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“You ready?” Philip asks.
I stand, but my legs are shaky. It’s one thing to suspect my brother was working me, another to stand next to him once I know he’s done it. I am a better con artist than any of you, I tell myself, trying to believe it, needing to believe it. I had to do everything without magic, so you won’t catch me. I can pretend to be calm until I am calm.
But another part of my mind is howling, rattling around and scraping for other false memories. I know it’s impossible to look for what’s not there, and yet I do, running through the last few days—weeks, years—in my mind, as though I will stumble in the gaps.
How much of my life has been reimagined by Barron? Panic chills my skin like a sickness.
We walk down the stairs of the house quietly, out to a Mercedes parked on the street with the headlights turned down and the engine humming. Anton’s in the driver’s seat. He looks older than the last time I saw him, and there’s a scar that runs over the edge of his upper lip. It matches the keloid scar stretching across his neck.
“What took you so long?” Anton says, lighting a cigarette and throwing the match out the window.
Barron slides into the backseat next to me. “What’s the rush? We’ve got all night. This one here doesn’t have school in the morning.” He musses my hair.
I shove away his gloved hand. The annoyance feels surreally familiar. It’s like Barron thinks we’re on a family car trip.
Philip gets into the passenger seat, looks back at us and grins.
I have to figure out what they think I know. I have to be smart. It sounds like they might believe some disorientation but not complete cluelessness. “What are we doing tonight?”
“We’re going to rehearse for this Wednesday,” Anton says. “For the assassination.”
I’m sure I flinch. My heart hammers. Assassination?
“And then you’re going to block the memory,” I say, fighting to keep my voice steady. I remember what Crooked Annie said about blocking access to memories so that the block can be removed later and the memory loss reversed. I wonder if we’ve rehearsed before. If so, I’m screwed. “Why do you have to keep making me forget?”
“We’re protecting you,” Philip says automatically.
Right.
I lean forward in the seat. “So my job is the same?” I say, which seems vague enough not to show my ignorance, but encourages an answer.
Barron nods. “All you do is walk up to Zacharov and put your bare hand on his wrist. Then you change his heart to stone.”
I swallow, concentrating on keeping my breathing even. They can’t mean what they’re saying. “Wouldn’t shooting him be easier?” I ask, because the whole thing is ridiculous.
Anton looks at me with hard eyes. “You sure he can do this? All this memory magic—he’s unstable. This is my future we’re talking about.”
My future. Right. He’s Zacharov’s nephew. Anything happens to the man in charge, the mantle slips onto his shoulders.
“Don’t punk out on us,” Philip says to me in his I’m-being-patient voice. “It’s going to be a piece of cake. We’ve been planning this for a long time.”
“What do you know about the Resurrection Diamond?” Barron asks.
“Gave Rasputin immortality or something,” I say, deliberately vague. “Zacharov won it at an auction in Paris.”
Barron frowns, like he didn’t expect me to know even that much. “The Resurrection Diamond is thirty-seven carats—the size of a grown man’s thumbnail,” he says. “It’s colored a faint red, as though a single bead of blood dropped into a pool of water.”
I wonder if he’s quoting someone. The Christie’s catalog. Something. If I just concentrate on the details like it’s a puzzle, then maybe I won’t completely freak out.
“Not only did it protect Rasputin from multiple assassination attempts, but after him it went to other people. There have been reports of assassin’s guns turning out not to be loaded at the critical moment, or poison somehow finding its way into the poisoner’s cup. Zacharov was shot at on three separate occasions and the bullets didn’t hit him. Whoever has the Resurrection Diamond can’t be killed.”
“I thought that thing was a myth or something?” I say. “A legend.”
“Oh, so now he’s an expert on working,” Anton says.
But Barron’s eyes are shining. “I’ve been researching the Resurrection Diamond a long time.”
I wonder how much of that research he even remembers or if it has been winnowed down to just a few phrases. Maybe he wasn’t quoting an auction catalog; maybe he was quoting one of his notebooks.
