"What about there?"

Trey pointed ahead toward a small modern building that looked so warm and welcoming I almost started crying—and I really had no reason to cry, it was Trey who wasn't wearing a coat. We'd taken turns a few times sharing the coat that Mrs. Richmond had given me, but as soon as Trey saw me begin violently shivering, he'd insist that I put it back on. The building was not far from the water's edge on a residential street, and a vicious wind slipped through the pine trees separating us from Lake Huron. We'd been wandering through the streets of St. Ignace for what felt like an hour but was really more like twenty minutes, bypassing the few motor inns we'd encountered out of fear that we'd be turned over to the police faster than we'd know what was happening if we dared to enter any of their warm lobbies. A hotel or motor lodge wouldn't do—it would be too suspicious for two teenagers to hang out. Neither of us had a credit card to make it seem like we were actually interested in renting a room, and between us we only had the cash that Mrs. Richmond had pressed into my hand so many, many hours earlier that day. What we really needed was a simple, ordinary fast food restaurant... someplace warm with a bathroom (but more importantly, warm) where we could sit down and pass some time inconspicuously.

There were seemingly no such fast food restaurants in the town of St. Ignace, Michigan, or if there were, they were further along Interstate 2, the highway on which we'd driven all day. In our collective haste to deal with the guy whose car had plowed over the edge of the bridge as efficiently as possible, Henry had forgotten to tell us the passcode for his phone, and we'd forgotten to ask... so the phone was useless to us for anything other than incoming calls. We were pretty helpless until he found a way to call us from a pay phone.

An American flag waved apathetically on a flagpole in the parking lot of the building we approached. It was a one-story building in an L-shape, with a snow-covered peaked roof and a strange circular turret on one side. As we hurried toward the double doors of its entrance, we were comforted by the cars in the lot. Whatever this structure was, it was still open at almost eight o'clock at night, which was miraculous.

"It's a library," I exclaimed with relief as we got close enough for me to read the WELCOME sign over its doors. A book return chute was built into the brick wall next to the doors, making me desperately homesick for Weeping Willow the moment I noticed it.

We noticed as we entered the building that it was closing in fewer than twelve minutes for the night, but even knowing that we couldn't stay long didn't prevent us from entering. The familiar, comforting smell of yellowing book pages greeted us, and without exchanging words we marched directly into the aisles of books in the back, shivering and leaving a trail of snow behind us. Thankfully, the library was mostly empty, except for the small line of people waiting to check out books, which fortunately kept the two librarians on duty behind the counter near the entrance from paying us much attention.

"You're so red," Trey said as we both shook in an aisle of hardcover biographies.

If my cheeks and nose were red, Trey's was certainly redder. Our faces were chapped by the wind and our eyes were bloodshot. Trey's lips were cracked and dry, and when I ran my thick-feeling tongue over my own lips, I was surprised to feel that they seemed to be similarly haggard. His forearms and fingers were bright red, and I knew that venturing back outside and wandering around aimlessly was not an option for us. One of us (or, both of us) would end up with frostbite.

"We both must look like a mess," I said. "What are we going to do? This place is closing soon and I don't know if I can handle going back outside."

Trey peeked around the edge of the bookshelves. "There's an internet station," he said after scanning the layout of the library. There was hope in his voice. "We could look at a map and see if there's anything else around here within close walking distance."

Trying to keep a low profile, we crossed the library and sat down in wooden chairs at one of the desktop computers set up on the long table that served as the internet research area. Trey entered the town of St. Ignace, Michigan into Google Maps form field, and we both waited impatiently as the browser slowly loaded an illustrated map of the town. Trey zoomed in on our position, the library on Spruce Street, we both searched the screen desperately with our eyes as we tried to get a sense of exactly how far we'd have to walk before we'd find shelter again.

The clock in the lower right-hand corner of the computer screen told us we had six minutes to figure it out. Fewer than six, actually, because I didn't want us to be the last people to leave the library and risk the librarians taking a close look at us. There were two more people waiting in line to check out books... an older woman who looked like she might be retired, and a young mother balancing a toddler on her hip. The toddler was playing with his mother's bright yellow scarf with unwavering focus.

"There's just nothing around for miles," Trey deduced, his voice waffling a little. I thought, just for a second, that Trey might start crying. I couldn't blame him if he did. We were completely on our own with barely any money, no way of contacting Henry, and completely ill-equipped for the brutal weather outdoors.

"Then," I said, looking around the library, "We're going to have to spend the night here."

Trey chortled. "Right."

"No, Trey," I said, believing my own words more as I thought the idea through. "We have no choice. We can't go back outside."

"Maybe," Trey said, looking around over the top of the computer monitor, "I could steal a coat, you know? Off the back of someone's chair. That wouldn't be too evil, right? All these people have cars. They wouldn't freeze to death."

But, there weren't any coats on the backs of chairs. The retired woman from the line was stuffing the books she'd just had hand-stamped into her canvas tote bag and the young mother was stepping up to check out her books. The second librarian behind the counter had disappeared, presumably to start preparing the library for closing while her colleague dealt with the last few customers of the night.

"There aren't any coats, Trey. Seriously. We don't have time to think about this. They're going to lock up soon, and we have to hide ourselves in here before the staff realizes we haven't left," I said forcefully. As much as I was not exactly thrilled about spending the night in a library, there was simply no other alternative if we wished to survive until morning. The more I wondered what was happening with Henry at that very moment, the more realistic it seemed to me that he had gotten himself into some kind of jam.

Wordlessly acknowledging that I was right, Trey rose from his chair and we walked, hand in hand, toward the library's double front doors, making eye contact with the librarian wrapping up her last check-out of the night and nodding to assure her that we were on our way out. I pushed the one of the doors open—just long enough to allow a blast of cold wind to blow in to suggest our departure—and then Trey and I both slipped down the hall toward the restrooms.

Trey instinctively pushed open the door to the men's room and I vehemently shook my head "no" and motioned for him to follow me into the ladies' room. Once the door had whooshed closed behind us, he whispered, "Both of those librarians are women! Don't you think they're going to come in here to use the bathroom before they leave for the night?"

Without slowing my pace, I entered the stall furthest from the door and Trey followed me. "Maybe," I admitted, "But most likely they have a staff bathroom, and there might only be one stall in the men's room. There could be other people working here, you know?"

I lowered the lid on the toilet seat and Trey closed the stall door but didn't lock it, leaving it open just a half inch so as not to arouse suspicion if anyone were to enter. Carefully, I climbed atop the toilet seat and turned around, leaning my back against the tile wall behind me, and spread my arms outward so that my hands were placed on both walls of the stall, allowing me to balance myself. Trey also stepped onto the toilet seat facing me and pressed his hands against the walls of the stall. We were less than two inches apart, breathing into each other's faces, alone—we realized simultaneously—for the first time in months.

"Well, hello there, Miss Brady," Trey teased in a flirtatious voice.

Even though we were in pretty much the most unromantic setting of all time, and at any moment a librarian or custodian could push the bathroom door open, find us, have us picked up by the police, hauled away, and separated forever (or quite possibly because of all of those things), a flurry of butterflies stirred at the bottom of my stomach and drifted up to my throat. Before I was even aware of what I was doing, I placed my hands on the sides of Trey's flushed cheeks and drew him toward me, moaning as I felt the warm wetness of his open mouth on mine. Desire, so sudden and long repressed, overtook us, and Trey pressed me hard against the wall with his entire body. His hands found my hips and our tongues slipped against each other in a steady rhythm. He smelled and tasted of the bitter cold outside, like the sharpness in the air right before a heavy snowfall.

The creak of the door, followed by the click-clack of pumps on the tile floor, caught us off-guard.

Fortunately we were kissing silently, because someone had entered the bathroom and stepped into the stall next to ours before we became aware of their presence. Trey's eyes, mere inches from mine, popped open in mock horror and he smiled at me like a goon, threatening to make me giggle, as we listened to the tinkling sound of the person in the stall next to us relieving her bladder. I felt like a huge creep overtly listening to someone else use the bathroom, especially because Trey was so humored by it. The toilet flushed and Trey nodded dramatically as if that flush was long overdue, and I shook my head, trying to discourage him in his blatant attempts to crack me up. When we heard the water blasting at the sinks, he closed his eyes and kissed me quickly on the lips before resting his forehead against mine.

We remained in that position long after we heard the rumbling of the paper towel dispenser and the click of the light switch, which left us in pitch darkness. Then it was just me and Trey, the two of us touching in the dark, the weight of his head set upon mine.  I could hear the pattern of his breathing, and felt my lungs assume the same pace. I wrapped my arms around him and placed my hands on his shoulders, comforted by his strength and the solidity of his presence. For the first time since I left Dearborn, I felt fear swell within me. There was a good chance we wouldn't figure out how to stop Violet. She had the odds in her favor in terms of outsmarting us and tricking us into ending up in even more trouble. It was highly possible, even likely, that by the next time I saw my mother and my childhood home, Mischa would be dead, and I'd never even have a chance to apologize to her for not being able to save her life.

Standing there, on the toilet in the library bathroom, my thoughts drifted to Jennie, and the last glimpse I'd ever had of my sister before she died. I'd seen her silhouette in the window of our house as flames devoured it, beam by beam, and I had just stood there on the front lawn, stupefied, with Moxie running in circles around me. I hadn't been able to save Jennie, and it seemed incredibly unfair that fate had put me, once again, in the impossible position of having to save someone else's life. But this was different than when Jennie had died. I was older. I had no excuses for not being prepared to challenge Violet; it seemed like the proper way to end the curse had to be so obvious that I was somehow just overlooking it.

"I think the building's empty," Trey finally said. His words made me realize that I'd slipped into a daze that bordered on an early sleep state. I was exhausted.

"Should we go—"

Before I could suggest that we check to see if the coast was clear, the toilet in the stall next to us flushed on its own. The cataclysmic rush of water took us both completely by surprise, causing us both to flinch and steady ourselves by holding onto the walls of the stall.

"Jesus," Trey whispered. "What in the..."

Then, the toilet in the third stall in the bathroom flushed. There was another flush in the stall next to us, and when we heard the fourth flush, we knew we weren't alone.

They'd found us, Violet 's spirits, and they were seemingly none too pleased that we'd made it off of the bridge.

"Let's go," Trey said. "Maybe it'll stop if we leave the bathroom. If there's anyone else in the building, they're going to hear that and come in here to check it out."

He hopped off of the toilet first, and I heard an unmistakable splash as his feet hit the floor. The toilets were overflowing, spewing water everywhere. Trey held my wrist as I jumped off the toilet and slid a few inches. I would have fallen if it weren't for his tight grip on me. Blindly, in the dark, we made our way toward the faint orange horizontal line of light peeking from underneath the door.

Outside the bathroom, the lights had been lowered in the library but hadn't been turned off completely. Aside from the sloshing racket of the overactive toilets behind us in the ladies room, the library was immaculately quiet. We listened carefully before venturing toward the front doors of the library, not wanting to be surprised by a late night janitor.

"I think it's safe," Trey whispered.

We tiptoed past the front doors and across the check-out area, back toward the tall rows of books where we'd hidden when we first entered. It felt both criminal and exciting to be in another town's library after hours; it wasn't like we were going to steal or vandalize anything, but we were still trespassing, plain and simple.

"Do you think there are surveillance cameras in here?" I asked. "You know, like, motion detectors?"

Trey looked at me as if I were nuts.

"Why would there be?"

I felt childish for a second. "Um, you know. To keep people from stealing."

"Books?" Trey laughed. "I steal books all the time."

It was true – the copy of Conversations with the Dead by James W. Listerman that he'd stolen from the Weeping Willow town library was probably still tucked away somewhere in his bedroom back at home.

Confident that we weren't going to set off any alarms by exploring, we snooped around an ideal place to sleep. The library seemed larger than when we'd first surveyed the layout—there was a children's section with couches and toys for story time, a microfiche room, a language lab with a computers and tape decks in it, and a periodicals section with comfortable-looking chairs.

"I'm leaning toward that red couch in the children's section," Trey announced after we completed our audit of options.

"Sounds like a plan, sir," I agreed, feeling the burn of sleepiness singe my eyes.

We curled up on the red couch, which wasn't particularly comfortable and smelled like a kind of disgusting combination of apple sauce and urine. Neither of us even dared to remove our shoes, wanting to be ready to run in a matter of seconds if necessary. I spread Olivia's winter jacket over both of us as a makeshift blanket, and tightly clutched Henry's cell phone in my left hand, wanting to be sure not to miss his call if he were to reach out to us that night. By the time we were both reclining and Trey's arm was around me, our mutual need to sleep overwhelmed our romantic urges. I was so tired that I heard myself begin to snore ever so slightly and was too exhausted to even try to stop.

Suddenly, without any kind of warning, I was struck hard in the forehead by something blunt.

"Ah!" I exclaimed, sitting straight up, my palm pressed to my forehead.

"What is it?" Trey asked with concern behind me.

"Something hit me," I said, and saw a hardcover children's book about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly on the floor next to the couch.

"What?" Trey asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

I picked up the book and before I even had a chance to read the title, two more books wiggled free from the story time shelf across from the red couch. I saw them hover in the air in the dim light and then appear to hurl themselves at us. "Watch it!" I warned Trey, ducking. One of the books soared past my head and hit the bookshelf behind us before clattering to the ground. The other hit Trey's shoulder.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," he said. I kept my eyes glued to the story time shelf; three more books were wriggling free.

"Maybe we should sleep somewhere that's less of a target zone," I suggested, not particularly wanting to be bludgeoned by books all night long.

"Yeah," Trey groaned. "I am getting the distinct feeling that something's not happy we're here. But watch this—"

He stood up from the couch and lifted one end of it. "Grab the other side," he instructed me. We turned the couch around and carried it to a nearby wall, repositioning it so that any books hurled at us would simply hit the back of the couch instead of us.

"Amazing," I said as we resumed our positions on the couch and felt the occasional thunk of a book making impact.

Then, even as books continued to aim themselves at us from across the children's section, we heard a strange woman's voice coming from another section of the library. The voice was soothing and mature, and quite honestly, it freaked me out.

"What is that?" I asked, terrified.

"It sounds like... I don't know," Trey admitted.

Reluctantly, we both got up from the couch again, and tiptoed through the library in the direction of the voice. When we reached the audio library, which was locked, we saw a reel-to-reel audio player in motion. It seemed to be playing an old-fashioned language lesson in Spanish at top volume, which was fortunately at least slightly muffled because the room had been designed as sound-proofed.

"Pedro dice que se hace tarde. Es hora de ir a casa," the woman's voice patiently said. Then the reels halted, rewound themselves with a whirring noise, and played again.

"Pedro dice que se hace tarde. Es hora de ir a casa."

"What does that mean?" I asked, digging my fingernails into Trey's arm. I had taken French instead of Spanish and quite honestly probably wouldn't have understood the sentences even if they'd been spoken slowly and deliberately in the language I had studied.

Trey sighed with resignation?and informed me, "It means, Pedro says, it's getting late. Time to go home. Something wants us to go home."

We stood there in the semi-darkness, watching the reel-to-reel play itself, rewind itself, play itself, and rewind itself. I was too afraid to take a step in any direction, feeling completely exposed and vulnerable in that moment. We were literally locked inside the library. It was our prison for the night, and anything could happen to us within its walls. I did my best not to think about fire, and what might happen if anything in the library were to burst into flames, but naturally fired scared me more than anything.

"I don't know if we can spend the night here, Trey. I'm scared," I said, hating how my voice shook.

"We don't have a choice, McKenna," he reminded me. "We've got twelve hours until this joint opens up in the morning, and we're going to do our best to get some rest."