We walked.

The battery on Laura's phone was at fifty percent after we spoke with her. We knew we'd wear it down further if we continuously referenced the map application on it before we found a charger, and we were in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Neither Trey nor I were in much of a chatty mood after we told Laura we'd answer her call in the morning. We briefly considered spending the night in the conductor's cab of the train in which we'd hidden from the police, but quickly concluded that we might be discovered there at any given moment by another group of cops, or train staff.

So, we walked south on U.S. Highway 67, which was barely more than a two-lane country road, through an area of the country that was even more rural and downtrodden than our own. Every once in a while we passed a house with peeling paint or a trailer home with lawn chairs rusting in a dirty bank of snow out in front of it. Occasionally, cars drove past us, but we'd hear them coming from a distance and step off the road and into the trees to avoid their headlights. A few times, dogs on chains barked at us. We barely noticed. According to the quick glance we'd given the map, we had about eight miles to walk before we'd reach the nearest town.

Eight miles. After enduring six months of chaotic life upheaval, trudging through eight miles of melting snow in the moonlight seemed like a penance... only we weren't the ones who'd committed any sins.

A small house appeared on the right side of the road, and Trey scanned it for activity. The lights inside were off, and its front porch boasted an impressive assemblage of junk: an upholstered recliner chair, a card table with a chess board and figurines on top, an ancient lawn mower, a frost-covered croquet set. "Wait just a second," Trey said and trotted off toward the house before I could object. He stealthily crept through the darkness while I waited in silent protest in the middle of the otherwise empty highway. I saw his silhouette slide across the porch, where he lingered in front of the chess board before jogging back over the patches of snow on the lawn to return to me.

"Check it out," he said, clearly very pleased with whatever booty he'd stolen from the residents of the house. He withdrew a pack of Marlboro Lights and a butane lighter from his coat pocket.

"Trey," I teased. "That's stealing."

"I've been serving time for far less," he replied, which was true. He'd served three months in what could be considered a prison simply for being a passenger in the car (his own mother's) I'd been driving when I refused to pull over at the request of police.

He removed one of the four remaining cigarettes from the box and lifted it to his lips. The crackle of the lighter filled the otherwise quiet early spring night as flame illuminated Trey's face with a red glow. I fought the urge to scold him; smoking was kind of gross, but nagging him about a nasty habit wasn't really my style. After all, watching him take a long, satisfying drag off his cigarette in the moonlight reminded me of the many times I'd caught glimpses of him at Weeping Willow High before we'd really gotten to know each other. Back then, when we were both just regular old high school students, sometimes he'd hang out and smoke by the dumpsters outside the cafeteria while cutting classes with the burn-out skateboarding guys. Despite having known Trey since I was a toddler because he lived on our block, I'd always considered him to have an air of mystery and danger about him. Now I realized—even though I knew him well enough to predict half of the words that came out of his mouth—there were still things I'd never know about Trey, no matter how many secrets he shared with me.

That bare truth made me feel simultaneously vulnerable and desperately happy that he was with me as we resumed our journey. Despite having spent the last two months living with my dad in Florida, miles and miles away from Weeping Willow, it seemed like I had never been further from home before in my whole life, or less like there was a possibility I'd ever see my little town again.

The rumble of a car engine in the distance triggered both of us stepping off to the right side of the road. We wandered a few feet into the trees and I impulsively sat down next to one to rest my back against its trunk. "Can we rest a minute?" I asked. It had to be around three in the morning, and we'd been on our feet for several hours. My shoulders were sore from having been tensed for so long, walking in a worried rush.

Trey squatted down a few feet away, facing me, and puffed pensively on his cigarette. I felt cool dampness from the wet ground seep through the seat of my jeans, but couldn't find the strength to stand up again. We heard the car pass by and continue on its way, but neither of us budged. "Do you think you're going to look like that forever now?" he finally asked, his eyes fixed on the highway instead of on me.

"God, I hope not," I mumbled. Rather unselfishly, the future of my physical appearance hadn't been my immediate concern when Laura told us that she'd killed Esther. Fear that I'd be stuck looking like a blond stranger for the rest of my life settled in after it occurred to me that Laura was now in serious danger of being arrested for murder. It didn't sadden me at all that Esther was dead, but it disturb me profoundly that the events Violet had set into play back in September had claimed yet another victim. Laura had put herself in the position of having to defend her own safety in an attempt to help me and Trey, and now she was likely going to end up on the run, just like us.

It was only when I began wondering whether or not Laura had the necessary skills to unbind the spell Esther had placed on me that I realized my new appearance might be irreversible. If Laura wasn't as skilled a witch as Esther had been, or if she was arrested and unable to meet us, I'd never look like myself again. I balanced the back of my head against the tree, fighting the enormous wave of dread and regret rising inside of me. It was a familiar sensation, one that I'd been experiencing regularly ever since Olivia's birthday party, but it had grown stronger in the months that had since passed. I could choose to view looking like a different person for the rest of my life as either the greatest gift Esther could have given me, since it would make it much easier for me and Trey to leave the country... or as the worst punishment imaginable. Whenever Jennie and I would quarrel as little girls, I would passionately wish for us to not be identical anymore. But now that she was gone, seeing a face that was the same as hers in the mirror was all I had left of her, and now I didn't even have that anymore.

"I can't believe she killed her," Trey said faintly to himself. I sort of couldn't believe that someone as librarian-ish as Laura had been driven to murder Esther either, but then, we weren't in a position to put our faith in anything. Laura had told us that Esther had figured out the little switcheroo that she'd arranged with Trey. The old witch was furious when she realized that she had her young shopkeeper locked up in her house instead of Trey, and had attacked Laura so violently that Laura claimed she'd strangled Esther in self-defense.

I reminded him, "We don't know for sure that she did." There was certainly a possibility that Laura was lying. She may have been telling us fibs just to get back in our good graces, or for all we knew, Esther was pretending to be Laura to trick us. However, the phone call from Laura had struck me as alarmingly genuine. When we'd spoken to her earlier that evening, she had sounded totally rattled about what to do with Esther's body. Evidently, Esther had been the leader of a sizable coven in suburban Chicagoland, so it was only a matter of time before her disappearance was noticed by other witches in the community.

"Yeah, but," Trey mashed out the butt of his cigarette into the dark mud. "If Esther was that angry about the two of us getting away—"

"Then why didn't she just kill us instead of Laura?" I interrupted.

"I was actually thinking that this curse we're dealing with, it must be way more powerful than we thought. If someone like Esther was angry enough about us getting away to attack someone that she, you know, liked—like Laura—to get her hands on it?" He tilted his head back and peered up at the stars in the night sky through the branches overhead. "It must be a majorly big deal."

I unzipped my bag and ran my hand through it, feeling an urge to touch all of my belongings. My old leather wallet, my key chain with keys to both my mom's house in Wisconsin and my dad's house in Tampa, a tube of lip balm that I'd bought in the fall at Hennessey's Pharmacy. My prized pair of polarized Ray-Bans, which had a light scratch across one lens from the time during sophomore year when I was wearing them while walking home from school with Cheryl and walked right into a low-hanging tree branch. In the little inner pouch sewn into the lining of my purse, my fingertips ran over the stub of a movie ticket from when I'd gone to the mall with my dad's girlfriend, Rhonda, a few weekends ago. I carried with me a small laminated mass card that I'd picked up at St. Monica's the day of Mr. Portnoy's funeral, which already seemed like it had happened ages ago rather than just a few days in the past. These random trifles were all that remained of my regular life. Prior to that moment I hadn't had a chance to really process that I might never climb into my own bed in Weeping Willow again, wind up my music boxes, or touch the toys that I'd once shared with my twin.

"Oh, man. Are you crying?" Trey asked.

I was, in fact, crying just a little. I'd be turning seventeen in July, and less than a year ago I was a college-bound, top student with reliable friends like Cheryl and Erica. Now I was practically an outlaw disfigured by a magic spell, sitting in a damp forest somewhere in Arkansas in the middle of the night, hellbent on somehow getting myself across the country to confront a friend who probably could have snuffed out my life with ease. I didn't remember anymore why I'd so urgently felt the need to stand by Mischa after Olivia and Candace had died. The fact was, I had only been friendly with those girls for a few weeks before we played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. I could have easily turned my back on Mischa and thrown myself full-force into being the best Class Treasurer that Weeping Willow High School had ever seen. I could have been a better friend to Cheryl, I could have played everything differently and not sacrificed my own future.

Trey sat down on the ground next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. "I'm sure we'll be able to find someone who can take the spell off you. I mean, there are probably witches casting glamour spells all over the country. Apparently there are a whole bunch in Chicago. Who knew? Maybe every single movie star in Hollywood has some kind of glamour spell on them. But we're not going to find anyone around here who can help us. We've got to keep moving."

He was doing his best to comfort me, but his words did little to alleviate my despair. "The game didn't work on me," I sputtered. "Violet couldn't see a prediction for me. My sister saved me—she saved my life and then I went off and ruined it anyway, and I dragged you into it, and that wasn't fair."

Giving in to exhaustion and hopelessness, I sobbed despite being appalled by how over-dramatic I was being in front of Trey. He waited until my crying jag ended and I paused to catch my breath before saying, "You didn't drag me into anything. I've already told you that I was involved in this even before you were. Jennie saved you because you're meant to finish it and she knew you would."

We sat in silence until my moment of self-pity passed, and then we were both spooked in unison when we became more aware of the sounds of the woods around us. An owl hooted in the distance. Leaves rustled slightly; there could have been any number of nocturnal animals watching us with interest.

"If we don't get up and keep moving now," Trey said, "we may not ever get up."

So we kept walking. I didn't allow myself to think about Mischa, who was probably fast asleep in her cozy residential hotel in Long Beach. I didn't think about Violet, either, who was probably dreaming about cashmere sweaters and prom in her fancy canopy bed in Weeping Willow. Instead, I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and imagining places we might find to lie down for a few hours once we arrived at the end of our eight mile journey in the small town that we'd seen on the map. On the screen of Laura's phone, the town had looked like little more than a handful of stores and a post office, but the hope that we might find a convenience store where we could buy some food kept me going.

I guessed that it was around four-thirty in the morning when we finally crossed the bridge I remembered seeing on the map. Beneath it, a small foul-smelling body of water named Coffee Creek gurgled. The bridge signified that we were on the outskirts of a little town called Gurdon. Our journey was about to come to an end for the night. "Yes!" Trey exclaimed when we saw a tiny convenience market about half a mile ahead of us with its lights on, and then our hearts sank when we arrived and found that it was closed for the night. We should have been able to guess as much from a distance by the fact that there weren't any trucks in the parking lot.

We trudged onward, and indulged ourselves in a quick peek at the map on Laura's phone to see how much further we had to walk before we arrived at whatever kind of town center Gurdon had to offer. "I'm starving," I confessed. "For real."

Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves on the main drag of the small town, which was completely desolate at the strange hour. As we passed a few storefronts, I noticed that not only did the town seem abandoned, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest that it actually was. The little buildings in the town looked like they'd been constructed in the 1930's and had never been renovated. Although it was dark outside, the windows of the town's stores were mostly empty. The sign over one store's front window claimed that it was an antique shop, but American flags hung in its dusty windows. "This is freaky," I whispered to Trey. It felt kind like we'd wandered into a ghost town a few hours before dawn.

"No, this is perfect," Trey corrected me. "First all, there's no one around who may have seen us on television. Second, there's a warm place for us to sleep for a few hours." He nodded in the direction of a commercial bank up ahead on Main Street, the only modern-looking structure on the entire street. Its lights were on in the ATM lobby area, and Trey was right: the lobby was probably heated. "And..." he said, stopping and pointing down at his feet. "We can get out of here whenever we're ready."

On the pavement in front of us, white X's flanked by R's had been painted, and had long ago faded. We had somehow, almost miraculously, wandered back to the railroad tracks that the Amtrak train we'd deboarded had probably traveled down a few hours earlier. "Do you think we could get on another Texas Eagle?" I asked with hope. My eyes burned and my voice cracked from tiredness.

"No way!" Trey exclaimed, and put me in a playful headlock. "Are you nuts? Police are going to be crawling every Amtrak train covering that line. But, we could check on Laura's phone to see if any cargo trains pass through here. We could ride the rails like hobos to go wherever we're headed next."

I most certainly did not want to ride the rails like a hobo, and it did not escape my attention that Trey had deftly avoided saying that we'd catch a train that could take us the rest of the way to California. He still wasn't sold on the idea of confronting Mischa, but I was far too sleepy to raise that topic with him. With fumbling fingers, I reached into Laura's bag to find her ATM card when we reached the bank. I figured that it was improbable that anyone would ever trace me and Trey to Gurdon, Arkansas if I were to use my own ATM card to unlock the bank's doors, but there was no point in taking the risk.

As soon as I pulled the door of the lobby open and was hit with gust of warm air, I almost began crying again, but this time from relief.

"Hold on a second," Trey said before following me inside the bank lobby. He took a few steps backwards toward the barren-looking electronics store we had just passed, which sold second hand televisions, washing machines, and dryers at rock-bottom prices. Handwritten signs on cardstock in neon shades of pink and yellow hung in the store's windows.

"Trey, come on," I whined, wanting nothing more than to just collapse in the corner of the lobby and close my eyes. My feet were throbbing, my shoulders ached.  But his attention had been captured by something in the window of that store, and I reluctantly followed him back outside.

"...We're urging him to just call home. That's all. I just want to hear his voice and know that he's okay."

Trey faced the picture window of Corwin's Electronics with his lips slightly parted. The reflection of the store's fluorescently illuminated display brightened his blue eyes, and then I saw what had drawn him back there for a second look. Mrs. Emory, Trey's mother, was on a late night news show giving a satellite interview to a middle-aged newscaster wearing a beige sports jacket. "And Mrs. Emory, if there was any chance that your son, Trey, might be watching this broadcast, what would you like to say to him, directly?" the newscaster asked.

Stunned, I reached for Trey's hand and our eyes met briefly before we both returned our attention to the television to find out what his mother wanted to tell him. Mrs. Emory, looking just as solemn as she had the day before I'd left Willow when she'd stopped by our house with the police, now looked haggard.  There were bags under her eyes and her complexion was a sickly shade of ashen gray. She looked right at the camera—right at us—and said in a steady, patient voice, "I'd want to say Trey, you think you know what you're doing, and I have my suspicions about what you're trying to accomplish, but you're wrong. What you're up against is more dangerous than you think, and the one who will pay the ultimate price is you."

Trey tightened his grip on my hand, squeezing my cold knuckles. To anyone else in America watching late night news, Mrs. Emory seemed to be warning her eldest son about running away from the police and the potential legal repercussions that would come down on him. Her carefully chosen words were just vague enough to have passed as something any parent in her situation would have said to a kid on the run. But without exchanging a single word between us, Trey and I both knew at once that she was warning us about the curse. We were right; she'd somehow been involved in casting it, or strengthening its power, whichever the case may have been. Ever since we'd first gotten into trouble with the law back in November, she'd kept silent about whatever insights she had into the Simmons family and our involvement with Violet. But for whatever reason, now she seemed to be desperate enough to prevent Trey from breaking the curse to go on national television and beg him while the entire country watched.