“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. 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.

  I think about the ant Barron told me I never turned into a stick, but I don’t remember how I did it. He stripped that memory out so cleanly, there’s not even a trace.

  It can’t be triggered by strong emotion. I’ve been angry lots of times and I’ve never accidentally turned my gloves into squirrels or anyone into anything. Besides, I am feeling plenty of strong emotion right at the moment.

  When I changed the gun, Philip was about to get shot. Maybe 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 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. Something you maybe suggested. 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 is 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 this is the kiss I fantasized about when I was fourteen, and even later than that, when I knew it was sick and wrong and horrible to desire the girl I murdered. Every kiss I ever gave or took was shadowed by her presence, so the real thing catches me wholly off guard. 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.

  “I remember it,” I say. “The blood. Slipping on the blood. And feeling gleeful, like I’d gotten away with it. Looking down at your body and feeling the way I did—the memory still seems so real. Like something that no one could make up, because it was so awful. And how I was—It’s worse than feeling nothing, like you’re just psycho. It’s much worse to think you enjoyed it.” I’m glad we’re in the dark. It is impossible to imagine saying all this to her face.

  “They were supposed to kill me,” Lila says. “Barron and I were in your grandfather’s house in the basement, and he grabbed my arms. At first I thought he was kidding around, that he wanted to wrestle, until you and Philip walked in. Philip was saying something to you, and you just kept shaking your head.”

  I want to say that it isn’t true, that it didn’t happen, but of course I really have no idea.

  “I kept asking Barron to let me get up, but he wouldn’t even look at me. Philip took out a knife, and that’s when you seemed to change your mind. You walked over to me and looked down, but it was like you weren’t really looking at me. Like you didn’t even know who I was. Barron started to get up, and I was relieved, until you took my wrists and pressed them down on the shag rug. You pressed them down harder than he did.”

  I swallow hard and close my eyes, dreading what she’ll say next.

  Steps on the stairs make her clam up.

  “Tell me,” I whisper. My voice comes out louder than I planned. Probably not loud enough to get their attention. “Tell me the rest.”

  She presses her bare hand against my mouth. “Shut up.” She’s whispering, but she sounds fierce.

  If I struggle, I really am going to make noise.

  “I don’t want you to tell Anton,” Philip says. He sounds close, and Lila’s body jolts. I try to slide my hand against her upper arms to gentle her, but that only seems to make her shake worse.

  “Tell him what?” asks Barron. “That you think Cassel’s going to flake? Do you want this whole thing to come apart?”

  “I don’t want it to blow up in our faces. And Anton’s acting more unstable.”

  “We can take care of Anton when this is over. Cassel’s fine. You baby him too much.”

  “I just think that this is risky. It’s a risky plan and Cassel needs to be on board. I think you forgot to make him forget.”

  “You know what I think?” Barron says. “I think that bitch wife of yours is the problem. I told you to cut her loose.”

  “Shut up.” I hear the growl under Philip’s seeming calm.

  “Fine, but he was hanging around her last night after dinner. She obviously figured out enough to leave.”

  “But Cassel—”

  “Cassel nothing. She told him what she suspected. And he did a little fishing to find out if it was true. See how you’d react. He doesn’t know anything yet, unless you freak out. Simple. Case closed. Now let’s go.”

  “What about Lila?”

  “We’ll find her,” he says. “She’s a cat. What can she do?”

  I hear the front door slam. We wait what feels like ten minutes and then slide under the pole to open the closet door. I look around the room. It’s trashed, but no more than it was before.

  Lila steps out behind me, and when I look back at her, her mouth curves up at one corner. She turns toward the bathroom.

  I catch her wrist. “They’re gone and I still want to hear the rest. Tell me. Please. How you got away from Barron. Why you lured me up to the roof of Smythe Hall with that crazy dream.”

  “I wanted to kill you,” she says, that slight smile widening.

  I drop her wrist like it’s burning me. “You what?”

  Here I was, eating my whole heart over her, forgetting what she was actually like back then.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she says. “I hated you even more than I hated them, but I still couldn’t do it. That’s something, right?”

  I feel like she knocked the air out of my lungs.

  “No,” I say. “It’s nothing. Less than nothing.”

  The kitchen door opens with a creak. Lila presses herself against the wall, shooting me a warning glance. There’s no time to dash for the closet, so I step into the kitchen to take whatever’s coming.

  Philip smiles from the doorway. “I knew you were here.”

  “I just walked in,” I say, even though he knows I’m lying.

  He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back. I wonder if he’s going to try to kill me. I hold up my hands, still bare. He doesn’t seem to even notice.

  “I need you to tell her,” Philip says, and for a moment I don’t know who he’s talking about. “Tell Maura I was weak. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I didn’t know how to stop.”

  “I told you I don’t know where Maura is.”

  “Fine,” he says tightly. “See you Wednesday night. And, Cassel, maybe you’re pissed off or you have questions, but it’s going to be worth it in the end. Trust us just a little bit longer and you’re going to have everything you ever wanted.”