As I fell into a deep sleep nestled against Trey in the lobby of the bank, I couldn't tell if he was attempting to engage me in a conversation or was simply talking aloud to work through his mother's angle on our situation. I was baffled by Mrs. Emory's behavior, too—if she'd had any knowledge of the Simmons family and the evil they'd unleashed on our town, I found out difficult to understand why she had suffered through Trey's trial in Ortonville back in November in silence. Or why she'd so calmly allowed Judge Roberts to sentence Trey to the Northern Reserve School until his eighteenth birthday. There had to have been a reason why she thought it would have been safer for him to be sent far away from our town and the Simmons family for her to have allowed it... what kind of mother would keep quiet while her son was unfairly punished if she could have prevented it?

Perhaps she believed that Trey would have been better off far away from Weeping Willow. The much more troubling alternative, which darkened the brief dreams I had during the three hours of fitful sleep that I got at the bank, was that Trey's mother had some other reason for stepping aside and allowing the Simmons' to banish him from our town. A reason that had nothing at all to do with what was best for Trey, and everything to do with what was best for... someone else.

When I woke up, searing morning sun glared against the glass of the bank window. It was early; the street outside was still empty. Unlike when I'd stirred awake on the train and didn't know where I was for few a seconds, I was fully aware of my surroundings the instant I opened my eyes. My head rested against Trey's chest and I heard him breathing deeply; not quite snoring, but close. We were lucky that we hadn't been awakened by a bank manager arriving to open the bank at an ambitiously early hour. I had to think hard for a second to figure out what day of the week it was; Mom had dropped me off at the airport on Monday, we'd escaped from Esther on Tuesday, we'd walked all night and now it was Wednesday.

I leaned forward and yawned. Through the locked interior doors of the bank, I could see a clock on the wall inside over the tellers' desk which gave the time as 8:24 A.M. The decal letters on the front door of the bank indicated that it would open at nine. Nap time was over. I unzipped my purse to pull out my contact lens case, grateful that I'd been smart enough to take my lenses out before I fell asleep.

"I think I probably should call my mom," Trey said as he stretched, which made half of the sentence that he uttered come out at a booming volume. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. "If we can think of a way to call her without her being able to find out where we are, that is. She's never tried to stop the police from throwing me back into Northern Reserve, and I doubt she'd try now."

Before we could put any serious thought into how we might go about calling Mrs. Emory, our more urgent need was finding a place where we could use a bathroom and buy some food.

"Man, I don't remember the last time I brushed my teeth," Trey complained. "I'm starting to feel like a cave man. Apologies if I, like, melt off a few layers of your skin with my breath."

We already knew what we'd find if we headed west on Main Street, since we'd come that way last night. So we decided to venture east, figuring that there had to be a public library or a grocery store or something around here, somewhere. As it turned out, we didn't have to walk far before we came across a sparkling Sonic diner with a drive-thru, an unexpected but welcome sight. 

I volunteered to order food after we both cleaned ourselves up since police weren't looking for me. In the ladies' bathroom, I did my best to wash myself off, since I had no idea when I'd next have an opportunity to take a long, hot shower. My hair was already limp and greasy, although as I gauged its grossness in the mirror, I had to wonder how I really looked underneath the spell Esther had cast on me. As I washed my face with hand soap at the sink, it kind of felt like I was playing with a Barbie doll whenever I looked at my reflection.

Outside, Trey waited for me at a table with the hood of his fleece hoodie pulled up over the top of his head. It was pleasantly warmer than it had been the previous day, which made it slightly less strange to the few people who pulled into the Sonic's parking lot that we had chosen to sit outside instead of inside. Even though the restaurant was technically a drive-in where employees would carry your food to your car, it was still cold enough that there had been a few people enjoying their breakfasts inside at tables rather than in their chilly cars.

"Oh my god, that smells so good," Trey groaned as I opened the greasy white paper bag containing the breakfast burritos I'd ordered. "I've definitely taken food for granted throughout my life. You know those crappy pizza bagels that they used to make in the cafeteria? Sometimes when I was at Northern my stomach would growl at night just thinking about how I used to eat like, three or four of them, as many as I wanted, with those nasty pieces of pepperoni on top, because they were so cheap and they were right there," he said. I didn't bother reminding him that the pizza bagels were still on the menu at Weeping Willow High School, we just weren't allowed to ever set foot on school grounds again to enjoy them.

"Yeah," I agreed, handing him a burrito wrapped in foil and paper printed with the Sonic logo. I sat down on the red bench next to him rather than across the table from him. "When I was at Dearborn I used to think the same kinds of things. Like, how dumb I was to not enjoy doing laundry at my mom's house where I could use detergent that smelled like lavender and as many dryer sheets as I wanted. Laundry is so much worse when it's other people's clothes and the detergent smells like parmesan cheese, and you have to empty out giant lint traps that have, like, big hairy monsters in them." I'd been on laundry duty most of my brief time at Dearborn, and I had loathed every second of standing in the school's steamy basement laundry room folding other students' uniforms and underwear.

Trey took a huge chomp out of his burrito, and as he chewed he replied, "Even just being able to do laundry whenever you want is kind of a luxury. I wish I could do laundry right now. These jeans could probably walk to Mexico on their own at this point."

Our reminiscence about normal high school life before our respective sentences were issued in November was interrupted by the ringing of Laura's phone in my bag. Rather than simply reaching for the phone to answer it, I looked up at Trey to see whether or not he thought I should. We hadn't discussed the topic of how to deal with Laura yet that morning, and now here it was... nine o'clock and already time to strategize our next move.

"Answer it," Trey urged me after its third ring. "I guess we have nothing to lose."

I answered and placed the phone on the speaker setting so that both of us could hear what Laura had to say for herself. "Hello?"

"McKenna. Thank God. I was afraid maybe the phone's battery died." Laura sounded more composed than she'd been last night when we'd last spoken.

"It might be best for us to not speak for a while," I suggested. There may have been surveillance footage from O'Hare airport of Trey and me with her on Monday when we'd met at the baggage claim area, even though the only person who could have tied us to her was Henry Richmond. "We were thinking, you know, that we're in trouble with the police, and now you're in trouble with the police, so..." I trailed off, hoping Laura could fill in the rest on her own. If there was any chance that police were going to be following Laura's movement, we couldn't afford to sustain any further contact with her. Trey and I were both in pretty grave trouble, but neither of us had ever been connected to a murder. Yet.

"Police?" Laura asked, sounding surprised. "Wait, what? There aren't any police. No one suspects anything. I'm at the store."

Trey raised an eyebrow at me; everything she'd said so far sounded suspicious.

"What I mean is," Laura clarified, "I came into the shop early this morning. I've taken care of everything at Esther's house. No one will suspect anything unless they bring some kind of high Wiccan priestess with them to clear the entire house of magic, which of course, they won't. When her body is eventually found, it'll look like she died in her sleep of natural causes. It took a lot of research, but I think I managed to cover everything up with spells."

I shook my head at Trey; there was no way Laura was going to get away with murder simply by masking evidence with glamour spells.

"Listen, I know the battery on the phone is probably almost dead by now. I was able to get in touch with Henry Richmond. He and I are arriving in Los Angeles on Saturday. So, you guys have to figure out a way to get there by then."

The mention of Henry's name took my breath away; he was supposed to have been back in France. But I didn't want Trey to sense how relieved I was to hear that Henry would be joining us to aid in trying to talk some sense into Mischa. It was already a good bet that Trey no longer had much interest in following through on the plan to go to California, even if we were right about his mom's involvement in the origins of how Mischa had obtained her dangerous ability to sentence people to death. The added element of Henry's involvement was definitely enough to convince Trey that he was better off boarding a train bound for the Canadian Rockies or the most remote beaches of Mexico, and never looking back.

"Look," Trey said sternly. "We don't have any money and we're in the middle of nowhere, so we can't exactly promise to be anywhere at any particular time."

"I get that, Trey. But you have my credit card, don't you? You can use that if you need to. I mean, for God's sake, buy a phone charger."

A red pick-up truck hitched up to a horse trailer drove past us. We truly were in the middle of nowhere. It was impossible to imagine how we might get ourselves to the sunny West Coast in a matter of days when we were smack dab in the middle of rural Clark County, Arkansas. "Realistically, Laura, how are we supposed to get to California? Cops are going to be looking for Trey on passenger trains. We can't take a plane without showing I.D. We're not old enough to rent a car," I said angrily. "And why do you even care about helping us break this curse? It doesn't have anything to do with you."

"McKenna," Trey said in a cautionary tone. He'd leaned away from the phone held between our heads and was looking at its screen. "We're down to twenty-eight percent and I'm pretty sure there's not an Apple store in this one-horse town."

"I'm not sure how you can get yourselves to California, but you seem pretty crafty to me. If you'd started learning how to use your abilities back in January when I told you to, transportation would be no problem at all," Laura said in a toldya-so tone. "And I do have an obligation to help you. Anyone who uses magic regularly has an obligation to help good people who need assistance. Besides which, I would like to think that someday I'll be able to go about my life without interference from all your little dead friends."

I had almost forgotten that Olivia, Candace, and probably even Jennie were tormenting Laura on a regular basis in the store. With Esther now dead, there was a good chance that Laura wouldn't be able to keep the store open on her own, and I might never have a chance to reconnect with Jennie again.

"Are you going to be able to lift this spell off McKenna so that she looks normal again?" Trey asked as he looked into my eyes.

"Not over the phone," Laura replied. "Use my credit card to book whatever kind of tickets you need to get yourselves to L.A. And try not to think about what you look like too much, McKenna. The more energy you put into the situation, the harder it's going to be to undo it."

We finished eating our breakfast quietly after ending the call, both of us well aware that we'd be intimidated to try using Laura's credit card, and for that reason, this would probably be the last hot meal we'd enjoy until we became desperately hungry. When he finished his burrito, Trey crumpled the foil and paper in which it had been served, and tossed it overhand into a nearby trash bin. "You know what's pretty odd?" he asked. "We haven't been contacted by any ghosts or meddling evil spirits in a long time."

"Actually, I heard from Candace over the weekend. She came through on the radio," I informed him. "But I didn't get the sense that it was about anything important. She just wanted me to promise that I'd tell her mom she was sorry for not listening or something."

"Well, did you?" Trey asked.

"Contact Candace's mom? No!" I said. "I can't just call Mrs. Cotton—or Mrs. Lehrer—or whatever her name is, and tell her that I have a message for her from her dead daughter."

Trey placed his elbows on the table while I finished eating and rested his head on his hands. "I just think it's odd, you know? Like, why would they have stopped harassing us if we're on our way to California to try to lift the curse from Mischa?" He paused, and corrected course. "I mean, not that we definitely are going to California. But to them it must definitely look like we are."

Perhaps Trey had suffered from terrifying dreams for his whole life, but I'd been tormented by ghosts throughout the fall in ways that I hadn't even shared with him. I'd burned my hand on my bedroom doorknob, I'd suffered through midnight visits from spirits who shook my bed and wound up my music boxes. He'd been present to witness some of it, but not the worst of it. "Don't know," I said, popping the last bite of my burrito into my mouth. "And I can't say that I miss it. I thought for sure that we were going to freeze to death when we were locked in that columbarium in Chicago."

"Exactly," Trey said without emotion. "They seemed so adamant that we not try to break the curse when it was on Violet, but now it's like they don't seem to care at all that we're coming after Mischa."

"Maybe they know your heart's not in it," I teased, even though I actually kind of meant what I'd said. The spirits that had protected the curse when it was still on Violet had practically been able to intuit our actions before we took them. They managed to pierce Henry's windshield with an icicle that could have killed us all on a highway, they tipped off cops to our location when we got close enough to Violet in Michigan to formulate our plan to force her into playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board again. Perhaps this time they knew better than I did that Trey was planning to ditch me and forget about all the innocent kids that his half-sister had willed to gruesome deaths. We hadn't given them any real reason to believe we were going to be successful this time, so they weren't troubling themselves by trying to stop us.

Trey stood up, reached for the sky in a full-body stretch, and then rubbed his stomach over his winter coat. "Do you think we should try to call my mom before we blow this popsicle stand?  I'm kind of curious about what she meant last night about my paying the ultimate price. It sounded kind of like I was going to be voted off Survivor or something."

I stood to prepare to leave, thinking that we'd next try to determine where in town we might purchase a phone charger, or access the internet. A little research was going to be necessary to figure out how we were going to get ourselves out of Arkansas. Then suddenly, as I looked over at Trey, the keenest sense of déjà vu enveloped me. Everything about that moment felt as if I'd lived it before; the expression on his face, the light breeze tousling the hair on his forehead, the clouds passing over the sun overhead and slightly darkening the day.

"What is it?" he asked me, aware that I was troubled.

"Nothing," I said, but made no attempt to move. "Remember when we were at Homecoming and it felt really weird right before Candace lunged at Violet? Or when we were in my garage and we found the Lite Brite and it kind of felt like someone was watching us?"

"Yeah..?"

"Do you feel it now?" I asked.

Trey fell quiet and took in his surroundings for a moment. Main Street was still pretty desolate for the start of a weekday. One of the patrons at Sonic stepped outside carrying a cup of coffee and started his car engine.  "I feel like we've been here before. It feels weird. Let's walk back through town and see if we can use a computer somewhere. The longer we stay in this town, the more likely it is that someone's going to recognize me. I mean, it's pretty obvious that we're not from here."

We linked our fingers together and strode back in the direction of the bank and the railroad tracks. We might not have truly been walking faster on our return into the eerie abandoned shopping area, but it definitely felt like we were hurrying a bit. "I don't think that crappy electronics store is going to have a charger," I said, remembering all of the outdated appliances it had on display in its window.

"Yeah but maybe someone who works there will let you use theirs," Trey suggested. "You are a hot blond from out of town, after all."

Just as I was about to react to his teasing, I noticed that an armored truck with the word BRIGGS on its side was idling outside the bank where we'd slept for a few hours. One uniformed employee carried cases from the open back doors of the truck toward the bank, where a middle-aged male bank employee wearing a suit held the door open. Another guy wearing a Briggs uniform stood guard at the back of the truck with his hand resting on the gun in the holster he wore around his hips. I stopped short, watching. It was probably nothing more than an ordinary occurrence in this small town of a cash delivery to the bank for its daily transactions, but the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

"Trey," I said, tugging on his hand to urge him to stop.

As he paused to look over his shoulder at me, we both practically jumped out of our skin at the unexpected squeal of tires dropping rubber on pavement up ahead. A mid-sized economy car had just spun around the same corner we'd turned on foot a few hours earlier, and its brakes seemed to be failing as it sped in our direction. In a fraction of a second, the security guard holding the gun leapt out of the way before the car slammed into the back of the armored truck with a heart-stopping sound of metal crumpling. Like a slow motion sequence from an action movie, paper money blew out of the back of the armored truck like a flock of birds startled into flight. Bills fluttered in the morning sunlight and drifted to the wet ground as all of us—the Briggs guards, the bank manager, the driver, and me and Trey, watched in awe.

"Shit," Trey finally said as the Briggs guys sprang into motion and started yelling at the stunned driver. "We should get out of here. If this town even has a police force, it'll be here soon."

He passed in front of me, intending to duck behind the bank before the security guards and bank employee took notice of us. There was nothing behind the bank except a gravel parking lot occupied by an older model Toyota Corolla and a newer Nissan Altima. The lot itself was encircled with a rusty fence, and there was no reason for us to climb a fence and dash off into the trees when no one was chasing us and there weren't any police present. My heart was pounding; I was sure that we had just witnessed something that had been orchestrated for us to see.

"We should just go around to the other side of the bank and cross the street," I said, knowing that if we took off on foot without exploring whatever resources this town had to offer, we were in for a rough time of it, wherever we went next. We weren't bound to get far without a map or mobile phone.

We crept around the other side of the bank (being needlessly sneaky, since there was at most only one other bank employee inside the building), and Trey stole a peek at the accident scene around the building's edge to see if anyone would notice if we emerged from where we were watching. He motioned for me to follow him, and we both stepped out from the side of the building onto the sidewalk headed toward the electronics store. I couldn't suppress the urge to look over my shoulder at the wreck. One of the security guards was examining the damage to the back doors of the truck while the other frantically tried to pick up all of the hundreds of wet bills that had settled into dark puddles on the street. The elderly man who'd lost control of his vehicle was scratching his head in total confusion. "I've never had a problem with the brakes before. I don't know what happened. I tried to slow down for the turn and it was like the brake lines had been cut."

Something caught my eye through the thin white smoke pouring from the damaged car's hood at the point of impact with the truck. Something that could not have been a coincidence.

"Trey," I said, stopping mid-step. "Look."

The Arkansas license plate fixed to the back fender of the car had been issued with the number JNE8B.

"What is it?" Trey asked, not making the connection as quickly as I had.

I resisted the urge to point, knowing that any swift motions like that on my part would surely catch the unwanted attention of the Briggs guys. "J-N-E-eight-B. Jennie eight B. Jennie was eight when she died."

And our last name began with a "B."