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I shake my head. “I need you to do it. Please. Please just listen.” I’m afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.
“Cassel, I don’t care what reason you have. There is no reason good enough to take away someone’s free will.”
“It’s already been taken! Remember when I said that I tried to stay away from Lila?” I say. “I’ve stopped trying. How’s that for a good reason?”
She doesn’t trust me. Surely she can understand if I don’t trust myself either.
The look Daneca gives me is full of disgust. “There’s nothing I can do anyway. You know that. I can’t take the curse off her.”
“Work her so that she feels nothing for me,” I say. My vision blurs. I wipe the dampness away from my eyes angrily. “Let her just feel nothing. Please.”
She looks at me in an odd, stunned way. When she speaks, her voice is soft. “I thought the curse was fading. It might already be gone.”
I shake my head. “She still likes me.”
“Maybe she likes you, Cassel,” Daneca says carefully. “Without the curse.”
“No.”
She waits for a long moment. “What about you? How are you going to feel when she—”
“It doesn’t matter about me,” I say. “The only way that Lila could be sure—that anyone could be sure—the curse was over is if she didn’t love me.”
“But—,” Daneca begins.
If I can just get through this, then nothing else can hurt me. I will be capable of anything. “It has to be this way. Otherwise I’ll create reasons to believe that she wants me, because I’d like that to be true. I can’t be trusted.”
“I know that you’re really upset—,” Daneca says.
“I can’t be trusted. Do you understand me?”
She nods, once. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it.”
I exhale all at once, a dizzy rush of breath.
“But this is a onetime thing. I will never do this again. I will never do anything like this again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And I’m not even sure how to do it, so there are no guarantees. Plus the blowback is going to make me act all weird and emotional, so you are responsible for babysitting me until I am stable. Okay?”
“Yes,” I say again.
“She won’t care about you.” Daneca tilts her head to one side, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “You’ll just be some guy she once knew. Everything she feels about you—everything she felt about you—it will all be gone.”
I close my eyes and nod my head.
* * *
The first thing I do when I get back home is go down into the cellar. I open the cooler. Janssen is right where I left him—milk pale, with sunken eyelids and frosty hair. He looks like a demented marble sculpture—portrait of a killer, killed. All the blood must have made its sluggish way to his back before it froze. I bet if I turned him over, he’d be purple.
I strip off my right-hand glove and place my hand on his chest, pushing aside the stiffened fabric of his undershirt, letting my fingers rest against his icy skin.
I turn his heart to glass.
The change takes only a moment, but recovering from it takes longer. Once the blowback wears off, I rub my head where I smacked it against the floor. Everything aches, but I’m getting used to that.
Then I go upstairs, take the gun out of the plastic bag, close my eyes, and shoot two bullets into the ceiling of the parlor. Dust rains down on me, covering the room in a powdery cloud. A single chunk of plaster nearly brains me.
