Mrs. Emory practically leapt from the car, leaving its engine running. "Whatever you're about to do - don't go in there!" she yelled, presumably at me and Trey. "You can't trust those men!"

Father Fahey nervously eyeballed the windows of the nearby school. Mrs. Emory's wild voice had caught the attention of school children, who peered at the scene unfolding in the parking lot with curiosity from their desks. It was a damp, cool spring morning. "Mary Jo, please. Let's take this inside the rectory and keep it a private matter."

"Not a chance," Trey's mother fired back, her voice trembling with either fear or anger. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides, although she stood beside her car and came no closer to us. "That's my son. He's a minor. Trey, I forbid you from entering that building with those men. If you do, there's no telling what they're going to do to you-and no one will be able to help you."

My teeth sank into my lower lip. We already knew that we couldn't trust Father Fahey or Mr. Simmons, but what Mrs. Emory didn't know was that Mr. Simmons had a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. Not that he'd shoot us in plain view of St. Monica's school... but still. We were already within the town limits of Weeping Willow, Wisconsin, where to say that the police were pursuing Trey and I was a gross understatement.

"You're making this more complicated than it needs to be, Mary Jo," Mr. Simmons called out to her over the parking lot in a threatening tone. He then added, presumably to humiliate her, "As always."

Mrs. Emory dared to take two steps toward us. She looked even frailer than she had when I'd last seen her in our kitchen. "Complicated? You think I don't know what you've brought these kids here to do? Well, it won't work, Michael. Not the way you think it will."

Father Fahey held the screen door of the rectory open for us and motioned again for us to enter. "Come on, children. We don't have much time."

"Trey!" Mrs. Emory called out desperately, and although Trey was infuriated with his mother, he couldn't ignore her anguished cry. After all, boys are always their mother's sons, no matter what unthinkably cruel things their mothers have done to shape their lives. He hesitated on the doorstep, his body twisted awkwardly as he looked over his shoulder at his mother. "Please," she continued. "At least let me explain."

Defying Mr. Simmons, Trey backtracked a step to permit his mother an opportunity to do exactly what she'd requested: explain. When her lips parted, suggesting that she understood that we were all waiting for her to speak, her eyes filled with panic. She hadn't prepared for this moment, obviously. How does anyone ever prepare to unload a secret they've kept for seventeen years?

"If you've got something to say, you'd better make it quick," Trey told her.

Mrs. Emory knotted her hands together as she struggled to decide where to begin. "I was young when you were born, Trey," she said, carefully avoiding eye contact with Mr. Simmons. "And things were different then. Kids who grew up in this town were more naïve when we left home for college than you are today. And I had been made promises that turned out to be lies by someone who hid behind lawyers because he didn't have the courage to tell me the truth to my face."

Inches from me, Mr. Simmons crossed his arms over his chest impatiently. "You were stubborn and ignorant, Mary Jo. You believed what you wanted to believe."

Refusing to acknowledge him but tightening her shoulders in response, Trey's mother seemed to be addressing only her son. "Michael told me that he was unhappy and would leave his wife to take care of me. But then he stopped answering my phone calls abruptly and a man I'd never seen before hand-delivered a letter from the Simmons family's law firm to me on campus, detailing terms for some kind of an agreement proposed by his family. It was then that I realized he never had any intention of leaving Vanessa. In fact, they were trying to have children of their own. They moved back here to Weeping Willow the summer you were born to take a break from city life. As if it wasn't hard enough for me to hear gossip all over town about the prestigious Simmons family, by the end of the summer, rumor had it that Michael Simmons' lovely wife was expecting a baby."

Now she narrowed her eyes and focused her gaze at Mr. Simmons. "That was what pushed me over the edge-that you'd chosen a life with her over a life with me. That your child with Vanessa would have everything-money, opportunity-and Trey would be ostracized here in this small town, forever."

"There was nothing keeping you in this town other than your own lack of ambition," Mr. Simmons snapped at her.

Ignoring him, Mrs. Emory kept speaking. "My roommate during the school year had been interested in witchcraft, so I decided to cast a spell on Michael's wife. Never in a million years did I believe it would actually work." She seemed embarrassed to even be telling us about her past actions, as if she still wasn't convinced that her amateurish spell had produced results. No one knew better than me and Mischa how embarrassing it was to engage in a childish game and then find out that it hadn't been an innocent game at all. "I planted a rose bush. Just a plain, ordinary rose bush that I bought at the lawn and garden store."

"I knew it," Trey said under his breath. He had known it. A few days earlier, he'd mentioned how odd it was that his mother always had fresh roses in the house when he was growing up. Somehow even as a child he must have known that the roses were tied to darkness.

"A life for a life," Laura muttered from where she stood in front of me on the rectory's front steps. Her uncombed hair, now a defeated shade of teal, looked like a rat's nest in the morning sunlight.

Unable to hear any of us, Mrs. Emory continued talking. "I mean, it was probably just a coincidence-it had to be a coincidence-that Michael's wife lost the baby she was carrying. I know now, of course, that it was awful of me to be happy. But I was. For the first time in months I felt like it might be possible for my heart to heal because the universe had delivered justice. Michael and his wife left town, Walter had asked me to marry him, and I thought maybe-just maybe-I could focus on the future."

It was hard not to feel sympathy for Mrs. Emory as she unraveled her tale of woe for us. Weeping Willow was such a small town, and it was very fond of gossip. The months after she'd returned home from college with a baby on the way and no ring on her finger must have been awful for her. "But then one Saturday afternoon as I drove past the Simmons estate when Trey was a toddler, I saw Michael outside, planting saplings. Three of them, to be precise. I knew that he and his wife had lost two babies before I'd ever met him on campus, as well as the third they'd lost that summer. I just knew immediately the fact that he was planting three had something to do with a spell. I remembered him telling me that his mother had always been fascinated with the occult, with readers of tea leaves and astrologers, so it wasn't such a crazy thing to suspect she'd figured out what I'd done. By the time I got home, I'd become convinced that somehow his mother had determined what kind of spell I'd put on Vanessa, and they were taking the necessary steps to remove it."

"I was furious, Trey. I thought they might go so far as to do something cruel to you! That very night, I cast a spell that I'd found in some dumb witchcraft book on the saplings that Michael had planted, figuring that if he'd tried to put any magic on them, it would take hold that night by the light of the moon. I was so hysterical and focused on revenge that I forgot what my roommate had told me about never casting spells without making an offering to the universe-and never casting spells with the intention of hurting anyone else."

Against my better judgement I impulsively looked over at Violet, who looked terrified. I couldn't know what kind of yarns her father had spun for her about his previous relationship with Trey's mother. If he'd described Mrs. Emory as a bit of a nut, she was certainly proving him right. But it was also easy to see how deeply he'd hurt her by dumping her without even explaining his actions.

At this point in her story, Mrs. Emory's eyes filled with tears of regret. "I'm so sorry, Trey. If I could take back my actions from that day, I would. All I wanted was for the Simmons family to desperately want something they could never have, just like I did. I wanted them to experience the same sense of shame and regret that I'd been made to feel in town. I never would have done it if I'd known what danger I was putting you in."

"The rule of three," Laura said, understanding the impact of the offense Mrs. Emory had committed more quickly than the rest of us.

"The rule of three?" Henry asked. "That's actually real?"

"You bet your ass it's real," Laura told him. "When you use magic for evil purposes without taking necessary precautions, it turns on you three times."

Mrs. Emory dared to take another step closer to us. "I lost both of my parents as a result of my foolishness, Trey. Since you were a very little boy I've always felt that something was watching us, following us. I can't stand the house being dark because nighttime is when it's worst. You don't know how much I've worried about you during these months you've been away-because I have to believe that I'll be punished a third time before the curse is undone."

"And you think I'll die," Trey surmised grimly.

Mrs. Emory couldn't even bring herself to nod to confirm his assumption. She appeared to be frozen with fear.

"Well, maybe you'll die," Trey said viciously. "You're the one who cast the spell. Maybe you'll be the one to pay the biggest price."

"Trey!" I exclaimed, shocked by his callousness.

But Mrs. Emory didn't seem surprised or offended by his cruel remark. "That's not how it works, Trey."

Interrupting the tense stand-off, Mr. Simmons sternly asked, "Are we done now? The clock is ticking."

Father Fahey had been holding the screen door of the rectory open this entire time. "We should get started," he said with less urgency in his voice than before, perhaps having a little pity on Trey's mother.

"Trey," her voice trailed off as we entered the building. "Please, don't! We can go up to Canada! Whatever you want-I'll go with you and take care of things! I owe that to you. Trey!"

Not having a good feeling about how any of this was going to turn out, I followed Mischa into the dim hallway and hesitated for moment as my eyesight adjusted to the indoor lights. Mrs. Emory's desperate pleas faded after Father Fahey closed and locked the rectory door behind us. Trey trailed behind me, holding my right hand. A sense of déjà vu swept over me as we passed the wooden bench across from the secretary's office where Trey and I had sat and waited for Father Fahey months ago. Our footsteps were muted by the carpeting in the hallway as we pressed onward toward the rectory kitchen, which forever smelled like beef stew. I comforted myself with the notion that if Mrs. Emory was worried enough that breaking the curse would kill Trey, she'd call the police. As for whether or not I believed Trey might die if we successfully lifted the curse from Mischa, I wasn't sure. I would have been afraid-if it weren't the case that I was already terrified of what we were about to do.

Few details of the kitchen seemed to have changed since the last time I found myself in this room. The pages of the calendar featuring the Duomo had been changed to April. Jesus stared at us from the same painting underneath the cuckoo clock as he had back in October. If anything at all seemed different, it was the size of the room itself. By the time Father Fahey joined the rest of us, it felt like the wallpapered walls were closing in on us.

"Trey and McKenna," Father Fahey began, "I believe I owe you both a bit of an apology. I wasn't aware of just how much danger the two of you were in the last time you came here. Obviously, I've followed the news about you since the fall, and it seems like this situation escalated very quickly."

I inched closer to Trey. The last time we stood in this cozy kitchen, we were innocent high school students who suspected we were in grave trouble. Although we feared we were in over our heads, things like prom and graduation still seemed like events in our future. Now, we were both practically outlaws. Our clothes drooped from our slim frames thanks to the garbage we'd been eating over the last few days on the run, and Trey was almost emaciated from his time spent at Northern Reserve. Neither of us had showered in days. We were two lost souls without futures, and it was fair to say that our pathetic state was largely in part due to Father Fahey's refusal to be honest with us about how he'd helped Grandmother Simmons when we'd first sought his help.

"Before we get started, can I ask you to clarify something?" Laura asked. I admired her boldness. I might not have trusted her, but Laura wasn't intimidated by anyone. "You worked with Mr. Simmons' mother to cast the spell on the trees, right?"

Hesitantly, Father Fahey nodded. "It wasn't so much that we worked together, but that Mrs. Simmons came to me several times over the period of several years seeking advice. At first the requests were nothing out of the ordinary at all. She asked that I'd say a mass as an offering for Vanessa. Asked that I'd pray the rosary with her. And then one day she came to me said she had reason to believe that someone had cast a spell on her daughter-in-law, and she sought my assistance in breaking it." He turned to Mr. Simmons and sighed heavily. "The spell was innocent enough. It was intended to protect Vanessa's unborn child, Violet. Nothing more. I could see that Ann was intent on meddling with witchcraft whether I was willing to assist or not, so although it wasn't typically the kind of thing a priest aids in, I agreed to help her."

Trey smirked and shifted his standing position. "Right. I'm sure that the fact that the Simmons family practically paid for the entire renovation of the church twenty years ago had nothing to do with your decision to help an old lady out with her witchcraft."

Father Fahey's face remained blank in response to Trey's accusation. I wanted to believe that he wouldn't outright lie to us about his involvement in casting the spell with Grandmother Simmons, but he'd proven himself to be most untrustworthy.

"What was the spell supposed to do?" Henry asked.

Father Fahey and Mr. Simmons exchanged a look and Mr. Simmons gently placed one hand on Violet's shoulder.

"It was intended to call upon the souls of the three Simmons girls who hadn't made it past infancy and ask them to strengthen Violet's chances of survival. That was all," Father Fahey admitted. "If it had been any more involved than that, I would have told Ann that I couldn't help. But the spell she'd brought to me wasn't so different from a prayer, you see. I didn't see any harm in planting some trees."

There had been harm in what Grandmother Simmons intended to do, though. Violet had already told us that her grandmother had studied up on witchcraft. Ann Simmons had done a good deal of research on the subject after her son Michael had confessed to her what a mess he'd made of his life on the University of Chicago campus the semester when he'd met Trey's mom. And Grandmother Simmons had understood enough about dark magic at the time of her death to leave Violet a letter explaining how she would have to follow the orders of the evil spirits if she wanted to keep her mother alive. Standing there, in the rectory, I realized that I would never fully understand the motivations of Ann Simmons, Violet's late grandmother, but I would have to accept that everything she did to ultimately set me and my friends on this course of action was inspired by her desire to help her son.

"But," Laura said, "The second spell that Trey's mother cast on the trees allowed three forms of evil to pass through to our world from Hell instead of the souls of Violet's sisters. And it contorted the original protection spell that you'd cast to only protect Violet as long as she carried out the orders of the spirits."

So there it was: the malicious architecture of the double curses on Violet that required her to collect souls as mandated by the evil spirts. The refrigerator hummed, filling the room with noise as Laura's statement ran through our heads. Mischa refused to look at me, instead frowning at her feet. These last few months she surely knew that she was in some kind of supernatural danger, but she probably hadn't understood that she was actually being ordered around by spirits from Hell.

Father Fahey shrugged emphatically to emphasize his innocence. "There was no way I could have known what Trey's mother had done. I never even suspected until these two-" he nodded at me and Trey-"showed up here last fall talking about a game being played by some high school children that resulted in mysterious deaths. Naturally I concluded that Ann and I must have overlooked something when Miss Brady mentioned Violet's involvement in the game."

"So, how does this work? Exactly?" Mischa asked, very conscious of how much time was passing while she was away from her training routine.

Before Laura could reply, Father Fahey held up a hand to silence her. He then motioned for us to follow him. "I must insist before we talk in detail about this that we go downstairs into a safer space," he said. I remembered as we all dutifully followed him to the rectory's basement how in the fall he had told me and Trey that he feared allowing evil to reach the elderly priests who lived on the upper floors of the rectory. The last time I'd descended the staircase to the basement, I hadn't had any clue what was down there. But this time, knowing that we were headed into the dark, sound-proofed room where exorcisms had been performed in the past, my blood ran cold.

Father Fahey unlocked the safe room's door and reached inside to flip the light switch for us. The room was exactly as I remembered it: windowless, with a strange table positioned at one end. A brass bowl of holy water rested on a tabletop just inside the door. A plain wooden crucifix hung on one wall, and upon closer inspection I noticed that it was actually nailed against the wall rather than hung there like a frame on a wire.

There was a moment after which we had all stepped into the room when Henry caught my eye. He looked at me with a powerful combination of concern, regret, and fear. I wished instantly that he hadn't come along for this part of the adventure. Perhaps we needed Laura's guidance to stand any sort of chance for success in repealing the curse, but Henry was merely an innocent observer to this entire disaster. He was here only out of a sense of obligation to the memory of his sister, recklessly endangering his own life and probably not even realizing it. It was odd to feel a pang of defensiveness for him as I felt Trey's grip on my hand tighten.

Father Fahey secured the deadbolt lock on the door and made the sign of the cross after dipping his fingers into the bowl of holy water. He urged us to all take seats, although the room really wasn't big enough to comfortably accommodate seven people. Henry, Laura, and Violet squeezed together on the sofa, and Mischa sat rigidly on the edge of one of the chairs facing it. Her body had taken on the potential energy of a set trap, on the brink of springing. Mr. Simmons lingered near the door rather than sitting down, probably to ensure that none of us decided to make a run for it. Inseparable, Trey and I stood together behind Mischa's chair, unwilling to split up so that one of us could sit in the one remaining chair.

Now that we were in a secure space, Laura explained what she expected would need to happen in order for us to remove the curse from Mischa and prevent it from leaping to anyone else. "We'll all have to sit on the floor and play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, just like the girls did at Olivia's birthday party. McKenna will be the storyteller, and she'll tell the story of how Mischa will die. It's really important that all of the rest of us-" She cast a side-eye glance at Mr. Simmons-"put our full attention into the game. There's never a guarantee that it'll work, so we can't take any chances."

Her eyes fell upon Mischa. Laura tried and failed to offer my friend a reassuring smile. "As we raise Mischa toward the ceiling, the spell I've cast on the black candle that we'll be burning should drive the evil into the bottle. I'll cap the bottle once it seems like the game has worked, and..." she trailed off and looked around the room at all of our faces. "That should be it."

After a long, silent, awkward moment, we all self-consciously got down on our knees on the floor. Trey took the spot next to me on my right side, with Violet on his other side. Mischa crawled into the center of the oval we formed and sat down, hugging her knees into her chest.

Laura lit the wick of a cheap black tea candle with a cigarette lighter and looked around the small room for a suitable place to let it burn. "Not sure I like the idea of being locked into a room with no exits other than a deadbolted door as a candle blazes," she said to herself. She wisely chose not to place the candle on the wooden bookshelves, where it could have easily ignited the dusty books as well as the shelves if the game got out of hand. Instead, she set it on the metal table that looked like it belonged in a doctor's office. That was the table where exorcisms were performed, if what Father Fahey had told us the last time we were in this room was true. The flame atop the candle was barely visible, just a tiny flickering speck of orange struggling to remain lit in the airless room.

"OK," Laura said, taking her place on my left alongside Mischa. She twisted the cap off the bottle and set it down on the floor in the inches between her knees and Mischa's left shoulder. She looked up at Mr. Simmons, who remained standing near the door, a self-appointed sentinel. "Everyone has to play, or it won't work. That includes you."

Mr. Simmons cocked one eyebrow as if Laura greatly annoyed him. "I'm serious," Laura insisted. "Everyone has to be engaged because anyone who's not will be a prime target for the curse once the candle draws it away from Mischa."

Mr. Simmons looked unconvinced, but then unfolded his arms over his chest. It was possible that Laura was BS-ing him, but her threat seemed to have effectively convinced him that he needed to take the game seriously. He knelt down next to Henry on Mischa's left side. Father Fahey knelt across from me, at Mischa's feet.

"Alright, I guess we're ready," Laura announced. Mischa reclined fully, setting her head on the floor near my knees. With her eyes closed, it seemed as if she was willing herself to fall asleep, which may very well have been the case. "Everyone has to place the fingertips of their index fingers underneath Mischa's body, and when McKenna says light as a feather, stiff as a board, you have to gently lift up. Gently is the key. If the game has worked, Mischa will be weightless."

Looking down at Mischa, I wished my heart would stop beating so loudly. I knew why Laura had insisted that I take the role of storyteller. She was depending on my unexplored psychic abilities to provide a true prediction of Mischa's death, just as Violet had been able to accurately do when the curse was on her. Lifting the curse wouldn't be possible if the storyteller were to just make up a fictional demise, which was usually how the game was played. When we were little kids and would play this game at slumber parties, the deaths predicted by the person in the role of storyteller were usually over-the-top, ridiculous accounts of gruesome shark attacks and murders by serial killers. But hyperbole had no purpose in our task that day.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of my jeans and withdrew the whistle that Trey and I had bought in Laguna Beach. There wouldn't be any way I could use it as a pendulum while I had my fingers pressed against Mischa's temples, but I knew that having it in a place where I could see it would be comforting. Not caring if anyone else in the room thought I was a weirdo for doing so, I pulled the lanyard from which the whistle hung over my head and let the whistle dangle from my neck.

"Ready?" Laura asked me.

Mischa looked directly up and into my eyes. "Please don't mess this up, McKenna," she said earnestly.

"I'll try," I promised.

"If anything bad happens, tell my mother that I'm sorry and that I love her," Mischa said with her eyes closed.

"I will," I promised, and then thought better of the commitment I'd just made. "But you'll be OK," I assured her.

Just as I placed my fingertips on Mischa's temples, Laura exclaimed, "The lights!" Violet scrambled to her feet and crossed the room to flip the overhead light switch near the door, and then returned to her place as our eyes adjusted to the dim candlelight. She settled back into position on her knees, and nodded at me once she'd slipped her fingers beneath Mischa's calves. An eerie chill shot through the room, and it suddenly seemed very late at night instead of mid-morning on a weekday. It felt, in fact, very much like it had in the Richmonds' basement the night of Olivia's Sweet Sixteen party. Like something was moving through the shadows in the darkness that surrounded us-observing us, closing in on us, preparing to strike.

This time, as I set my fingertips on Mischa's temples again, I couldn't help but notice the flourish of the flame atop the black candle across the room. The room grew unmistakably brighter as its glow widened around the wick. Everyone, including Trey, looked down at Mischa instead of at me, so I was probably the only one to have noticed.

It was show time, and I knew everyone was waiting for me to start describing Mischa's death. But this didn't feel at all like the last time I'd played the role of storyteller, back in Michigan. When I'd predicted Violet's death that day in January, Cheryl had held up a mirror in which Jennie had shown me exactly what would one day happen to Violet. Now that I was thinking about how we'd not brought a mirror with for today's game, I was also questioning why Jennie had shown me that Violet would grow to a comfortable old age before a doctor would inform her that she had inoperable cancer-when Mr. Simmons had just spent the last two days convincing us that Violet might not live past her teenage years if we didn't find a way to break the curse. How could both futures for Violet be real? The vision Jennie had shown me in the mirror had to have been true, or maybe it was only true until we altered the curse? Perhaps we'd effectively changed the future, and the way in which Violet was meant to die-

I realized when Mr. Simmons cleared his throat that I'd been spaced out, lost in thought, for quite a while. With my fingertips still on Mischa's temples, I began feeling a little dizzy. It was a sensation I'd only felt once before in my life, when I'd gone to see a 3D movie with my mom in Ortonville. Afterwards, when I took off my 3D glasses, I had to lean against the wall in the theater until my eyes adjusted to real life again. This felt like that, only I wasn't wearing 3D glasses. I was just about to say, "Sorry, I'm not seeing a story for Mischa," when I looked down and saw the whistle hanging from my neck moving in a very slight clockwise motion.

As I focused my vision on the whistle, it seemed as if everyone else in the room began lifting Mischa toward the ceiling as if I'd already successfully predicted her death. They were chanting like I'd already given them the prompt. My thoughts wandered in confusion. The details of the room seemed as if they were going wavy around me, and just as I was about to ask Trey what was going on, I realized for myself what was happening.

Jennie was showing me Mischa's death; she was going to die minutes from now, as we played the game. Mr. Simmons had lured us all here so that he could kill her while the part of the curse that required her to reap souls for the evil spirits was still on her. He had no intention of following through with Laura's plan to extract and trap the curse. In the vision presented by Jennie, as Mischa's body was raised over our heads, Mr. Simmons would shoot her with the gun he'd brought with him. One single shot to the back, which would tear through her spine and pull bone fragments through her heart. I saw a dark blood stain bloom across the back of Mischa's sweater from where I stood below her, looking upward. Blood dripped downward and was swallowed by the brown carpeting below. It splashed all over Laura's face and clothing, surprising her enough to drop the bottle.

In a flash, I felt as if I was no longer in the rectory basement, but was instead at a gun show in Northern Illinois. I watched as a salesman at one of the exhibits demonstrated for Mr. Simmons how to use the features of the handgun that he carried with him at this very moment. I could hear rock-and-roll playing on overhead speakers and see other vendors in the background inviting passersby to check out their selections. This was happening in the past, years ago, far in advance of Grandmother Simmons' death. Mr. Simmons attended the gun show intending to purchase a handgun for home security, not for any of its potential uses at St. Monica's today.

Then, I saw a glimpse of Mr. Simmons standing at the front desk of the police station in Weeping Willow, filling out a form. I didn't need to see what he was writing to know that this scene Jennie was showing me was much more recent. He'd reported his own handgun missing the day the first news broadcast about my disappearance had aired on television last week. Mr. Simmons was the reason why police thought we were armed and dangerous; he'd told them we were. He'd been strategically planning for this moment-the moment when he could kill Mischa Portnoy to save his own daughter's life, and leave us literally holding the smoking gun-for quite a while.

Next, I saw police cars encircling the St. Monica's rectory later that evening, their red and blue lights scattering color all over the dark, chilly parking lot. I saw Trey and I huddling in this very room unsure of what to do next, squeezing our ice cold hands together. At that very moment as Mrs. Emory drove back to the house where she lived with Trey's stepfather and half-brother, one of the landscapers from the Simmons estate had been dispatched to the old Svensson property to cut down any rose bushes growing there. It was withered and had yet to bloom this spring, but the landscaper tore at its branches and stuffed the enormous plants remains into a brown paper composting bag.

And then the vision carried me back to the Simmons' mansion on the outskirts of town. I passed beneath the foreboding branches of the trees along the private drive and felt my stomach turn in horror. I hated those trees and the feeling that I'd had while visiting Violet's house that I'd entered into another world where anything at all could happen to me and no one would ever be any the wiser. Inside the house, I saw Mr. Simmons and Father Fahey sitting in the magnificent parlor, having tea. They were discussing what would happen when today arrived, when Mr. Simmons would knock on the side door of the rectory with McKenna Brady, Trey Emory, and Mischa Portnoy. Father Fahey he was desperate to convince him that the only way to definitively break the curse was for the cursed person to die. To save Violet, they would have to kill Mischa, and neither man seemed the least bit troubled by the idea of murdering one teenage girl to save another.

Down near Mischa's ankles, Mr. Simmons cleared his throat and I realized the first time I'd heard that noise, it had been a premonition. This time, it was real. The flame atop the black candle blazed brightly, fueled by the evil that swelled within the room. The vision that Jennie had just shared with me was coming true, and I had only seconds to figure out how to prevent it.