Barron bows deeply. “It just so happens that I can be amusing.”
“It just so happens,” says Anton, “that Philip and I have a little side thing going where I get rid of people for money. I can’t have her father know. I’m going to take over the business someday.”
“Alas, alack,” says Lila. “Woe.”
Barron smiles and rubs his hands together. “It just so happens that I like money.”
Philip looks right at me, as though I was the one he was speaking to. “Anton’s going to be our ticket out of being small time. And I think my girlfriend is pregnant. You understand, right? I’m doing this for all of us.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand.
On the stage Lila gives a small scream and starts shrinking, changing shape until she’s the size of a mouse. Then the white cat springs down from one of the balconies, her dress tearing on the jagged splinters of the floorboards and pulling free from her furry body. Pouncing, she catches the Lila-mouse in her teeth and bites off the tiny head. Blood spatters across the stage.
“Lila,” I say. “Stop it. Stop with all the games.”
The cat gulps down the remains and looks out at me. And then the stage lights are turning toward me, the brightness making me blink in confusion. I stand up. The white cat stalks toward me. Her eyes—those blue and green eyes—are so clearly Lila’s that I stumble back and into the aisle.
“You have to cut off my head,” she says.
“No,” I tell her.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
Her teeth are like ivory knives. “I don’t know,” I say.
“If you love me, you’ll have to cut off my head.”
Somehow I have a sword in my hand and am swinging it. The cat is changing like Lila did, but she’s getting larger, growing into something monstrous. The audience’s applause is deafening.
My ribs are throbbing, but I force myself to swing my legs off the bed. I walk into the bathroom, piss, and then chew up a handful of aspirin. Staring at myself in the mirror, taking in my bloodshot eyes and the mass of bruises near my ribs, I think over the dream, about the cat looming over me.
It’s ridiculous, but I’m not laughing.
“Is that you?” Grandad’s voice comes from down the stairs.
“Yeah,” I call back.
“You slept late,” he says, and I can hear him muttering, probably about how lazy I am.
“I’m not feeling good,” I tell him from the stairwell. “I don’t think I can clean today.”
“I’m not that great myself,” he says. “Rough night last night, huh? I drank so much I don’t remember most of it.”
I walk downstairs, cradling my ribs half-unconsciously. I stumble. Nothing feels right. My skin doesn’t fit. I am Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have failed to put me back together again.
“Did anything happen you want to tell me about?” Grandad asks. I think of his eyes seeming to blink in the dark last night. I wonder what he heard. What he suspects.
“Nothing,” I say, and pour myself a cup of coffee. I drink it black, and the warmth in my belly is the first comforting thing I remember feeling in a while.
Grandad tilts his head in my direction. “You look like crap.”
“I told you I didn’t feel good.”
The phone rings in the other room, a shrill sound that jangles my nerves. “You tell me lots of things,” Grandad says, and walks off to answer it.
I see the cat on the stairs, her white body ghostly in a beam of sunlight. She blurs in my vision. My brothers were uncomfortable, but not for the reasons I thought. Not because I was a murderer or an outsider. I was such an insider that I never even knew it. I was inside of the insiders. I was hidden inside my insides. For a moment I want to dash all the crockery to the floor. I want to scream and shout. I want to take this newfound power and change everything that I can touch.
Lead to gold.
Flesh to stone.
Sticks to snakes.
I hold up the coffee cup, and I think about the muzzle of the gun melting and shifting in my hand, but no matter how I try to summon that moment, the cup stays. The slogan keeps reading AMHERST TRUCKING: WE LIFT STUFF on a glossy maroon background.
“What are you doing?” Grandad asks me, and my hand jerks, sloshing coffee onto my shirt. He’s holding out the phone. “Philip. For you. Says you left something over there.”
I shake my head.
“Take it,” Grandad says, sounding exasperated, and I can’t think of an excuse not to, so I do.
“Yeah?” I say.
“What did you do to her?” His voice sounds thick with anger and something else. Panic.
“Who?” I ask.
“Maura. She’s gone, and she took my son. You have to tell me where she is, Cassel.”
“Me?” I ask him. Last night he watched Barron kick me in the stomach until I blacked out, and today he’s accusing me of masterminding Maura’s escape? Anger makes my vision blur. I grip the phone so tightly that I’m afraid the plastic case is going to crack.
He should be apologizing to me. He should be begging.
“I know you’ve been talking to her. What did you tell her? What did you do to her?”
“Oh, sorry,” I say automatically, cold fury in every word. “I don’t remember.” I click the off button on the phone, feeling so vindictively pleased that it takes me a moment to realize how incredibly stupid I’ve just been.
Then I remember I’m not Cassel Sharpe, kid brother and general disappointment, anymore. I’m one of the most powerful practitioners of one of the rarest curses.
I’m not taking Lila and leaving town. I’m not going anywhere.
They should be afraid of me.
Grandad leaves about an hour later, asking me if I need anything from the store. I say I don’t. He tells me to put some of my clothes in a bag.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We’re taking a road trip down to Carney,” he says.
I nod my head, cradle my ribs, and watch him go.
Lila stares at me from the center of the mounds of papers, clothes and platters on the dining room table. She’s eating something. I get closer and see a piece of bacon, the grease soaking into a scarf.
“Grandad give you that?” I ask.
She sits on her hind legs and licks her mouth.
My cell phone is ringing. The caller ID says Daneca.
“You gave her the slip,” I say. “Did you really walk all the way here?”
Lila yawns, showing her fangs.
I know I have to change her, now before Grandad returns. Before my ribs start to hurt again and I can’t concentrate.
If only I knew how.
Her eyes are shining as I walk toward her.
A curse was placed on me. A curse that only you can break.
I reach out my hand and touch her fur. Her bones feel light, fragile, like the bones of a bird. I think of the moment when the barrel of the gun began to turn to scales, try to summon the impulse that made it transform.
Nothing.
I imagine Lila, imagine the cat elongating, growing into a girl. As I picture it, I am aware that I don’t know what Lila would look like now. I push that out of my head and let myself make up some combination of the girl I knew and the girl from my dream. Close enough is close enough. I imagine her changing, imagine it until I’m shaking with concentration, but she still doesn’t change.
The cat growls deep in her throat.
I push out one of the dining room chairs and flop down on it, resting my forehead against the wood of the back.
When I changed the gun, I wasn’t thinking about it. Instinct took over. It was like some kind of muscle memory or a part of my brain that I could access only when someone I cared about was in danger.
I’ve been angry lots of times. I never accidentally turned my gloves to leaves or changed anyone into anything. So it isn’t emotion.
I think about the ant Barron told me I never turned into a stick. I can’t remember what I did do.
I look around the room. The sword I found when I was cleaning out the living room is right where I left it, leaning against the wall. I pick it up, feel the weight, as though I am distant from my body. I note the rust running down the blade. The sword feels heavy in my hands, not like the light fencing foils at school.
If you love me, cut off my head.
“Lila,” I said. “I don’t know how to change you.”
She pads to the edge of the table and jumps onto the floor. Surreal. Everything is surreal. None of this is happening.
“I am thinking of doing something to force myself. Something crazy. To force the magic.”
This is stupid. Someone has to stop me. She has to stop me.
She rubs her cheek against the blade, closing her eyes, and then rubs her whole body against it. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“You really think this is a good idea?”
She yowls and hops back up onto the table. Then she sits, waiting.
I reach out and place one hand on the fur of her back. “I’m going to swing this sword at your head, okay? But I’m not going to hit you.”
Stop me.
“Stay still.”
She’s just watching me, just waiting. She doesn’t move, except for her twitching tail.
I pull back the sword and swing it toward her tiny body. I swing it with all my weight behind it.
Oh, God, I’m going to kill her again.
And then I see it. Everything goes fluid. I know I can shift the sword in my hand into a coil of rope, a sheet of water, a dusting of dirt. And the cat is no longer a collection of fragile bird bones and fur. I can see the badly woven curse on her, obscuring the girl underneath. A simple mental tug and it pulls apart.
I’m suddenly bringing the sword down on the naked form of a crouching girl. I pull back, but my weight is way off balance.
I topple to the floor and the sword flies out of my hands. It crashes into a water-stained Venetian chest at the other end of the dining room.
She is a tangled mass of dredded curls the color of hay and sunburned skin. She tries to stand up and can’t. Maybe she’s forgotten how.
This time when the blowback hits, it’s like my body is trying to rip itself apart.
“Cassel,” she says. She’s bent over me, in a too big shirt. I can see almost the entire length of her bare legs when I turn my head. “Cassel, someone’s coming. Wake up.”
My ribs are hurting again. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I just need to sleep. If I sleep long enough, when I wake up, I’ll be back in Wallingford and Sam will be spraying himself with too much cologne and everything will go back to the way things are supposed to me.
She slaps me, hard.
I suck in a deep breath and open my eyes. My cheek is stinging. When I turn my head, I can see the hilt of the sword and a shattered vase that must have fallen off the chest. The whole floor is freshly strewn with books and papers.
“Someone’s coming,” she says. Her voice sounds different from how I remember. Scratchy. Hoarse.
“My grandfather,” I say. “He went to the store.”
“There are two people out there.” Her face is both familiar and strange. Looking at her makes my stomach hurt. I reach out a hand.
She flinches back. Of course she doesn’t want me to touch her. Look what I can do.
“Hurry,” she says.
I stumble up. “Oh,” I say out loud, because I remember the stupid thing I told Philip. I can’t believe I ever thought that I was good at deception.
“The closet,” I say.
The coat closet is choked with fur and moth-eaten wool. We kick out the boxes at the bottom and squeeze ourselves inside. The only way to fit without pressing against the door is to duck under the bar holding up the hangers and let that wedge me in. The rod bangs into my arm, and Lila comes in after me, closing the door. Then she’s pressed against my sore ribs, breathing in short rapid gasps. Her breath smells like grass and something else, something richer and darker. It’s warm against my throat.
I can’t see her, just slivers of lights along the outline of the door. One of my mother’s mink collars brushes my chin, and there’s a faint trace of perfume.
I hear the front door open and then Philip’s voice call, “Cassel? Grandad?”
Automatically I make a sudden movement. It’s just a reflex, not much but it makes Lila grab my arms and dig her fingers into my biceps.
“Shhhhh,” she says.
“You be quiet,” I whisper back. I’ve grabbed hold of her shoulders without consciously deciding to, a mirror of her gesture. In the dark she’s a phantom. Not real. Her shoulders are trembling slightly, vibrating under my hands.
Both our hands are bare. It’s shocking.
She’s leaning forward.
Then her mouth is sliding against mine. Her lips open, soft and yielding. Our teeth click together, and she tastes like every dark thought I’ve ever had. This is the kiss I fantasized about when I was fourteen, and even later than that, even when I knew it was sick to think about her—the kiss I wanted and never got, and now that it’s happening I can’t stop it. My shoulders press against the wall. I reach out with one hand to steady myself, gripping the wool shoulder of a coat so hard I can feel the ancient cloth rip.
She bites my tongue.
“He’s not here,” Barron says. “The car’s gone.”
Lila turns away from me abruptly, tilting her neck so that her hair is in my face.
“What do you think he said to Grandad?” Philip asks.
“Nothing,” Barron says. “You’re overreacting.”