“Hi,” Mina says. “Can I walk with you?”
“Uh, sure.” I frown. No one’s asked me before. “Are you okay?”
She hesitates and then says the words all in a rush. “Someone’s blackmailing me, Cassel.”
I stop walking and stare at her for a long moment as students rush around us. “Who?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, does it?”
“I guess not,” I say. “But what can I do?”
“Something,” she says. “You got Greg Harmsford kicked out of school.”
“I didn’t,” I say.
She looks up at me through lowered lashes. “Please. I need your help. I know you can fix things.”
“I really don’t think that I can do as much as—”
“I know you made rumors go away. Even when they were true.” She looks down when she says it, like she’s afraid I’m going to be mad.
I sigh. There were some perks to being the school bookie. “I never said I wouldn’t try. Just that you shouldn’t expect too much.”
She smiles at me and tosses that gleaming mane of hair over her shoulders. It falls down her back like a cloak.
“And,” I say, holding up one hand, cautioning her against being so thrilled by my answer, “you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on. All of it.”
She nods, her smile fading a little.
“Now would be good. Or you can keep putting it off and—”
“I took photos.” She blurts it out, then presses her lips together nervously. “Photos of me—naked ones. I was going to send them to my boyfriend. I never did, but I kept them on my camera. Stupid, right?”
Some questions have no good answer. “Who’s this boyfriend?”
She looks down and reaches across her body to adjust the shoulder strap of her bag, making her seem smaller and more vulnerable. “We broke up. He didn’t even know. He couldn’t have anything to do with this.”
She’s lying.
I’m not sure which part is the lie, but now that we’re getting to the details, she’s exhibiting tells. Avoiding eye contact. Fidgeting.
“So I guess someone got a hold of them,” I say, prompting her to continue.
She nods. “My camera got taken two weeks ago. Then this past Sunday someone slipped a note under my door. It said that I have a week to get five thousand dollars. I have to bring that to the baseball pitch at six in the morning next Tuesday or the person’s going to show the photos to everyone.”
“The baseball pitch?” I frown. “Let me see the note.”
She reaches into her book bag and gives me a folded piece of white printer paper, probably from one of the computer labs on campus. The note says exactly what she told me.
I frown. Something doesn’t add up.
She swallows. “I don’t have that kind of money—not like the note wants—but I could pay you. I could find some way to pay you.”
The way she says it, with her lashes fluttering and her bruised voice, I know what she’s implying. And while I don’t think she’d actually follow through, she must be panicked to try that angle.
Plenty of people get conned because they don’t know any better. They’re just gullible. But lots of people are suspicious at the start of a con. Maybe the initial investment is small enough that they can afford to lose it. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they’re hopeful. But you’d be surprised how many people start a con knowing there’s a good chance they’re being conned. All the signals are there. They just keep ignoring them. Because they want to believe in the possibility of something. And so, even though they know better, they just let it happen.
“So you’ll find a way to help me?” she asks. “You’ll try?”
Mina’s lack of skill at lying touches my heart. I know I’m being conned—just like all those other suckers—but somehow, in the face of her enormously obvious attempt at manipulation, I can’t turn her down.
“I’ll try,” I say.
I don’t understand much about this situation, except there’s a pretty girl and she’s looking at me like I can solve all her problems. I want to. Of course, it would help if she told me the truth about what they were.
I could really use a win.
She throws her arms around my neck as she thanks me. I inhale the scent of her coconut body wash.
CHAPTER FIVE
I STALK INTO PHYSICS and slide into my new spot, next to Daneca. She’s opening her notebook and smoothing down the pleats of her black skirt. She turns to give me a poisonous look. I glance away from her eyes and notice that the gold thread on the Wall-ingford patch over the pocket of her blazer is fraying.
“I’m really sorry I didn’t make it to the library yesterday,” I say, putting my gloved hand to my heart. “I really meant to be there.”
She doesn’t reply. She tugs back a mass of her purple-tipped hair and rolls it into a loose bun, then slips an elastic band off her wrist and around the whole thing. It doesn’t seem like it should hold, but it does.
“I saw Lila,” I say. “She had to tell me something about my family. It really couldn’t wait.”
Daneca snorts.
“Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”
She takes a chewed-on pencil out of her bag and points it in my direction. “If I asked you one question, would you answer it honestly?”
“I don’t know,” I say. There are some things I can’t talk about and other things I’m not sure I want to. But at least I can be honest with her about my uncertainty. I’m not sure she sees that as the same step forward I do, though.
“What happened to that cat we saved from the animal shelter?”
I hesitate.
Here’s the problem with telling the truth—smart people figure out the parts you don’t say. A lie can be airtight, easy. The truth is a mess. When I told Daneca the story about my brothers changing my memory, about how they wanted me to kill Zacharov and how they’d held Lila captive, I left out one essential detail. I never told her that I was a transformation worker.
I was too scared. I was already trusting her so much that I couldn’t bring myself to give up that last secret. And I was scared of the secret itself, scared to say the words out loud. But now Daneca’s put the whole thing together and found the gap. The cat that she saw me hold—the one that she never saw again.
“I can explain,” I start.
Daneca shakes her head. “I thought you’d say that.” She turns away from me.
“Come on,” I say. “I really can explain. Give me a chance.”
“I already did,” she whispers as Dr. Jonahdab starts taking attendance. “You blew it.”
No matter how angry Daneca is with me, I know she always wants answers. But maybe she feels like she already has them.
Something prompted her to start thinking about stuff that happened seven months ago. Lila must have said something—maybe even told her that I was a transformation worker, that it was because of me she spent years trapped in a body that wasn’t hers, that she was the cat we stole. She and Daneca have been hanging out a lot. Maybe Lila needed to talk to someone. It’s as much Lila’s secret as it is mine.
Now I guess it’s Daneca’s secret as well.
I skip track practice, flop down on the sofa in the common room of my dorm, and Google Central Fine Jewelry in Paterson. There’s a crappy website that promises to pay cash for gold and claims to accept consignments. It’s open only until six, so there’s no way I can make it there before closing time.
I dial the number listed. I pretend to be a regular, checking when Bob works, claiming he’s the only one I’ll trust with some estate pieces. The grouchy woman on the other end of the line says he’ll be in on Sunday. I thank her and hang up. I guess I have plans for the weekend.
Central Fine Jewelry doesn’t seem like the kind of place where you keep working after you make a mint reselling the Resurrection Diamond, though, so I’m not feeling optimistic.
They do have a page on the site featuring amulets. It looks pretty legit. They don’t claim to have any transformation amulets. Claiming to have one is a sure sign of a scam, since no one but a transformation worker can make them. Most of the stones in stock are for luck magic. They list a few more unusual amulets, ones to prevent memory work and death work—well, prevent it once, before the amulet snaps and you’re left buying a new one—but nothing too good to be true. I figure that since he knew my dad, Bob used to have ties to curse workers. His inventory is proof that he still does.
It figures that a forger would be in with workers. The thing about curse magic being illegal is that it turns everyone who uses it into a criminal. And criminals stick together.
That thought makes my mind turn inevitably toward Lila.
As much as she hates me now, she will hate me that much more once I sign the papers and become a federal agent. Down in Carney, where we spent our summers growing up, if a curse worker joined the government, that person was considered a traitor, the lowest of the low, someone not worth spitting on if he was on fire.
There’s some part of me that takes a perverse delight in doing the one thing that is going to make a bunch of murderers, con men, and liars all gasp and clutch their pearls.
I bet they didn’t think I had it in me.
But I never wanted to hurt Lila—at least not hurt her worse than I already have. And no matter what any of them think of me, I will never let the government get its claws in her.
Another senior, Jace, comes into the common room and turns on the television. He flips the channel to some reality show about beauty queens stranded on a desert island. I’m not really watching. My mind is skipping to Mina Lange and blackmail.
I don’t want to even consider how thinking about Lila brought me to Mina.
Still, I turn her story over and over in my head, trying to see if there is some clue I can glean from the little she told me. Why did it take the thief two weeks after stealing the camera to start blackmailing Mina? Don’t people who steal cameras usually want the camera more than what’s on it, anyway? Who bothers flipping through another person’s pictures? But then, it’s not like most kids at Wallingford can’t afford to buy a camera, and it’s weird how many rich kids steal for fun. They’ll shoplift from the convenience store down on the corner, break into each other’s rooms to grab boxes of cookies, and clumsily jimmy open doors so that they can grab iPods.
Which, unfortunately, only widens the suspect pool, instead of shrinking it. The blackmailer could be anyone. And, more than probably, the person is joking about the five grand and the baseball field, trying to scare Mina. The remote cruelty points to a girl or a bunch of girls. Whoever she is, she probably just wants to make Mina squirm.
If I’m right, it’s a pretty good con. Even if Mina calls their bluff, she can’t do much about it, because she won’t want the pictures to get out. But the girls probably can’t resist giggling when Mina comes into the cafeteria or teasing her in class, even if they don’t say anything about the pictures.
I just wish I was sure Mina was telling me the truth.
Assignments like these are what FBI agents do, right? On a grander scale but still, using the same techniques. This might be like one of the exercises that Barron is given, except that this one is mine. A little investigation for me to practice on in secret. So that when I finally join up, I’ll be better than him at something.
A little investigation to prove to myself that I am making the right decision.
I’m still running through ways to draw out the blackmailer when the beauty queen program is interrupted by news footage of Governor Patton. He’s on the steps of the courthouse, surrounded by microphones, railing loudly.
“Did you know that government bodies exist staffed entirely by curse workers—curse workers with access to your confidential files? Did you know that no one requires testing of applicants to government jobs to determine who among us are potentially dangerous criminals?” he says. “We must root all workers out of our government! How can we expect our legislators to be safe when their staffers, their aides, even their constituents could be seeking to undermine policies directed at bringing these sinister predators to light, because those policies would inconvenience them.”
Then we cut to the reporter’s serious, perfectly made-up face and are told that a senator from New York, Senator James Raeburn, has made a statement denouncing Patton’s position. When they show Senator Raeburn, he appears in front of a blue curtain, at a lectern with the state insignia on it.
“I am deeply disappointed by the recent words and actions of Governor Patton.” He’s young for a senator, with a smile like he’s used to talking people into and out of things, but he doesn’t look slick. I want to like him. He reminds me of my dad. “Are we not taught that those who have confronted temptation and triumphed over it are more virtuous than those who have yet to face their own demons? Are not those who are born hyperbathygammic and tempted into a life of crime—tempted to use their power for their own benefit—are not those people just like us, who resist temptation and choose instead to work to shield us from their less moral kind, are they not to be celebrated rather than treated to Governor Patton’s witch hunt?”
The newscaster tells us that more details will be forthcoming and more statements are expected from other members of government.
I fumble for the remote and switch the channel to a game show. Jace has his laptop open and doesn’t seem to notice, for which I am grateful. I guess anything that distracts Patton from talking about my mother is a good thing, but I still hate the sight of him.
