“What a coincidence,” Barron says. “I’m at Walling-ford too.”
The fire alarm sounds. Sam jumps up and starts shoving his feet into sneakers.
“Grab the PlayStation,” he says to me.
I shake my head, covering the phone. “It’s a prank. Someone pulled it.” Then I nearly spit into the phone, “You idiot. Even if you wanted me to leave, there’s no way I can now. They will take a head count. They will make absolutely sure we’re all back in our rooms.”
Sam ignores me and starts unhooking his game system.
“I already made your hall master forget you,” Barron says. The words send a chill up my spine.
I file out with Sam and all the other kids to stand on the grass. Everyone’s looking up at the building, waiting for wisps of smoke to unfurl or flames to light the windows. It’s easy to back away until I’m near trees and shadows.
No one’s looking for me. No one but Barron.
His gloved hand comes down on my shoulder heavily. We walk away from the school, along the sidewalk, toward houses bathed in the flickering blue light of televisions. It’s only around nine, but it feels much later.
It feels too late.
“I’ve been thinking about the Zacharovs,” says Barron too casually. “They’re not the only game in town.”
I should never have let my guard down.
“What do you mean?” It’s hard to look at Barron now, but I do. He’s smirking. His black hair and black suit make him into a shadow, as if I conjured some dark mirror of myself.
“I know what you did to me,” he says, and although he’s trying to keep his tone even, I can hear rage bleeding through. “How you took advantage of the holes in my memory. How for all your bellyaching about doing the right thing, you’re no different from me or Philip. I met two nice men from the FBI—Agent Jones and Agent Hunt. They had a lot to tell me about my big brother—and about my little one. Philip told them how you turned me against him. How somehow you’d messed up my head so that I didn’t remember that I’d been in on his plan to make Anton head of the Zacharov family. At first I didn’t believe them, but I went back and looked at my notebooks again.”
Oh, crap.
There are master forgers in the world, folks who know exactly what chemicals ink had in it in the sixteenth century versus the eighteenth. They have sources for paper and canvases that will carbon date correctly; they can create perfect craquelure. They practice the loops and flourishes of another hand until it is more familiar than their own.
It probably goes without saying that I am not a master forger. Most forgeries get by because they are good enough that no one checks them. When I sign my mother’s name to a permission slip, so long as it looks like her handwriting, no one brings in a specialist.
But if Barron compared the notebook I hastily forged to his older ones, the fake would be obvious. We are all specialists in our own handwriting
“If you know what I did to you,” I say, trying not to seem rattled, “then you know what you did to me, too.”
That brings out his lopsided grin. “The difference is that I’m willing to forgive you.”
That’s so unexpected that I have no reply. Barron doesn’t seem to need one. “I want to start over, Cassel,” he says, “and I want to start at the top. I’m going to the Brennan family. And for that I need you. We’ll be an unstoppable team of assassins.”
“No,” I say.
“Ouch.” He doesn’t sound all that put out by my refusal. “Think you’re too good for such a dirty job?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s me. Too good.”
I wonder if he really could rationalize what I did to him, really treat betrayal like the slight transgression of a recalcitrant business partner. I wonder if I hurt him.
If he can rationalize what I did to him, it’s easy to imagine how he rationalized what he did to me.
“Do you know why you agreed to change all those people into inanimate objects? Why you agreed to kill them?”
I take a deep breath. It sucks to hear the words out loud. “Of course I don’t. I don’t remember anything. You stole all my memories .” “You would follow Philip and me around like a little puppy,” Barron says. I can hear the violence in his voice. “Begging to do a job with us. Hoping we’d see your black heart and give you a chance.” He pokes me in the chest.
I take a step back. Rage flashes through me, sudden and nearly overwhelming.
I was their baby brother. Sure, I idolized them. And they kicked me in the teeth.
Barron grins. “It’s pretty clever, really. I made you believe you’d killed before. That’s all! I made you believe that you were what I wanted you to become. You loved it, Cassel. You loved being a goddamn assassin.”
“That’s not true,” I say, shaking my head, willing myself to shut out his words. “You’re a liar. You’re the prince of liars. And since I don’t remember, you know you can say anything. I would be stupid to believe you.”
“Oh, come on,” Barron says. “You know your own nature. You know if something feels true.”
“I’m not going to do it,” I say. “You and the Brennans can go to hell together.”
He laughs. “You will do it. You already have. People don’t change.”
“No,” I say.
“Like I said, those federal agents came to see me,” Barron says. I start to interrupt him, but Barron just raises his voice. “I didn’t give them anything important. Nothing like I could have. If I told them what you are, it would just be a matter of time before they connected the dots and figured out you’re the murderer they’re looking for.”
“They’d never believe you,” I say, but I feel unsteady. The world has already tilted. I can feel myself falling.
“Of course they would,” Barron says. “I can show them a body. The one you left in the freezer in Mom’s house.”
“Oh,” I say faintly. “That.”
“Sloppy,” Barron says. “I was the one who told you about him, after all. Didn’t you think I would look?”
“I don’t know what I thought.” Truly, I don’t.
“Then they can make you that same crap offer they made Philip, get what they want, and lock you away for a thousand years.”
“Philip had immunity,” I say. “I saw the contract.”
Barron laughs. “I saw it too. Too bad Philip didn’t show it to me before he sold them his soul. I was pre-law, remember? That contract’s worthless. Agents can’t offer immunity; it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It was for show. They could have taken Philip in whenever they wanted.”
“Did you tell him that?” I ask.
“Why bother?” Barron says. “Philip didn’t want to hear it. He just wanted to say good-bye before they shipped him off to witness protection land.”
I can’t tell if Barron’s lying or not. I have a sinking feeling that this time he’s telling the truth.
Which means I can’t trust the Feds.
But Barron’s going to go to the Feds if I don’t throw in my lot with the Brennans.
And Zacharov will have me killed in a heartbeat if I do work for the Brennans.
There’s no way out.
I think about what Zacharov said at Philip’s funeral. There are people close to you that you will have to deal with eventually.
You will do it, Barron said. You already have. People don’t change.
I look over at him. He smirks. “Not a tough choice when I lay it all out for you, is it, Cassel?”
It’s not.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BARRON WALKS ME BACK to my dorm. I get there before lights-out at eleven. The hall master looks surprised to find someone occupying the other half of Sam’s room when he comes in for the final hall check, but he doesn’t say anything. He must figure that he’s getting old, to be forgetting things like which students he’s supposed to be responsible for. He must worry about dementia, Alzheimer’s, getting enough sleep. It’s a trick that wouldn’t have worked at any other time but the beginning of the year.
It did work, though. Barron’s clever.
“What happened to you during the fire drill?” Sam asks, pulling on a ratty Dracula T-shirt. His sweatpants have a hole on the knee.
“Went for a walk,” I say, peeling off my gloves. “Fresh air.”
“With Daneca?” Sam asks.
I frown. “What?”
“I know you took her out in that new, fancy car of yours. You got her in trouble, man.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” Then I grin. “But it was kind of funny. I mean, she never does anything bad, and now she’s cutting class, getting thrown in jail . . .”
Sam isn’t smiling. “You’re going to treat her the same way you treated Audrey, aren’t you? Barely noticing if you hurt her. I always knew Daneca liked you. Girls like you, Cassel. And you ignore them. And then they like you more.”
“Hey,” I say. “Wait a minute. She skipped class because she was miserable over you. We talked about you.”
“What did she say?” I can’t tell if he believes me, but at least I’ve distracted his focus.
I sigh. “That you’re a bigot who doesn’t want to date a worker girl.”
“I’m not!” Sam says. “That’s not even why I’m mad at her.”
“I told her that.” I chuck a pillow at him. “Just before we leaped into each other’s arms and made out passionately, like weasels on Valentine’s Day, like those really magnetic magnets, like greased-up eels—”
“Why am I your friend?” Sam moans, flopping back onto the bed. “Why?
A knock on the door startles us just before our hall master jerks it open. “Is there a problem? Lights-out was fifteen minutes ago. Keep it down in here and go to sleep or I’m giving you both a Saturday detention.”
“Sorry,” we both mumble.
The door closes.
Sam snickers and pitches his voice low. “Okay, fine. I get it. I’m insecure. But look, I’m a fat dork. Girls aren’t exactly getting in line, you know? And then there’s this girl, and I figure she’s too good for me so there has to be some kind of catch, and then there is. She’s hiding that she’s a worker. She doesn’t trust me. She’s not taking me seriously.“
“You ignoring Daneca is making you both insane,” I say. “She made a mistake. I’ve made plenty of mistakes. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you. It means she wants you to like her and she thought she had to lie to make that happen. Which makes her less perfect, sure. But isn’t that a relief?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly, his pillow half-covering his mouth. “I guess. Maybe I should talk to her.”
“Good,” I say. “I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.”
It’s a dream. I’m pretty sure it’s a dream, but I am back in my grandfather’s basement in Carney, lying on top of Lila, and my hands are tightening on her arms, and it’s really hard to concentrate on anything but the smell of her hair and the feel of her skin. Except then I look down at her and she’s staring up at the ceiling, her face slack and pale.
And in the dream I lean down to kiss her anyway, even though I can see that her neck is slit with the worker’s smile, cut too deep, running with blood. Even though she’s dead.
Then I’m teetering on the roof of my old dorm, slate tiles biting into the pads of my feet. Leaves rustle overhead. I look down at the empty quad, just like I did last spring.
This time I jump.
I’m awake, sweating through the sheets, hating myself for the hot shudder that’s running through my body. On the other side of the room, Sam is snoring gently.
I reach for my cell phone before I think better of it.
Stop it, I type to Lila
What? she texts back a moment later. She’s awake.
And then I’m pushing open the window and sneaking out to the quad in the middle of the night, in just a T-shirt and boxers. It’s stupid, stupid like driving off campus with no plan. I’m acting like I want to get caught, like I want someone to stop me before I have to make the decisions I am careening toward.
Once, a year ago, I would never have believed how easy it was to just walk out of one building and into another. The front doors of the dorms aren’t even locked. Each floor door is locked, but not with anything challenging. No bolt. Just a quick twist and swipe, and I’m walking across her floor and into her room, like getting caught is the last thing on my mind.
“You, ” I say, my voice low but not low enough. She’s huddled in blankets and peering up at me owlishly.
“I can’t keep having these dreams,” I whisper. “You have to stop giving them to me.”
“Are you crazy?” She rolls onto her back, kicking off the blanket and sitting up. She’s only got on a tank top and underwear. “You’re going to get us both thrown out of school.”
I open my mouth to bargain with her, but I feel suddenly undone by despair. I am like a clockwork automaton whose gears just locked.
She touches my arm, bare skin on bare skin. “I’m not giving you any dreams. I’m not working you. Can’t you believe there’s one person in your life who’s not out to get you?”
“No,” I say, too honest by half. I sit down on the bed and put my head in my hands.
She puts her hand on my cheek. “There’s something really wrong, isn’t there?”
The fire alarm sounds. Sam jumps up and starts shoving his feet into sneakers.
“Grab the PlayStation,” he says to me.
I shake my head, covering the phone. “It’s a prank. Someone pulled it.” Then I nearly spit into the phone, “You idiot. Even if you wanted me to leave, there’s no way I can now. They will take a head count. They will make absolutely sure we’re all back in our rooms.”
Sam ignores me and starts unhooking his game system.
“I already made your hall master forget you,” Barron says. The words send a chill up my spine.
I file out with Sam and all the other kids to stand on the grass. Everyone’s looking up at the building, waiting for wisps of smoke to unfurl or flames to light the windows. It’s easy to back away until I’m near trees and shadows.
No one’s looking for me. No one but Barron.
His gloved hand comes down on my shoulder heavily. We walk away from the school, along the sidewalk, toward houses bathed in the flickering blue light of televisions. It’s only around nine, but it feels much later.
It feels too late.
“I’ve been thinking about the Zacharovs,” says Barron too casually. “They’re not the only game in town.”
I should never have let my guard down.
“What do you mean?” It’s hard to look at Barron now, but I do. He’s smirking. His black hair and black suit make him into a shadow, as if I conjured some dark mirror of myself.
“I know what you did to me,” he says, and although he’s trying to keep his tone even, I can hear rage bleeding through. “How you took advantage of the holes in my memory. How for all your bellyaching about doing the right thing, you’re no different from me or Philip. I met two nice men from the FBI—Agent Jones and Agent Hunt. They had a lot to tell me about my big brother—and about my little one. Philip told them how you turned me against him. How somehow you’d messed up my head so that I didn’t remember that I’d been in on his plan to make Anton head of the Zacharov family. At first I didn’t believe them, but I went back and looked at my notebooks again.”
Oh, crap.
There are master forgers in the world, folks who know exactly what chemicals ink had in it in the sixteenth century versus the eighteenth. They have sources for paper and canvases that will carbon date correctly; they can create perfect craquelure. They practice the loops and flourishes of another hand until it is more familiar than their own.
It probably goes without saying that I am not a master forger. Most forgeries get by because they are good enough that no one checks them. When I sign my mother’s name to a permission slip, so long as it looks like her handwriting, no one brings in a specialist.
But if Barron compared the notebook I hastily forged to his older ones, the fake would be obvious. We are all specialists in our own handwriting
“If you know what I did to you,” I say, trying not to seem rattled, “then you know what you did to me, too.”
That brings out his lopsided grin. “The difference is that I’m willing to forgive you.”
That’s so unexpected that I have no reply. Barron doesn’t seem to need one. “I want to start over, Cassel,” he says, “and I want to start at the top. I’m going to the Brennan family. And for that I need you. We’ll be an unstoppable team of assassins.”
“No,” I say.
“Ouch.” He doesn’t sound all that put out by my refusal. “Think you’re too good for such a dirty job?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s me. Too good.”
I wonder if he really could rationalize what I did to him, really treat betrayal like the slight transgression of a recalcitrant business partner. I wonder if I hurt him.
If he can rationalize what I did to him, it’s easy to imagine how he rationalized what he did to me.
“Do you know why you agreed to change all those people into inanimate objects? Why you agreed to kill them?”
I take a deep breath. It sucks to hear the words out loud. “Of course I don’t. I don’t remember anything. You stole all my memories .” “You would follow Philip and me around like a little puppy,” Barron says. I can hear the violence in his voice. “Begging to do a job with us. Hoping we’d see your black heart and give you a chance.” He pokes me in the chest.
I take a step back. Rage flashes through me, sudden and nearly overwhelming.
I was their baby brother. Sure, I idolized them. And they kicked me in the teeth.
Barron grins. “It’s pretty clever, really. I made you believe you’d killed before. That’s all! I made you believe that you were what I wanted you to become. You loved it, Cassel. You loved being a goddamn assassin.”
“That’s not true,” I say, shaking my head, willing myself to shut out his words. “You’re a liar. You’re the prince of liars. And since I don’t remember, you know you can say anything. I would be stupid to believe you.”
“Oh, come on,” Barron says. “You know your own nature. You know if something feels true.”
“I’m not going to do it,” I say. “You and the Brennans can go to hell together.”
He laughs. “You will do it. You already have. People don’t change.”
“No,” I say.
“Like I said, those federal agents came to see me,” Barron says. I start to interrupt him, but Barron just raises his voice. “I didn’t give them anything important. Nothing like I could have. If I told them what you are, it would just be a matter of time before they connected the dots and figured out you’re the murderer they’re looking for.”
“They’d never believe you,” I say, but I feel unsteady. The world has already tilted. I can feel myself falling.
“Of course they would,” Barron says. “I can show them a body. The one you left in the freezer in Mom’s house.”
“Oh,” I say faintly. “That.”
“Sloppy,” Barron says. “I was the one who told you about him, after all. Didn’t you think I would look?”
“I don’t know what I thought.” Truly, I don’t.
“Then they can make you that same crap offer they made Philip, get what they want, and lock you away for a thousand years.”
“Philip had immunity,” I say. “I saw the contract.”
Barron laughs. “I saw it too. Too bad Philip didn’t show it to me before he sold them his soul. I was pre-law, remember? That contract’s worthless. Agents can’t offer immunity; it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It was for show. They could have taken Philip in whenever they wanted.”
“Did you tell him that?” I ask.
“Why bother?” Barron says. “Philip didn’t want to hear it. He just wanted to say good-bye before they shipped him off to witness protection land.”
I can’t tell if Barron’s lying or not. I have a sinking feeling that this time he’s telling the truth.
Which means I can’t trust the Feds.
But Barron’s going to go to the Feds if I don’t throw in my lot with the Brennans.
And Zacharov will have me killed in a heartbeat if I do work for the Brennans.
There’s no way out.
I think about what Zacharov said at Philip’s funeral. There are people close to you that you will have to deal with eventually.
You will do it, Barron said. You already have. People don’t change.
I look over at him. He smirks. “Not a tough choice when I lay it all out for you, is it, Cassel?”
It’s not.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BARRON WALKS ME BACK to my dorm. I get there before lights-out at eleven. The hall master looks surprised to find someone occupying the other half of Sam’s room when he comes in for the final hall check, but he doesn’t say anything. He must figure that he’s getting old, to be forgetting things like which students he’s supposed to be responsible for. He must worry about dementia, Alzheimer’s, getting enough sleep. It’s a trick that wouldn’t have worked at any other time but the beginning of the year.
It did work, though. Barron’s clever.
“What happened to you during the fire drill?” Sam asks, pulling on a ratty Dracula T-shirt. His sweatpants have a hole on the knee.
“Went for a walk,” I say, peeling off my gloves. “Fresh air.”
“With Daneca?” Sam asks.
I frown. “What?”
“I know you took her out in that new, fancy car of yours. You got her in trouble, man.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” Then I grin. “But it was kind of funny. I mean, she never does anything bad, and now she’s cutting class, getting thrown in jail . . .”
Sam isn’t smiling. “You’re going to treat her the same way you treated Audrey, aren’t you? Barely noticing if you hurt her. I always knew Daneca liked you. Girls like you, Cassel. And you ignore them. And then they like you more.”
“Hey,” I say. “Wait a minute. She skipped class because she was miserable over you. We talked about you.”
“What did she say?” I can’t tell if he believes me, but at least I’ve distracted his focus.
I sigh. “That you’re a bigot who doesn’t want to date a worker girl.”
“I’m not!” Sam says. “That’s not even why I’m mad at her.”
“I told her that.” I chuck a pillow at him. “Just before we leaped into each other’s arms and made out passionately, like weasels on Valentine’s Day, like those really magnetic magnets, like greased-up eels—”
“Why am I your friend?” Sam moans, flopping back onto the bed. “Why?
A knock on the door startles us just before our hall master jerks it open. “Is there a problem? Lights-out was fifteen minutes ago. Keep it down in here and go to sleep or I’m giving you both a Saturday detention.”
“Sorry,” we both mumble.
The door closes.
Sam snickers and pitches his voice low. “Okay, fine. I get it. I’m insecure. But look, I’m a fat dork. Girls aren’t exactly getting in line, you know? And then there’s this girl, and I figure she’s too good for me so there has to be some kind of catch, and then there is. She’s hiding that she’s a worker. She doesn’t trust me. She’s not taking me seriously.“
“You ignoring Daneca is making you both insane,” I say. “She made a mistake. I’ve made plenty of mistakes. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you. It means she wants you to like her and she thought she had to lie to make that happen. Which makes her less perfect, sure. But isn’t that a relief?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly, his pillow half-covering his mouth. “I guess. Maybe I should talk to her.”
“Good,” I say. “I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.”
It’s a dream. I’m pretty sure it’s a dream, but I am back in my grandfather’s basement in Carney, lying on top of Lila, and my hands are tightening on her arms, and it’s really hard to concentrate on anything but the smell of her hair and the feel of her skin. Except then I look down at her and she’s staring up at the ceiling, her face slack and pale.
And in the dream I lean down to kiss her anyway, even though I can see that her neck is slit with the worker’s smile, cut too deep, running with blood. Even though she’s dead.
Then I’m teetering on the roof of my old dorm, slate tiles biting into the pads of my feet. Leaves rustle overhead. I look down at the empty quad, just like I did last spring.
This time I jump.
I’m awake, sweating through the sheets, hating myself for the hot shudder that’s running through my body. On the other side of the room, Sam is snoring gently.
I reach for my cell phone before I think better of it.
Stop it, I type to Lila
What? she texts back a moment later. She’s awake.
And then I’m pushing open the window and sneaking out to the quad in the middle of the night, in just a T-shirt and boxers. It’s stupid, stupid like driving off campus with no plan. I’m acting like I want to get caught, like I want someone to stop me before I have to make the decisions I am careening toward.
Once, a year ago, I would never have believed how easy it was to just walk out of one building and into another. The front doors of the dorms aren’t even locked. Each floor door is locked, but not with anything challenging. No bolt. Just a quick twist and swipe, and I’m walking across her floor and into her room, like getting caught is the last thing on my mind.
“You, ” I say, my voice low but not low enough. She’s huddled in blankets and peering up at me owlishly.
“I can’t keep having these dreams,” I whisper. “You have to stop giving them to me.”
“Are you crazy?” She rolls onto her back, kicking off the blanket and sitting up. She’s only got on a tank top and underwear. “You’re going to get us both thrown out of school.”
I open my mouth to bargain with her, but I feel suddenly undone by despair. I am like a clockwork automaton whose gears just locked.
She touches my arm, bare skin on bare skin. “I’m not giving you any dreams. I’m not working you. Can’t you believe there’s one person in your life who’s not out to get you?”
“No,” I say, too honest by half. I sit down on the bed and put my head in my hands.
She puts her hand on my cheek. “There’s something really wrong, isn’t there?”
