Esther's garage was entirely non-extraordinary considering it was the garage of a witch. It smelled like gasoline just like my mother's garage did at home in Weeping Willow, and a bicycle hung on one wall for the winter from hooks. In another corner, a name-brand fancy lawn mower rested with a dustcover over it, and gardening tools hung from a pegboard on one wall.

In silence, Trey and I inched around a Mercedes that I assumed was Esther's to reach Laura's VW Bug. So much had happened in the last sixteen hours or so that everything in my life that had happened prior to our incarceration in Esther's secret room seemed like a distant memory, and now all that mattered was getting in that car and driving away as fast as possible...

Even if it meant that we would have to live out the rest of our lives with these new appearances that we'd obtained within the walls of Esther's house. This was a concern that pressed heavily upon my heart as I waited for Trey to unlock the passenger side door of the car. I wanted to believe that I'd love Trey forever no matter what he looked like, but the truth was that I felt very weird leaving Esther's house while the person who had Trey's solemn face, sharp cheekbones and aquamarine eyes was hidden away on its second floor. Perhaps that made me superficial, but I couldn't deny it: I adored that face.

I buckled my seat belt and kept my expression blank while I watched Trey hesitate for a moment as he tried to figure out which key on Laura's key chain would start the engine of the car. With Esther still watching us from the open doorway, I remained silent, not even daring to look in the side-view mirror on my side of the car at my reflection. The car's engine hummed to life, Esther tapped a button on the wall of the garage to raise its automatic door, and daylight flooded the garage, making my pulse dance with anticipation. Trey threw the car into reverse without looking in the rearview mirror even once, and finally we backed out into the driveway. I exhaled a gust of air in relief as we cleared the boundaries of the house. Now I was able to peer up at its exterior and try to determine from the position of the windows which room was the one in which I'd been held prisoner. The room's windows had overlooked this very same street, only I could see lace curtains hanging in the two windows that seemed to match the position of the room where Trey and I had been kept. There had definitely not been any lace curtains in that room when I'd been locked inside, which furthered my belief that Trey and I hadn't been held in a real room at all.

Trey cranked the steering wheel to the left once we reached the corner and peeled away down the block. Snow was melting in all of the front lawns which served as a bitter reminder that I was supposed to be in Florida at that very moment, riding the bus down Royal Palm Lane to the high school I attended in Dad's part of Tampa. I stretched my neck to peer over my shoulder trying to see if the cement lawn animals had ever returned to their resting place next to Esther's driveway. There was no sign of their gray forms on the spotty snow covering her front yard.

It was only when we reached the corner, waited for one solitary car to pass, and turned right onto the busier residential street which cut through Esther's neighborhood that I began to breathe more normally. The muscles in my shoulders and back ached from having been so tense since the moment I'd awakened in the hidden room over twelve hours ago.

"I really wasn't sure if we were going to make it out of there," Trey said with a little cough.

"God," I gasped, unable to even formulate a sentence about my feelings in that moment. I was, of course, relieved to be free, but still totally despairing about the impossible predicament we'd gotten ourselves into. Esther was going to stalk us with her magic until we convinced Mischa to abandon her Olympic dreams and come back to Illinois with us. Even if by some unlikely, miraculous circumstances we were able to accomplish that, I had my doubts that Esther was just going to let us go on with our lives without further conditions placed on our freedom. The tables had definitely turned against us; now not only were we going to have to avoid the evil that seemed to protect the curse, but a suburban witch was going to devote all of her energy to making sure that we deal with the curse in a timely manner.

 At the next intersection, Trey turned left and then pulled over along the curb on the slushy street and let the car roll to a stop before he put it in "park" mode. Above us, thick gray clouds covered the sky; it was going to be a gloomy, overcast day. "I mean, when she made me look in that mirror, I thought for sure that was it. I thought she was, like, going to wave a magic wand at us and turn us into toads, like, Harry Potter-style," the person behind the driving wheel cackled. It certainly sounded like Trey's sarcasm coming out of her mouth, but it still pretty much just seemed like Trey's intellect oozing from Laura's body.

"Do you feel, you know, weird?" I asked.

From behind Laura's brightly framed glasses, Trey raised an eyebrow at me. "Um, yeah. I mean, I was just drugged by a witch with hallucinogenic tea and locked in a magic chamber overnight. I'd say that I feel weird. Did you have strange dreams before Laura woke us up? I was dreaming all kinds of strange stuff in that room."

I didn't want to talk about dreams, I wanted to discuss his appearance. "Trey, I mean, do you feel like... Laura? Like, do you feel like you're in her body?" I asked, wanting him to take our situation more seriously.

He fell quiet and his expression became solemn. "I must really look like her, huh? You know, you look pretty weird, too. I didn't want to say anything, but..."

"What do I look like?" I demanded, suddenly alarmed. I had no idea what kind of spell Esther had cast on me; I'd been so eager to just leave her house that it hadn't occurred to me to wonder if she'd turned me into a dude or an old lady, or had simply given me blue eyes.

He gripped the driving wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and smiled shyly. "Just, like, blond and... kind of like Olivia Richmond."

Now my curiosity got the better of me and I impulsively looked at my own reflection in the side view mirror on the other side of the window on my side of the car. Expecting—practically hoping to see a beautiful blond young woman with delicate features like Olivia's—I was still taken aback by the girl who looked back at me. I looked so much like Olivia that it was eerie, and I remembered how Mrs. Richmond had almost screamed when she'd come across me dressed in Olivia's clothes at the Richmond's house over the winter. The transformation was so complete that tiny dimples formed in my cheeks when moved my mouth, and the black winter coat I'd been wearing when I left my mother's house was now a shiny purple puffer coat in my reflection. This was the trippiest part of the spell Esther had put on me; when I looked down at my own body, I saw my own brown hair resting on my shoulders and my black winter coat, which I'd been wearing since freshman year of high school. It felt as if the version of myself that I saw was the illusion, since everyone else presumably saw what I saw in the mirror.

"I don't understand why Laura told you not to look in the mirror because you'd break the spell on you, but nothing happened when I looked in the mirror," I mumbled, utterly dumbstruck by what was going on. "Wasn't the spell supposed to break once I saw my own reflection?"

"Well," Trey began as if he was about to state a theory. But before any more words came out, he looked at his own reflection in the rearview mirror and suddenly, in a fraction of an instant, he just looked like Trey again. The seatbelt across his chest even readjusted to accommodate his torso, which was slimmer than Laura's. Completely ignorant to the transformation I'd just witnessed, Trey studied his own reflection in the mirror, and lifted his fingers up to his cheek to gently touch the area under his eye. "I feel like myself, and to me, I look like myself."

I dug my lower teeth into my upper lip before saying, "Um, I think you just broke the spell by looking in the mirror. I mean, you look like you again."

We sat in the car in wonderment for a long moment, listening to the engine idle and both becoming aware in unison that it was cold outside. Trey flipped on the heat on the dashboard. "It must have been because Laura isn't as good at casting spells as Esther," I suggested, still unable to really justify why Trey's appearance had returned to normal but seemingly mine hadn't.

"We should probably get going," Trey said, looking in the rearview mirror for traffic behind us even though the street was empty at the early hour. "Actually, do you mind..." He looked down at the driving wheel and instantly I got what he was referring to: Trey hadn't really driven since the accident that had killed Olivia. And now here he was, driving a car with a girl who looked just like Olivia in the passenger seat.

"Yeah, of course." We both got out of the car and walked around the back of it to switch places. Only when we met at the back bumper, Trey pulled me close, buried his nose in my hair, and we just stood like that for a second while exhaust from the car poured out of the muffler, filling the wintry air around us with white smoke. For just a second, I let allowed my love for him to flood through my body, so grateful and happy that we were together and at least for the moment, safe.

"I feel weird kissing you when you don't look like you," Trey mumbled bashfully into my hair. "But I'm glad we got out of there."

"Then I'll kiss you," I said, but even as I leaned forward and planted my puckered mouth on his lips, I could sense his resistance. I looked exactly like a girl whose death he felt responsible for, so I backed off, smiled apologetically, and walked around the car to the driver's side.

I adjusted the car's clutch to take it out of park, and noticed that Trey lingered outside the passenger side door of the car in the cold for a moment before climbing in. It was perfectly brutal of Esther to send us on this journey with my appearance altered to make me look like Olivia, which was sure to freak Mischa out when (or if) we ever found her. Since Esther didn't know yet that I'd left the house with Trey instead of Laura, it was amazingly ironic that she'd made me look like someone who filled my boyfriend with dread. She was a more skillful witch than she even realized. My heart ached with the knowledge that for the duration of Esther's spell, Trey would barely be able to look at me.

Trey greeted me with a smile when he climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up. "You don't think that woman can, like, hear and see us, do you?" he asked.

I shook my head. "She's not Superman or anything. If she was that powerful, Laura would have warned us."

Trey scoffed, "It might have been nice if Laura had warned us about everything else that lady can do. I don't think I trust Laura much."

I had to admit, I didn't trust Laura much, either. I pulled back into the lane and we wove our way through Esther's subdivision until we found ourselves back on the town's main road again. Using my telephone and not Laura's, Trey looked up directions that would take us back into the heart of Chicago, which seemed like our best bet even though we didn't have a plan and most definitely did not want to end up anywhere near the occult bookstore where Esther was probably going to be later in the day. An hour later, we found ourselves at a stoplight on posh Michigan Avenue with a gas tank that was almost empty.

"Where to, navigator?" I asked Trey. Driving in the city made me a little nervous; the lanes were quite narrow, and there were just so many cars on all sides of us. It had been months since I'd driven a car, too, and I definitely did not want to get pulled over by a police officer. Maybe there had been a glamour spell cast on me, but it hadn't similarly been cast on my driver's license. The picture and name on the license in my wallet were most definitely those of McKenna Brady, the very same McKenna Brady whose parents had probably enlisted the aid of the police in trying to find her.

"I think," Trey said dreamily, gazing at pedestrians crossing the street in front of Laura's VW Bug, "We should go to the train station and get out of here. Like, back to yesterday's Plan A. We have that girl's credit cards." He was right; he'd carried Laura's purse over his shoulder when we'd left Esther's house. "We could buy a bunch of tickets to different places to throw them off, but just, like, make a clean break."

Wordlessly, I eased onto the gas pedal as the light changed and traffic began moving. We were headed in the direction of Chicago's Union Station and would be there in fewer than ten minutes if that was indeed going to be our plan. But just as I'd felt a reluctance to allow Mischa to continue indiscriminately killing people yesterday, I began rehearsing in my head how I was going to tell Trey once we got to the train station that I wasn't ready to leave the country without finding a way to end the curse. And Esther had basically told us how it had to be done: we needed to force Mischa to play the game with Father Fahey, who'd originally worked with Violet's grandmother to cast it. Even if Esther was evil and quite possibly crazy, there was no point in denying after I'd seen Trey's metamorphosis from Laura back into himself that she knew her stuff.

I knew that Trey was going to feel like I was betraying him, but the only thing I knew with certainty that I had to do before we went anywhere was get in touch with Henry Richmond.