Literature / The Curse Workers

aka: White Cat

"No-one at home is ever going to forget that Cassel is a killer. No-one at home is ever going to forget that he isn’t a magic worker. And now he is being haunted by a white cat."

Cassel Sharpe, seventeen year old son of the now-notorious Shandra Singer, grandson of the once-feared Desi Singer, lives in a world similar to our own, except for the fact that magic is real. It is also currently illegal in the United States where Cassel lives, having been banned in the 1930s ala Prohibition. Since then, people with magic — "Curse Workers"— have had essentially three choices: try to hide their magic at the risk of being ostracized by society (or worse), work for the U.S. government tracking down and dealing with magical criminals, or join one of crime syndicates founded by powerful Worker families.

Cassel's aloof older brothers, Barron and Philip, already work for the Zacharov crime family, as does their grandfather and their currently-incarcerated mother. Though raised in the life of crime right alongside his brothers, Cassel faces serious issues barring him from fully embracing the family business. The first of which is that he has no magic. He's not a Curse Worker.

He is, however, a murderer, and that leads to the second issue, because it's a murder that the head of the Zacharov family absolutely cannot find out about.

Instead, Cassel tries to eke out a life at Wallingford Preparatory, the private school his family managed to get him in to. There, he attempts to act like a normal person, mitigating most of his criminal impulses save for an illicit school betting pool he works on the side, and otherwise pretending that he has no connection to curse work or the criminal underworld that comes with it. It's an act that's ruined when he wakes up one night dangling from the dormitory roof, with no memory of how he got there.

While Cassel assumes this was a resurgence of his childhood sleepwalking habits, the sudden attentiveness of his family, and the hushed conversations they're having about him leave him uncertain. Those, coupled with reoccurring dreams of a mysterious white cat, the memory of a murder he committed in his childhood, and the increasingly frequent sleepwalking lead him to investigate just what is happening in the families— both his own, and Zacharov's.

The books in the series are:

1. White Cat (2010)
2. Red Glove (2011)
3. Black Heart (2012)

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This series contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Shandra Sharpe is an emotion worker, meaning she has the ability to make people feel whatever she wants them to. While she typically does this to seduce and financially abuse wealthy men, she also frequently "worked" her sons, forcing them to feel immense shame and remorse when they misbehaved, forcing them to love one another when they argued, forcing them to feel love and loyalty to the family. The nature of her magic also means that she experiences severe emotional mood swings herself, and she's shown to scream and threaten her sons, as well as emotionally manipulate them the mundane way. While Cassel at firsts reflects on this with casual acceptance and chalks it up to a Hilariously Abusive Childhood, it's not until he sees a pamphlet outlining the long-term physical and psychological effects of frequent emotion work that he realizes that his mother's magic has done him actual lasting harm.
• Aloof Big Brother: In the first book, Cassel feels this way towards his oldest brother Philip and, to a lesser extent, the middle brother Barron. He recounts how, as children, he would follow Philip around in adoration, constantly trying to get his attention and faking need so that Philip would come help him. Philip never did. Cassel assumed that both of his brothers were distant with him because he was the outsider without magic, and after Lila's death, Cassel says Philip hasn't looked him in the eye in three years. It's not until the later half of the first book that he realizes they aren't distant with him because he has no magic, they're distant because he has highly powerful magic, and they've been using him as their "garbage disposal" and erasing his memory repeatedly since he was a kid.
• Amateur Sleuth: Cassel manages to get himself into trouble each book this way.
  • In White Cat, Cassel is certain someone has been meddling with his memories, and attempts to find out who and why. In the process, he discovers a plot to assassinate the head of the Zacharov family, a years-long kidnapping plot, and a number of unsolved murders.
  • In Red Glove, Cassel is tasked by the feds to find a serial murderer connected to the Zacharov family. His friends Daneca and Sam join in the investigation, and while Cassel soon identifies the murderer of six of the victims, he spends the novel trying to discover the identity of the final and, in his opinion, most important victim.
  • In Black Heart, Cassel is tasked by Zacharov himself to find an object that has been stolen from him: the Resurrection Diamond, a gem that can supposedly render its wearer immortal.
• Ambiguously Brown: Cassel and his family. Even they don't know what ethnicity they are, with his grandfather providing different and contradictory origin stories including being descended from a maharaja of India, being descended from a runaway slave, being Iroquois, and being related to Julius Caesar.
• An Arm and a Leg: It's mentioned that in some areas outside the US, Workers sometimes have their hands cut off to prevent them from doing magic... though this doesn't stop Workers from learning how to use magic with their feet.
• Animal Motifs: In the first book, Cassel constantly dreams about a white cat. The motifs of cats are throughout the novel, and he winds up adopting a feral white cat he finds in his family's old barn. The cat is a transformed Lila, and he was having dreams because she was attempting to communicate with him.
• Anti-Magic: Certain mineral amulets can prevent a worker from affecting the wearer. Unfortunately, they tend to be one-use only, and can only be made by people with that type of magic. Cassel noted that there is a huge market for protective amulets, and most of them are fake.
• Anti-Magical Faction: Historically, curse workers have been severely abused, enslaved, and used for their talents. In the modern day, a significant portion of the population want to create a way to track and monitor workers. The federal government cracks down on workers, but also tries to recruit as many as it can, seeking to control them.
• Asshole Victim: The assassination targets Cassel Sharpe kills all seemed to have deserved it, with the ones given page-time being violent criminals and murderers themselves. Arguably Philip Sharpe is also an asshole victim, seeing as he had his wife's memories wiped so many times to prevent her from leaving him that she started constantly hallucinating music, and he lied to, used, and abused Cassel for years, forcing him to become an assassin.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: While Daneca, her mother, and Yulikova of the Licensed Minority Division attempt to espouse that not all Curses have to be used to bad ends, Cassel's personal experience of growing up surrounded by hardened criminal Workers leave him doubtful. He doesn't even know that Physical Workers have the ability to heal, as he had only ever seen enforcers use it to break bones and torture people.
• Ban on Magic: Magic has been illegal in the US since the 1930s. As with Prohibition, this lead to the rise of criminal syndicates built around an underground trade in magical services and the use of magic to aid in various criminal enterprises.
• Being Evil Sucks: Growing up in the mob, being a con artist, and being a secret assassin have led to Cassel being ridden with self-loathing and paranoia. Him going to Wallingford Preparatory is his shot at trying to be normal, and he's completely blown away when Sam tells him that everyone could see though his act.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family:
  • Cassel's named family includes two brothers who has been mentally and magically abusing him for years, a mother who also mentally and magically abused her sons, and his grandfather, a retired killer for the mob who is also the most ethical family member Cassel has, and the only one who seems to genuinely care about his well being without any ulterior motives.
  • Lila's named family includes her father, the Kingpin of the Zacharov family, her mother who (mutually) despises her father's guts, and her cousin who tried to murder her, wound up imprisoning her as a cat for years instead, and attempted to murder her father.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Nobody in this story is innocent, except for perhaps Cassel's Wallington school friends Daneca and Sam. Everyone in Cassel's life is a a criminal, most of them are also murderers, and all of them have some connection to a criminal empire or two. When the Yulikova of the Licensed Minority Division branch of the federal government tries to recruit him in the second and third books, the federal government is also shown to be wildly unethical, ineffective, and corrupt.
• Black Sheep: Due to his status as the only non-Worker in the household, Cassel sees himself as this. Even his childhood friendship with Lila is colored by his status, as her family and friends all consider him beneath her.
• Blessed with Suck: All Workers have blowback to varying extents, some of which can be crippling or even fatal. Death Workers have random parts of their bodies rot away, Memory Workers lose their own memories, etc. Having powers is as dangerous to the owner as it is to everyone else.
• Boarding School: Wallingford Preparatory is the private high school Cassel attends, and much of his trouble comes from trying to balance his desire to appear normal and complete his education with his family's criminal and magical shenanigans.
• Boxed Crook: Yulikova's plan in Black Heart. Cassel was already tenuously working with the federal Licensed Minority Division in exchange for protecting Barron and his mother, but that wasn't enough to please Yulikova's superiors. So they decide to have Cassel murder Governor Patton, who due to the Fed's own incompetence has become a publicity nightmare and is actively ruining their political machinations to get Proposition 2 passed. They tell Cassel that they will ensure he isn't discovered, but their actual plan is to have him publicly caught, arrest and steal him away, strip him of his civil liberties now that he's officially a convict, and force him to be their weapon. At the same time, while Patton in life might be a nauseating embarrassment, if he was killed by a Worker, he would be martyred and Proposition 2 would receive the much needed public support.
• Cast from Hit Points: Death Work blowback withers a part of the Worker's own body; Physical Work blowback makes the worker feel weak and sick.
• Childhood Friends: Cassel and Lila have known each other since they were about nine years old, and had been thick as thieves.
  • Unlucky Childhood Friend: Relatedly, Cassel has been carrying a torch for Lila since he was about nine years old. He's certain that she never returned his feelings, seeing as how she openly dated other young men, including his older brother.
• Con Man: Both Cassel and his mother are skilled confidence tricksters, and though his mom's a lot better at it thanks to her gifts as an Emotion Worker, Cassel is still quite effective through mundane methods.
• Conspicuous Gloves: As the powers can only have an effect through skin-to-skin contact, everyone in this world wears gloves.
• Consummate Liar: Spoken word for word by Cassel regarding Barron. Cassel suspects Barron is a sociopath and pathological liar, who feels no compunction about altering the memories of those around him and replacing them with whatever he wants.
• Corruption of a Minor: One of Cassel's earliest memories is of his mom sending him into a house to steal paperwork. One of his fond memories of his father is being taught how to pick locks. Suffice to say, growing up with parents who are part of The Mafia doesn't leave a lot of room for childhood innocence.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Lila, the heiress to the Zacharov crime family. She strives to be as cold and pragmatic as she can in order to demonstrate to her father that she can handle the family business, and Zacharov is clearly a proud father.
• Deadpan Snarker: Cassel cannot keep his mouth shut, a problem that has resulted in him being beaten by criminals, lawmen, and his family members alike. Extra points go to his smart mouth getting Anton killed. Anton's plan to murder Zacharov had been discovered, Zacharov had him surrender, and the matter would have been dealt with, but Cassel made a smart comment, provoking Anton to try to murder him in front of everyone. Cassel's grandfather saved him by killing Anton.
• Demoted Memories: In Red Glove, Cassel realizes that something he remembers as a scene from a movie is an actual memory that Barron tampered with.
• Differently Powered Individual: People with magical powers are commonly called "Curse Workers" or simply "Workers"; the Technobabble term is "hyperbathygammic" or "HBG". "Heebiejeebies" is a somewhat derogatory term derived from the latter. Archaic terms include "theurgists" and "dab hands".
• Emotion Control: Emotion Working in a nutshell; on the upside, you have the ability to induce love, fear, hate, trust and all manner of other emotions in anyone you touch, but on the downside, the blowback gradually destroys your ability to regulate your own emotions.
• Empathic Healer: Physical Workers can heal injuries and cure or mitigate diseases, but the blowback makes them weak and sick.
• Equivalent Exchange: The more you use your power, the more blowback affects you in a way directly related to your field of influence. For example, a Luck Worker that constantly decreases the luck of others will end up unlucky themselves; emotion workers lose control of their emotions; Memory Workers lose more of their memories for every memory they alter; Death Workers suffer necrosis for everyone they kill, and so on.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Cassel's grandfather laments not having kept his daughter out of the mob. By contrast, said daughter actively worked (in every relevant sense of the word) to initiate her own sons into the life.
• Fantastic Racism: The general public fears Workers due to their power and the strong connection between magic and organized crime, to the point that everyone takes it as a given that the mandatory hyperbathygammic testing law, if passed, would lead to Workers being denied jobs and housing.
• First-Episode Twist: Cassel discovers that he's a Transformation Worker two thirds of the way into the first book. From then on, his ability and the effort of dealing with it and people who desire it becomes the premise of the later two novels.
• Forced Transformation: Lila spends most of the first book as a white cat, having been transformed by a brainwashed Cassel.
• For Your Own Good: Everyone who was involved in hiding Cassel's power and assassination history from him insists that they did it to protect him.
• Gambit Pileup: White Cat is essentially a head-on collision between multiple plans and agendas, including Cassel's attempts to find out who's messing with his head, Philip and Barron's attempts at The Perfect Crime, Lila's efforts to get Cassel to reverse her transformation - or kill him before he can be used to assassinate her father, and all the improvised counters to said plans.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: One of the abilities Emotion Workers have. Cassel recalls his mother forcing him and his brothers to love each other whenever it looked like they weren't getting along.
• Grumpy Old Man: Cassel's grandfather spends a lot of his time drunkenly grumbling about how stupid young Workers are.
• Handshake of Doom: Since magic can only be performed through skin-to-skin contact, gloves are endemic, bare hands are considered indecent, and people are very careful about handshakes - to the point that this trope is a plot point in the first book: Cassel is actually a Transformation Worker brainwashed into serving as an undetectable assassin; his handlers have cut a tiny hole in the finger of one of his gloves, so that when Cassel shakes hands with the target, he can touch their wrist just long enough to turn the victim's heart to stone.
• Hidden Wire: Cassel wears a wire at the end of Red Glove in order to completely implicate his brother Barron in some crimes, forcing him to join Cassel with working for the Feds as a Boxed Crook.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Agent Yulikova suffers from it due to heavy use of her physical working power.
• It Runs in the Family: Working primarily seems to be a genetic factor, although it does seem to sometimes occur out of the blue.
• Killer Cop: Agent Jones, much to Cassel's surprise. Cassel know ruining the plans of the LMD would anger them, but when the cop in question actually kidnaps him and takes him to a secluded place to be murdered, Cassel's in shock.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: If you happen to read the dust-jacket to Red Glove before White Cat you're treated to the entire plot of the first book.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: In general, this is the main ability of a Memory Worker. In specific, the plot of the first novel revolves around Cassel discovering that someone has been altering his memories, and he tries to find out who and why.
• Left Hanging:
  • Cassel has known since the first book that "Philip Sharpe" is a fake name his father used. Near the end of Black heart, Cassel finds out his father's real name: Philip Raeburn. A senator James Raeburn is mentioned early in the book as a politician Cassel sees on TV who is arguing against Prop 2. Cassel mentions that James Raeburn reminds him of his father. Any deeper connection between James Raeburn, Cassel's dad, or the family is never mentioned.
  • The Resurrection Diamond is a semi-mythical charm that can supposedly give its wearer immortality. The one Zacharov has is a phony, with Cassel's mother Shandra assuming they had the real one. However, that one is also a fake, and at some point Cassel's father stole the real one. He didn't sell it, but nobody knows where it's at.
• Lethal Harmless Powers: Dream Working sounds perfectly benign, but it can easily be used to cause someone to sleepwalk off a roof.
• Mafia Princess: Lila Zacharov, heiress to the Zacharov family criminal syndicate.
• Memory-Wiping Crew: Barron is a memory worker, and is most commonly employed in wiping any memories related to Cassel's assassination work. He isn't happy about it, even bitterly referring to himself as a cleanup crew.
• Missing Mom: Subverted. Cassel's mom is absent for most of White Cat, due to being in prison. It doesn't seem to change her relationship with her children and she is out of prison at the end of White Cat and in Red Glove.
• My Beloved Smother: Shandra Sharpe is so overbearing that Cassel finds himself hoping she stays in prison a little longer. She clearly loves her sons, and they love her in return, but her general situational obliviousness, her selfishness, her lack of compunction about using her emotional magic on them, and her tendency to meddle disastrously with their lives is something Cassel does not miss.
• Nightmare of Normality: The big twist of White Cat is that Cassel isn't the token muggle of the family after all: he's actually a transformation worker, and has been brainwashed by his brothers into forgetting his powers - except on occasions when they need an assassin who can effectively kill people without leaving any kind of evidence. As such, reclaiming his powers and saving one of his past victims forms a major part of the story from then on.
• Oblivious Younger Sibling: Cassel feels like an outsider in his family due to being the only one without magic. He generally looks up to his older brothers and wishes they would include him and respect him— or in Philip's case, at least look him in the eye. It's not until he invests in a few memory charms that he sees his brothers have been manipulating him and using him to assassinate people.
  I was such an insider that I never even knew it. I was inside of the insiders.
• Our Nudity Is Different: In the US, at least, the custom of wearing gloves to prevent surreptitious magic has been in place for so long that bare hands have become mysterious and titillating.
• The Perfect Crime: Attempted by Barron and Phillip and Cassel in the backstory. Cassel is a transformation worker, so he can effectively kill people by turning them into inanimate objects; Barron can erase Cassel's memory and make him believe that he's a Muggle Born of Mages; by using this combination, Barron and Phillip can orchestrate several murders without leaving any kind of evidence, without having to get their hands dirty, and without anyone remembering the killings. It only goes wrong when Cassel turns Lila into a cat - meaning that she can use her own powers against Cassel, allowing him to realize that someone's been manipulating him.
• Plagued by Nightmares: Nightmares about killing Lila haunt Cassel through half the first book until he discovers that he didn't kill her.
• Power at a Price: Every type of curse work has a "blowback" reaction. For example, when Death Workers kill someone, a random piece of their body rots off. When Emotion Workers manipulate someone's feelings, they become emotionally unstable themselves. When a Memory Worker alters someone's memories, they suffer from amnesia. When a Transformation Worker changes something or someone, they lose control of their physical form. The severity of the blowback's lasting effects depends on the Work being done, the individual Worker, and the frequency of how often they do it.
• Power Limiter: Magic can only be used via skin to skin contact with the magic users hand and another person. Naturally everyone wears gloves to safeguard against this.
• Rule of Seven: there are seven types of "Work".
  • Luck Work, which is stated to be the most common at about 60% of the worker population. This magic works good luck and bad luck.
  • Dream Work, which gives people the ability to control dreams.
  • Physical Work, which includes the ability to heal or break someone's bones with the barest of skin contact.
  • Emotion Work, which can manipulate other's emotions
  • Memory Work, which can erase old memories and implant new memories.
  • Death Work, which is the Touch of Death.
  • Transformation Work, which is the rarest type of magic and said to crop up, globally, maybe once in a decade. While the exact limits and abilities aren't known because the power is so rare, their most notable ability is the ability to change living things into other living things or into inanimate objects, killing them. They can also shapeshift themselves.
• Recruiting the Criminal: In Red Glove, Cassel is tagged by the federal government to find a serial murderer connected to the Zacharov crime family. Cassel begrudgingly accepts, partly because they're threatening his family, and partly because six of the murders were ones he unwittingly committed, and the last one is the murder of his brother Philip. Because the Feds are enamored with connecting them all to one single murderer, Cassel fears they won't investigate Philip's murder properly.
• Self-Surgery: After realizing that someone's been magically messing with his head, Cassel buys several Anti-Magic charms so he can protect himself in future - and to make sure that nobody notices the charms, he cuts a hole in his leg and inserts them under his flesh, with hydrogen peroxide as disinfectant. Ouch.
• Shapeshifter Swan Song: Transformation Workers experience blowback in the form of random, uncontrollable shapeshifting, most of it incredibly disturbing both to the sufferer and the onlookers. It wears off relatively quickly, but it's still quite traumatic. Cassel experiences this twice in White Cat.
• Siblings in Crime: Philip and Barron work illegal jobs for the Zacharov crime family, and for themselves. Cassel is part of their assassination racket, though he has no memory of it.
• Save the Villain: Cassel saves the lives of Barron and Philip at the end of White Cat, bargaining with Zacharov to leave them alive despite everything they had done. In the Red Glove, Cassel arranges for Barron to become a Boxed Criminal for the Feds, as it's the only way he can see saving Barron from himself, Zacharov, the Feds themselves, and the Brennan crime family.
• Soapbox Sadie: Daneca Wasserman, who proudly displays buttons expressing her feelings on various causes on her bag, leads the Wallingford branch of a worker rights youth group, and scolds Cassel for his indifference to politics.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Phillip Sharpe at the start of Red Glove, whose death becomes the impetus for Cassel to work with the federal government and find their killer.
• Super Registration Act: "Proposition 2" is a bill put forth by Governer Patton of New Jersey that would require mandatory HBG testing for all citizens to determine who is a worker. While he (initially) claims the results would be private, everyone in Cassel's circle knows it would be the first step to a return of the historic magical Work Camps, segregation, and the general oppression of curse workers.
• Sympathetic Murderer:
  • Cassel tells us in the first book that he murdered his best friend Lila when they were fourteen. The event is shown to be highly traumatic, especially since he has no idea why he would do that to her. All he remembers is laughing about it after as his brothers helped him clean up the body. It turns out, Lila's death was fabricated; Cassel transformed her into a cat in order to help her escape her cousin's assassination attempt, then had his memory altered by his brother.
  • A straighter example is the actual murders Cassel did commit due to Barron and Philip's manipulation. They had him transform their targets into inanimate objects, then altered his memory so he would be unaware of what they were doing. Barron laughs later, recounting how he had to manipulate Cassel's memory to convince him to do the murders in the first place, giving him false memories of being a violent killer.
  • Maura ran away from her abusive husband, only to have been found and contacted by the FBI. Her husband would have been an important and useful informant, but he would only proceed if the FBI found her and forced her to make contact with him. With both the Feds and the criminal families supporting him, the only way out she could think of to protect herself and her child was to kill her ex.
• Terminal Transformation: The rare Transformation Workers have the power to turn living beings into almost anything with a touch. Victims who have been transformed into animals can be restored, but those who've been changed into inanimate objects are dead from the moment of their transformation. It's for this reason that Barron and Phillip have brainwashed Cassel into serving as an assassin, as his powers allow him to kill anyone without leaving any kind of evidence.
• Thicker Than Water: Despite the numerous abuses, betrayals, and manipulations all of his family members (sans his grandfather) have done to him, Cassel still does everything in his power to protect them from Zacharov and the Feds.
• Touch of Death: Death working; as with all forms of curse work, it can only be inflicted by skin-to-skin contact, resulting in people who've been touched by a Death worker instantly dropping dead.
• Trapped in Villainy: After learning about Cassel's ability, Zacharov is at first satisfied with showering him with expensive meals and cars to bribe him into working officially for the Family. After the events of White Cat and the roles Barron and Phillip played, Zacharov demands Cassel do work for him in exchange for their lives.
• The Transmogrifier: Transformation Workers are the rarest and arguably the most dangerous: their sole power is to transform their victims in almost any way - into other human beings, into animals, or into inanimate objects. People who are transformed into animals can be reverted to normal by the Worker responsible, but those who've been changed into objects are dead from the word go. The big twist of the first book in the series is that Cassel is a Transformation Worker that's been brainwashed into thinking that he's A Muggle Born of Mages; his brothers have been secretly using him as an assassin, employing the Objectshifting trick to eliminate targets without leaving evidence.
• Unabashed B-Movie Fan: Cassal's friend Sam, who loves old horror movies and wants to give up his parents' dream of him becoming a pharmaceutical executive or doctor so he can do special effects for movies.
• Violin Scam: Cassel needs to get a cat out of a shelter. He's under 18 and can't just adopt it, so his friend comes into the shelter claiming her expensive white cat is lost and offering a huge reward. Cassel then goes in and claims he has the missing cat, but will need a white cat for his little sister as a replacement. The shelter worker, thinking of the huge reward, is willing to skip the background check and give Cassel the cat, expecting Cassel to return later with the "missing" cat.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Shapeshifting is one of the talents of a Transformation Worker, though because of the massive amount of energy used and the excruciating blowback after, it's rarely done in the series.
• You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!: Working is illegal for the general populace, with the catch that the only way to discover you're a Worker is to have inadvertently done some magic in your childhood (or to have taken the new Gamma Test), meaning that all Workers are technically criminals. Despite this, the federal government has several programs in place to find wayward Workers and hire them. When Cassel ultimately rejects joining the Licensed Minority Division, his ex-handler Yulikova attempts to use this line of reasoning to convince him to stay.

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