by Holly Black
Hunt gives me a long look, then nods once. “We also visited Bethenny Thomas and recovered two guns, although ballistics will still need to match the bullets. Now let’s see you transform something.”
“Oh, right. The show,” I say, standing up.
I strip off my gloves slowly and press my hands down onto the cool, dry surface of the table.
At eleven that night I call Barron from my car.
“Okay,” I say. “I made my decision.”
“You really had no choice,” he says, smug. He sounds very big-brotherly, like he already warned me not to cross the street by myself and there I am on the other side, cars whizzing by and no way back. Just as casual as that. I wonder if Barron really doesn’t feel violated, if he’s so steeped in magic and violence that he believes cursing and blackmailing one another is just what brothers do.
“No,” I say. “No choice at all.”
“Okay,” he says, laughter in his voice. He sounds relaxed now, no longer wary. “I’ll let them know.”
“I’m not doing it,” I say. “That’s my decision. I’m not working for the Brennans. I’m not going to be an assassin.”
“I could go to the Feds, you know,” he says stiffly. “Don’t be an idiot, Cassel.”
“Go, then,” I say. “Go ahead. But if you do, then they’ll know what I am. You’ll lose the ability to control me. I’ll be common property.” It’s easy to bluff now, when the Feds already know what I am.
There is a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally he says, “Can we talk about this in person?”
“Sure,” I say. “I can sneak out of Wallingford. Pick me up.”
“I don’t know,” he says sourly. “I don’t want to encourage your delinquency.”
“There’s a store near the school,” I say. “Be there or be square.”
“It’ll take me fifteen minutes.”
When we hang up, I look out the window of the car. My chest feels tight, cramped, the way my legs would sometimes get after running—a pain so sudden that it would wake me from a sound sleep.
There’s only one thing to do when that happens. You wait for it to pass.
I figure that the Benz will make Barron nervous about my loyalties, so I wait for him on foot, leaning against the concrete wall. Mr. Gazonas, who owns the corner store, looked at me sadly from behind the counter when I came in and bought a coffee.
“You should be in school,” he said, then looked at the clock. “You should be asleep.”
“I know,” I said, putting my money on the counter. “I’ve got family troubles.”
“No trouble ever got fixed late at night,” he said. “Midnight is for regrets.”
I don’t like to think about that as I sip coffee and twiddle my thumbs, but everything else I’ve got to think about, I like even less.
Barron’s only a half hour late. He pulls up and rolls down his window. “Okay,” he says. “Where do you want to go?”
“Somewhere private,” I say, getting into the car.
We drive a couple of blocks until we come to an old cemetery. He pulls onto the pebbled road, past a NO TRESPASSING sign.
“Look,” I say. “I get that you have something on me. You could run your mouth. Tell people what I am and what I’ve done. Hell, you could scream it from every rooftop. I would be screwed. My life would be over.”
He frowns. I can’t tell if he’s considering what I said or just scheming.
“The thing is,” I say, “I could change my face and start a totally different life. All I’d need is a name and a Social Security number. I’m pretty confident that Mom raised me well enough to commit a little identity theft.”
He looks startled, like he’d never even considered that.
“I don’t want to be a murderer,” I say.
“Don’t think of it like that,” he says, leaning over and picking up my coffee from the cup holder. He takes a long swallow. “The people we’d be taking out aren’t good guys. Let me explain how this would work. The Brennans don’t even have to meet you. They’ll just get to see your work. I’m your agent and accomplice and fall guy. I help you set up the crimes, and I hide your identity.”
“What about school?”
“What about it?” he asks.
“I’m not leaving Wallingford.”
He nods, lip curling up. “Now that Lila’s at Wallingford, I just bet you don’t want to leave. It always comes back to her, doesn’t it?”
I frown. “So why couldn’t I do this on my own? Cut you out?”
“Because you need me to do the research,” he says, clearly relieved to be asked a question he can easily answer. “I’ll make sure we find the right person on the right night. And, of course, I’ll make sure the witnesses don’t remember anything.”
“Of course,” I echo.
“So?” he says. “Come on. We could make a lot of money. And I could even make you forget—”
“No,” I say, cutting him off. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to do it.”
“Cassel,” he says desperately. “Please. Look, you’ve got to. Please, Cassel.”
For a moment I am uncertain about everything.
“I don’t,” I say finally. The inside of the car feels stuffy, cramped. I want to get out. “Just take me back to Walling-ford.”
“I already took a job,” he says. “I was so sure that you’d say yes.”
I freeze. “Barron, come on. You can’t manipulate me like this. I’m not going to—”
“Just this once,” he says. “One time. If you hate it, if it goes to hell, we never have to do it again.”
I hesitate. After I changed Barron’s notebooks, he became the brother I always wanted. There’s always a price. “So instead of pizza night, we’re supposed to bond over murder?”
“So you’ll do it?” he asks.
I feel sick. For a moment I really think I am going to throw up. He looks so genuinely pleased by the idea that I might agree. “Who?” I ask, leaning my head against the cool glass of the window. “Who’s this victim?”
He waves his hand in the air dismissively. “His name’s Emil Lombardo. No one you know. Total psycho.”
I am glad my face is turned, so he can’t see my expression. “Okay,” I say. “Just this once.”
He claps me on the shoulder just as a car pulls between the pillars behind us. Red and blue lights whirl, sending the gravestones into bizarre strobing relief.
Barron punches the dashboard. “Cops.”
“It does say no trespassing,” I remind him, pointing toward the sign.
He leans down and peels off one of his gloves.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He raises his eyebrows, his lip quirking on one side. “Getting out of a ticket.”
The floodlight on the cop car turns on suddenly, making spots dance behind my eyes.
I look nervously through the rear window. One of the officers has gotten out and is walking toward us. I take a deep breath.
Barron rolls down the window, a grin splitting his face. “Good evening, sir.”
I grab Barron’s wrist in my gloved hand before he can strike. He looks at me, too shocked to register that he ought to be angry, as Agent Hunt lowers the barrel of a gun to his face.
“Barron Sharpe, step out of the car,” Hunt says.
“What?” he demands.
“I’m Agent Hunt, remember?” Agent Hunt looks pleased for the first time since I’ve met him. “We had a nice conversation about your brother. You told us a bunch of things that didn’t quite check out.”
Barron nods his head, glances at me. “I remember you.”
“We just heard your very interesting proposition,” Agent Hunt says. In the side mirror, I see Agent Jones get out of the car.
He walks around to my side and opens the door. Barron turns toward me.
I do the only thing I can think of. I lift up my shirt to show him the wire.
“Sorry,” I say. “But I figured that if y
ou could force me to work for someone, then you couldn’t be too mad if I did the same to you. I enrolled us in a program.”
He looks like he doesn’t quite agree with my logic.
I think of Grandad sitting in his backyard, looking up at the sky, wishing things could have been different for us kids. I’m sure this wasn’t what he was picturing.
So what if I led the horse directly to water , I tell myself. It’s not like I made him drink.
They slap the cuffs on Barron. Good thing I’ve already negotiated his deal, because Hunt and Jones look like they’d much rather lock him in a deep dark hole than work with him. I recognize the look. It’s the same one they give me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE HARDEST THING IS making sure that I don’t have a tail. Agent Hunt gave me a lift back to my car at Wallingford, which made me nervous. I drive around aimlessly for about an hour, until I’m sure there’s no one behind me.
The streets are nearly empty. This late at night, there are few good reasons to be on the road.
Finally I head to the hotel. I park in the far back, near the Dumpsters. The night air is like a slap in the face. It seems too early in the season for the temperature to have dropped so abruptly. Maybe it’s just colder at three in the morning.
The hotel she picked is brick, with a central building and then a couple of other buildings that form a C-shape around a greenish pool. All the rooms open onto the outdoors, so there’s no need to walk through a lobby.
She’s in room 411. Upstairs. I knock three times. I hear the chain slide, and then the door opens.
My brother’s widow looks less gaunt than she did the last time I saw her, but her eyes are as bruised as ever. Her hair is a silky brown tangle, and she’s wearing a tight black dress that I in no way deserve.
“You’re late.” She motions me inside and locks the door. Then she leans against it. Her hands and feet are bare, and I have to remind myself that she’s not a worker.
Her suitcase is open in one corner, and her clothes are spread across the floor. I move a slip off the one chair in the room and sit down. “Sorry,” I say. “Everything takes longer than you think it will.”
“You want a drink?” Maura asks me, indicating a bottle of Cuervo and a couple of plastic cups.
I shake my head.
“I knew you’d figure it out.” She drops a couple of cubes into the cup and gives herself a generous pour. “You want to hear the story?”
“Let me tell it,” I say. “I want to see how much I actually figured out.”
She takes her glass and goes over to the bed, where she lies down on her stomach. I’m pretty sure this isn’t her first drink.
“Philip and you had one of those relationships that was all ups and downs, right? Highs and lows. Lots of screaming. Passionate.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking at me oddly.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “He was my brother. I know what all his relationships were like. Anyway, maybe the fighting got to be too much for you, or maybe it was different after you had the baby, but at some point Barron got involved. Started making you forget fights you’d had with Philip. Made you forget you’d decided to leave him.”
“That’s when you gave me the amulet,” she says. I think of handing it to her in the kitchen of the apartment, my nephew howling in the background, Grandad snoring on a chair in the living room.
I nod. “He made me forget a lot too.”
She throws back a good portion of the liquid in her glass.
“And you’d already started to get some pretty bad side effects.” I think of her sitting at the top of the stairs, legs dangling off the edge, her whole body moving in time with a song I couldn’t hear.
“You mean the music,” she says. “I miss it, you know?”
“You said it was beautiful.”
“I used to play the clarinet in middle school—did you know that? I wasn’t very good, but I can still read music.” She laughs. “I tried to write down snatches of it—a few notes, even—but it’s all gone. I may never hear it again.”
“It was an auditory hallucination. I get headaches. Be glad it’s gone.”
Maura makes a face. “That is a very unromantic explanation.”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “So anyway. You realized what Barron and Philip were doing to you and you split. Took your son.”
“Your nephew has a name,” she says. “It’s Aaron. You never say it. Aaron.”
I flinch. For some reason I never connected the kid with me. He was always Philip’s son, Maura’s son, not my nephew. Not someone with a name who’ll grow up to be another screwed-up member of my screwed-up family.
“You took Aaron,” I say. “Philip guessed that I had something to do with you two leaving, by the way.”
She nods. There’s a story there, one about the slow realization of how betrayed she really was, one where she jumped a little as she felt the amulet pinned under her shirt splitting. One where she had to think fast and not gasp, and keep pretending even when she must have felt drowned by horror. But she doesn’t move to tell it, and it’s her story to tell or not tell. My brothers did this to her. She doesn’t owe me anything.
“So you’ve got a big family, right? Or a best friend who moved to the South. Someone you thought you’d be safe staying with in Arkansas. You get in your car and just go. Maybe trade it in for another vehicle. You’re using your maiden name, and even though you figure Philip is going to freak out about you taking his son, you know that you’ve got lots on him. You’re sure that he’s going to be afraid of you going to the police, so you never even consider that he will.
“You’re careful, but not careful enough. Maybe it’s hard to find you, but far from impossible. So when the Feds call, looking for you, with stories about your husband going into witness protection and wanting you with him, you freak out. The Feds need you—Philip wouldn’t give them what they wanted until he saw you—so I’m sure they didn’t care about your feelings. Your country needed you.”
Maura nods.
“You realize you’ll never get away from him. Legally, with the Feds helping him out, he might be able to get joint custody of your son. You might even be forced to live nearby—and then maybe a couple of his friends would come over. Either they’d work you or they’d work you over, but you knew he could get you back. You knew that you were in danger.”
She’s watching me like I’m a snake, coiling back and ready to strike.
“You know where Philip keeps his guns. You drive up from Arkansas, you take one, and you shoot him.”
At the word “shoot” she flinches. Then she swallows the rest of her tequila.
“You wear a big coat and those very lovely red gloves. Security had put in cameras outside the condos recently. Luckily for you, all they could tell was that the person who entered Philip’s apartment that night was a woman.”
“What?” She sits up and stares at me like I’ve finally surprised her. She presses both her hands to her mouth. “No. There was a camera?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “After, you toss the clothes and the gun someplace where you figure they’ll be safe. My house. Mom’s out of jail, after all. You figure she’ll be hoarding again in no time. A garbage house really would be a great place to hide evidence—under so much crap that even cops aren’t going to have the patience to sort through it all.”
“I guess I’m no criminal genius, though,” she says. “You found them. And I had no idea about being taped.”
“There’s just one thing I didn’t figure out,” I say. “When I talked to the Feds, they said they spoke to you in Arkansas the morning after Philip’s murder. That’s at least a twenty-hour drive. There’s no way you shot him and got back in time to take that call. How did you do it?”
She smiles. “You and your mother taught me. The agents called my house. Then my brother called me on a prepaid cell phone with an Arkansas area code. He conference-called me and then called back the federal agents. Simple. It looked l
ike I was returning their call from home. Just like how I had to help your mother make all those calls from jail.”
“I am all admiration,” I say. “I actually thought the coat and gloves and gun belonged to Mom, until I saw the amulet I gave you. The one you left in the pocket.”
“I made a lot of mistakes. I see that now,” she says, pulling a gun from underneath the covers and leveling it at me. “You understand I can’t afford to make any more.”
“Oh, absolutely,” I say. “So you sure don’t want to kill the guy who just framed someone for his own brother’s murder.”
The gun wavers in her hand.
“You didn’t,” she says. “Why would you?”
“I tried to protect Philip when he was alive.” I’m sincere, although I’m sure she’s used to sincere liars. “I don’t think he believed that, but I did. Now that he’s dead, I’m trying to protect you.”
“So you’re really not going to tell anyone,” she says.
I stand, and the gun comes up.
“I’ll take it to my grave,” I say, and grin. She’s not smiling.
Then I turn and walk out of the hotel room.
For a moment I think I hear a click, and my muscles stiffen, anticipating the bullet. Then the moment’s past and I keep moving—out of the room, down the stairs, and into my car. There’s this old Greek myth about this guy named Orpheus. He goes down to Hades to get his wife back, but he loses her again because on the way out of hell, he looks behind him to see if she’s really there.
That’s how I feel. Like if I look back, the spell will be broken. I’ll be dead.
It’s only when I pull out of the parking lot that I can breathe again.
I don’t want to go back to Wallingford. I just can’t face it. Instead I drive down to Carney and bang on Grandad’s door. It’s well past the middle of the night, but eventually he answers, wrapped in a bathrobe.
“Cassel?” he says. “Did something happen?”
I shake my head.
He waves to me with his good hand. “Well, get in here. You’re letting in all the cold air, standing in the doorway.”
