Chapter Thirteen #2
“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 be.
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.”
“You didn’t hear him on the phone,” says Philip. “He remembered—I don’t know what. Enough to know someone had been working him.”
Something crunches under one of their feet. Considering all the stuff scattered on the floor, it could be anything. “He’s a smart-ass. You’re just being paranoid.”
Lila’s breath is hot on my neck.
Footfalls on the stairs tell me they’re going to look for me up there.
We’re so close that it’s impossible not to touch her. And that makes me recall that she must have been touching me to make me dream.
“That night, at Wallingford—were you in the room with me?” I whisper.
“They needed me to get you,” she says. “To make you sleepwalk out to them. I made lots of people sleepwalk right into their hands.”
I picture a white shape on the steps, the hall master’s dog starting to bark before she made the dog dream too.
“Why did you kiss me?” I ask her, keeping my voice low.
“To shut you up,” she says. “Why do you think?”
We’re silent for a moment. Above us I can hear my brothers walking across the creaking boards. I wonder if they’re in their old bedrooms. I wonder if they’re in my bedroom, going through my things like I went through Barron’s.
“Thanks,” I say, finally, sarcastically. My heart is beating like a rattle.
“You don’t remember any of it, do you? I figured that part out. Barron told me that you laughed when he told you I was in a cage, but you didn’t laugh, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t,” I say. “No one told me you were alive.”
She gives a weird short, gurgling laugh. “How did you think I died?” I think of the cage and of her being there for the last three years. How that could drive anyone crazy. Not that she seems crazier than anyone else. Me, for instance.
“I stabbed you.” My voice breaks on the words, even though I know the memory’s not true.
She’s quiet. All I can hear is the hammering of my own heart.