"I'll tell you everything, we just need to go someplace more private. And whatever you do, don't say my name."

I was still too surprised to be looking into Trey's blue eyes at the airport newsstand to even react. In a rapid series of observations, I processed information based on his appearance: he had a fading black eye, a purple bruise that was yellowing which encircled his left eye and spread across his cheekbone.  His face looked more chiseled than it had the last time I'd seen him, which meant that he hadn't been eating enough at his school. The sprinkling of dark scruff covering his upper lip and chin suggested that he hadn't shaved in a few days; it was the closest he got to being able to grow a mustache and beard. Instantly I became aware of the police presence in the airport. It didn't seem to be heightened, but I had definitely noticed at least two uniformed cops roaming the terminal since I'd passed through security.

Without saying a word, I nodded, and I kept my head down as Trey led me away from my departing gate and toward a quiet gate at the other end of the short terminal. The airport in Green Bay was significantly smaller than the airport in Tampa, which left us few options in the way of semi-private places to talk. My heart thumped as if it was going to explode right through the front of my chest, and even though I knew I was probably being excessively paranoid, it felt like a thousand sets of eyes followed us as we moved through the crowd of parents tugging rolling suitcases and businessman carrying shoulder bags. We chose vinyl chairs that were positioned partially behind a pillar so that our presence in the almost otherwise empty seating area was less likely to attract attention. As we plunked down across from each other, Trey took my hands in his and smiled with pure joy.

"I can't believe I'm finally actually looking at you," he said in a hoarse voice.

"Trey." I couldn't begin to imagine what had happened to him back at Northern Reserve to have put him in such an emotional state, or to have resulted in such painful-looking bruises. "What are you doing here? The cops came to my house and were asking me all these questions."

Trey shook his head, obviously dismayed to hear this. "Crap. I didn't think they'd take it that seriously."

"Of course they're taking it seriously. Your picture was on the news. They're saying you might be dangerous if approached!" I wanted to be supportive and understanding, but my words were coming out all wrong. Instead of sounding concerned for him, I sounded angry. I squeezed his hands to reassure him that I was on his side. "They took my cell phone. You haven't texted me at all in the last two days, have you?"

"No. I figured that would put you in a bad position."

I breathed a sigh of relief, but only one. Maybe the cops weren't zeroing in on us at that very moment because they hadn't been able to intercept any text messages... but Trey still might have been followed on his way to the airport. "What happened? Why did you break out of school? And what happened to your face?" On an impulse I reached out to lightly touch the bruise on the left side of his face and he shrank from my fingers.

Trey let go of my hands and leaned back in his chair as if he wasn't sure where to start his explanation. "I can't stay at that place," he said in a low voice. "I don't know if he's trying to get them to kill me, or frame me for some kind of crime that'll get me transferred to prison in July instead of being released. It's one or the other, or maybe he doesn't even care as long as I'm out of the picture."

My mom's words about Trey having all kinds of problems that I couldn't fix echoed in the space between my ears. He sounded crazy, not unlike Candace had sounded after Olivia's death. "What do you mean? Who's trying to get you killed?"

Trey blinked away hot tears of anger and looked up at the ceiling. "Michael Simmons, Violet's father. My father, I guess."

A chill ran through me. The image of Violet waiting for me in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store with those folded-up notes in her palm flashed before my eyes. Somehow, her insistence that Trey sue for his half of the inheritance had to do with Trey's claim that her father was trying to kill him. I knew Violet was up to something.

"Look, I know I sound nuts, okay? But just," he looked over his right shoulder and then his left to make sure no one was approaching us. "Hear me out. Last week, I was pulled out of my math class and told to report to the principal's office. The guy told me that the janitors had found a bag of weed in my room under my mattress."

I pressed my fingertips to my mouth. There was no way Trey would have ever kept drugs in his room for any reason. Drugs were totally not his style, despite what our teachers at Weeping Willow High School may have thought.

"The principal told me he was going to do me a huge favor by not calling the cops on me because the quantity they'd found was just enough to have suggested intent to distribute. Instead, he said they were going to transfer me into C-Ward."

The distaste with which he uttered the word C-Ward gave me a pretty strong indication of what it meant. "Solitary?" I asked to verify my hunch.

Trey snorted. "I wish. Northern doesn't have any facilities equipped for long-term solitary confinement. Instead, they just throw the worst of the worst into C-Ward and let them regulate each other. Seriously, solitary confinement would be a lot better than having to fend for yourself against guys who've killed people, and worse."

I couldn't imagine Trey having to hold his own against violent guys who were bigger than him. Trey was tall but had always been slim. On nights when he'd slept in my bed to protect me from ghostly activity in the fall, I could slip my fingers into the impressions in between his ribs. When we'd attended high school together, he'd always been eager for verbal confrontation, but I couldn't recall a single time when he'd initiated a physical fight with another guy.

"One night last week, two guys came into my room around midnight and started strangling me."

As Trey told me what had happened at his school, I felt like an anvil at the bottom of my stomach was growing heavier and heavier.

"They dragged me out of bed and into the hallway, and my roommate just, like, sat there, watching." He paused for a moment, remembering, upset by the fact that another student had been probably no more than five feet away, and had witnessed his assault without trying to stop it.  "No one at Northern is really tight, you know? Like, I wouldn't say anyone there is my friend or anything, but I thought my roommate in C-Ward was okay. He's like, six-four and weighs about two hundred pounds, you know? He's at Northern for beating the crap out of a foster father who abused his sister. So for him to just sit there and not do anything was just... abnormal."

"Then, when we got into the hall, the guard on duty just a couple doors away stared straight ahead like he didn't hear anything. I mean, I was, like, kicking and trying to break free. They'd put duct tape over my mouth so I couldn't really yell, but I was still making all kinds of noise. But he just sat there, letting it happen."

"Where did they take you?" I asked.

Trey looked down at the floor in between our rows of chairs, obviously still rattled by what had happened that night. "Outside. I don't know where they were planning on taking me, but I'm pretty sure if we'd ever made it there, I wouldn't be sitting here today. When we were going down the stairs outside my dorm, I was able to knee one of the guys and he dropped me. Then I broke away from the other guy and made a run for it."

My throat narrowed with the urge to cry. Trey wasn't exaggerating. He'd really almost been killed at his reform school, although I knew for a fact he'd been trying to keep a low profile when it came to mingling with other students. He'd given me pointers on surviving my own time in minimum security boarding school: don't draw attention to yourself, avoid fights but stand your ground. "Jesus, Trey!" I whispered. "Why would they have come after you?"

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "I didn't even go back to school that night. As soon as I realized that they must have had keys in order to get me out of C-Ward, I knew there was no point in even asking for help from the school's staff. I ducked under the fence and hid in the woods across the highway. I really had no idea what to do. I was off school property, and if I had gone to the police and told them what had happened, they would have just thought I was playing games to try to get released from Northern. And for all I knew, the guard who'd let those guys drag me outside could have reported me as a runaway by that point."

I imagined how awful it must have been for Trey to have spent the night in the woods upstate in nothing but pajamas when there was still snow on the ground.

"So what happened? Did you even have shoes? Did those guys who attacked you get in trouble?" I asked, already knowing the answer about whether or not Trey's attackers had been punished. Even during the brief period I'd been at Dearborn, I'd learned quickly that administrators were not trustworthy, and in most cases, didn't even really have the upper hand when it came to disciplining the most problematic kids. Most of the staff at Dearborn was fearful of the school's worst troublemakers, and the primary tactic of their disciplinary system was hoping on a daily basis that nothing extraordinary would set the main troublemakers off.

Trey shrugged his shoulders. "No, I didn't have shoes. Socks, thankfully. I'm lucky I didn't get frostbite. I just slipped back onto the property in the morning and returned to my room like nothing had happened. I asked Brian what the deal was, why he didn't jump in and try to do anything, and all he said was if I was you, I'd find a way out of this place, and fast. Then it all started making more sense. Drugs had been planted in my old room so that I'd be transferred to C-Ward, where anything could happen to me and no one would say a damn thing. No one in C-Ward talks. If you mess up in C-Ward, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up in jail when you turn eighteen."

Everything Trey had said up until this point had been horrifying, but credible. However, now I had to interject. "So, wait... you think Violet's father planted marijuana in your room at Northern Reserve to get you transferred into a higher security ward?"

Trey leaned forward and reached for my hands again. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was desperate for me to believe him. "I don't think, McKenna. I know."

Obviously, I had serious doubts about a wealthy middle-aged businessman and former professor of finance driving all the way up to a boys' reform school and planting a bag of ganja under a mattress to frame a teenager. But I trusted Trey enough, even against my better judgment, to let him explain how he'd come to that conclusion.

Trey told me that he had plotted a pretty elaborate scheme to land himself in the principal's office two days ago. He'd completed an entire report on The Tempest for the student who had a copy of the keys to the chemistry lab storage room. Trey didn't have any interest in stealing chemistry equipment, only in getting caught pretending to be in the act of stealing. He had to perfectly time the moment when he'd be caught to happen on a Friday morning when he knew that the principal would be out of his office attending a weekly meeting with the facilitators from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. After being discovered by the chemistry teacher and twiddling his thumbs on the bench outside the principal's office for a few minutes waiting for the principal to return, Trey slipped into the principal's office and locked the door behind himself.

Knowing that he'd only have a few minutes before the other administrators in the school's office realized that a student was rifling through the principal's private files, he didn't waste any time. He tried to access his own files on the principal's computer first but didn't know the system password. The manila folder in the filing cabinet that he found with his name on it contained nothing exciting; just court records related to his punishment for evading the police in Weeping Willow back in November, and his transcripts from our high school. Then, as two of the secretaries who had noticed what he was up to were banging on the door and yelling to him that they were calling the police, he found an envelope on the principal's desk... and the return address on it was a law firm in Ortonville, Wisconsin.

That, naturally, struck him as odd.

He was out of time, and he hadn't thought his plan through beyond breaking into the principal's office. Without any other options, he lifted the window and climbed out onto the second story roof, shimmied down a drainpipe and took off for the busted gap in the fence around the school's perimeter, which amazingly hadn't been fixed since we'd found it back in January. He didn't bother looking inside of the envelope until hours later, when he'd found a gas station bathroom where he could rest for a little while. There wasn't an incriminating note inside the envelope detailing what Mr. Simmons had requested be done to Trey (of course there wasn't, Mr. Simmons was highly intelligent and was not about to make illegal requests in writing). Instead, the contents of the envelope were the equivalent of such a request, as far as Trey was concerned. It was a letter from the law offices of Ekdahl, West & Strohmann confirming a tax-deductible donation for one hundred thousand dollars from Tall Trees Finance... at the discretion of the brokerage's managing partner, Michael Simmons.

Ekdahl & West, I thought to myself. The same law firm that had been retained by the Simmons family to deal with the inconvenience of Mary Jane Svensson's unwanted pregnancy. Eighteen years had passed since that legal matter; evidently the law firm had promoted another partner in that time.

"Why?" I wondered aloud. "Why would Michael Simmons pay them to kill you?"

Trey's eyes clouded over and he rubbed his left eye gently, suddenly looking very sleepy. He probably hadn't gotten decent sleep for the last two nights. "He was either trying to kill me or making sure that when I turn eighteen. Whatever the case, he sure as hell doesn't seem to want me ever roaming free around Weeping Willow, Wisconsin again."

A middle-aged woman wearing a Green Bay Packers jacket smiled at us as she passed us on her way to a row of seats near the window. I hadn't noticed until then, but the screen over the counter near where we sat had illuminated and was now announcing that boarding for a flight to Newark, NJ would begin at that gate in an hour. We couldn't stay at the airport; Austin Straubel was small enough that police were sure to notice two teens lingering around for more than an hour or two.

There was so much that I needed to tell Trey—about Mischa, about Violet, about myself—but all of it would have to wait until we figured out where we should go next. "We shouldn't stay here," I told him.  It hadn't escaped my attention that my flight bound for Florida was boarding at that very moment on the other end of the terminal. Even though I wanted to remain with Trey and figure out what the two of us should do next, the knowledge that my suitcase had already been loaded onto a plane that would arrive in Florida in two hours without me aboard was making me perspire with anxiety. My father and Rhonda would be waiting for me at the airport in Tampa, and I knew quite well that if I ditched my flight and vanished, that would mean the end of my loving relationship with both of my parents.

An involuntary impulse to vomit overtook me and I swallowed hard. This was a defining moment in my life and my awareness of the impact of my decision was razor-sharp. The look in Trey's eyes suggested that he knew exactly what I was thinking in that moment: this was the point of no return. This was the point at which we were choosing each other over everything else... our parents, our educations, our future careers. It very likely also meant abandoning what I considered an obligation to Olivia and Candace to avenge their deaths by breaking the curse that had transferred from Violet to Mischa.

"Final boarding call for American Airlines Flight thirty-three ninety-eight, service to Chicago O'Hare with a continuing extension to Tampa, Florida." We both heard the flight attendant's announcement but made no attempt to get up from our seats.

"That's your flight, right?" Trey finally said. "I understand if you have to go, McKenna. I'll find a way to get in touch with you."

"No," I replied emphatically, feeling certain about my decision even though I knew I was essentially jumping off a diving board into an empty pool. "I won't leave you."

Trey looked as if he was about to say something that might change my mind, but then instead said, "You know, they're going to hold the flight if you're not on it."

He was right; a second later the flight attendant's announcement was blasted over the entire terminal. "Paging passenger Brady. Passenger Brady, please report to Gate Four."

It hadn't occurred to me that I was still basically considered a criminal, and was flying as a minor. Of course the airline was going to try to track me down if I didn't board my plane.

"Where should we go?" I asked Trey, and then blurted, "How did you even get through security? Did you know I'd be here today, or were you planning on flying somewhere else?"

When I'd gone through security an hour earlier, the security agent had checked my Wisconsin state identification card (which had been issued to me after my license had been taken away back in November) and matched it to my boarding pass. There was no possible way Trey had gotten into the terminal by showing his own identification; cops would have been called immediately.

Trey stood and zipped up his jacket. "I had no idea you were going to be here today. I mean, I had a feeling you were back here in Willow, but I didn't expect to see you at the airport. It was lucky I spotted you when I did, and if we leave the airport, I'm not sure I'll be able to get back in. Making it through security was no easy feat." He handed me a crumpled boarding pass, procured from his coat pocket. It was for a flight to Chicago that departed an hour and a half after mine, and the name on it, humorously enough, was CAMERON STIRLING.

"Holy... Trey! Did you book this flight using Coach Stirling's credit card?" I marveled.

His sheepish grin told me that he had indeed done exactly that.

There was no time for further explanation about how he'd created official identification to match it. The wheels in my head were turning, and there wasn't a second to spare.  "Stay here," I ordered him before breaking into a run toward the gate where I was being summoned.

I reached the counter just as the flight attendants were closing the door to the tunnel connecting the plane to the gate. "I'm so sorry," I apologized to the uniformed woman behind the counter. "I'm McKenna Brady. You were just paging me."

The flight attended did not look especially pleased with me. "The captain has already closed the door to the plane. It's against aviation regulations for us to open it at this point."

I brushed the hair clinging to my forehead out of my eyes and tried my best to look distraught. "I was in the bathroom. I feel really sick. Flying makes me super anxious. Are there any other flights to Tampa? My dad is picking me up at the airport and he's going to freak out if I don't make it back to Florida tonight."

Sighing heavily to communicate her annoyance with me, the flight attendant tapped a few keys on her computer keyboard and I watched the reflection of the aviation booking software shift from screen to screen in her eyes. "There's a flight to Miami that leaves in thirty minutes. I could book you on that and you could catch a connection from Miami to Tampa at nine o'clock tonight."

I raised one eyebrow. A flight that left in ten minutes and didn't stop in Chicago was not going to work out. "I still feel a little queasy. I'm not sure I'm going to be ready in ten minutes. Is there anything later?" What I wanted was for her to suggest booking me on Trey's flight without my having to bring my knowledge of that flight to her attention.

The flight attendant glared at me for making her work even harder on an otherwise easy Monday, and said in a condescending tone, "There's a flight to Chicago that boards in forty-five minutes. Will that give you enough time to prepare?"

I resisted the urge to steal a glimpse at Trey over my shoulder back at the other end of the gate. That had to be his flight. "Yes, I think so," I said.

She printed out a boarding pass and handed it to me as if it were a detention slip. "You'll have a two-hour layover in Chicago before your connecting flight to Tampa departs. We'll call your father and let him know that you won't be arriving in Florida until seven-fifteen this evening."

Once I'd thanked the flight attendant profusely, I texted both my mother and father to let them know I'd missed my flight because I didn't feel well, and that I'd been booked on the next outbound flight to Chicago. It didn't change the fact that I'd disappear out of their lives later that day, but it made me feel a little less deceitful about boarding Trey's flight.

When I returned to the gate where Trey was waiting for me, he pulled me close and kissed me softly. I could tell how much the kiss meant to him, and while I'd missed him dearly since the last time I saw him in January, I was just way too stressed out to be carried away by romance. "I should have done that sooner," Trey said when our lips parted. "I really missed you."

With a heavy heart I informed Trey of my real reason for being back in Weeping Willow: we'd failed to break the curse back in January when we'd forced Violet to play her own game. In fact, we'd undoubtedly made the entire situation worse by transferring the curse to Mischa, who might very well have been far more cunning than Violet. Trey fell silent as he digested all of this, and then replied, "I had a bad suspicion that it wasn't over. I've been having weird dreams about women dying, all kinds of women. Older women, like our moms' age, and then a couple younger women. Two of the younger ones, like, our age, were both gymnasts. I should have pieced it together that it was Mischa, but... why her? It doesn't make any sense."

But it did make sense, it made perfect sense. We'd stashed Mischa away at a sacred wellness center and death had passed her over when it was her chronological turn to die, so it was logical that it had come back for her soul on its own terms.

We both stared through the enormous window at the tarmac as planes rolled into gates and rolled out toward the runways. I felt lousy to have to tell Trey that I hadn't been able to figure out anything solid in the way of next steps toward a solution. "Henry Richmond thinks we need to destroy some trees on the Simmons' property. He's been talking with—"

Trey narrowed his eyes at me in a way that silenced me abruptly. "Henry Richmond? Have you been in touch with him?" He exuded so much jealousy that I could practically smell it wafting of his skin.

"Yeah, he came back to visit his parents for Easter," I lied. I wasn't sure why I didn't just tell Trey the truth, that Henry had come back because he'd feared the worst when he heard about Mr. Portnoy. Battling the curse had started out as a responsibility that Trey and I had shared. Trey had never said anything specifically about Henry's involvement in our trip to Michigan back in January to try to break the curse before the bus crash deaths that Violet had predicted for several girls on the cheerleading team. However, I'd gotten the sense that he resented having Henry around, even though I would have been the first to remind him that Olivia was Henry's sister. Henry was perfectly justified in wanting to help us.

"Right," Trey muttered, and I decided to just ignore his envy. I was, after all, about to board a flight to an unfamiliar city with Trey, practically penniless, to face unknown hardships and dangers. Trey couldn't very well question my allegiance.

"Over Christmas break, we met this girl at an occult book store," I said. "She helped us cast a spell to try to contact Olivia and Candace. She's the one who taught me how to use the pendulum." The orchid pendant from Henry was packed in the suitcase that was already bound for Florida, and I bade it farewell in my mind, knowing I might not ever see it again. "Anyway, the mirrors we used for that spell keep showing her the trees on the Simmons property. She reached out to Henry to tell him that she thinks Olivia and Candace are trying to tell us that the secret to breaking the curse is the trees."

Trey mulled this over. "Trees, huh?" But he didn't press me for the details on how Henry and I had discussed killing the trees, and I didn't volunteer them. Trey had a million other worries on his mind, and preventing Mischa from killing more girls was probably the least urgent of them. I had no fewer than a thousand questions to ask him (why'd he come back to Green Bay to catch a flight to Chicago if he hadn't known I'd be in Wisconsin for sure, how'd he even manage to get from his school in Northern Wisconsin all the way to Green Bay without the cops catching him, where'd he get the winter coat and beanie if he'd slipped out of his school in the middle of a school day), I could tell that he was exhausted. My questions would just have to wait.

We boarded our flight an hour later with our fingers interlocked, our hearts pounding in unison for fear that federal agents or the police would board our aircraft prior to departure and apprehend both of us. Once we got to Chicago, it would be mid-afternoon, and we'd have to find a place where Trey could catch up on sleep so that we could formulate a plan for what to do next. It would be hugely stressful, because by that point it was safe to assume we had a very limited window of time before my parents realized I was not headed toward Florida, and they called the police. I was terrified for myself, but I was more terrified for Trey. Michael Simmons was a man capable of asking his mother to cast a spell on his wife that had resulted in a lot of people's deaths. I didn't doubt for a second that Trey's belief that Mr. Simmons was trying to kill him was incorrect.

As scared as I was, I was certain that it was better for me to at least be with Trey than to be apart from him, wondering about his safety. If there was one thing in my whole life that I knew to be true, it was that I loved Trey and that he'd do anything for me.  I owed it       to him to stand by him; after all, he was serving time at Northern Reserve because he'd leapt to my aid in the fall when I'd first told him that I believed Olivia's death had been the result of us tampering with evil at her birthday party. If I hadn't practically pulled him with both hands into the mess that Mischa and I were trying to sort through, he'd probably be whimsically flunking his way through his senior year at Weeping Willow High School.

As we inched down the middle aisle of the plane in search of our seats, I vowed that I'd accompany Trey wherever we had to go and for however long we had to remain on the run for him to escape his biological father's scheme. But a shadow of guilt crept into my heart because I knew when I'd considered all we would be leaving behind if we set out to challenge Michael Simmons, it had occurred to me that I'd regret never seeing Henry again most.