The scent in the air seemed to change when we crossed the border from Arizona into California two nights later. Even though it was dark as the train chugged its way into Riverside County, our passage was marked by a floral fragrance on the breeze that was a new element on our journey. I sat up from where I'd been laying on my side on the dusty wood floor of the boxcar to look through the open door. The sapphire sky twinkled with stars that looked entirely different from the ones that hung over Weeping Willow at night. We were in the desert. It was the first time in my life I'd ever seen long stretches of dry earth completely devoid of trees and buildings for miles at a stretch. The volume of the train rattling on its track over the sand seemed intrusively loud as we barreled through the otherwise silent landscape.

A few feet behind me, Trey slept. We'd barely spoken since leaving Arkansas. There'd been little reason to communicate, since our trip had been suspiciously worry-free. Even when we'd had to switch train lines in Texas, our train from Arkansas pulled up right alongside the Epsilon Plastics cargo train that Candace had told us we could ride the rest of the way to Long Beach. We were able to tiptoe across the tracks, slip into an open boxcar, and overheard someone who worked on the railroad announce that the train wasn't scheduled to leave for another two hours. That gave us a comfortable window of time to use bathrooms at the modest railway station and restock our food supply from a vending machine.

It was just like we'd suspected when we'd slipped aboard the train in Arkadelphia: some unseen force was helping us safely get to California.

But at sunrise as the train rolled past the sleepy town of Barstow, California, I got the distinct feeling that our luck had run out. As if a shadow fellow over me, a chill ran down my spine and suddenly the creepy hunch that I was being watched-the same uncomfortable sensation that had become so familiar back at home in the fall-returned. Whatever benevolent force had been safeguarding our trip had been disabled. There was no doubt in my mind: we were on our own again, and something was definitely plotting against us.

"Whoa," Trey said when he woke up a few minutes later. He propped himself up on his elbow and rubbed his left eye with the back of his hand. "Do you feel that?" He waited a few seconds for my response, but I couldn't summon adequate words to confirm that it sure did feel like we were doomed. "Why do I get the feeling that either this train is about to derail or paratroopers are about to burst into this boxcar to arrest us?"

"You feel that, too?" I asked. Cold dread had already flooded my circulatory system and settled into my organs, making me feel awful in a familiar way that was strangely also kind of comfortable. Being paranoid enough to remain on the defensive gave me the sense that we were making progress again. We were on a mission in California, and the danger was still very real.

Trey stood and stretched. "Yeah. Totally. It was like I felt a switch flip while I was asleep just now. It actually woke me up. Do you think maybe something happened and suddenly now they're going to start throwing obstacles at us again?"

I stared out at the landscape. Mountains were visible in the distance. Without replying to Trey, I withdrew my phone from my bag on an impulse to try to contact Candace for guidance. It shouldn't have come as any surprise to me that I didn't have any cellular service. I hadn't done a very good job of studying the route that our train was taking across the state, and now in retrospect I realized I should have snapped a picture of my phone's screen the last time I'd pulled the route up on the map so that I'd be able to reference it in a moment like this. It would have been good to know where the train would next be stopping.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe Henry and Laura reached out to Mischa and now she knows we're on our way?" In my mind's eye, I pictured Mischa Portnoy. Even in kindergarten she'd been the tiniest kid in our class, so compact and spry. When we were little girls, back in elementary school, she was the girl everyone wanted as their field trip partner, on their volleyball team, and for their best friend. It just didn't seem possible that Mischa would turn whatever dark energy she'd inherited from Violet against me. "But I don't think that's the reason."

"Maybe they didn't think we'd get this far," Trey mused, joining me near the open door for a breath of fresh air and to take in the morning scenery. The boxcar we'd boarded on this train wasn't as smelly as the one in Arkansas, and didn't have any troubling graffiti spray-painted on its walls, either. But it was still stuffy and had slightly toxic-smelling chemical aroma.

"Do you remember where we next stop?" I asked.

He scratched his head. "San Bernardino, maybe?"

We sat in silence as the sun heated the morning. Now that we were in Southern California, the temperature sweltered as soon as the sun was high in the sky. Trey wiggled out of his winter coat, and I took mine off also and used it as a pillow.

The train tracks took us into hillier terrain. In between brush-covered slopes, towns popped up here and there. After a day and a half in this boxcar, we'd already learned the train's strange language of deceleration as it approached stopping points. In unison we both felt the first tug of the train's brakes and looked at each other, aware that it was time to make some decisions.

Trey stuck his head through the open boxcar door. "I don't see a town or anything yet, but the track curves around the base of one of these big hill things up ahead," he said. "Should we hop off before it pulls into the station?"

It was Saturday morning. We were so close to Long Beach, and we'd come so far. If we ditched the train in favor of not being caught at the next station, we'd risk not finding an alternative way of getting ourselves to the Los Angeles area. The knowledge that Henry and Laura would be waiting for us later that day made me all the more desperate to reach our destination. Without allowing my brain to consider in too much detail why my pulse quickened when I thought about seeing them, I promised myself it was because I wanted Laura to remove the spell on me and not because I longed to see Henry's friendly face.

"I think we should hide," I announced. We had not-on any of this train's previous stops across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-bothered to hide. Unlike the boxcar on our first train which had been empty except for a pile of gross blankets, there were stacks of cardboard boxes in this car with us. They were secured into place with bungee cords that prevented them from sliding around, although I had investigated them early on in our occupation of this boxcar and discovered that whatever was in them was so heavy that they probably wouldn't have been sliding around much, anyway. The fact that there was some kind of cargo in this boxcar with us made it all the more suspicious that the train operators had left the door partially opened, and hadn't bothered to search inside for freeloaders like us since we'd pulled out of Ft. Worth.

Trey lingered in the open doorframe of the boxcar for a minute after I sank down into the cozy space between two stacks of boxes, tightly clutching my winter coat. Someone from the train's staff would have had to actually climb into the boxcar and peer around the stacks to spot me, which made me feel somewhat secure even though I knew I was anything but. From what I'd observed on our brief journey so far, when cargo reached its destination, a crane pulled up and pulled the entire freight container off the train. Our boxcar was different from the brightly colored cargo containers elsewhere on the train, but still... eventually before we reached the ocean, these contents of these cardboard boxes were going to be removed from the train.

Just when I'd started to wonder if Trey had jumped off the train without me, he ducked around the boxes and squatted down next to me. "It's a pretty big train yard," he said, sounding a little worried. "It might not be a bad idea to be, like, ready to make a run for it."

The train's brakes squealed as it came to a stop. We sat in uncomfortable silence for about fifteen minutes, all the while both straining our ears for the dreaded sound of cranes. Although we didn't hear the typical roar of approaching construction vehicles, we did hear men's voices and the unsettling sound of someone happily whistling in the distance.

And the whistling-of a Christmas carol, which was odd since it was April-grew closer.

"Do you think they're searching boxcars?" Trey whispered.

I shook my head, not because I thought they weren't searching boxcars but instead because I just didn't want it to be true. But then, of course, we heard approaching footsteps on gravel. We cringed. They weren't right outside our boxcar, but they were close. It hadn't previously occurred to me to wonder whether or not men who guarded freight train cargo carried guns, but now I wondered.

"Shit," Trey muttered, his eyes wild with fear. His body tensed; I could tell he was ready to spring to his feet if needed.

A squealing metal sound came from outside. It sounded like it originated right outside our boxcar, and I could only guess its source, but it was a safe assumption that the door of the boxcar ahead of ours had just been pulled open. We heard a thud and an echo, the likely sounds of a man climbing aboard the car to take a look around. The whistled tune of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" resumed.

"We should go!" Trey whispered fiercely. "Someone's going to find us!"

Numbly, I nodded. We probably only had a handful of seconds to hop out of our boxcar and split before whoever was checking in on the next car continued on to ours, and those seconds were running out. We both stood up intending to leave. There was a crunch of gravel outside that sounded like whoever was in the boxcar next to ours had just climbed out and landed on the ground. Trey reached for my forearm and his cold fingertips pressed into my skin just above the wrist when suddenly with a screech of metal, everything went dark.

We held perfectly still for a second, both of us too terrified to move. We hadn't even made our way around the stack of cardboard boxes yet to have been spotted, but whoever was making the rounds for the freight line had closed the door of the car in which we were hiding. If either one of us had gasped in surprise, we might have been able to avoid what happened next. But we were both so accustomed to stifling natural reactions to terror that we didn't make a peep-which was probably exactly how Violet's evil spirits had assumed we'd react.

Before my eyes even adjusted to the pitch blackness within the boxcar, another noise flooded my chest with dread. Outside the door of our boxcar, which had just been closed, a metallic clang suggested that we'd just been locked in from the outside with the latch. I didn't know it then, but we had chosen to ride this particular train in what was known by more seasoned rail-riders as a "plug-door boxcar." Those could easily be locked from the outside, and hobos with more experience traveling by train than us went to great extents to avoid them.

"Oh my God," I whispered to Trey. The footsteps from outside the boxcar suggested that the yardman or train employee who'd just locked us in was moving along on his task of securing containers and boxcars while the train refueled. Our boxcar-and the two of us inside of it-were already far from that guy's thoughts. "Are we locked in?"

"Jesus, I hope not."

Feeling our way around the stacks of cardboard in the dark, we both crept toward the cracks of light that lined the bottoms and sides of the door. My eyes adjusted to the darkness well enough to see Trey in silhouette as he pulled on the edge of the door, trying to open it. He rattled the door, but it didn't budge.

We were, indeed, locked in.