I shake my head. “It’s just dreams.”
I don’t want Lila to see that I hoped the dreams were from her, wanted them to be clues that added up to something, wished for them to be something that could just stop. I didn’t want more evidence that the inside of my head is an ugly place.
She drops her hand and looks at me, head tilted to one side. For a moment I am flooded with nostalgia for us being kids, for my own uncomplicated and completely impossible yearning.
“Tell me,” she says.
“I can’t,” I say, shaking my head again.
There is a sound in the hallway, a door shutting and then footsteps. Lila looks toward her closet, and I start to pad my way toward it. Then I hear the flush of a toilet.
I sigh and lean against the wall.
“Come here,” she whispers recklessly, opening the covers. “Get under. You’ll be hidden if someone comes in.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a—,” I begin.
“Shhhh. ” She cuts me off, smiling in a way that suggests that she’s mocking her own motivations before I get the chance. “Come on. Quick.”
It’s not that I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. It’s that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me. I get under the covers. They’re warm from being against her skin, and they carry her smell—soap and the faint trace of ash. When she throws an arm over my torso, urging me to press against her, I do.
Her skin is soft and scorchingly hot after the cool night air. Her leg twines around mine. It feels so good, I have to choke back a gasp.
It’s so easy. Wrong, but easy. There are so many things I want to say to her, and they’re all unfair. I kiss her instead, smothering the unutterable I love you. I have always loved you against her tongue. Her mouth opens under mine with a whimper.
When she pulls her tank top over her head and throws it onto the floor, I am hollowed out, empty of everything but gnawing self-hate. When her bare fingers thread through my hair, even that fades away. There is nothing but her.
“I’m a good pretend girlfriend,” she says, like she’s telling a joke that’s just between us.
We should really stop.
Everything slows to her skin, the swell of her lip between my teeth, the arch of her bare back. My hands slide to her hip bones and the edge of her cotton under-pants.
“The best,” I say. My voice sounds unfamiliar, like I’ve been screaming.
Lila’s mouth moves against my shoulder. I can feel her smile.
I push her hair gently back from her cheek. I can feel her heartbeat throbbing in the pulse at her throat, measuring out the moments before she’s gone.
The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off—soon—she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.
I should stop, but there’s no point in stopping. Because I’m not strong enough—eventually, I won’t stop.
I thought the question was “Will I or won’t I?”
But that’s not the question at all.
It’s “When?”
Because I will.
It’s just a matter of time. It’s now.
Lila kisses me again, and even that thought spirals away. I close my eyes.
“We can do whatever you want,” I say, voice ragged. “But you have to tell me—”
The sound of shattering glass seems impossibly loud. I am up on my knees in the bed, cold air from outside sobering me before I really understand what’s happening. But then I see the tableau: the jagged outline of what’s left of the window, a rock lying in the glittering fragments on the floor, and a girl turning to run.
For a moment my gaze locks with Audrey’s. Then she’s halfway across the quad, rain boots sinking in the dirt.
Lila’s bent over the stone, looking dazed, a crumpled piece of paper in her hand. “There was a note taped to it. It says ‘Die, curse worker.’” She looks out the window. Too late. Audrey’s gone.
I hear footsteps in the hall, the banging of doors. Voices.
“You have to hide,” Lila whispers. She’s still bare to the waist. It’s really distracting.
I look around the room instead of looking at her. There’s nowhere to go—under the bed and in the closet might work for a quick room check, but not something like this.
All I can think to do is change myself.
I have never transformed myself beyond a slight changing of my hands, and only the terror of getting both of us thrown out of school is enough to make me concentrate. I jerk my body into shifting. It happens fast; I’m getting better. I fall forward onto the pads of four feet. I want to shout, but what comes out of my mouth is a yowl.
“A black cat?” Lila snorts, leaning down. Her fingers sink into my fur as she lifts me up. I’m glad she’s holding me, because the shift in perspective is dizzying. I’m not sure how to manage my feet.
Someone, probably her hall master, bangs on the door. “What’s going on in there? Ms. Zacharov, you better open up.”
Lila leans out the remains of the window, swinging my new body over the quad. My tail lashes back and forth without my knowing how I’m making that happen. It’s a long way down.
“Too far,” she says suddenly. “You’re going to hurt your—”
She’s forgotten that I’m not going to look like a normal cat in a moment. I squirm, twisting until I can bite her hand.
“Ow!” she yells, and lets go.
The air rushes past me, too fast for me to make any sound. I try to keep my limbs loose, not to brace myself for impact, but hitting the ground feels like a punch in the chest. My breath goes out of me.
I barely manage to crawl into the bushes before the blowback hits.
Everything aches. I lift my head to see a pink light glowing behind the stretch of trees near the track. Morning.
I’m still a cat.
Blowback as something smaller than yourself is even more bizarre than usual. Nothing feels real or right. No part of your body is your own. Even perspective is all wrong.
Waking up in an unfamiliar body is stranger still.
My senses are heightened to a surreal degree. I can hear insects moving through blades of grass. I can smell mice burrowing into the soft wood. I feel very small and very scared.
I’m not sure I can walk. I push myself up, leg by leg, and wobble until I’m sure I’ve got my balance. Then I shift one front paw and one back one, moving in a staggered limp across the quad in the early morning light.
It feels like it takes hours. By the time I make it to beneath my own window, I’m exhausted. The window is just as I left it, slightly lifted from the sill, but not so wide that Sam would be woken by the breeze.
I yowl hopefully. Sam, predictably, hears nothing.
Closing my eyes against the pain, I force the transformation. It hurts, like my skin was still raw from shifting the first time. I push open the window and hop inside, falling onto the floor with a thump.
“Hrm,” Sam says muzzily, turning over.
“Help me,” I say, lifting my arm to touch the metal edge of his bed. “Please. The blowback. You’ve got to keep me from being loud.”
He’s staring at me with wide eyes. They only get wider when my fingers start to curl like vines. My leg starts shaking.
“It hurts,” I say, shamed by the whine in my voice.
Sam is getting up, throwing his comforter over me. Two pillows come down on either side of my head so I can’t thrash it around too badly. He’s totally awake now, looking at me with true adrenaline-pumping horror.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to get out before my tongue turns to wood.
I feel a sharp nudge on my side. I turn stiffly and blink up at Mr. Pascoli.
“Get up, Mr. Sharpe,” our hall master says. “You’re going to be late for class.”
“He’s sick,” I hear Sam say.
I am cocooned in blankets. Just moving is hard, like the air has turned semi-solid. I groan and then close my eyes again. I have never felt so worn out. I had no idea that back-to-back blowback could do this to me.
“What is he doing on the floor?” I hear Pascoli say. “Are you hungover, Mr. Sharpe?”
“I’m sick,” I slur, borrowing Sam’s excuse. My mind isn’t working fast enough to come up with one of my own. “I think I have a fever.”
“You better get down to the nurse, then. Breakfast is almost over.”
“I’ll take him,” Sam says.
“I want to see a copy of that slip, Mr. Sharpe. And you better get one. If I find out you’ve been drinking or using, I don’t care what’s going on with your family, you’re going to be off my hall. Understand?”
“Yeah.” I nod. Right now I am willing to say whatever I think will make Pascoli go away faster.
“Come on,” Sam says, picking me up under my arms and dumping me onto my bed.
I struggle to stay sitting up. My head swims. I’m not really sure how I pull on jeans, gloves, and boots, which I fumble over and finally decide not to lace.
“Maybe we should call someone,” he whispers once Pascoli is out of the room. “Mrs. Wasserman?”
I frown, trying to concentrate on his words. “What do you mean?”
“Last night you seemed way screwed-up. And today? You look pretty bad.”
“Just tired,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like—”
“Blowback,” I say quickly, reluctant to hear his description of what it looks like. “Don’t worry about it.”
He narrows his eyes but waits for me to get up. He follows as I shuffle dazedly across campus.
“I need one more thing,” I say, “when we get to the nurse’s office.”
“Sure, man,” he says, but I don’t think he’s decided yet. I’m freaking him out.
“When we go in there, I am going to have a coughing fit, and you are going to volunteer to get me a glass of water. But you’re going to get me hot water—as hot as you can get it out of the tap. Okay?”
“Why?” asks Sam.
I force a grin. “Easiest way to fake a fever.”
Even semiconscious I can still manage a minor con.
Hours later I wake up in the nurse’s office, drooling on a pillow. I’m ravenously hungry. I get up and realize I’m still wearing my boots. I lace them and pad out to the front room.
The school nurse is gray-haired, short, and round. She moves around her white room, with its anatomical posters, with purpose born of the fact that she believes that all student problems can be cured with (a) rest on one of her cots, (b) two aspirin, or (c) Neosporin and a bandage. Luckily, there’s nothing else I need.
“Hey,” I say. “I’m feeling better. I’m going to go back to my room now if that’s okay?”
Nurse Kozel’s in the middle of giving pills to Willow Davis. “Cassel, why don’t you sit down and let me check your temperature. It was pretty high before.”
“Okay,” I say, slouching in a chair.
Willow swallows her medicine with a sip from a paper cup as Nurse Kozel crosses to the other side for the thermometer.
“You might as well lie down in the back until the pills start working,” Kozel calls. “I’ll come in a little while to check on you.”
“I’m so hungover,” Willow says to me under her breath. I smile the conspiratorial smile of people who have used the nurse’s office to sleep off the night before.
She heads for the back, and I get a thermometer stuck under my tongue. While I wait, I consider for the first time what happened—and didn’t happen—with Lila.
It’s just a matter of time.
Even in the light of day, the thought feels no less true.
Temptation is tempting. I like my shiny new Mercedes-Benz; I like getting fancy dinners with the head of a crime family; I like the Feds off my back and my mom safe. I like having Lila kiss me as if we could have some kind of future. I like it when she says my name as though I’m the only other person in the world.
I like it so much that I’ll probably do anything to get it.
Ignore that Lila doesn’t really love me. Kill my own brother. Become a hired assassin. Anything.
I thought that I could never betray my family, never work someone I loved, never kill anyone, never be like Philip, but I get more like him every day. Life’s full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE GREAT THING ABOUT a sick day is that it’s not hard to walk out of school. I do. I could drive, but I worry they’d notice my car missing. I can’t afford to take any more chances.
Besides, right now I’m not sure I should be trusted with nice things.
I have woken with a new resolution. No more stupid risks. No more trying to get caught. No more leaving things up to fate. No more waiting for the other shoe to drop. I walk until I get far enough off campus to be safe. Then I call a cab with my cell phone.
Barron doesn’t want to go to the Feds. If he tells them everything, then he gets nothing from the Brennans. But if he really believes I’m not going to cave to his demands, he might turn me in, and I need to tidy things up before he gets the chance. Especially because I know something that he can’t—there isn’t evidence just of what I’ve done at the old house. There’s evidence of Mom’s crime too.
First things first, I have to get rid of that.
I’m her son. It’s my job to keep her safe.
I wait on the tree-lined sidewalk in front of a bunch of nice-looking houses. Ones with backyards and swings. A white-haired lady smiles at me when she ducks out to get her mail from a polished brass box.