"I can't stay calm!" I screamed. "Those boxes are going to catch fire and whatever's in them might be highly flammable. Or toxic!"

I was certain that I had reached the final minutes of my life. There were at least a thousand urgent actions I wanted to take before I closed my eyes and never opened them again. I needed to call my mother and say goodbye. I needed to reach out to Mischa and beg her to seek help in breaking the curse since Trey and I wouldn't ever meet up with her. There were hundreds of songs I wanted to listen to again before I died. I longed to pull up a photo of Jennie on my phone and look at her face one last time. It occurred to me that she might show up at any second to fetch me and escort me over to the "other side," if television shows about near-death experiences could be believed.

We were both coughing desperately as the train reached its normal velocity. I thought maybe it wasn't too late to put out the fire with our winter coats, but I could already hear flames roaring behind me. Heat from the fire singed the tiny hairs on my arms. The temperature in the boxcar had increased so much that its steel walls were scalding to the touch. A dull boom sounded behind us as the fire engulfed the nearest stack of cardboard boxes, igniting whatever they contained. I covered my mouth long enough to grab my winter coat from the floor. Even though it might have prolonged my suffering by a matter of seconds, I planned to beat the flames away when they grew closer to me.

And then suddenly I felt the miraculous jerk of the train's brakes being applied. Previous times when the train had rolled into stations, its speed had lessened in barely perceptible increments until the final twenty seconds or so when it came to a full stop. But this time, the conductor hit the brakes so hard that both Trey and I stumbled a few feet toward the raging fire. When we regained our balance, the conductor braked again, causing us to both lose our footing and fall to our hands and knees.

"They must see smoke!" Trey exclaimed. Through the smoke in the boxcar, I saw his eyes dancing with excitement, illuminated by the orange glow of the flames.

But it didn't matter if the conductor saw smoke. We'd already been inhaling smoke for almost ten minutes. My mind had gone blank. I'd even lost my mental grip on the checklist of things I needed to do before the flames devoured me, and I slumped against the hot steel wall, unable to remain on my feet. However long it would take for the conductor to determine which boxcar was leaking smoke and come to our rescue was too long. The boxcar's door would not open fast enough for us to make it through this. Inside my eyelids I found myself in the basement of the Richmonds' house on the night of Olivia's sixteenth birthday party. The stench of fire that filled my head was coming from a crackling blaze in their fireplace. I was lying on my back on the carpeted floor with pressure from fingertips applied against the bottoms of both of my hips and my feet. The sugary taste of birthday cake lingered on my tongue. When I opened my eyes I saw Olivia Richmond smiling at me and felt fingertips brushing against my temples.

"No," I shouted. "I don't want to play this game!"

I heard a female voice say in wonderment, "Usually when I play this game, I get a good idea as soon as I touch someone. But I don't have any ideas for you. The only thing I can think of is fire, but it doesn't feel right. I mean, I can tell a story about fire if you want."

Those words-words I'd head before in real life and again and again in my nightmares-cut through the heavy fog in my head so clearly that I sat up screaming, "No! Don't tell my story! I don't want to hear it! Don't tell my story!"

"McKenna," a boy's voice said. My name was followed by raucous coughing.

I opened my eyes and saw nothing but blue. I realized that I was lying on grass and looking directly up at the cloudless sky. Trey knelt next to me and was violently shaking my shoulders. About twenty feet behind us, the train on which we'd been riding sat idle. Dark gray, angry smoke poured out of the boxcar in which we'd been hiding. Standing near Trey were two pot-bellied, middle-aged men wearing baseball caps, Ray-Ban sunglasses and orange safety vests. All at once I realized that Trey's plan must have worked. The train's conductor must have somehow seen smoke coming from our boxcar and stopped the train. Trey was doubled over, coughing into his fist. His shirt was soaked with perspiration. His face was covered in black charred dust, making the whites of his eyes look unnaturally bright.

"Oh my God," I whispered, looking back at the train. I had no memory of anyone opening the door or of being pulled out of the inferno that the boxcar had become. It didn't seem possible that I was actually alive.

"You just hold still there, little miss," one of the guys in an orange vest instructed me. "We've radio'd for an ambulance but it may be a while before one gets here because quite frankly," he looked around, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand, "We're in the middle of goddamn nowhere."

I leaned back and rested my head on the ground, not caring in the least if I looked like the real McKenna Brady or the identity Laura had designed for me. My head felt as if it weighed a ton and my brain throbbed within my skull. My lungs still functioned, although each breath of fresh air felt like it had been seasoned with jalapeno pepper, burning as it traveled down my windpipe and expanded my lungs. I concentrated on nothing but respiratory recovery for a few minutes while Trey continued coughing. Finally, he managed to stand and sputter, "We don't need an ambulance. We'll be fine."

The taller of the two railway employees crossed his arms over his chest. "Both of you inhaled a lot of smoke. It's best you get checked out by a doctor." He had a sunburn that made him look healthy and blond hair under his baseball cap that made him look a little like Glenn, my mother's boyfriend.

Sensing that we needed to be on our way, I climbed up on my feet and took a step toward Trey. "No," Trey insisted. "We should get going."

The railway guy put his hands on his hips. I looked around the landscape for ideas as to where we might run to escape this situation that was sure to result in Trey and I having to answer questions with local police, but there was nothing in any direction but hills and sky. "I'm afraid we're not going to be able to let you leave," the railway man informed Trey. "I mean, besides the fact that you two were trespassing on private property by even being in that boxcar-and we could issue you tickets-if there's any chance you've suffered injuries, we need to get that documented for insurance purposes. We can't have any kids' parents suing the rail line."

Taking stock of the situation, I realized that everything we'd been carrying with us was gone, presumably left on the blazing boxcar. With enormous relief I felt Laura's mobile phone in the back pocket of my jeans. That, more than anything else, was important. It was the only means by which we could get in touch with Henry and Laura later in the day. My heart swelled at the thought of how close we were to meeting them. I was grateful to be alive, but to have gotten this close to Long Beach and have no choice but to deal with EMT's and police was like a cruel joke.

The fact was, Trey and I were both too winded and freaked out to make a run for it. We waited in the punishing mid-morning sun until two ambulances and a firetruck bounced over the rough terrain to where we stood with the railway guys. The firemen quickly set about hosing down the blaze, which fortunately had been self-contained thanks to the steel walls of the boxcar, and EMT's in navy blue uniforms gathered information from the railway guys as to how we'd been found.

"What's your name?" a young Latino male EMT asked me as he took my blood pressure in the back of the ambulance. Trey had been escorted to the other ambulance despite his insistence that he'd prefer to ride with me. I sat on a cot wondering if we'd be separated even after we were taken to a hospital, or worse, if we'd be taken to different hospitals. I'd have no way of getting in touch with him again if that happened.

"My name is Violet," I lied. There was no evidence on me to betray my lie. It was safe to assume that McKenna Brady's cherished, hard-earned driver's license and Tampa high school student identification card were in ashes. "Simmons."

"What were you doing on that train, Violet Simmons?" the EMT asked. The rubber cuff around my upper arm squeezed as he continued to inflate it.

"My boyfriend and I were just trying to get to the beach," I said, wanting to keep the story vague. I hoped Trey wouldn't be dumb enough to mention that our ultimate destination was Long Beach, but he probably was more sensible than that. I didn't want to spin too many yarns just in case we ended up in some terrible Law & Order type of situation where detectives were comparing my statements to Trey's.

"Next time, rent a car," the EMT told me. He remained in the back of the ambulance with me while his partner drove. The ride was incredibly bumpy, making my sore brain ache even more, until we reached the highway. Once we were on smooth asphalt again I was pretty sure that the ambulance broke some speed limits as it raced to the hospital.

Only when the paramedic driving flipped on the siren did I speak again. "I really feel fine," I told the EMT riding in the back alongside me. This was a blatant lie; my lungs felt like charcoal briquettes and the stench clinging to my clothing made me want to douse myself in soapy water.

"I'm sure you do," he said. "But Josh likes the siren."

When we arrived at the emergency room, I brushed off assistance from the paramedic in climbing out of the back of the ambulance. He'd suggested that I recline on the gurney to be wheeled into the hospital properly, but I hopped out on my own. Trey's ambulance had arrived before mine. The paramedics who'd driven him to the hospital were returning to their vehicle as I walked past, already bound for another emergency elsewhere in town. My fear that Trey would have already been whisked away into an examination room subsided when I stepped inside the deeply air-conditioned hospital and saw him sitting in a chair in the waiting area.

"You two stay here," Josh, the EMT who'd driven my ambulance, told us as I slipped into the empty seat next to Trey's. Trey stunned me by immediately placing his hand over mine and lacing his fingers in between my own. It was the first time since we stowed away in the conductor's car on the train in Gurdon that he showed me any affection, but it wasn't the most convenient time to question him about his sudden resurgence of tenderness toward me. Our eyes followed Josh as he approached the front desk to speak with one of the nurses on duty.

It was surreal to be sitting in the heart of civilization again with fluorescent lights beating down upon us after so many days of being on the run. A morning talk show played in the waiting room on a flat-screen TV. On a nearby countertop, a gurgling coffee machine and array of mugs beckoned. I knew it would be risky for us to remain in that setting for long-after all, we were probably going to be held legally responsible for damage done to the boxcar if Trey's lighter was found in the ashes, and that would definitely mean police.

Our opportunity for escape presented itself in the form of a pregnant woman wheeled into the emergency room, howling in pain. Her nervous husband, who pushed the wheelchair in which she sat, yelled, "My wife's in labor!" as soon as they passed through the sliding doors into the waiting area. Josh the paramedic forgot all about the sullen, uncooperative, soot-faced teenagers he'd just plucked out of the desert and dashed to the woman in the wheelchair to pose questions to her about the contractions she was experiencing.

I raised an eyebrow at Trey. With an almost imperceptible nod of the head he confirmed that it was now or never, and we quietly strode through the sliding doors of the emergency room and vanished into downtown Riverside, California.

After we'd walked a few blocks in hurried silence to avoid being tracked down by the paramedics, Trey marched across a lush green front lawn on a residential street and leaned against a tree. I followed, taciturnly agreeing that we both needed to rest for a few minutes and discuss the absolutely insane morning we'd survived. "I'm sorry, McKenna," he said, reaching for both of my hands and pulling me toward him. "I'm sorry I doubted that you're you, and sorry that I made you go through that with the fire."

My face twisted into kind of a smirk-frown. Still in shock over being convinced I was about to die in that boxcar less than two hours earlier, I couldn't find words to reply. "We lived," was all I managed to say.

"Yeah, we lived," Trey said, and looked up at the sky with his magnificent blue eyes. "But I didn't know until you started freaking out about the smoke and fire that you're really you in there. It was really messed up of me to put you through that."

I shrugged. If we lived to see the end of our planned confrontation with Mischa, I was pretty sure I was going to have nightmares about smoke and flames for the rest of my life. But that was a big if. The spirits that safeguarded Violet's curse weren't messing around anymore. Locking us in a boxcar was not a warning, as many of the little tricks they'd played on us in the past had been. They were out for blood now. Our blood. "There wasn't any other way off the train," I admitted.

"This whole thing," Trey began, and then looked down at our interlocked hands. "I just don't know what's real and what's not anymore."

Birds chirped in the branches of the tree above us. A lawn mower hummed in the distance. We were smackdab in the middle of some kind of California suburban paradise, despite the fact that we could just as easily have been corpses in a morgue at that very moment if things had gone any differently that day. "The only things I know to be real are that I love you and I want this to be over," I said from my heart.

Getting the sense that it was okay to lean forward and kiss him, I did just that. Our lips met and for a few seconds, time stopped just like the first time we kissed. It was like the earth stopped spinning on its axis and we were the only people on the whole planet until Trey laughed. "God, I'm really thirsty," he admitted. "Sorry. Not very romantic but I'm, like, choking on my own tongue."

The pathetic truth was that I was insanely thirsty, too. It was seriously distracting. We stalked the perimeter of the next house on the block, a big two-story Spanish-style mansion, until we found an outdoor water spigot for a hose hook-up, and we took turns drinking from it.

We were close enough to Long Beach by that point that we could take California's Metrolink commuter train the rest of the way. As we walked across Riverside on foot toward the train station, our situation was grimmer than ever before. We stank of fire and we were penniless. At a Del Taco restaurant, I gawked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, ashamed that we'd walked so far from the hospital while looking downright monstrous. Laura's spell on me had not yet been broken, so my long blond hair hung in greasy clumps down my back. Chunks of the ends had sizzled into crispy frizz that broke off when I touched them. Black soot stained my cheeks, forehead, neck, and arms. My eyes were bloodshot and my lips were so dry that they were peeling. It was kind of crazy that Trey had kissed me in the state I was in, and even just thinking about how nice it had been to kiss him again made me smile.

I lingered in the bathroom scrubbing my skin clean with neon pink hand soap and rough paper towels for what felt like half an hour.

At the train station, we sifted through trash cans until we both found discarded tickets stamped with the current date. When the conductor came through our car collecting tickets we pretended to be asleep. He didn't bother us even though the tickets we'd slipped into the clip on the seat in front of ours had already been hole-punched and indicated a destination of Riverside, which we'd quite obviously already passed. When the train stopped in Los Angeles, we de-boarded at Union Station and I nervously dialed Henry Richmond's phone number from the station's magnificent waiting room. It infuriated me just a little bit that Laurahad stored it in her phone under the name Henry, as if they had been friendsfor a long time. 

"McKenna?" He sounded nervous when he answered.

"We're here," I said, trying to control the amount of joy I let seep into my voice. "I mean, not there, in Long Beach, but about an hour or so away. Where should we meet you?"

I heard him consult with someone else in the room, presumably Laura, before he said, "The Hilton. Is that OK? It's right in downtown Long Beach."

I agreed and told him that we'd call him as soon as we arrived. A balmy breeze blew through the waiting room as a gentle reminder that we were finally, at long last, in idyllic California. "I think we can take this subway thing all the way to Long Beach," Trey announced, showing me a pamphlet he'd found in the waiting room. A map of LA's Metro line suggested that the Blue Line ran directly from downtown Los Angeles all the way to the port area of downtown Long Beach.

"Taking a subway in Southern California," I said in a dubious tone. "What do you think the odds are that Violet's spirits could cause an earthquake while we're on an underground train and pull us down into the earth's molten core?"

"I don't think evil has much control over fault lines. Besides, I think this train line is mostly above ground, not below."

Traveling above ground was much more appealing to me than spending over an hour underground in dark tunnels. We followed signs in Union Station leading us to the Blue Line subway, which was kind of confusing, and passed through the somewhat ineffective electronic turnstiles after other passengers tapped their plastic commuter cards for entry. There weren't any police around to catch us in the act of not paying, which emboldened us. The people on the crowded train ranged from parents with little kids in strollers to annoyed-looking businessmen in button-down shirts, to straight-up mentally insane homeless people who'd practically built forts on top of seats with bags of garbage surrounding them. The diversity in the commuters made us far less inconspicuous than I felt. No one paid us much attention.

At a certain point on the trip, which was thankfully above ground after we got out of downtown Los Angeles, seats opened up and we collapsed onto them. I was tired enough to sleep the rest of the way to Long Beach, but our proximity to the source of the danger kept me on edge. As we approached Mischa, I felt a stirring in the pit of my stomach that the spirits protecting the curse were preparing for us. Whether I felt physically prepared for it or not, I was in for a battle. Something in the atmosphere seemed to be gathering momentum, and it disturbing.

The Hilton in Long Beach was nothing like what I'd expected. Since we'd left Wisconsin, I had imagined Long Beach, California as a luxury shoreline destination lined with five-star resorts and palm trees. Instead, what we saw of downtown Long Beach was pretty urban, and the hotel looked like the type of corporate place where my dad would stay when he traveled to speak at psychiatry conventions from time to time. Boring. Not at all the type of place I'd ever expected to step into, myself, and certainly not the type of place I would have handpicked for a rendez-vous with my dead friend's older brother and a witch who'd cast a glamour on me right before murdering her boss.

"McKenna!" It had barely been a week since the last time I'd seen Henry Richmond's face, but it felt like we'd been apart for years. Trey and I had just stepped into the lobby of the hotel when I heard Henry call my name. I hadn't even texted him yet to inform him that we'd arrived, but he must have been waiting for us. Tears welled up in my eyes before I could prevent them from forming. Because the gap between me and Trey had grown so wide since our cross-country adventure and encounter with Esther had begun, I was so relieved to see Henry that I had to fight the urge to sprint toward him and wrap my arms around his neck. Perhaps because he was two years older than me, or maybe because my whole life I'd thought of Henry's family as being a pillar of strength and iconic in its normalcy, I always felt like everything was going to be OK when Henry was around.

Henry spared me from the awkwardness of embracing him impulsively by approaching me with his arms extended to pull me into a hug. He smelled like soap and fresh laundry, like Weeping Willow and safety. Good old Henry Richmond, with his green eyes and smile like Olivia's. I slid my arms around his torso and remembered with a flush of heat in my cheeks the moment in the Richmonds' basement back in January when we'd almost kissed (but hadn't). It was only after I'd been resting my head on his shoulder for a second that I marveled how strange it was that we were the same height, and realized that he'd recognized me even though I didn't look like myself.

Laura had been sitting on a rose-colored velvet chair and stood to greet us. She looked amused by our appearance. "Wow, you two look like total crap," she said with a wide grin.

She must have been right about that, because the balding front desk concierge on duty was keeping an eye on us despite grinning politely in our direction. It probably wasn't every afternoon that filthy teenagers who reeked like chimneys strode into the lobby of the Long Beach Hilton.

"We've had quite a day," Trey replied.

Before I could even ask Henry how he'd known who I was, or demand that Laura remove the glamour from me, nearby elevator doors parted and my heart stopped beating when I saw who stepped off the elevator and into the lobby.

"You have got to be shitting me," Trey muttered and grabbed my arm as if to hang onto me for dear life.

My limbs turned to ice. I blinked twice, not trusting my eyes. "Oh my God," I heard myself mumble.

Walking straight toward us were Violet Simmons and her father.