"I hate you guys."

It was incredibly cold and dark, the kind of bone-chilling cold that no number of layers of clothing can possibly stave off. We'd been driving for a half-hour with the heater in Mischa's car on full blast and I was still shivering in the back seat, watching my breath slowly fill my window with steam, blurring the dark plains of Wisconsin beyond. Mischa was making no secret of the fact that she was not happy to have been pulled into our plans for the night, but as the only one of us with access to an automobile, I had little choice other than to ask for her help. She had reluctantly picked us up on Martha Road in the car that she shared with Amanda after emphatically refusing to allow her sister to accompany us. Naturally, I felt bad for Mischa that we'd had to involve her, but of the three of us, she was the one who would most benefit from our potential success.

I hadn't brought it up, because I knew I didn't need to. If we didn't figure out a way to reverse whatever curse Violet had put on all of us who had attended Olivia's sleepover birthday party, Mischa would be the next to die.

Just as I imagined it the first time I had heard Mischa tell the story about her mother's boss, so many weeks earlier on the night of Olivia's fateful birthday party, a sports bar appeared up ahead on the road to our left. SVEN'S was written in block letters over the bar's door, and the "V" was crooked. Fluorescent signs hung in the dirty windows, indicating that Coors Light and Old Milkwaukee beers could be found inside. But we were hardly in search of beer. I had driven down this stretch of Route 32 with my mom a million times in my lifetime in daylight, but had never gotten the chills before that night when we approached Sven's. Tiny snowflakes began falling from the pitch black sky, illuminated by Mischa's headlights, as we pulled into the gravel parking lot. The crunching of our wheels over the soft surface seemed very loud until the car rolled to a stop and Mischa turned off the car's engine. Then there was ear-splitting silence in the winter night beyond the windows of the car.

We sat quietly for a moment. I picked at my lint-covered purple gloves, suddenly remembering a seventh grade field trip to the House on the Rock. I had shared a bus seat with Cheryl and we'd sat behind Candace and Olivia. It had been early spring, early enough that there was still snow on the ground, and Olivia had worn a pair of cream-colored cable-knit cashmere gloves that seemed far too expensive and sophisticated for a twelve-year-old girl.

Olivia. It was fascinating, even to me, that I was still jealous of the girl even after she had died in an unimaginably horrible car accident. She had been, and forever would be in my mind, the girl who had all of the right possessions, the right expressions, and the correct answer to everything.

"She's going to know we're wearing costumes, you know," Mischa said as she tucked her long brown hair under a baseball cap in the driver's seat. "Ghosts probably aren't dumb."

"Let's just hope they're dumb," Trey said. "And real."

Our plan was flimsy, I knew. As its architect, even I had little faith it would work. But I couldn't think of anywhere else we could possibly expect to find a ghost other than Route 32, where Mischa claimed police commonly heard from drivers reporting to have seen a ghostly girl walking alongside the road not far from the St. Augustine's cemetery. Six months earlier, the idea of intentionally trying to track down a ghost would have scared the hell out of me. But six months is a long time, and everything in my life had changed since the spring. I'd lost thirty pounds, made all new friends, gotten myself involved in a mess because of a dangerously evil girl from school which had claimed the lives of two of my friends, and found a boyfriend. And now, if I didn't succeed in tracking down a ghost, who I could interrogate about current events in the world of ghosts, I wasn't sure what might happen. Certainly, Mischa would die. Quite possibly, I'd die, too.

Since all of the stories Mischa had ever heard about people claiming to see the famous Route 32 ghost, frequently referred to as Bloody Heather, had been men, we had decided to dress in drag so as to lessen the chance that the ghost might decide not to show herself to us. Mischa and I both wore Trey's hoodies and had scrubbed off our makeup before leaving our houses. Even with our long locks tucked under hats, neither of us really looked especially masculine, but it was the best we could do given our time constraint. It had been very briefly suggested that we send Trey on the mission alone, but he had adamantly refused to deal with a ghost all by himself, and there was also the issue of Mischa not entirely trusting him to drive her car alone. The judge who'd sentenced both me and Trey back in November had revoked both of our drivers' licenses until we were twenty-one.

"If we see her, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to drive," Mischa confessed.

This was a legitimate concern. The stories of Bloody Heather sightings usually involved a man driving alone on a winter night spotting a young girl walking alongside the road. He would pull over and offer the girl a ride home, and she would climb into the back seat of the car, often disappearing mysteriously before arriving at the address she had provided to the driver. If there was any chance Mischa was going to lose her cool after we'd picked up our precious cargo—assuming we'd even be able to find Bloody Heather—that was going to be disastrous.

"Trey should drive," I said firmly.

"He doesn't have a license."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "We're only going to drive for two miles in one direction. If he does the speed limit, no one will pull us over. I'd rather have him driving than you running us off the road and into a ditch if you freak out."

Without saying a word, Mischa got out of the car to switch places with Trey. He opened the back door of the car and motioned for me to get out.

"I'll sit back there," Trey offered.

"It's okay," I assured him, knowing that if I remained in the back seat, I'd quite possibly be face to face with a ghost. I was ready to make that sacrifice.  "I can handle it."

"I know you can handle it. But you're never going to convince her that you're a dude up close. You should sit in the front and drive."

He had a point, but I actually would have preferred being up close and personal with a ghost to driving a car. The last time I'd been behind the wheel of a car, I'd had at least five police cars chasing me and I'd broken a handful of traffic laws. If, for any reason, we were pulled over while I was driving, I'd be lucky to find myself back at the Dearborn School for Girls again. But I knew driving was particularly difficult for Trey. He'd been the driver in the crash that had killed Olivia, when they'd been hit head-on by a truck during a hailstorm. To the best of my knowledge, he hadn't really driven farther than around our corner since the night of the accident. I agreed to drive out of concern for him, even though I had serious doubts about my own ability to keep a level head while driving during the mission ahead of us.

We all buckled seatbelts, and then I started the car. I looked around the empty plains ahead once the headlights had illuminated the land around Sven's. Snow was starting to stick. We truly were in the middle of nowhere, which honestly was often the case in Wisconsin any time you drove for twenty minutes in any direction beyond a town's limits.

"I have a terrible feeling about all of this," Mischa said quietly as I backed out of our spot in the nearly empty parking lot. As I flipped the left turn signal to pull out of the lot and onto desolate Route 32, a man wearing a heavy winter jacket stepped outside Sven's.

"Crap," Trey said. "Slow down. If that guy's driving past the cemetery like us, chances are good she'll appear to him instead of us since he's alone."

All of our spirits collectively sank as I lingered at the edge of the parking lot, exhaust fumes pouring out of our tailpipe into the cold dark night. The man climbed into his beat-up Mercury Topaz and lingered for a minute before starting its engine. He pulled up behind us at the edge of the lot, and honked his horn at us, making all of us jump, even though he could have easily swerved around us to drive out of the lot.

"Just turn left," Trey urged me, and I made a sloppy, out-of-practice left turn into the north-bound lane on the country highway.

All three of us breathed a sigh of relief when the Mercury Topaz turned right out of the lot and headed in the opposite direction. South. Back toward towns like ours.

I drove slowly, carefully. We were the only car on the road, and if there had been any other cars around, no one would have suspected for a second that were driving intentionally slowly in the hopes of attracting a ghost as we grew closer to the St. Augustine's cemetery. The snow was falling more steadily now in lacy clumps, and the roads were slippery. I didn't have to ask to know that there weren't snow tires on Mischa's car. If I were to accelerate or try to make a fast U-turn, it would have been easy for us to skid off the road.

As I drove, my mind wandered no matter how hard I tried to remain focused on the road before me.  In my rearview mirror, I kept stealing glances at Trey, who looked uncomfortable in the back seat. He was so handsome, and I wondered what would become of us, and if we'd even have a few minutes alone during our week together in Willow before being shipped back to our respective boarding schools. I wondered what might have been possible between us under normal circumstances, if we were just normal kids at a normal high school and not freaks who had been punished and separated all because I'd gotten myself tangled up in this occult disaster. Maybe we'd be planning to go to the same college together so that we could be with each other. Or maybe we'd never have fallen in love to begin with; we'd somehow managed to live next door to each other since I was eight years old without ever exchanging words until that autumn, so it was possible that he would have graduated in the spring without ever paying me any attention. There were so many questions I had for Trey having to do with his own involvement in Olivia's death. He'd never told me what he'd been doing at the mall in Green Bay the afternoon of the Homecoming football game, the afternoon that he'd offered Olivia a ride home because her car wouldn't start in the mall parking lot, just as Violethad predicted. Trey wasn't the kind of guy who'd go to a mall, like, ever.

So, what had he been doing there?

He'd told me that in the car the day of the accident, Olivia seemed to know exactly what was going to happen. She had been freaking out in his front seat as soon as hail started falling, begging him to pull over, telling him that they were going to die. But now that I was thinking about it, it kind of seemed like he had somehow known, too. Why else would he have been in that parking lot in the first place? Why would he have ever approached Olivia and offered her a ride home? They weren't friends. In fact, it would be fair to say they were the opposite of friends. Olivia had made it her business to tease anyone at school who didn't fit in, and Trey, with his hair in his eyes and his Army jacket, had never fit in, not even in middle school. I'd heard her make fun of him even the day of her sixteenth birthday party, the day we'd played the game in her basement that had started all this trouble.  And Trey didn't especially seem to like her or any of my popular friends much, including Mischa. He had an impatience around girls who troubled themselves with fashion and celebrity gossip, and he was noticeably more calm and friendly around my less popular friends, like Cheryl, Kelly, and Erica.

He looked up from the window and his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. They were so, so blue. I felt a surge of overwhelming love for him fill my chest. I wished the two of us could just take off together and leave Willow and this whole mess with Violetand the trouble we'd gotten ourselves into behind. But of course, I'd never leave my mom that way. And the idea of running off with Trey scared me when I thought there were a lot of things he hadn't trusted me enough to tell me.

Why hadn't I ever asked him about his reason for going to the mall that day?

"I wish I had never told you guys about my mom's boss," Mischa rambled. When Mischa was nervous, she turned into a chatterbox, which got on Trey's nerves. When Trey was nervous, he clammed up and was silent. "This is crazy. This is absolutely crazy to be out driving around on Christmas Eve, looking for ghosts. I should be at home, opening gifts. I had to lie to my parents and say I was going to Matt's house because he had a surprise for me. What if they call over there, looking for me?"

"We don't have other options, Mischa," I reminded her. We'd tried summoning spirits with Ouija boards with results that had only confused matters, and quite possibly had made things worse.

"Well, I at least wish it wasn't snowing. This is freaky."

Trey's gaze returned to his window and the snow covering the fields.

"They don't have a story for him."

Those had been Violet's words when we had suggested on the track to her that we all play the game again after Candace had died, a few weeks after Olivia. Playing the game again, and summoning the same spirits who had killed our friends, seemed like the most obvious way to bring an end to the game. But Violet had assured us that the spirits wouldn't retell any game participant's story a second time. Once a death had been predicted, that was it. The fate had been sealed. Only, Violethadn't been able to see my death, she'd only been able to see the death I'd escaped. She'd seen the death of my twin sister, Jennie, or at least that was how it had sounded when she had told me she'd just seen fire. And I couldn't tell by her comment about Trey if the spirits truly didn't have a story for him, or if, for whatever inexplicable reason, Violet was unwilling to even ask them on his behalf.

"Holy crap," Mischa muttered. I saw her fingertips dig into the velour of the bucket front seat. I looked to the right corner of my windshield and gasped when I saw what she'd seen first.

Our headlights were shining on the back of a slim blond girl, walking barefoot in the snow about one hundred feet ahead of our car in the dark. She wore a silky cream-colored dress with a floral pattern on it, and a pink cardigan, and as we got a little closer, I saw that she was carrying a pair of beige ankle strap pumps in her left hand.

Her bare feet weren't leaving foot prints in the light snow that had collected on the pavement of the rural highway.

My blood, in that instant, ran ice cold. I was certain, more certain than I'd ever been about anything, that we were looking at a ghost.

"Jesus," Trey whispered in the back seat, leaning forward in between the two front seats to see through the windshield better.

"I don't want to do this. I said I did, but I don't. Don't stop, McKenna. Don't stop!" Mischa began wigging out completely in the front passenger seat. She sounded like a small child or a scared dog, whimpering and pleading.Her anxiety reminded me of Maude, the puppy my mom had adopted in the fall after my old dog, Moxie, had passed away.

Moxie. I had good reason to believe Violet had played a role in the death of my beloved dog, too, even though Moxie was old. I mentally added that to my lengthy list of grievances with Violet. I wondered where she was on that cold, snowy night. Probably curled up under a blanket in front of a Christmas tree with her wealthy parents, not the least bit concerned at all about all of the kids at our school, and at her old school, who she'd surrendered to whatever evil spirits were controlling her.

"Mischa, be cool. We have to do this," Trey said sternly.

"Listen to him," I said, even though I was fighting the urge to hit the gas, swing a U-turn and get the hell back to Willow as fast as I could drive.

My heart felt like it had decelerated to a dangerously low speed. I could hear my own blood pumping through my ears, hot with terror. Thump. Thump. Thump. My breath was raspy, and I tried to focus to prevent myself from hyperventilating. The girl was only about ten feet ahead of us now. Even though surely she must have sensed our car approaching, she never once looked over her left shoulder to look at us. I prayed, prayed so desperately, that when we finally pulled alongside her, her face wouldn't be gruesomely distorted.

"Unlock the windows, Mischa," Trey said calmly.

Mischa's fingers fumbled with the power button to unlock the windows in the back seat so that Trey could slide over to the right side and lower his window. I eased on the brake until our car rolled to an idling stop, and I saw the girl stop walking.

"Do you need a ride?" Trey asked her.

A moment later, Trey slid back over to the left side of the back seat, and the back door on the right side of the car was opening. I inhaled slowly, feeling thoroughly sickened. Panic and terror were nauseating me, and I felt as if I might seriously throw up all over the steering wheel if I thought about what was happening around me too much. Just go along with it, I commanded myself. I hesitated after the door clicked shut before I eased on the gas again. I dared to adjust the rearview mirror so that I could see Bloody Heather for myself. And when the mirror caught her reflection, I couldn't believe my eyes.

She looked exactly like Olivia.

She was Olivia.

Only her cold, dark eyes gave no indication of recognition when they met mine. If Bloody Heather actually was Olivia, or if Olivia had taken over her body for the purpose of communicating with us, the ghost's eyes confirmed nothing.

"Holy shi..." Mischa sounded like a helium balloon deflating. She didn't dare to look over her shoulder at the ghost sitting behind her, but she saw what I saw in her side view mirror.

"Where are you headed?" I asked, my voice trembling, at least remembering to lower my voice to sound more like a guy despite my profound fear. I didn't want to stray from the traditional stories of how Bloody Heather appeared to strangers just yet. We urgently needed this ghost, if she was willing and able to communicate with us. I thought it would be best, at least at first, to play by her rules.

"Eighteen-oh-one Cabot Drive," the girl told me.

I heard a small noise escape from Mischa, and then I realized that the girl had just given us Olivia's address. The Richmonds lived on the other side of town from where Trey and I lived, closer to Mischa's gated community. Cabot Drive was one of the fanciest streets in Weeping Willow, Wisconsin, lined with grand Georgian homes and manicured front lawns. I slowly accelerated the car, not wanting to slide on the snowy highway.

"You look just like our friend, Olivia," I managed to say, testing the limits of what this ghost would be willing to provide to us.

"Olivia would like to speak with you," the ghost told us.