White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

I look around the cafeteria, but no one seems close enough to hear. “You told her I was a worker?”

Sam looks down quickly. “We’ve been hanging out a lot, what with the play and all. I’m sorry. Sorry. I know that wasn’t cool.”

Of course. Normal people gossip. Normal people tell each other things, especially when they’re trying to impress each other. I guess I should feel betrayed, but all I feel is relief.

I’m tired of pretending.

“Are you guys a thing?” I ask. “A boyfriendly-girlfriendly thing?”

“Yeah,” Daneca says, her expression some combination of pleasure and embarrassment.

Sam looks like he’s going to pass out.

“That’s great,” I say. “I didn’t mean to lie to your mother, Daneca. I didn’t know.” But I know I wouldn’t have told her. I would have lied; I just didn’t get a chance.

“Are you going out with that girl?” she asks. “The one you were sleeping with?”

That startles a laugh out of me. “No.”

“So, what, you were just—”

“We weren’t,” I say quickly. “Believe me, we weren’t. For one thing, she’s probably insane. And for another, she hates me.”

“Okay, so who is she?” Daneca asks.

“I thought you’d want to know what I am.”

“I want you to believe you can trust me. And Sam. You can trust us.” She pauses. “You have to trust somebody.”

I bow my head. She’s right that if I want any plan to succeed, I’ll need help. “Her name is Lila Zacharov.”

Daneca gapes at me. “The girl that disappeared back, like, when we were in middle school?”

“You heard of her?”

“Sure,” Daneca says, picking up one of my Tater Tots. Oil soaks her glove. “Everyone heard about it. A crime family princess. Her case was on the news a lot. My mom got weird about letting me go anywhere by myself after it happened.” She puts the tot into her mouth. “So, what really happened to her?”

I hesitate, but it’s all or nothing now. “She was turned into a cat,” I say. I can feel my face twisting into an awkward grimace. It feels so unnatural to tell the truth.

Daneca chokes, spitting the food into her hand.

“A transformation worker?” Daneca says. Then, after a moment, she whispers. “The cat?”

“That’s crazy,” says Sam.

“I know you think that I’m making this up,” I say, rubbing my face.

“We don’t,” she says, and she shifts a little.

Sam winces. I think she kicked him under the table. “I didn’t mean crazy like ‘You’re crazy,’” he says. “I meant it like ‘Whoa.’”

“Sure. Okay.” I’m not sure if they believe me, but I feel a dizzy sense of hope.

It occurs to me that I’ve done exactly what I need to in order to set up Daneca and Sam for a con job. They’re already invested. They trust me. They’ve seen me pull a scam before. This is bigger stakes; I just have to promise them a bigger score.

My phone buzzes and I look down. It’s a number I don’t know. I flip it open and bring it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“This is what I want you to do,” says Lila. “You’re going to go to the party on Wednesday and pretend to work my dad—the same way you were supposed to. I’m trusting you to fake it. I think Dad’s smart enough to go along with you.”

“That’s the plan?”

“That’s your part. I can’t talk for long, so you have to listen. A few minutes later I’m going to come through the door with a gun, shoot Anton and save Dad. My part. Simple.”

There is so much that can go wrong with that plan that I don’t even know where to start. “Lila—”

“I even got your brother Philip out of it—just like you wanted,” she says.

“How?” I ask, startled.

“I told my bodyguard he was poking around the penthouse and saw me. They let me lock him up here. That means we just have Barron and Anton to worry about.”

Just Barron and Anton. I rub the bridge of my nose. “You said you were going to keep both my brothers out of it.”

“Our arrangement has changed,” she says. “There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“No one here is supposed to carry a gun at the party. They won’t let me have one.”

“I don’t have a—” I stop myself. Really not a good idea to talk about me and guns in school—especially not in the same sentence. “I don’t have one.”

“There’s going to be a metal detector,” she says. “Get one and think of a way to get it in.”

“That’s impossible,” I say.

“You owe me,” says Lila. Her voice is as soft as ash.

“I know,” I say, defeated. “I know that.”

The line goes dead.

I am left staring at the cafeteria wall, trying to convince myself that she isn’t setting me up.

“Did something happen?” Sam asks.

“I’ve got to go,” I say. “Class is going to start.”

“We’ll skip class,” says Daneca.

I shake my head. “Not on my first day back.”

“We’ll meet up at activities period,” Sam says. “Outside the theater. And then you’re going to tell us what’s going on.”

On the way to class, I call back the number Lila called from.

A man answers; not Zacharov. “Is she there?” I ask.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he says gruffly.

“Just tell her I need two more tickets for Wednesday.”

“There’s no one here—”

“Just tell her,” I say.

I have to believe he does.

Leaning against the brick wall of the building, I start talking. Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

I don’t play them. I don’t even try. I just start at the beginning and tell them about being the only nonworker in a family of workers. I tell them about Lila and thinking that I’d killed her, about finding myself on the roof.

“How could all of you be curse workers?” Sam asks.

“Working is like green eyes,” Daneca says. “Sometimes it just shows up in families, but if the parents are both workers, worker kids are more likely. Like, look at how almost one percent of Australians are workers, because the country was founded as a worker penal colony, but only, like, one one-hundredth of a percent of people in the U.S. are workers.”

“Oh,” says Sam. I don’t think that he was expecting such a comprehensive answer. I know I wasn’t.

Daneca shrugs.

He turns to me. “So, what kind of worker are you?”

“He’s probably a luck worker,” says Daneca. “Everyone’s a luck worker.”

“He’s not,” Sam says. “He’d tell us that.”

“What I am . . . doesn’t matter. The point is that my brothers want me to kill this guy and I don’t want to do it.”

“So you’re a death worker,” Sam says.

Daneca punches him in the arm, and despite being huge, he flinches. “Ow.”

I groan. “Look, it really doesn’t matter because I’m not going to work anyone, okay?”

“Can you just bail?” Sam asks. “Skip town?”

I nod for a moment, then shake my head. “Not going to.”

“Let me try to understand,” Sam says. “You believe your brothers can potentially make you kill someone, but you’re going to stick around and let them try. What the hell?”

“I believe,” I say, “that I am a very clever young man with two fantastically clever friends. And I further believe that one of those friends has been looking for an opportunity to display his expertise in fake firearms.”

At that, Sam’s eyes take on an acquisitive gleam. “Really? The guy who’s getting shot has to put the wires through his pants, put the trigger in his pocket or something. And it would have to be timed so it happens at the exact moment as the gunshot. Unless you’re talking about faking death work. That’s a whole lot easier, really.”

“Gunshots only,” I say.

“Wait,” Daneca says. “What is it—exactly—that you’re planning on doing?”

“I have a couple of ideas,” I say, as innocently as possible. “Mostly bad ones.”

We talk through the plan a dozen times at least. We refine it down from the ridiculous to the unlikely to something that might work. Then, instead of going to dinner in the cafeteria, they drive me over to Barron’s house and I show them how to pick a lock.

Without Grandad the house feels empty and enormous. I miss the teetering piles as I brew a pot of coffee. This house feels unfamiliar and disturbingly full of possibilities. I spread out the new notebooks in a fan in front of me, crack my knuckles, and get ready for a long night.

When I wake up Tuesday morning with drool darkening the cuff of my shirt and Sam hitting the horn in the driveway, I barely manage to brush my teeth before I stumble out the door.

He hands me a cup of coffee. “Did you sleep in those clothes?” he asks.

I almost can’t stand the thought of drinking more coffee, but I do. “Sleep?” I ask.

“You have blue ink on your cheek,” he says.

I flip down the visor and look in the tiny mirror. My face scruff is looking scruffier and my eyes are bloodshot. I look terrible. The smear of ink across my jawline is the least of my problems.

At school I am so out of it that Ms. Noyes takes me aside and asks if everything is okay at home. Then she checks to see if my pupils are dilated. Dr. Stewart tells me to shave.

I fall asleep in the back of the debate team meeting. I wake up in the middle of a debate about whether or not to wake me. Then I drag myself over to the drama department for a tutorial from Sam on weapons.

I wolf down dinner and then head out to the parking lot with Sam.

“Mr. Sharpe,” Valerio calls, walking toward us. “Mr. Yu. I hope you weren’t thinking of going off campus.”

“I’m just going to drive Cassel home,” Sam says.

“You have a half hour to get back before study hall starts,” he says, pointing to his watch.

I go back to the table and the notebooks and wind up sleeping on the downstairs couch with all the lights on. There’s so much work to do. I don’t remember half of what I write and when I look at the words in the morning, they don’t look like I wrote them at all.

Sam arrives right on time.

“Can I borrow your car?” I say. “I don’t think I’m going to school today. I’ve got a big night.”

He hands over the keys. “You’ll want a hearse of your own when you feel how this thing hugs the road.”

I drive him to school, then I break back into Barron’s house. I’m the best kind of thief, the kind that leaves behind items equal in value to those he’s stolen.

Then I go home and shave until my skin is as slick as any slickster’s.

* * *

I’m so exhausted that I fall asleep at four and don’t wake up until Barron shakes my arm.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” says Barron, sitting in the chair I’ve never liked, with his arms folded. He rocks back, pushing the front legs off the floor with his weight.

Anton leans against the door frame leading into the dining room. A toothpick rests on the swell of his bottom lip. “Better get dressed, kid.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask, trying to sound sincere. I walk past them into the kitchen and pour myself some of the day-old coffee. It tastes a little bit like battery acid, but in a good way.

“We’re going to a party,” Barron says making a face when he sees what I’m doing. “In the city. It’s going to be pretty swank. Lots of hoodlums.”

“Philip’s stuck,” says Anton. “Zacharov sent him on an errand at the last minute.” I know that’s not true, but I can’t tell if Anton is worried. I can imagine Lila sending him a message with Philip’s phone.

I rub my hand over my eyes. “You want me to come?”

Anton and Barron exchange glances. “Yeah,” Barron says. “I thought we told you about it.”

“No—look, you guys go ahead. I’ve got a lot of homework.”

Anton takes the cup out of my hand and spits his toothpick into it. “Don’t be stupid. No kid your age wants to sit home doing homework instead of partying. Now get upstairs and get in the shower.”

I go. The shower feels like hot needles on my back, relaxing my muscles. There’s a spider—one I missed—hunched in a corner of the ceiling, tending a knot of eggs. I shampoo my hair and watch the beads of water catch in her web.

When I step out into the foggy bathroom, the door is open and Barron’s there to hand me a towel. He gives me a quick glance before I wrap it around me. I try to turn to one side, but I’m not fast enough.

“What’s that on your leg?”

I realize that naked means easy to check for amulets.

“Hey,” I say, “there’s this thing called privacy. You might have heard of it.”

He grabs my shoulder. “Let me see your leg.”

I clutch the towel tighter. “It’s just a cut.”

He lets me push past him into the hall, but Anton’s waiting in my bedroom.