Red Glove (Curse Workers #2)

Sam shakes his head sadly. “Okay. Admittedly, probably not.”

Daneca shuffles. “Guy number two—James ‘Jimmy’ Greco. He ran an illegal gambling operation—Hey, kind of like you, Cassel.”

I make a rude gesture halfheartedly. I am sure the federal agents don’t want me sharing these files with civilians, especially ones they have no legal reason to harass. Even though I am still annoyed with Daneca and Sam, that knowledge gives me some measure of satisfaction. Anything that pisses off the Feds can’t be all bad.

Daneca smiles. “Greco was a luck worker, so no surprises there on his choice of profession. No idea how he crossed Zacharov, since he was a big earner. Then, bam. Taken out. Last seen passed out in a bar in Philadelphia.”

It seems easy to imagine that hit. Greco stumbling, carried out on the shoulder of someone claiming to be a friend. Maybe someone who was a friend. Tip to the bartender. Killed in the car.

Or the killer was a woman, pretending to be his girlfriend, his wife. Even better. Maybe even a last drink, with a little something to make him sleep. Flash of her red gloves.

Nothing the Feds haven’t already considered, I’m sure.

“That brings us to Antanas Kalvis. Ran a pretty high-end call girl service out of Newark along with his wife.” Daneca likes playing detective. It’s just a game to both of them, a murder mystery with fancy props. At the end you guess it was the butler with the candlestick and turn over a card to find out if you’re right.

“They ran it together?” Sam asks.

“When I picture pimps, I picture fur coats, wide lapels, and no fixed address,” I say.

“Yeah, because all criminals are like in the movies,” Daneca snaps. Maybe she’s taking it more seriously than I thought. “Kalvis was an emotion worker. Ugh. That’s just so gross. Anyway—”

“You said he was married, right?” I say, interrupting her. “How did he go missing without his wife knowing anything about it?”

She flips over a couple of pages. “Actually, it’s really creepy. He disappeared from bed. Like, right next to her. So either that’s true or Mrs. Kalvis was in on the hit.”

I’m warming to the idea of a murderess. I imagine her posing as one of the call girls—maybe in distress—and arranging an emergency meeting with Kalvis. He slips out of bed without waking his wife.

Or maybe he was sleepwalking. Right into Philip and Anton’s waiting arms. Then someone like me makes the body disappear.

Or maybe I did. Maybe it was me.

“It sounds like the wife was covering up,” Daneca says speculatively. “We could start with her. Maybe you know someone who knows someone who could ask—!”

“Cassel? Is something wrong?” Sam scoots to the edge of his bed.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Let’s hear the rest.”

“Okay,” Daneca says slowly. “Henry ‘Trigger’ Janssen. Physical worker. Soldier in the Zacharov family. Apparently worked closely with an Anton Abramov. Anton? Is that the Anton who died—”

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.

Zacharov’s job offer makes a whole lot more sense right now. All those people, gone. Just gone.

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 think I did it, every piece of paper seems damning. Every detail, obvious.

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.