Chapter Thirteen
I DON’T WANT TO MOVE because even breathing hurts my ribs.
The bruises hurt more in the morning than they had the night before.
Lying on the bed in my old room, I test my memory for blank spots.
It reminds me of being a kid, sticking my tongue into my gums after a tooth fell out.
But I remember last night very clearly: my brothers standing above me, Barron kicking my stomach over and over.
I remember the gun changing, coiling around the man’s wrist. The only thing I don’t remember is how I got to bed, but I think that’s because I blacked out.
“Oh, God,” I say, rubbing my hand over my face, then looking at my hand to make sure it’s still mine. Make sure it hasn’t twisted into some other shape.
I reach my arm down slowly and carefully to touch the wound in my leg where the worked stones are.
I feel the hardness of a whole one under my fingers and the outline of shards where two broke.
My skin jumps, alight with pain, at the pressure.
I wasn’t crazy. A stone cracked last night, under my skin, each time Barron tried to work me.
Barron.
He’s the memory worker. He’s the one who changed Maura’s memories. And mine.
My stomach clenches and I roll gingerly to one side, afraid that I’m going to throw up and then choke on it. Dizzily I see the white cat sitting on a pile of laundry, her eyes slitted.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper. My voice sounds like shards of glass are stuck in my throat.
She stands up, stretching her paws to knead the sweater she was lying on. Her nails sink into the fabric like little needles. Then her back arches.
“Did you see them bring me back here?” I croak.
Her pink tongue swipes her nose.
“Stop screwing with me,” I say.
She hunkers down and then jumps onto the bed, startling me. I groan with fresh pain. “I know what you are,” I say. “I know what I did to you.”
Only you can undo the curse. Of course.
Her fur is soft against my arm, and I reach out a hand toward her. She lets me stroke down her back. I’m lying. I don’t know what she is. I think I know who she was, but I’m not sure what she is anymore.
“I don’t know how to turn you back,” I say. “I figured out that it was me who changed you. I figured out that part. But I don’t know how I do it.”
She stiffens, and I turn to bury my face in her fur. I feel the rough pads of her paws. Her tiny claws are sharp against my skin.
“I don’t have a dream amulet,” I say. “I don’t have anything to stop you from working me. You can make me dream, can’t you? Like the rainstorm and the roof. Like before you were a cat.”
Her purr is a rumble, like distant thunder.
I close my eyes.
I wake up still hurting. I am lying in a pool of blood, slipping as I try to rise. Leaning over me are Philip, Barron, Anton, and Lila.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” Lila the girl says. When she smiles, her canine teeth come to sharp points. She looks older than fourteen. She looks beautiful and terrible. I cower back from her.
She laughs.
“Who got hurt?” I ask.
“Me,” she says. “Don’t you remember? I died.”
I push myself up onto my knees and find myself on the stage of the theater at Wallingford.
Alone. The heavy blue curtain is closed in front of me, and I think that I can hear the sounds of a crowd beyond it.
When I look down, the blood is no longer there, but a trapdoor is open.
I scramble to my feet, slip, and nearly fall into the pit.
“You need makeup,” someone says. I turn my head. It’s Daneca, in shining plate mail, approaching me with a powder puff. She hits my face with it. There’s a cloud of dust.
“I’m dreaming,” I say out loud, which doesn’t help nearly as much as it should.
I open my eyes and find myself no longer on the Wallingford stage but in the aisle of a majestic theater.
The wood-paneled walls are grooved with dust above a scarlet rug.
Lights drip crystals, and the plaster ceilings are painted in frescoes of gold.
In the rows of seats on the terraces in front of the stage, cats in clothes fan one another, wave programs, and mew.
I turn around and around, and a few of them glance in my direction, their eyes shining with reflected light.
I stumble into one of the empty rows and take a seat as a dark red curtain opens.
Lila walks onto the stage, wearing a long white Victorian dress with pearl buttons.
She’s followed by Anton, then Philip and Barron.
Each of the guys is in a costume from a different period.
Anton’s got on a purple zoot suit with an enormous feathered hat, Philip is dressed like an Elizabethan lord with a doublet and ruff, and Barron’s wearing a long black robe.
I can’t decide if he’s supposed to be a priest or a judge.
“Lo,” Lila says, pressing the back of her wrist against her forehead. “I am a young girl and very much given to amusement.”
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?”