White Cat

Page 24

Lila scrunches her eyebrows for a moment, then a wide grin splits her face. “Oh! Because I’m so pale, right?”
Stacey flinches. Audrey looks at me like she’s trying to see if I’m offended. Wallingford’s idea of political correctness is never to mention anything about race. Ever. Tan skin and dark hair are supposed to be as invisible as red hair or blond hair or skin so white its marbled with blue veins.
“No, it’s all good,” says Lila. “We’re stepcousins. My mother married his mother’s brother.”
My mother doesn’t even have a brother.
I don’t lift an eyebrow.
I don’t smile.
I don’t admit to myself that scamming the girl I might still be in love with is making my pulse race.
“Audrey,” I say, because I know this script pretty well, “can we talk for a minute?”
“Cassel,” says Lila. “I have to cut my hair. I have to take a shower. Come on.” She grins at Audrey and grabs my arm. “It was nice meeting you.”
I keep my gaze on Audrey, waiting for her to answer.
“I guess you can talk when you get back to school,” says Jenna.
“She could use the shower at the dorm,” Audrey says hesitantly.
I am a very bad person.
“So we can talk?” I ask her. “That would be great.”
“Sure,” she says, not looking at me.
As we all walk back to Wallingford, Lila flashes me a grin. “Smooth,” she mouths.
Audrey and I sit on the cement steps in front of the arts building. Her neck is blotchy, the way it gets when she’s nervous. She keeps pushing her red hair out of her face, hooking it over one ear, but it tumbles loose with every breeze.
“I’m sorry about what happened at the party,” I say. I want to touch her hair, smooth it back, but I don’t.
“I’m an independent woman. I make my own decisions,” she says. Her gloved hands pull at the weave of her gray tights.
“I just meant that I—”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “I was drunk, and you shouldn’t kiss drunk girls, certainly not in front of their boyfriends. It’s not chivalrous.”
“Greg’s your boyfriend?” That certainly explains his reaction.
She bites her lower lip and shrugs.
“And then I hit him!” I say quickly, to make her laugh. “No pistols at dawn. You must be so disappointed. Chivalry is truly dead.”
She grins, clearly relieved I’m not going to interrogate her. “I am disappointed.”
“I’m funnier than Greg,” I say. It’s easy to talk to her today, knowing I didn’t kill the last girl I was in love with. I had no idea how heavy a burden that was until I set it down.
“But he likes me better than you ever did,” she says.
“He must like you a whole lot, then.” I look into her eyes as I say it, and am rewarded by the blotchy blush spreading across her cheeks.
She punches me in the arm. “Oooh. You are funny.”
“Does that mean you’re not quite over me?”
She leans back and stretches. “I’m not sure. Are you coming back to school?”
I nod. “I’ll be back.”
“Tick tock,” she says. “I might forget all about you.”
I grin. “Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones.”
“You’ve got a good memory,” she says, but her gaze is focused somewhere behind me.
“Did I mention that I was smarter than Greg too?” When she doesn’t react, I turn to see what she’s staring at.
Lila is heading across the quad toward us in a long skirt and a sweater that she obviously talked someone out of. She cut off so much of her hair that it’s shorter than mine: a pale silvery cap on her head. She’s still wearing my boots, and her lips are shining with pink gloss. For a moment I don’t breathe.
“Big difference,” Audrey says.
Lila’s smile widens. She walks up and links her arm with mine. “Thank you so much for letting me use the shower.”
“No problem,” says Audrey. She’s watching us, like she suddenly thinks that there’s something off about what occurred. Maybe it’s just how different Lila looks.
“We have to catch a train, Cassel,” says Lila.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll call you.”
Audrey nods her head, still looking bewildered.
Lila and I head toward the sidewalk, and I know what this is. The blow-off and the getaway. High stakes or low stakes, the steps are the same.
Turns out I’m not like my dad at all. I really am just like my mother.
The train station is practically empty without the weekday commuter traffic. A guy about my age sits on one of the painted wooden benches, arguing with a girl whose eyes look red and puffy. An old woman leans over a pull cart of groceries. Standing in the far corner two girls with slender mohawks dyed a deep pink giggle together over a Game Boy.
“We should call your dad.” I fish my cell phone out of my pocket. “Make sure he’s going to be in his office when we get there.”
Lila stares into the glass of a vending machine, her expression unreadable. Her reflection wavers a little, like maybe she’s trembling. “We’re not going to New York. We have to get him to meet me somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want anyone but him to know I’m back. Anyone. We have no idea who’s working with Anton.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding. After all she’s been through, a little paranoia is probably not misplaced.
“I overheard a lot,” she says. “I know their plan.”
“Okay,” I say again. I never thought she didn’t.
“Promise me you won’t tell him what happened to me,” she says and lowers her voice. “I don’t want him to know I was a cat.”
“Okay,” I say again. “I’m not going to say anything you don’t want, but he’s going to expect me to say something.” I’m ashamed at my own relief. I wasn’t sure what would happen next. As angry as I am at Barron and Philip, as much as I hate them right now, if Zacharov knew what they did, he’d kill them. I’m not sure I want them dead.
Lila reaches out her hand for my phone. “You won’t be there. I’ll go by myself.”
I open my mouth, and she gives me a warning look that lets me know I better think carefully before I talk. “Look, just let me come with you on the train. I’ll take off once you’re wherever. Safe.”
“I can take care of myself,” she says, and there is a burr in her voice that sounds like a growl.
“I know that.” I hand her the phone.
“Good,” she says, flipping it open.
I frown as she punches in the numbers. Not telling Zacharov, even if it delays my need to make decisions, isn’t a solution. His life is in danger. We need a strategy. “You can’t think your dad is going to blame you? That’s crazy.”
“I think my father is going to feel sorry for me,” she says. I can hear the ringing on the other end.
“He’s going to think you were brave.”
“Maybe,” she says, “but he’s not going to think I can take care of myself.”
I hear a woman’s voice, and Lila puts the phone to her ear. “I’d like to talk with Mr. Ivan Zacharov.”
There is a long pause. Her lips press together into a thin line. “No, this is not a joke. He’ll want to talk to me.”
She kicks the wall with one too large boot. “Put him on the line!”
I raise my eyebrows. She covers the receiver with her hand. “They’re getting him,” she mouths.
“Hello, Daddy,” she says, closing her eyes.
A few moments later she says, “No, I can’t prove I’m me. How could I prove that?” I can hear his voice like a distant buzz, growing louder.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she says tightly. “Don’t call me a liar. I am Lillian!”
She bites her lip and, after a few more moments, thrusts the phone in my direction. “Talk to him.”
“What do you want me to say?” I keep my voice low, but the prospect of talking to Mr. Zacharov makes my palms sweat.
She reaches over to a tray of brochures and shoves one at me. “Tell him to meet us there.”
I look down at it.
“He’s got a room at the Taj Mahal,” Lila hisses.
I take the phone. “Um, hello, sir,” I say into the receiver, but he’s still yelling. Finally it seems to register that she’s no longer on the line.
His voice is that of someone used to his commands being obeyed. “Where is she? Where are you now? Just tell me that.”
“She wants us to meet you in Atlantic City. She says you have a place there. At the Taj Mahal.”
The phone goes so silent that for a moment I think he hung up on me.
“What kind of setup am I walking into?” he says finally, slowly.
“She just wants you to meet her. Alone. Be there at nine tonight. And don’t tell anyone.” I don’t know how else to keep him from arguing, so I close the phone.
I look at Lila. “Can we actually get there by nine?”
She spreads open the schedule. “Yeah, plenty of time. That was perfect.”
I carefully feed a twenty into the machine out by the steps and punch in our destination. The change comes in coins, silver dollars ringing against the tray like bells.
You can’t take a train from the middle of Jersey directly to Atlantic City. You have to ride all the way to Philadelphia and change trains at Thirtieth Street Station for the Atlantic City line. As soon as we settle into our seats, Lila rips open the bag and eats the three chocolate bars in quick greedy bites. Then she wipes her face with a fist, knuckles down over her cheek to her nose. It isn’t a human gesture, or at least it isn’t how humans make the same gesture.
Uncomfortable, I look out the cracked grimy glass at the sea of houses blurring past. Each one, full of secrets.
“Tell me what happened that night,” I say. “The rest of it. When I changed you.”
“Okay,” she says. “But first I need you to understand why my father can’t know what happened to me. I’m his only child and I’m a girl. Families like mine—they’re really traditional. Women might be powerful workers, but they’re seldom leaders. Get it?”
I nod my head.
“If Dad found out what happened, he’d bring down vengeance on Anton and your brothers—maybe even on you. But afterward I’d be the daughter who needed to be protected. I could never be the head of the family.
“I’m going to get my own vengeance and I’m going to save my father from Anton. Then he’s going to see that I deserve to be his heir.” She crosses her legs, propping her feet next to me. My boots are huge on her, and one of the laces has come undone.
It’s hard to picture her as the head of the Zacharov family.
I nod again. I think of Barron kicking me in the ribs. I think of Philip looking down at me as I writhed. Anger rises up in me, white hot and dangerous. “You’re going to need me to do that.”
Her eyes narrow. “Is that a problem?”
I loathe them, but they’re my family. “I want you to leave my brothers out of your plans.”
I can see her jaw clench as she brings her teeth together abruptly. “I deserve revenge,” she says.
“You want to deal with your family your way. Fine. Let me deal with my family.”
“You don’t even know what they did to you.”
I flinch from the surge of dread I feel. Swallow it down. “Okay, tell me.”
She licks her lips. “You want to know what happened that night? I told you that they were arguing. Anton told Barron to get rid of me. You were supposed to turn me into . . . into something. Something glass so he could smash me. Something dead so I’d be dead. That’s what they kept saying while you were pinning me to the floor.
“Philip said that if you didn’t do it, they were going to have to hurt me and it would make a mess. Barron kept saying something about remembering what I did to you and I kept shouting that I didn’t do anything.” Her gaze drops for a moment.
Tells. Everyone has them. “Why did Anton want you dead?”
“He wants to take over my family. He was afraid Dad would never tap him as his heir with me around. So he always wanted me dead. He just needed a way to make it happen that wouldn’t implicate him.
“The excuse for getting rid of me was that Barron had asked me to make some people sleepwalk out of their houses. I would brush against them during the day, and then that night they’d have a dream and they’d get up and go stand on their lawns. Sometimes they woke up on the way out and the curse faded, sometimes not. I didn’t know what it was for. Barron said they were people who owed my father money and that Barron would be able to talk to them, keep them from getting hurt. Anton found out that Barron had used me to help and told him that I had to be killed or else.”
“Or else what? What’s the big deal about making people sleepwalk?” I lean back. The vinyl seat squeaks.
“Um, your brothers? They make people disappear. That’s what they do.”
“They kill people?” My voice comes out too loud. I don’t know why I’m shocked. I know criminals do bad things, and I get that my brothers are criminals. I had just assumed that whatever Philip did for Anton was small time. Leg-breaking stuff.