the downstairs couch and Philip’s standing over me. “You sleep like the dead.”

“If the dead snored,” says Barron. “Hey, good job in here. The living room looks great. Cleaner than I’ve ever seen it.”

Dread coils around my throat, choking me.

I look over at Grandad. He’s still passed out in the reclining chair with a bucket next to him. Grandad was sick for hours, but he seemed fine by the time he fell asleep. Coherent. I would have thought all the noise would have woken him. “What did you give him?” I ask, throwing a leg out from under the afghan.

“He’s fine,” says Philip. “I promise. It will wear off by morning.”

I am reassured by the rise and fall of Grandad’s chest. As I watch him sleep for a moment I think I see his eyelids flicker.

“You always worry,” Barron mumbles. “And we always tell you he’s fine. They’re always fine. Why do you worry so much?”

Philip shoots him a look. “Leave Cassel alone. Family looks out for family.”

Barron laughs. “That’s why he shouldn’t worry. We’re here to look after them both.” He turns to me. “Better get ready fast, though, worrywart. You know how much Anton hates to wait.”

I don’t know what else to do, so I pull on my jeans and zip a hoodie over the T-shirt I slept in.

They seem totally comfortable waiting for me, so comfortable that, thinking over what Barron said, I come to the groggy conclusion that this has all happened before. They’ve gotten me out of this house—maybe my dorm—and I don’t remember a thing. Have I ever panicked? I’m panicking now.

I grab my gloves and slide on a pair of work boots. My hands are trembling with adrenaline and fear—enough that I can barely get the gloves on.

“Let me see your pockets,” Philip says.

“What?” I stop tying the laces to look up at him.

He sighs. “Turn them inside out.”

I do, thinking of the stinging cut in my calf, the charms healing inside my skin. He rubs the pocket cloth, checking for something hidden in it, then pats down my clothes. My hands fist, and I want to take a swing at Philip so much that my arms ache from the strain of not hitting him. “Looking for a mint?”

“We need to know what you’re bringing, is all,” Philip says mildly.

Adrenaline has pushed back exhaustion. I’m wide awake and starting to get angry.

He looks at Barron, who reaches over for my arm. He’s not wearing a glove.

I pull back. “Don’t touch me!”

It’s funny how instinct is; I keep my voice low when I say it. Because in some ridiculous part of my head this is still family business. It doesn’t even occur to me to shout for help.

Barron holds up both his hands. “Hey, okay. But this is important. It takes a few minutes for the old memories to settle. Think back. We’re in this together. We’re on the same side.”

That’s when I realize they’ve already worked me. Before they woke me up. My skin crawls with horror and I have to take quick, shallow breaths to keep from running away from them, from the house. I nod, buying myself what time I can. I have no idea what memories they expect me to have.

I watch Barron pull his glove back on and flex his hand, stretching the leather.

I realize what a bare hand means.

Philip isn’t the one behind the stolen memories. Anton’s not the memory worker.

Barron is—he must be. He didn’t lose his memories because he was worked; he’s not absentminded. Every time he takes a memory from me or Maura or all the other people he must be stealing them from, he loses one of his own. Blowback. I search my memories for an occasion when he worked for luck, but there’s nothing, just a dim sense that I know he’s a luck worker. I can’t even recall when I started “knowing” that.

Now that I focus on it, the memory doesn’t even seem real. It slips away from me, like the blurred copy of a copy.

“You ready?” Philip asks.

I stand, but my legs are shaky. It’s one thing to suspect my brother was working me, another to stand next to him once I know he’s done it. I’m the best con artist in this family, I reassure myself. I can lie. I can seem calm until I am calm.

But another part of my mind is howling, rattling around and scraping for other false memories. I know it’s impossible to look for what’s not there, and yet I do, running through the last few days—weeks, years—in my mind, as though I will stumble in the gaps.

How much of my life has been reimagined by Barron? Panic chills my skin like a sickness.

We walk down the stairs of the house quietly, out to a Mercedes parked on the street with the headlights turned down and the engine humming. Anton’s in the driver’s seat. He looks older than the last time I saw him, and there’s a scar that runs over the edge of his upper lip. It matches the keloid scar stretching across his neck.

“What took you so long?” Anton says, lighting a cigarette and throwing the match out the window.

Barron slides into the backseat next to me. “What’s the rush? We’ve got all night. This one here doesn’t have school in the morning.” He musses my hair.

I shove away his gloved hand. The annoyance feels surreally familiar. It’s like Barron thinks we’re on a family car trip.

Philip gets into the passenger seat, looks back at us and grins.

I have to figure out what they think I know. I have to be smart. It sounds like they might believe some disorientation but not complete cluelessness. “What are we doing tonight?”

“We’re going to rehearse for this Wednesday,” Anton says. “For the assassination.”

I’m sure I flinch. My heart hammers. Assassination?

“And then you’re going to block the memory,” I say, fighting to keep my voice steady. I remember what Crooked Annie said about blocking access to memories so that the block can be removed later and the memory loss reversed. I wonder if we’ve rehearsed before. If so, I’m screwed. “Why do you have to keep making me forget?”

“We’re protecting you,” Philip says automatically.

Right.

I lean forward in the seat. “So my job is the same?” I say, which seems vague enough not to show my ignorance, but encourages an answer.

Barron nods. “All you do is walk up to Zacharov and put your bare hand on his wrist. Then you change his heart to stone.”

I swallow, concentrating on keeping my breathing even. They can’t mean what they’re saying. “Wouldn’t shooting him be easier?” I ask, because the whole thing is ridiculous.

Anton looks at me with hard eyes. “You sure he can do this? All this memory magic—he’s unstable. This is my future we’re talking about.”

My future. Right. He’s Zacharov’s nephew. Anything happens to the man in charge, the mantle slips onto his shoulders.

“Don’t punk out on us,” Philip says to me in his I’m-being-patient voice. “It’s going to be a piece of cake. We’ve been planning this for a long time.”

“What do you know about the Resurrection Diamond?” Barron asks.

“Gave Rasputin immortality or something,” I say, deliberately vague. “Zacharov won it at an auction in Paris.”

Barron frowns, like he didn’t expect me to know even that much. “The Resurrection Diamond is thirty-seven carats—the size of a grown man’s thumbnail,” he says. “It’s colored a faint red, as though a single bead of blood dropped into a pool of water.”

I wonder if he’s quoting someone. The Christie’s catalog. Something. If I just concentrate on the details like it’s a puzzle, then maybe I won’t completely freak out.

“Not only did it protect Rasputin from multiple assassination attempts, but after him it went to other people. There have been reports of assassin’s guns turning out not to be loaded at the critical moment, or poison somehow finding its way into the poisoner’s cup. Zacharov was shot at on three separate occasions and the bullets didn’t hit him. Whoever has the Resurrection Diamond can’t be killed.”

“I thought that thing was a myth or something?” I say. “A legend.”

“Oh, so now he’s an expert on working,” Anton says.

But Barron’s eyes are shining. “I’ve been researching the Resurrection Diamond a long time.”

I wonder how much of that research he even remembers or if it has been winnowed down to just a few phrases. Maybe he wasn’t quoting an auction catalog; maybe he was quoting one of his notebooks.

>

Philip drugged him. The reason eludes me, but I think of the sludge and I know Philip must have done it.

“You should just stay,” Barron says for the millionth time.

“You’re going to drop him,” Philip says. “Careful.”

“Then help me,” I say, grunting.

Philip puts out his cigarette on the aluminum siding and slips his shoulder under Grandad’s arm to lift him up.

“Just bring him back into the house,” Barron says, and a look passes between them. Barron’s frown deepens. “Cassel, how are you going to get him into the house on the other end if you need Philip’s help getting him into the car?”

“He’ll have sobered up some by then,” I say.

“What if he doesn’t?” Barron calls, but Philip walks toward the car door.

For a moment I think he’s going to block my way, and I have no idea what I’ll do if he does. He opens the door, though, and holds it while I heave Grandad inside and belt him in.

As I pull out of the driveway, I look back at Philip, Barron, and Maura. Relief floods me. I’m free. I’m nearly gone.

My phone rings, startling me. Grandad doesn’t stir, even though it’s loud; the sound is turned all the way up. I watch for the rise and fall of his chest to make sure he’s still breathing.

“Hello?” I say, not even bothering to check who’s calling. I wonder how far the hospital is and whether I should go.

Philip and Barron wouldn’t kill Grandad. And if they were planning on killing him, Philip wouldn’t poison him in his own kitchen. And if he did, he sure as hell wouldn’t try and get me to put the body to bed in his guest room.

I repeat that thought to myself over and over.

“Can you hear me? It’s Daneca,” she says, whispering. “And Sam.”

I don’t know how long she’s been speaking.

I look at the clock on the dashboard. “What’s wrong? It’s, like, three in the morning.”

She tells me but I’m barely listening to her answer. My mind is going through all the possible things you can give someone to knock them out. Sleeping pills are the most obvious. They go great with booze too.

I realize the other end of the line is expectantly silent. “What?” I ask. “Can you say that again?”

“I said your cat’s disgusting,” she says slowly, clearly annoyed.

“Is she okay? Is the cat okay?”

Sam starts laughing. “The cat’s fine, but there’s a little brown mouse on Daneca’s floor with its head ripped off. Your cat killed our mouse.”

“Its tail looks like a piece of string,” Daneca says.

“The mouse?” I ask. “The mouse of legend? The one everyone’s been betting on for six months?”

“What happens if everybody loses a bet?” Sam asks. “Nobody got it right. Who the hell do we pay?”

“Who cares about that? What do I do?” Daneca says. “The cat is just staring at me, and I think there’s blood on her mouth. I look at her and see the deaths of hundreds of mice and birds. I see them just lining up to march into her mouth along an unfurling carpet of tongue like in an old cartoon. I think she wants to eat me next.”

“Pet the cat, dude,” says Sam. “She brought you a present. She wants you to tell her how badass she is.”

“You are a tiny, tiny killing machine,” Daneca coos.

“What’s she doing?” I ask.

“Purring!” says Daneca. She sounds delighted. “Good kitty. Who’s an amazing killing machine? That’s right! You are! You are a brutal, brutal tiny lion! Yes, you are.”

Sam laughs so hard he chokes. “What is wrong with you? Seriously.”

“She likes it,” Daneca says.

“I hate to be the one to have to point this out to you,” he says, “but she doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Maybe she does,” I say. “Who can tell, right? She’s purring.”

“Whatever, dude. So, do we keep the money?”

“It’s either that or release another mouse into the walls.”

“Right, then,” Sam says. “We keep the money.”

I drive the rest of the way home, unbuckle Grandad, and shake him. When that doesn’t work, I slap him in the face hard enough that he grunts and opens his eyes a little.

“Mary?” he says, which freaks me out because that’s my grandmother’s name and she’s been gone a long time.

“Hold on to me,” I say, but his legs are rubbery and he’s not much help. We go slowly. I bring him right into the bathroom and let him slouch on the tiles while I mix up a cocktail of hydrogen peroxide and water.

When he starts puking, I figure that my Wallingford’s AP chemistry class was good for something. I wonder if this would be a good argument to give Dean Wharton in favor of letting me back in.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“HEY, GET UP,” SOMEONE is saying. I blink in confusion. I am lying on the downstairs couch and Philip’s standing over me. “You sleep like the dead.”

“If the dead snored,” says Barron. “Hey, good job in here. The living room looks great. Cleaner than I’ve ever seen it.”

Dread coils around my throat, choking me.

I look over at Grandad. He’s still passed out in the reclining chair with a bucket next to him. Grandad was sick for hours, but he seemed fine by the time he fell asleep. Coherent. I would have thought all the noise would have woken him. “What did you give him?” I ask, throwing a leg out from under the afghan.

“He’s fine,” says Philip. “I promise. It will wear off by morning.”

I am reassured by the rise and fall of Grandad’s chest. As I watch him sleep for a moment I think I see his eyelids flicker.

“You always worry,” Barron mumbles. “And we always tell you he’s fine. They’re always fine. Why do you worry so much?”

Philip shoots him a look. “Leave Cassel alone. Family looks out for family.”

Barron laughs. “That’s why he shouldn’t worry. We’re here to look after them both.” He turns to me. “Better get ready fast, though, worrywart. You know how much Anton hates to wait.”

I don’t know what else to do, so I pull on my jeans and zip a hoodie over the T-shirt I slept in.

They seem totally comfortable waiting for me, so comfortable that, thinking over what Barron said, I come to the groggy conclusion that this has all happened before. They’ve gotten me out of this house—maybe my dorm—and I don’t remember a thing. Have I ever panicked? I’m panicking now.

I grab my gloves and slide on a pair of work boots. My hands are trembling with adrenaline and fear—enough that I can barely get the gloves on.

“Let me see your pockets,” Philip says.

“What?” I stop tying the laces to look up at him.

He sighs. “Turn them inside out.”

I do, thinking of the stinging cut in my calf, the charms healing inside my skin. He rubs the pocket cloth, checking for something hidden in it, then pats down my clothes. My hands fist, and I want to take a swing at Philip so much that my arms ache from the strain of not hitting him. “Looking for a mint?”

“We need to know what you’re bringing, is all,” Philip says mildly.

Adrenaline has pushed back exhaustion. I’m wide awake and starting to get angry.

He looks at Barron, who reaches over for my arm. He’s not wearing a glove.

I pull back. “Don’t touch me!”

It’s funny how instinct is; I keep my voice low when I say it. Because in some ridiculous part of my head this is still family business. It doesn’t even occur to me to shout for help.

Barron holds up both his hands. “Hey, okay. But this is important. It takes a few minutes for the old memories to settle. Think back. We’re in this together. We’re on the same side.”

That’s when I realize they’ve already worked me. Before they woke me up. My skin crawls with horror and I have to take quick, shallow breaths to keep from running away from them, from the house. I nod, buying myself what time I can. I have no idea what memories they expect me to have.

I watch Barron pull his glove back on and flex his hand, stretching the leather.

I realize what a bare hand means.

Philip isn’t the one behind the stolen memories. Anton’s not the memory worker.

Barron is—he must be. He didn’t lose his memories because he was worked; he’s not absentminded. Every time he takes a memory from me or Maura or all the other people he must be stealing them from, he loses one of his own. Blowback. I search my memories for an occasion when he worked for luck, but there’s nothing, just a dim sense that I know he’s a luck worker. I can’t even recall when I started “knowing” that.

Now that I focus on it, the memory doesn’t even seem real. It slips away from me, like the blurred copy of a copy.

“You ready?” Philip asks.

I stand, but my legs are shaky. It’s one thing to suspect my brother was working me, another to stand next to him once I know he’s done it. I’m the best con artist in this family, I reassure myself. I can lie. I can seem calm until I am calm.

But another part of my mind is howling, rattling around and scraping for other false memories. I know it’s impossible to look for what’s not there, and yet I do, running through the last few days—weeks, years—in my mind, as though I will stumble in the gaps.

How much of my life has been reimagined by Barron? Panic chills my skin like a sickness.

We walk down the stairs of the house quietly, out to a Mercedes parked on the street with the headlights turned down and the engine humming. Anton’s in the driver’s seat. He looks older than the last time I saw him, and there’s a scar that runs over the edge of his upper lip. It matches the keloid scar stretching across his neck.

“What took you so long?” Anton says, lighting a cigarette and throwing the match out the window.

Barron slides into the backseat next to me. “What’s the rush? We’ve got all night. This one here doesn’t have school in the morning.” He musses my hair.

I shove away his gloved hand. The annoyance feels surreally familiar. It’s like Barron thinks we’re on a family car trip.

Philip gets into the passenger seat, looks back at us and grins.

I have to figure out what they think I know. I have to be smart. It sounds like they might believe some disorientation but not complete cluelessness. “What are we doing tonight?”

“We’re going to rehearse for this Wednesday,” Anton says. “For the assassination.”

I’m sure I flinch. My heart hammers. Assassination?

“And then you’re going to block the memory,” I say, fighting to keep my voice steady. I remember what Crooked Annie said about blocking access to memories so that the block can be removed later and the memory loss reversed. I wonder if we’ve rehearsed before. If so, I’m screwed. “Why do you have to keep making me forget?”

“We’re protecting you,” Philip says automatically.

Right.

I lean forward in the seat. “So my job is the same?” I say, which seems vague enough not to show my ignorance, but encourages an answer.

Barron nods. “All you do is walk up to Zacharov and put your bare hand on his wrist. Then you change his heart to stone.”

I swallow, concentrating on keeping my breathing even. They can’t mean what they’re saying. “Wouldn’t shooting him be easier?” I ask, because the whole thing is ridiculous.

Anton looks at me with hard eyes. “You sure he can do this? All this memory magic—he’s unstable. This is my future we’re talking about.”

My future. Right. He’s Zacharov’s nephew. Anything happens to the man in charge, the mantle slips onto his shoulders.

“Don’t punk out on us,” Philip says to me in his I’m-being-patient voice. “It’s going to be a piece of cake. We’ve been planning this for a long time.”

“What do you know about the Resurrection Diamond?” Barron asks.

“Gave Rasputin immortality or something,” I say, deliberately vague. “Zacharov won it at an auction in Paris.”

Barron frowns, like he didn’t expect me to know even that much. “The Resurrection Diamond is thirty-seven carats—the size of a grown man’s thumbnail,” he says. “It’s colored a faint red, as though a single bead of blood dropped into a pool of water.”

I wonder if he’s quoting someone. The Christie’s catalog. Something. If I just concentrate on the details like it’s a puzzle, then maybe I won’t completely freak out.

“Not only did it protect Rasputin from multiple assassination attempts, but after him it went to other people. There have been reports of assassin’s guns turning out not to be loaded at the critical moment, or poison somehow finding its way into the poisoner’s cup. Zacharov was shot at on three separate occasions and the bullets didn’t hit him. Whoever has the Resurrection Diamond can’t be killed.”

“I thought that thing was a myth or something?” I say. “A legend.”

“Oh, so now he’s an expert on working,” Anton says.

But Barron’s eyes are shining. “I’ve been researching the Resurrection Diamond a long time.”

I wonder how much of that research he even remembers or if it has been winnowed down to just a few phrases. Maybe he wasn’t quoting an auction catalog; maybe he was quoting one of his notebooks.