I nod. “His mother’s maiden name was Zacharov.”

  “Could he have been the killer?” Sam asks. “I mean, not of your brother, obviously.”

  “So that we’re talking about two different people? Yeah, I’m wondering about that too. The Feds think—” I pause, because I don’t know if I should tell them that the Feds are looking for a woman with red gloves. And I am sure I shouldn’t tell them the Feds probably should be looking for me. “They think the person got sloppy, but I don’t know. These other people just disappeared.”

  “Maybe the FBI have evidence they’re not telling you about,” Daneca says.

  Sam shrugs. “Or maybe they want you to help solve this case and they think if they tell you it had something to do with your brother, you will.”

  “That’s really paranoid,” I say admiringly. “I’m going with that.”

  “You can’t seriously think that federal agents would lie in a way that would put you in danger.” Daneca seems exasperated with both of us, which seems just as ridiculous to me.

  “Yeah, because they are tireless advocates of worker rights,” I say with plenty of sarcasm.

  “Next up,” she says, ignoring my point because she’d have to concede it. “Sean Gowen.”

  I hold up a hand. “Wait, how did Janssen die?”

  “Going home from his mistress’s house, apparently. She says he left in the middle of the night and she figured he went home to his wife, which pissed her off, until she found out he was dead. Or, well, gone. No body.”

  An involuntary shudder runs through me, like someone’s walking over my grave.

  Middle of the night again. No body.

  Lila told me how Barron and Philip sent her into houses as a cat. She could make anyone she’d given the touch to sleepwalk right out into my waiting arms. Then, although I can’t remember it, I transformed them. We must have been a hell of a team.

  No bodies.

  “Back to Sean Gowen,” Daneca says. “Gowen was a loan shark and a luck worker. That’s weird. He disappeared in the early afternoon. All the others—”

  “He worked nights,” I say.

  “What?” Sam says. “Did you know him or something?”

  I shake my head. “It’s just a guess. Did he?” I want very badly to be wrong.

  That prompts a hunt through the strewn files. Finally Sam holds one up. “Yeah, I guess so. Or at least he usually got home around four in the morning, which is pretty much the same thing.”

  He was asleep. The one thing they all had in common.

  “Do you have a theory or something?” Daneca asks.

  I shake my head. “Not yet,” I say, lying through my teeth. I’ve told Daneca and Sam more about me than I’ve ever told anyone else, but I can’t tell them this. I think I did it. I’m the killer. I grip my knees to keep my hands from shaking.

  No wonder Zacharov wants to hire me. All those people, gone. Just gone. What was it Lila called me? A human garbage disposal.

  Daneca flips pages relentlessly. “Well, let’s look at the last one. Then we can hear your not-a-theory. This guy is Arthur Lee. Another luck worker and an informant for the FBI. Died out on a job for Zacharov.”

  A cold sweat breaks out at my temples. Now that I believe I did it, every piece of paper seems damning. Every detail, a flashing red arrow.

  Anton and Barron in the front of the car, me and Philip in the back with Lee. No sleep magic needed. Just a touch from my bare hand.

  “The thing I don’t understand is—,” Daneca begins.

  Our new hall master, Mr. Pascoli, clears his throat outside the open door. Daneca’s busted. At least it’s a new year and we’re all starting from zero demerits. I open my mouth and try to come up with some excuse for why she’s in a guy’s room, no matter how flimsy.

  “I think this project of yours has taken long enough, don’t you?” he asks, before I can speak.

  “Sorry,” Daneca says, gathering up some of the papers.

  Pascoli smiles benevolently and walks away, like nothing happened.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “I just told him that Sam and I had a project to do together and that the common room was too noisy. He said as long as we kept the door open and actually studied, he didn’t mind.”

  “Nerds get away with everything,” Sam says.

  Daneca grins. “Don’t we just.”

  I smile back, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that eventually we all get caught.

  * * *

  Even though I’m exhausted, I can’t sleep. I pored over the files once Daneca left, and I run through the details again and again in my mind, trying to remember some part of what happened. I keep twisting on my bed, making the springs squeak. My body feels wrong, hot and uncomfortable.

  Finally I grab my phone and text Lila.

  U awake? I type.

  Then I actually look at the screen and realize it’s three thirty in the morning. I punch my pillow and flop down onto it, face forward.

  My phone chirrups. I roll over and snatch it up.

  Bad dreams, it says. Always awake.

  Sneak out, I text back, and pull on a pair of jeans.

  The great thing about a room on the ground floor is that you can just push open your window and hop right into the bushes. Sam moans at the creak of the wooden frame, kicks at his blankets, and goes back to snoring.

  I’m not sure which dorm is hers, so I stand in the middle of the quad.

  The night air is still and heavy. Nothing feels real. I wonder if this was what it was like when we waited outside someone’s house for the victim to walk right into our arms. The whole world seems dead already.

  After a few moments I see a rope dangle from a low window in Gilbert House. I pad over and realize Lila has somehow managed to jam a grappling hook into the sill. Which means she thought to bring a grappling hook to school and managed to hide it in her room. I am all admiration.

  She spiders down and then drops, barefoot, still in her pajamas. She’s grinning, but when she sees my face, her smile fades.

  “What’s wrong?” Lila asks.

  “Come on,” I say softly. “We have to get away from the dorms.”

  She nods and follows me without saying anything else. This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

  I go out to the track. Nearby are only tennis courts and the patch of woods that separates the Wallingford campus from a stretch of suburban homes.

  “So, what do you think of it here?” I ask her.

  “School’s school,” she says with a shrug. “A girl on my hall wanted me to go shopping with her and her friends. I didn’t go. Now she’s always on my case about being stuck up.”

  “How come you didn’t—?”

  Lila is looking at me uncertainly. I can see the hope in her face, along with the dread. “Who cares?” she asks finally. “Well, what? Why are we here?” Her pajamas are blue, covered in stars.

  “Okay. I want to ask you about what we did—about what I did. The murders or whatever you want to call them.” I don’t look at her, so instead I look back at Wallingford. Just some old brick buildings. I have no idea how I thought they were going to shelter me from my own life.

  “That’s what you brought me all the way out here to talk about?” she says, her voice hard.

  “This is definitely not where I would take someone for a romantic rendezvous.” When she flinches, I keep going. “I saw some files. Some names. I want you to tell me if they’re the ones.”

  “Fine,” she says. “But it’s not going to help you to know.”

  “Antanas Kalvis?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “You changed him.”

  “Jimmy Greco?”

  “Yeah,” she says again, softly. “Him, too.”

  “Arthur Lee.”

  “I don’t know. If you did, I wasn’t there. But since you knew the names of the first two, you’re probably right about the third.”

  My hands are shaking again.

  “Cassel, what’s the difference? You knew about all of this before. They’re just names.”

  I sink down to the grass. It’s damp with dew. I feel sick, but self-loathing has become a familiar sickness. I was a monster before. A monster with the excuse that he didn’t know details so he didn’t really have to think about it. “I don’t know. I guess there’s no difference.”

  She sits next to me and pulls up a handful of weeds. She tries to throw it, but most of the blades stick to her bare fingers. Neither of us is wearing gloves.

  “It’s just—why? Why did I do it? Barron could make me remember anything, but what did I remember that let me change these people into objects?”

  “I don’t know,” Lila says in a monotone.

  I reach out for her shoulder without thinking, rubbing my fingers over the cotton. I no longer know how to say aloud what I feel. Sorry my brothers kept her in a cage, sorry that it took me so long to save her, sorry I changed her in the first place. Sorry I’m bringing up those memories now.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  My bare fingers still. “Right. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “My father wants you to work for him, doesn’t he?” she asks, scooting away from me. Her eyes are bright in the moonlight.

  I nod. “He offered me a job at Philip’s funeral.”

  Lila groans. “He’s got some conflict going with the Brennan family. He does a lot of his business at funeral parlors these days.” She pauses. “Are you going to do it?”

  “You mean am I going to keep on murdering people? I don’t know. I guess I’m good at it. It’s good to be good at something, right?” There’s bitterness in my voice, but not as much as there should be. The horror I felt earlier is fading, being replaced by a kind of resignation.

  “Maybe they don’t die when you change them into objects,” Lila says. “Maybe they’re just in suspended animation.”

  I shudder. “That sounds even worse.”

  She flops back in the grass, looking up at the night sky. “I like how you can see stars out here in the country.”

  “This isn’t the country,” I say, turning toward her. “We’re close to two cities and—”

  She smiles up at me, and all of a sudden we’re in dangerous territory. I’m above her, looking down at the fall of her silvery hair on the grass, at the way her neck moves when she swallows nervously, at the way her fingers curl in the dirt.

  I try to say something, but I can’t remember what we were talking about. All my thoughts melt away as her lips part and her bare hand slides through my hair, pulling me down to her.

  She makes a soft sound as my mouth presses against hers, hungry, desperate. Only a monster would do this, but I already know I’m a monster.

  I roll toward her, not breaking the kiss, crushing her body against mine. My eyes close, so I don’t have to see what I’m doing, but my hands find her easily enough. She moans into my mouth.

  Her fingers are still knotted in my hair, gripping it hard, like she’s afraid I am going to pull away.

  “Please,” I say breathlessly, but then we’re kissing again and it’s hard to concentrate on anything but the feel of her body arching under mine, and I never get the rest of the words out.

  Please stop me.

  I drag my mouth away from hers, moving to kiss the hollow of her throat, my teeth gliding over her skin, my tongue tasting sweat and dirt.

  “Cassel,” she whispers. She’s said my name a hundred times before, a thousand times, but never like this.

  I pull back, abruptly, panting. Never like this.

  She rises with me, but now at least we’re both sitting up. That helps. She’s breathing hard, her eyes black with pupil.

  “I don’t—,” I start. “It’s not—not real.”

  The words make no sense. I shake my head to clear it.

  She looks at me with an expression I cannot name. Her lips are slightly apart and swollen.

  “We have to go back,” I say finally.

  “Okay.” I can barely hear the word. Her voice is all breath.

  I nod, pushing myself to my feet. I reach out my hand, and she lets me pull her up. For a moment her hand is in mine, warm and bare.

  At the window to my room, I catch my reflection in the glass. Shaggy black hair. Sneer. I look like a hungry ghost, glowering in at a world I am no longer fit to be part of.

  * * *

  The dream takes me by surprise. I’m standing at the edge of a lawn. Barron’s beside me. I know, without any reason to know, that we’re waiting for someone to come out of the big pillared white house in front of us.

  “Join me in a cup of tea?” he asks, holding out a paper cup with a smirk. The amber liquid inside is boiling, bubbles rising along with steam. It’s going to scald us both.

  “Oh,” I say. “Do you think we’ll fit?”

  6

  I’M USELESS IN CLASSES the next day. I fail a quiz in physics and conjugate my verbs completely weirdly in French. Luckily, I probably won’t need French in my future assassination career, unless I’m one of those fancy movie assassins who travel the world and also steal jewels. Physics I might need—got to calculate the trajectory of bullets somehow.

  I call Barron on my lunch break to avoid the cafeteria. I don’t know how to say anything to Sam and Daneca that isn’t all lies. And I don’t know how to say anything to Lila that isn’t the truth.

  “Hey,” he says. “We still on for Tuesday pizza?” His voice is casual. Normal. It makes me almost believe that I can relax.

  “I need to ask you something. In person. Where are you?” A teacher walks by and gives me a look. We’re not supposed to be calling people during the school day, even between classes. I’m a senior, though, so she doesn’t give me a hard time.

  “Mom and I are having fun. We’re staying at the Nassau Inn. It’s pretty swank.”

  “That’s in Princeton,” I say. It’s right downtown, minutes away from Daneca’s house. I experience a frisson of horror at the thought of my mother and hers in the same pharmacy line.

  Barron laughs. “Yeah. And? Mom says you two basically tore up Atlantic City, so we’re looking for a fresh start.”

  I have no idea why I thought that Barron would do anything but amplify all of Mom’s problems. A memory of him saying something about a painting nags at me; I should have seen this coming.

  “Look, whatever,” I say. “Can you meet me somewhere at six? I can skip dinner and some of study hall.”

  “We’ll come over now. Mom can sign you out, remember? We’ll get sushi.”

  “Sure, okay,” I say.

  It takes them an hour and a half to make the twenty-minute trip from Princeton to Wallingford. By the time they get there, I am in the “extra help” period, where I have to suffer through realizing that almost all my physics mistakes were dumb and obvious.

  It’s a relief to be called to the office.

  Barron is lounging against the secretary desk in a sharkskin suit. Mom is next to him, her hair pulled back into a Hermès scarf with a massive black-and-white hat over it, black gloves, and a low-cut black dress. They’re both wearing sunglasses. She’s bent over, signing a sheet.

  I think she’s supposed to look like she’s in mourning.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “The doctor wants to see you to make sure you don’t have the same thing that killed your brother.” She turns to Ms. Logan, who looks scandalized by the whole encounter. “These things can run in families,” she confides.

  “You’re afraid I’m going to come down with a bad case of getting two in the chest?” I say. “ ’Cause you might be right about that running in families.”

  Mom purses her lips in disapproval.

  Barron claps me on the back hard. “Come on, funnyman.”

  We walk toward the parking lot. I shove my gloved hands deep into the pockets of my uniform. Barron is keeping pace with me. He has left the top couple buttons of his crisp white shirt undone, enough so that I can see a new gold chain slide against his tan skin. I wonder if he’s wearing charms against being worked.

  “I thought you wanted us to come get you,” Mom says as she lights a cigarette with a gilt lighter and takes a deep drag. “What’s the matter?”

  “All I want is for Barron to tell me where the bodies are,” I say, keeping my voice down as I walk across the lawn. Having them here is surreal. They don’t belong at Wallingford, with its manicured lawns and low voices. They’re both larger than life.

  They exchange a look brimming with discomfort.

  “The people I transformed. Where are they? What did I turn them into?”

  I don’t know exactly what Barron remembers about the disappearances of Greco and Kalvis and all the rest. I have no idea how many of Barron’s memories are missing, how extensively he’s damaged himself with blowback, but if there’s a record in his journals, then maybe he knows something. Yeah, sure, I changed his journals so that he forgot that he wanted to use me to kill Zacharov, forgot that he wasn’t on my side against Philip and Philip’s buddy, Anton. But I didn’t change anything else.

  “There’s no reason why you need to know that,” Barron says slowly. Which sounds promising.

  “Let’s just say that I do.” I stop walking, forcing them to either stop too or go on without me. They stop.

  “Don’t argue, boys,” Mom says, blowing out a cloud of smoke that hangs in the air. “Cassel, come on, baby. Let it go.”

  “One,” I say. “Give me one body.”

  “Fine.” Barron shrugs nonchalantly. “Remember that chair you hated?”

  I open my mouth and then close it, like a fish. “What?” I say, but I know which chair he means. The one I almost threw out when Grandad and I cleaned the house, because the thing always creeped me out. It was a too-exact replica of one I’d seen on television.

  He laughs and tilts up his sunglasses, so I can see him raise his eyebrows at me. “Yep.”

  I root my keys out of my bag. “Thanks for signing me out, Mom,” I say, kissing her on her powdered cheek.