Audrey blanches, holding her gloved hand against her stomach as though she’s just realized what he is.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Gramps, this is Audrey. Audrey, my grandfather.”

  “A pretty girl like you can call me Desi,” he says, slicking back his hair and grinning like he’s a rascal daring to be reprimanded.

  He’s still grinning as we walk past him into the living room.

  I sit down on the ripped cushion of our couch. I wonder what she thinks of the house and if she’s going to say anything about it or about my grandfather. When I was a kid and brought friends over, I was defiantly proud of the chaos. I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled. Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain.

  She reaches into her shiny black pocketbook and takes out a handful of printouts.

  “Here,” she says, dumping the papers on my lap and flopping down beside me. Her red hair’s slightly damp—as though she’s just come from the shower—and cold against my arm.

  Lila’s hair was blond, soaked red with blood the last time I saw her.

  I press my eyes shut hard, press my fingers over them until I see nothing but black. Until I push the images away. When I was Audrey’s boyfriend, I thought that by making her like me, by making her think I was like everyone else, I’d become like everyone else.

  I think about winning her back, wondering if I could do it. Wondering how long before I screw up and she leaves me again. I’m just not a good enough con man to keep her.

  “Some ‘sleep aid’ pills can cause sleepwalking,” Audrey says, pointing to the papers. “Unofficially. I brought some articles from the library. Some guy was even driving in his sleep. I was thinking you could just say—”

  “That I was medicating myself for insomnia?” I ask, rolling over and pressing my face against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her, filtered through sweater fabric.

  She doesn’t push me away. I consider kissing her right there on the dirty couch, but some instinct of self-preservation stops me. Once someone’s hurt you, it’s harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn’t stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.

  “It doesn’t have to be true. You can just say you were taking sleeping pills,” she says, like I don’t understand lying, which is sort of sweet and sort of humiliating.

  It’s not a bad plan, really. If I had been smarter and had thought of it myself earlier, I’d probably still be at school. “I already told them I had a history of sleepwalking as a kid.”

  “Crap,” she says. “Too bad. There’s this other pill in Australia that’s made people binge eat and paint their front doors while asleep.” She tilts her head, and I see six tiny protective amulets slide across her collarbone. Luck. Dreams. Emotion. Body. Memory. Death. The seventh one—transformation—is caught on the edge of her sweater.

  I imagine crushing her throat in my hands and am relieved to be horrified. I feel guilty when I think of killing girls, but it’s the only way I know to test myself, to make sure that whatever terrible thing is inside of me isn’t about to get out.

  I reach out and unhook the little stone pendant, letting it fall against her neck. Hematite. Probably a fake. There aren’t enough transformation workers around for there to be many real amulets. One worker every generation or two. That charm makes me wonder if the rest are fake too. “Thanks. For trying. It was a good idea.”

  She bites her lip. “Do you think this has something to do with your dad dying?”

  I shift abruptly, so that my back’s against the armrest. Real smooth. “Do I think what has to do with it? He was in a car accident in the middle of the day.”

  “Sleepwalking can be triggered by stress. What about your mom being in jail? That’s got to be stressful.”

  My voice rises. “Dad’s been dead for almost three years and mom’s been locked up practically as long. Don’t you think—”

  “Don’t get mad.”

  “I’m not mad!” I rub my hand over my face. “Okay, look. I almost fall off a roof, I’m getting kicked out of school, and you think I’m a head case. I’ve got reasons to be pissed.” I take a deep breath and try to give her my most apologetic smile. “But not at you.”

  “That’s right,” she says, shoving me. “Not at me.”

  I catch her gloved hand in mine. “I can handle Northcutt. I’ll be back at Wallingford in no time.” I hate having her here in the middle of my messy house, already knowing more about me than is comfortable. I feel turned inside out, the raw parts of me exposed.

  I don’t want her to leave, either.

  “Look,” she whispers with a glance in the direction of the kitchen. “I don’t want to set you off again, but do you think you could have been touched? You know, heebeegeebies?”

  Touched. Worked. Cursed. “To sleepwalk?”

  “To throw yourself off a roof,” she says. “It would have looked like suicide.”

  “That’s a pretty expensive work.” I don’t want to tell her I’ve thought about it, that my whole family thought about it so much they even had a secret meeting to discuss the possibility. “Plus, I lived. That makes it less likely.”

  “You should ask your granddad,” she says softly.

  If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.

  I nod, barely noticing as she puts the papers back into her purse. Then she hugs me lightly. My hands rest on the small of her back and I can feel her warm breath against my neck. With her, I could learn to be normal. Every time she touches me, I feel the heady promise of becoming an average guy.

  “You better go,” I say, before I do something stupid.

  At the door, as she leaves, I turn to look at my grandfather’s face. He’s twisting a screwdriver into the stove to pop off a crusted burner, without any apparent concern that the entire Zacharov family might be after me. He’s worked for them, so it’s not like he doesn’t know what they’re capable of—he knows better than I do.

  Maybe that’s why he’s here.

  To protect me.

  The thought makes me need to lean against the sink from a combination of horror, guilt, and gratitude.

  * * *

  That night, in my old room with the ratty Magritte posters taped to the ceiling and bookshelves stuffed with robots and Hardy Boys novels, I dream of being lost in a rainstorm.

  Even though it’s a dream, and I’m pretty sure it’s a dream, the rain feels cold against my skin and I can barely see with the water in my eyes. I hunch over and run for the only visible light, shading my face with one hand.

  I come to the worn door of the barn behind the house. Ducking through the doorway, however, I decide I was mistaken about it being our barn. Instead of the old tools and discarded furniture, there’s only a long hallway, lit by torches. As I get closer, I realize that the torches are held by hands too real to be plaster. One hand shifts its grip on a metal shaft, and I leap back from it. Then, stepping closer, I see how the wrist of each has been severed and stuck on the wall. I can see the uneven slice of the flesh.

  “Hello,” I call, like I did from the roof. This time, no one answers.

  I glance back. The barn door is still open, sheets of rain forming puddles on the wooden planks. Because it’s a dream, I don’t bother to go back and close the door. I just head down the hall. After what seems like a disproportionately long time walking, I come to a shabby door with a handle made from the foot of a stag. The coarse fur tickles my palm as I pull it.

  Inside sits a futon from Barron’s dorm room and a dresser I’m sure I recall Mom buying off of eBay, intending to paint it apple green for the guest room. I open the drawers and find several pairs of Philip’s old jeans. They’re dry, and the top pair fits me perfectly when I pull them on. There’s a white shirt that was Dad’s hanging on the back of the door; I remember the cigarillo burn just below the elbow and the smell of my father’s aftershave.

  Since I know I’m dreaming, I’m not frightened, just puzzled, when I walk back into the hall and this time find steps going up to a painted white door with a hanging crystal pull. The pull looks like the kind that summons servants in grand houses on PBS shows, but this one is made from glittering parts of an old chandelier. When I pull it, a series of bells rings loudly, echoing through the space. The door opens.

  An old picnic table and two lawn chairs rest in the middle of a large gray room. Maybe I’m still in the barn after all, because the spaces between the planks in the walls are wide enough that I can see rain against a storm-bright sky.

  The table is draped with some kind of embroidered silk cloth and topped with silver candlesticks, two silver chargers, and gilt-edged plates, the center of each covered by a silver dome. Cut glass goblets stand at each place setting.

  Out of the gloom, cats come, tabbies and calicos, marmalade cats and butterscotch cats and cats so black I can barely tell them from their shadows. They creep toward me, hundreds of them, swarming over one another to get close.

  I jump up onto one of the chairs, snatching a candlestick, not sure what sick thing my brain is about to conjure next when a small, veiled creature walks into the room. It’s wearing a tiny gown, like the kind that expensive dolls wear. Lila had a whole row of dolls in dresses like that; her mother would yell at her if she touched them. We played with the dolls anyway when her mother wasn’t looking. We dragged the princess one through Grandad’s backyard pretending she was being held captive by one of my Power Rangers, with a broken Tamagotchi as an interstellar map—until its dress was streaked with grass stains and torn along the hem. This dress is torn too.

  The veil slips and falls. Underneath is a cat’s face. A cat, standing on two legs, her triangle head tilted to one side, almost like her neck’s been broken, her body covered in the dress.

  I can’t help it, I laugh.

  “I need your help,” says the tiny figure. Her voice is sad and soft and sounds like Lila’s, but with an odd accent that might just be how cats sound when they talk.

  “Okay,” I say. What else can I say?

  “A curse was placed on me,” the Lila cat says. “A curse that only you can break.”

  The other cats watch us, tails flicking, whiskers twitching. Still silent.

  “Who cursed you?” I ask, trying to smother my laughter.

  “You did,” says the white cat.

  At that my smile becomes more of a grimace. Lila’s dead and cats shouldn’t stand, shouldn’t press their paws together in supplication, shouldn’t talk.

  “Only you can undo the curse,” she says, and I try to watch the movement of her mouth, the flash of her fangs, to see how she can speak without lips. “The clues are everywhere. We don’t have much time.”

  This is a dream, I remind myself. A deeply messed-up dream, but a dream just the same. I’ve even dreamed about a cat before. “Did you bite out my tongue?”

  “You seem to have it back,” the white cat says, her shadowed eyes unblinking.

  I open my mouth to speak, but I feel claws on my back, nails sinking into my skin and I yelp instead.

  Yelp and sit up. Wake up.

  I hear the steady patter of rain against my window and realize that I’m soaked, blankets wet and clinging. I’ve been outside. I might be back in my room, in my old bed, but my hands are shaking so hard that I have to press them underneath my body to make them stop.

  5

  WHEN I STAGGER DOWN to the kitchen in the morning, I find Grandad boiling coffee and frying eggs in bacon grease. I have on jeans and a faded Wallingford T-shirt. I don’t miss my itchy gloves or strangling tie; comfort’s the consolation prize for getting booted, I guess, but I don’t want to get too used to it.

  I found a leaf stuck to my leg while I was getting dressed, and that was enough to make me remember waking, drenched with rain. I’ve been sleepwalking again, but the more I think about the dream, the more confused I get. Nothing lethal happened, which takes the Zacharov revenge scenario off the table. So maybe it’s just guilt that makes me dream of Lila. Guilt makes you crazy, right? It festers inside of you.

  Like in Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart,” which Ms. Noyes made us read out loud, where the narrator hears the heart of his victim beating beneath the floorboards, louder and louder until he confesses, “I admit the deed! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

  “I need to talk to you,” I say, taking out a mug and pouring milk into it first, then adding the coffee. The milk billows up from the bottom, along with flecks of dust I should have probably checked for. “I had a weird dream.”

  “Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters.”

  “Uh, no.” I take a sip of the coffee and wince. Grandad made it ridiculously strong.

  My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. “Guess it would have been kind of weird if we’d had the same dream.”

  I roll my eyes. “Well, you’d better not tell me anything else. Don’t ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.”

  Grandad chuckles, but it turns into a wheeze.

  I look out the window. There are no cats on the grass. As I watch Grandad pour ketchup onto his eggs, the red liquid spreading, I think, There’s too much blood, and I don’t remember stabbing her, but a wet knife is in my hand and the blood is smeared over the floorboards like a thick glaze.

  “So are you going to tell me about the dream you did have?” My grandfather sits down at the table, smacking his lips.

  “Yeah,” I say, blinking as I remember where I am. Mom said those sudden, sickening flashes of the murder would get better over time, but they just got less frequent. Maybe some small decent part of me didn’t want to forget.

  “You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Grandad asks.

  “The dream started with me outside in the rain. I walked out to the barn, and then I woke up in my bed, with mud all over my feet. Sleepwalking again, I guess.”

  “You guess?” he asks.

  “Lila was in my dream.” I force the words out. We never talk about Lila or the way the whole family protected me, after. How my mother wept into the fur collar of her sweater and hugged me and told me that even if I had done it, then she was sure that little Zacharov bitch deserved it, and she didn’t care what anyone said, I was still her baby. How there was something dark under my fingernails and I couldn’t seem to get it out. I tried with my own nails and then with a butter knife, pressing until I started to bleed. Until my blood washed away the other darkness.

  So my own conscience is finally doing me in. It’s about time.

  Grandad raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it would help if you talk about her. Talk about killing her. Get it off your chest. I’ve done bad things, kid. I’m not going to judge you.”

  Mom got arrested not long after Lila’s murder. Not because of me, not exactly, but she was off her game. She wanted a big score and she wanted it fast.

  “What do you want me to say? I killed her? I know I did, even if I don’t remember it. I always wondered if Mom paid someone to make me forget the details. Maybe she thought if I didn’t remember how it felt, I wouldn’t do it again.” There’s got to be something dead inside me, because normal people don’t stand over the corpse of someone they love and feel nothing but a distant, horrible joy. “Lila was a dream worker, and so I guess the sleepwalking and the nightmares seem ironic. I’m not saying I don’t deserve them; I just want to understand why they’re happening.”

  “Maybe you should come down to Carney. See your uncle Armen. He can still do some memory work. Maybe he can help you remember.”

  “Uncle Armen has Alzheimer’s,” I say. He’s a friend of Grandad’s from when they were kids, and not really even my uncle.

  Grandad snorts. “Nah. Blowback. But let’s see what that fancy doctor thinks first.”

  I pour more coffee into my cup. A week after Lila died and Barron and Philip hid her body wherever bodies get hidden, I went to a pay phone and called Lila’s mother. I’d promised I wouldn’t, had listened to my grandfather explain that if anyone found out what I’d done, the whole family would pay. I knew that the Zacharovs were unlikely to forget who had dug the grave and mopped up the blood and failed to turn me in, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Lila’s mother alone in that house.

  Alone and waiting for her daughter to come home.

  The ringing seemed too harsh. I felt light-headed. When her mother answered, I hung up. Then I walked around to the back of the convenience store and puked my guts out.

  Grandad stands up. “How about you start on the upstairs bathroom? I’m going out for supplies.”

  “Don’t forget the milk,” I say.

  “My memory’s fine,” he shoots back at me as he reaches for his jacket.

  * * *

  The floor tiles of the bathroom are cracked and torn in places, and there’s a cheap white cabinet shoved against one wall. Inside are dozens and dozens of mismatched towels, some full of holes, and amber-colored plastic bottles with a few pills in each. On the shelf beneath that there are jars crusted with dark liquids and tins of powder.

  As I clean silken balls full of baby spiders from the corners of the shower and toss out sticky, mostly empty shampoo bottles, I force myself to think about Lila.

  We were nine when we met. Her parents’ marriage was coming apart and she and her mother went to live with her grandmother in the Pine Barrens. She had wooly blond hair, one blue eye and one green one, and all I knew about her was that Grandad said her father was someone important.

  Lila was what anybody might expect from a girl who could give you nightmares with a bare-handed touch, from the head of the Zacharov family’s daughter. She was spoiled rotten.

  At nine she beat me mercilessly at video games, raced up hills and trees so fast I was always three steps behind her long legs, and bit me when I tried to steal her dolls and hide them. I couldn’t tell if she hated me half the time, even when we spent weeks hiding under the branches of a willow tree, drawing civilizations in the dirt and then crushing them like callous gods. But I was used to brothers who were fast and cruel. I didn’t mind that. I worshipped her.