Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

“I’m going to take off,” I tell him. “See you around.”

Agent Jones looks at me incredulously, then snorts. “You planning on walking?”

“I’ll call a friend.”

“Get in the car,” he growls, switching from amused to impatient in a single breath. There is something in his face that makes me even more certain that going with him is a bad idea.

“Make me,” I say. “I dare you.”

When he doesn’t actually lunge at me, I take out my cell phone and call Barron.

“Little brother,” he drawls, picking up on the first ring. “You need to leave school and join up with the Feds. Last night we raided a worker strip club, and I was knee-deep in naughty gloves. Did you know no one uses Velcro on tear-away gloves anymore? The new kind are held together by magnets so they just slide right off the hand—”

“That’s, uh, interesting,” I say. “But what I really need right now is a ride.”

“Where are you?” he asks.

I tell him the name of the hospital while Agent Jones watches me with a cold, furious look in his eyes. We don’t like each other. He should be relieved that he isn’t getting forced to spend any more time with me, but he’s obviously brimming with rage instead. The more I study his expression, the more unnerved I am. He’s not looking at me the way an adult looks at an obnoxious kid. He’s studying me the way a man studies his opponent.

I sit on the cold stoop and wait, letting the chill seep into my skin. It takes a while for Barron to show—long enough that I start wondering if I should call someone else. But just as I decide that I’m going to have to go inside and get something warm to drink or con a blanket from one of the nurses, Barron pulls up in a red Ferrari. He rolls down a dark tinted window and flashes me a grin.

“You stole that,” I say.

“Even better. This beautiful car was seized during a raid. Can you believe it? There’s a whole warehouse of stuff that gets confiscated and then just sits around until the paperwork is sorted out. Best warehouse ever. Come on, get in.”

I don’t need to be told twice.

Barron is looking very pleased with himself. “Not only did I manage to get myself some new wheels, but I filled up the trunk with a bunch of tins of caviar and bottles of Krug that were just sitting around. Oh, and some cell phones I am pretty sure I can resell. Altogether a pretty good Saturday. How about yourself?”

I roll my eyes, but I’m already relaxing in the warmth of the heater, leaning back against the seat. “I’ve got to tell you some stuff. Can we go somewhere?”

“Anywhere you like, kid,” Barron says.

Despite his extravagant offer, we wind up getting take-out Chinese and heading to his place in Trenton. He’s fixed it up some, replacing the broken windows he’d previously just covered in cardboard. He even bought some furniture. We sit on his new black leather sofa and put our feet up on the trunk he’s using for a coffee table. He passes me the tub of lo mein.

On the surface his place looks more normal than it used to, but when I go to the cabinet to get a glass, I see the familiar pattern of sticky notes on the fridge, reminding him of his phone number, his address, his name. Whenever he changes someone’s memories, blowback strips out some of his—and he can’t be sure which ones will go. He could lose something small, like his memory of eating dinner the night before, or something big, like the memory of our father’s funeral.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

I’d like to believe that Barron has stopped working people, the way he promised he would, that all these little reminders are here because of habit or in case of an emergency—but I’m not an idiot. That warehouse wasn’t unguarded. I’m sure someone had to be made to “remember” paperwork that let Barron load up a car with whatever he wanted and drive it out of a government building. And then that same person had to be made to forget.

When I come back to the living room, Barron is mixing a concoction of duck sauce and hot mustard on his plate. “So what’s up?” he asks.

I explain about Mom and her failed attempt to sell Zacharov back his own diamond, and the long-standing affair she appears to have had with him. Then I realize I have to explain how she stole it in the first place.

Barron looks at me like he’s considering accusing me of lying. “Mom and Zacharov?”

I shrug. “I know. It’s weird, right? I’m trying really hard not to think about it.”

“You mean about the part that if Zacharov and Mom got married, that would make you and Lila brother and sister?” He starts laughing, falling back on the cushions.

I chuck a handful of white rice at him. A few of the grains stick to his shirt. More stick to my glove.

He keeps on laughing.

“I’m going to go talk to the forger tomorrow. Some guy up in Paterson.”

“Sure, we could do that,” he says, still giggling a little.

“You want to come?”

“Of course.” He opens the chicken with black bean sauce and dumps it over his mustard and duck sauce concoction. “She’s my mother too.”

“There’s something else I should tell you,” I say.

He pauses with his hand on a packet of soy.

“Yulikova asked me if I would be willing to do something. A job.”

He goes back to pouring out the sauce and taking a first bite. “I thought you couldn’t get put to work, since you haven’t officially joined up.”

“She wants me to take out Patton.”

Barron’s brows draw together. “Take out? As in transform him?”

“No,” I say. “As in take out to dinner. She thinks we’d make a good couple.”

“So you’re going to kill him?” He regards me carefully. Then he mimes a gun with his fingers. “Boom?”

“She didn’t tell me much about the plan, but—,” I start.

He throws back his head and laughs. “You should have joined the Brennans if you were just going to become an assassin anyway. We could have made a lot of money.”

“This is different,” I say.

Barron laughs and laughs. Now that he’s off again, there’s no stopping him.

I stab at the lo mein with my plastic fork. “Shut up. It is different.”

“Please at least tell me that you’re going to get paid,” he says when he manages to catch a breath.

“They said they’d get the charges against Mom dropped.”

“Good.” He nods. “Any cold hard cash going along with that?”

I hesitate, then have to admit, “I didn’t ask.”

“You have a skill. You can do something no one else can,” Barron says. “Seriously. You know what’s good about that? It’s valuable. As in you can trade it for goods or services. Or money. Remember when I said it was wasted on you? I was so right.”

I groan and shove rice into my mouth so that I don’t decide to dump the whole carton over his head.

After we finish eating Barron calls Grandad. He tells a long and complicated series of lies about the questions the federal agents asked and how we weaseled out of answering all of them through our inherent charm and wit. Grandad cackles down the line.

When I get on, Grandad asks me if any of what Barron said was true.

“Some,” I tell him.

He stays quiet.

“Okay, very little,” I finally admit. “But everything’s okay.”

“Remember what I said. This is your mother’s trouble, not yours. Not Barron’s, either. Both of you need to stay out of it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Is Sam still there? Can I talk to him?”

Grandad gives the phone to Sam, who still sounds groggy but not all that upset to be abandoned for most of the day and the rest of tonight.

“It’s okay,” he informs me. “Your grandfather is teaching me how to play poker.”

If I know Grandad, that means what he’ll really be teaching Sam is how to cheat.

Barron offers to let me take his bed, saying that he can sleep anywhere. I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that there are beds all over town for him to slip into or just that he’s not picky about sleeping on furniture, but I take the sofa so I don’t have to find out.

He digs up a couple of blankets that used to be at the old house. They smell like home, a somewhat dusty stale odor that’s not entirely pleasant but that I inhale greedily. It reminds me of being a kid, of being safe, of sleeping late on Sundays and watching cartoons in my pajamas.

I forget where I am and try to straighten out my legs. My feet kick against the armrest, and I remember that I’m not a kid anymore.

I’m too tall to be comfortable, but I curl on the couch and manage to doze off eventually.

I wake up to the sounds of Barron making coffee. He pushes a box of cereal at me. He’s terrible in the morning. It takes him three cups of coffee before he can reliably put together a whole sentence.

I take a shower. When I come out, he’s wearing a dark gray pin-striped suit with a white T-shirt under it. His wavy hair is gelled back, and he’s got a new gold watch on his wrist. I wonder if that was in the FBI warehouse too. Either way, he looks like he made an impressive effort for a Sunday afternoon.

“What are you all dressed up for?”

Barron grins. “Clothes make the man. You want to borrow something clean?”

“I’ll muck through,” I tell him, pulling on my T-shirt from yesterday. “You look like a mobster, you know.”

“That’s another thing I’m good at that most trainees aren’t,” he says, getting out a comb and running it through his hair one last time. “No one would ever guess that I’m a federal agent.”

By the time we’re ready to leave, it’s early afternoon. We get into Barron’s ridiculous Ferrari and head upstate, toward Paterson.

“So how’s Lila?” Barron asks once we’re on the highway. “You still hung up on her?”

I give him a look. “Considering you locked her in a cage for several years, I guess she’s okay. Comparatively speaking.”

He shrugs, glancing in my direction with a sly look. “My choices were limited. Anton wanted her dead. And you surprised the hell out of us by transforming her into a living thing. After we got over the shock, it was a relief—although she made a terrible pet cat.”

“She was your girlfriend,” I say. “How could you have agreed to kill her?”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “We were never that serious about each other.”

I slam my hand down on the dashboard. “Are you crazy?”

He grins. “You’re the one who changed her into a cat. And you were in love with her.”

I look out the window. The highway is flanked by towering soundproofing walls, vines snaking through the gaps. “Maybe you made me forget almost everything, but I know I wanted to save her back then. And I almost did.”

His gloved hand touches my shoulder unexpectedly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really did start messing with your memories because Mom said it would be better for you not to know what you were. Then, when we got the idea to go into the killing business, I guess I thought that so long as you didn’t remember, nothing we made you do counted.”

I have no idea what to say in return. I settle for not saying anything at all. Instead I lean my cheek against the cool glass of the window. I look at the stretch of asphalt highway snaking in front of us, and I wonder what it would be like to leave all of this behind. No Feds. No brother. No Lila. No Mom. No mob. With just a little magic I could change my face. I could walk out of my life entirely.

Just a few fake documents and I’d be in Paris. Or Prague. Or Bangkok.

There I wouldn’t have to try to be good. There I could lie and cheat and steal. I wouldn’t really be me so it wouldn’t really count.

Change my identity. Change my name. Let Barron take care of Mom.

Next year Sam and Daneca are going to be away at college. Lila will be doing whatever bootleg business her father tells her to do. And where will I be? Killing people for Yulikova. Everything’s arranged, all for the best, and as bleak as a desert road.

Barron knocks on the side of my head. “Hey, anyone in there? You’ve been quiet for, like, fifteen minutes. You don’t have to tell me that you forgive me or anything like that—but you could say something. ‘Good talk.’ ‘Shut up.’ Whatever.”

I rub my face. “You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.”

He swallows. “Okay . . .”

I take a deep breath. “But if you want forgiveness, fine. You’ve got it. I’m not mad. Not anymore. Not at you.”

“Yeah, right. You’re pissed off at someone,” he says. “Any idiot can see that.”

“I’m just angry,” I say. “Eventually it will burn off of me or something. It has to.”

“You know, this might be your cue to say that you’re sorry about forcing me to go into this whole federal agent training program—”

“You never had it so good,” I say.

“But you didn’t know that,” he says. “I could be miserable right now, and it would be all your fault. And then you’d feel bad. Then you’d be sorry.”

“Then I might. Now I’m not,” I say. “Oh, and—good talk.”

>

“I’m going to take off,” I tell him. “See you around.”

Agent Jones looks at me incredulously, then snorts. “You planning on walking?”

“I’ll call a friend.”

“Get in the car,” he growls, switching from amused to impatient in a single breath. There is something in his face that makes me even more certain that going with him is a bad idea.

“Make me,” I say. “I dare you.”

When he doesn’t actually lunge at me, I take out my cell phone and call Barron.

“Little brother,” he drawls, picking up on the first ring. “You need to leave school and join up with the Feds. Last night we raided a worker strip club, and I was knee-deep in naughty gloves. Did you know no one uses Velcro on tear-away gloves anymore? The new kind are held together by magnets so they just slide right off the hand—”

“That’s, uh, interesting,” I say. “But what I really need right now is a ride.”

“Where are you?” he asks.

I tell him the name of the hospital while Agent Jones watches me with a cold, furious look in his eyes. We don’t like each other. He should be relieved that he isn’t getting forced to spend any more time with me, but he’s obviously brimming with rage instead. The more I study his expression, the more unnerved I am. He’s not looking at me the way an adult looks at an obnoxious kid. He’s studying me the way a man studies his opponent.

I sit on the cold stoop and wait, letting the chill seep into my skin. It takes a while for Barron to show—long enough that I start wondering if I should call someone else. But just as I decide that I’m going to have to go inside and get something warm to drink or con a blanket from one of the nurses, Barron pulls up in a red Ferrari. He rolls down a dark tinted window and flashes me a grin.

“You stole that,” I say.

“Even better. This beautiful car was seized during a raid. Can you believe it? There’s a whole warehouse of stuff that gets confiscated and then just sits around until the paperwork is sorted out. Best warehouse ever. Come on, get in.”

I don’t need to be told twice.

Barron is looking very pleased with himself. “Not only did I manage to get myself some new wheels, but I filled up the trunk with a bunch of tins of caviar and bottles of Krug that were just sitting around. Oh, and some cell phones I am pretty sure I can resell. Altogether a pretty good Saturday. How about yourself?”

I roll my eyes, but I’m already relaxing in the warmth of the heater, leaning back against the seat. “I’ve got to tell you some stuff. Can we go somewhere?”

“Anywhere you like, kid,” Barron says.

Despite his extravagant offer, we wind up getting take-out Chinese and heading to his place in Trenton. He’s fixed it up some, replacing the broken windows he’d previously just covered in cardboard. He even bought some furniture. We sit on his new black leather sofa and put our feet up on the trunk he’s using for a coffee table. He passes me the tub of lo mein.

On the surface his place looks more normal than it used to, but when I go to the cabinet to get a glass, I see the familiar pattern of sticky notes on the fridge, reminding him of his phone number, his address, his name. Whenever he changes someone’s memories, blowback strips out some of his—and he can’t be sure which ones will go. He could lose something small, like his memory of eating dinner the night before, or something big, like the memory of our father’s funeral.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

I’d like to believe that Barron has stopped working people, the way he promised he would, that all these little reminders are here because of habit or in case of an emergency—but I’m not an idiot. That warehouse wasn’t unguarded. I’m sure someone had to be made to “remember” paperwork that let Barron load up a car with whatever he wanted and drive it out of a government building. And then that same person had to be made to forget.

When I come back to the living room, Barron is mixing a concoction of duck sauce and hot mustard on his plate. “So what’s up?” he asks.

I explain about Mom and her failed attempt to sell Zacharov back his own diamond, and the long-standing affair she appears to have had with him. Then I realize I have to explain how she stole it in the first place.

Barron looks at me like he’s considering accusing me of lying. “Mom and Zacharov?”

I shrug. “I know. It’s weird, right? I’m trying really hard not to think about it.”

“You mean about the part that if Zacharov and Mom got married, that would make you and Lila brother and sister?” He starts laughing, falling back on the cushions.

I chuck a handful of white rice at him. A few of the grains stick to his shirt. More stick to my glove.

He keeps on laughing.

“I’m going to go talk to the forger tomorrow. Some guy up in Paterson.”

“Sure, we could do that,” he says, still giggling a little.

“You want to come?”

“Of course.” He opens the chicken with black bean sauce and dumps it over his mustard and duck sauce concoction. “She’s my mother too.”

“There’s something else I should tell you,” I say.

He pauses with his hand on a packet of soy.

“Yulikova asked me if I would be willing to do something. A job.”

He goes back to pouring out the sauce and taking a first bite. “I thought you couldn’t get put to work, since you haven’t officially joined up.”

“She wants me to take out Patton.”

Barron’s brows draw together. “Take out? As in transform him?”

“No,” I say. “As in take out to dinner. She thinks we’d make a good couple.”

“So you’re going to kill him?” He regards me carefully. Then he mimes a gun with his fingers. “Boom?”

“She didn’t tell me much about the plan, but—,” I start.

He throws back his head and laughs. “You should have joined the Brennans if you were just going to become an assassin anyway. We could have made a lot of money.”

“This is different,” I say.

Barron laughs and laughs. Now that he’s off again, there’s no stopping him.

I stab at the lo mein with my plastic fork. “Shut up. It is different.”

“Please at least tell me that you’re going to get paid,” he says when he manages to catch a breath.

“They said they’d get the charges against Mom dropped.”

“Good.” He nods. “Any cold hard cash going along with that?”

I hesitate, then have to admit, “I didn’t ask.”

“You have a skill. You can do something no one else can,” Barron says. “Seriously. You know what’s good about that? It’s valuable. As in you can trade it for goods or services. Or money. Remember when I said it was wasted on you? I was so right.”

I groan and shove rice into my mouth so that I don’t decide to dump the whole carton over his head.

After we finish eating Barron calls Grandad. He tells a long and complicated series of lies about the questions the federal agents asked and how we weaseled out of answering all of them through our inherent charm and wit. Grandad cackles down the line.

When I get on, Grandad asks me if any of what Barron said was true.

“Some,” I tell him.

He stays quiet.

“Okay, very little,” I finally admit. “But everything’s okay.”

“Remember what I said. This is your mother’s trouble, not yours. Not Barron’s, either. Both of you need to stay out of it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Is Sam still there? Can I talk to him?”

Grandad gives the phone to Sam, who still sounds groggy but not all that upset to be abandoned for most of the day and the rest of tonight.

“It’s okay,” he informs me. “Your grandfather is teaching me how to play poker.”

If I know Grandad, that means what he’ll really be teaching Sam is how to cheat.

Barron offers to let me take his bed, saying that he can sleep anywhere. I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that there are beds all over town for him to slip into or just that he’s not picky about sleeping on furniture, but I take the sofa so I don’t have to find out.

He digs up a couple of blankets that used to be at the old house. They smell like home, a somewhat dusty stale odor that’s not entirely pleasant but that I inhale greedily. It reminds me of being a kid, of being safe, of sleeping late on Sundays and watching cartoons in my pajamas.

I forget where I am and try to straighten out my legs. My feet kick against the armrest, and I remember that I’m not a kid anymore.

I’m too tall to be comfortable, but I curl on the couch and manage to doze off eventually.

I wake up to the sounds of Barron making coffee. He pushes a box of cereal at me. He’s terrible in the morning. It takes him three cups of coffee before he can reliably put together a whole sentence.

I take a shower. When I come out, he’s wearing a dark gray pin-striped suit with a white T-shirt under it. His wavy hair is gelled back, and he’s got a new gold watch on his wrist. I wonder if that was in the FBI warehouse too. Either way, he looks like he made an impressive effort for a Sunday afternoon.

“What are you all dressed up for?”

Barron grins. “Clothes make the man. You want to borrow something clean?”

“I’ll muck through,” I tell him, pulling on my T-shirt from yesterday. “You look like a mobster, you know.”

“That’s another thing I’m good at that most trainees aren’t,” he says, getting out a comb and running it through his hair one last time. “No one would ever guess that I’m a federal agent.”

By the time we’re ready to leave, it’s early afternoon. We get into Barron’s ridiculous Ferrari and head upstate, toward Paterson.

“So how’s Lila?” Barron asks once we’re on the highway. “You still hung up on her?”

I give him a look. “Considering you locked her in a cage for several years, I guess she’s okay. Comparatively speaking.”

He shrugs, glancing in my direction with a sly look. “My choices were limited. Anton wanted her dead. And you surprised the hell out of us by transforming her into a living thing. After we got over the shock, it was a relief—although she made a terrible pet cat.”

“She was your girlfriend,” I say. “How could you have agreed to kill her?”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “We were never that serious about each other.”

I slam my hand down on the dashboard. “Are you crazy?”

He grins. “You’re the one who changed her into a cat. And you were in love with her.”

I look out the window. The highway is flanked by towering soundproofing walls, vines snaking through the gaps. “Maybe you made me forget almost everything, but I know I wanted to save her back then. And I almost did.”

His gloved hand touches my shoulder unexpectedly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really did start messing with your memories because Mom said it would be better for you not to know what you were. Then, when we got the idea to go into the killing business, I guess I thought that so long as you didn’t remember, nothing we made you do counted.”

I have no idea what to say in return. I settle for not saying anything at all. Instead I lean my cheek against the cool glass of the window. I look at the stretch of asphalt highway snaking in front of us, and I wonder what it would be like to leave all of this behind. No Feds. No brother. No Lila. No Mom. No mob. With just a little magic I could change my face. I could walk out of my life entirely.

Just a few fake documents and I’d be in Paris. Or Prague. Or Bangkok.

There I wouldn’t have to try to be good. There I could lie and cheat and steal. I wouldn’t really be me so it wouldn’t really count.

Change my identity. Change my name. Let Barron take care of Mom.

Next year Sam and Daneca are going to be away at college. Lila will be doing whatever bootleg business her father tells her to do. And where will I be? Killing people for Yulikova. Everything’s arranged, all for the best, and as bleak as a desert road.

Barron knocks on the side of my head. “Hey, anyone in there? You’ve been quiet for, like, fifteen minutes. You don’t have to tell me that you forgive me or anything like that—but you could say something. ‘Good talk.’ ‘Shut up.’ Whatever.”

I rub my face. “You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.”

He swallows. “Okay . . .”

I take a deep breath. “But if you want forgiveness, fine. You’ve got it. I’m not mad. Not anymore. Not at you.”

“Yeah, right. You’re pissed off at someone,” he says. “Any idiot can see that.”

“I’m just angry,” I say. “Eventually it will burn off of me or something. It has to.”

“You know, this might be your cue to say that you’re sorry about forcing me to go into this whole federal agent training program—”

“You never had it so good,” I say.

“But you didn’t know that,” he says. “I could be miserable right now, and it would be all your fault. And then you’d feel bad. Then you’d be sorry.”

“Then I might. Now I’m not,” I say. “Oh, and—good talk.”