"Oh, my god!"

Cheryl was smart enough not to shout out my name as we trotted through the heavy, crunchy-topped snow to where she and Kelly stood waiting for us.  

"I can't believe you're actually here!" Cheryl exclaimed once we reached her. Kelly, who—like Cheryl—I'd known since kindergarten, seemed apprehensive about even looking at me. I could understand why... Kelly and Cheryl were good girls, the kind of girls at school who always tattled if they thought that telling an authority figure was in the wrongdoer's best interest. Once upon a time I'd been that kind of girl, too, in the not-so-distant past. I'd desperately sought out approval from authority figures before my friends and I had gotten ourselves into trouble so deep that authority figures could never begin to understand what we'd done.

"Yeah, we're here," I admitted, "but obviously we can't stay long. Listen, Cheryl... is there any chance you know which hospital Violet was taken to this morning?"

Cheryl and Kelly exchanged blank expressions, but their eyes told me everything—they knew where she was, or at least they had some idea.

Kelly hesitated before replying and weakly said, "I don't think we should be telling you guys anything about Violet Simmons. You're in a lot of trouble. The police—"

"The police have it wrong," Henry interjected.

Kelly put her hands on her hips, taking a stand. Maybe she found the courage to speak so boldly to a guy who'd been a senior—and not a particularly nice senior—less than a year earlier because she knew she would have had the police and just about every parent in Weeping Willow on her side. "I saw on the news this morning that authorities in three states are looking for you guys. McKenna and Trey are presumed by local police to be armed and dangerous."

I elbowed Trey when he burst out laughing. Sure, it was funny that the cops thought we were armed, but not if they actually intended to pull guns on us if we came across them. I did not find the idea of police pointing loaded weapons at me to be humorous at all.

"Look, we don't want to get anyone in trouble," I said, trying to defuse the situation. "We're just trying to figure out if Violet's still here in Michigan, or if someone's already arrived to take her back to Wisconsin."

After a long, anger-filled silence and a lot of emotive eye movements exchanged between Cheryl and Kelly, finally Cheryl admitted, "We wouldn't know. I mean, I saw Miss Kirkovic drinking hot chocolate in the lounge right before we took our turn down the hill. But that doesn't mean anything other than that Miss Kirkovic left Violet at the hospital."

All of the hope that had been building inside of me since we'd driven out of the library parking lot earlier that morning slipped right through my nostrils and into the winter scene around us. Cheryl was right. I couldn't ask her to march into the ski lodge and ask Miss Kirkovic all kinds of suspicious questions about the whereabouts of Violet Simmons. Miss Kirkovic was one of the few actual cool teachers at Weeping Willow High. To the best of my knowledge, she had an apartment in Green Bay and sometimes her personal artwork was shown in galleries in Milwaukee and Chicago. She had a real grown-up life, and I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if she had simply not shown up for work teaching high school one day because success had come calling to rescue her from being our art teacher.

"One of us is going to have to find Miss Kirkovic," I said to Henry, turning my back on Cheryl and Kelly. Of course, the second I did, Kelly began inching her way toward the entrance of the lodge. For the first time since we'd arrived at Fitzgerald's it occurred to me that we were in a highly unsafe area. The lodge probably had its own private security, a television in every single room that would ensure every guest there had seen us on the news, and most dangerous of all, there were only two ways on and off the property: down the main road via the parking lot, or down the side of the mountain on foot.

"It has to be me," Henry  said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Cheryl waving "goodbye" to me as she and Kelly slipped back into the lodge. I decided against calling across the snow to thank her and sent a swift prayer to heaven that Cheryl would talk Kelly out of ratting on us to the first authority figure she encountered.

"Won't she think that's weird, that you, like, graduated and yet you're on the junior class ski trip?" Trey asked.

There simply was no other way... even though I'd been one of Miss Kirkovic's favorite students, I just couldn't walk into the restaurant of the lodge and look for Miss Kirkovic drinking hot chocolate, or even crazier, walk the halls knocking on doors in the hope of finding her room. Even if she still happened to be there, chatting by the fireplace with someone, I was inevitably going to be spotted by no fewer than ten students who all would have been delighted to report me to a less amicable teacher. Especially now that the hill was closing for the night and all of the students would be drifting indoors. We couldn't remain where we were, and Trey and I couldn't return inside the hotel. It was all just too risky.

We marched down to the parking lot and Trey and I took off our boots and skis so that Henry could return to them to the ski rental shop. Since our shoes were back up in the rental shop, Trey and I had no choice but to wait in the pick-up truck for Henry to return, a situation that put me on edge.

"Um, what should we do if cops come down to the parking lot to arrest us?" Trey asked, vocalizing my concerns. "Run off through the snow in our socks?"

After the amount of time Trey had spent walking around Michigan without a coat the day before, I didn't blame him for being more outspoken than me.

Henry tossed him the keys. "I guess you should drive away," he said.

I felt very on edge as we sat in the pick-up truck waiting for Henry to return. Not wanting to use up Henry's tank of gas, we didn't turn on the engine so that we could heat the cab, and instead sat there shivering. It was already getting dark out, and I grew irrationally angry that it was winter. Short days, bitter cold, and heavy snow were certainly complicating our pursuit of Violet.

Oddly enough, even though I spent a lot of time at Dearborn looking at the clock and wondering what was happening at Weeping Willow High School, it hadn't wondered what was happening at the Dearborn School for Girls even once since I'd broke out. I simply didn't care. The more time I spent away from there, the less real it seemed that I'd ever return. But there was a dorm room there with in an empty bed in it that was mine, and if we stopped being mindful of how much trouble we were in, even just for a few minutes, I'd be staring through those barred windows at Dearborn until my eighteenth birthday.

 "Well, this sucks," I muttered after almost half an hour had passed.

"What do you think about Vancouver?" Trey asked me, changing the topic. "After this is over? I mean, it's Canada, and it's way warmer than here. Probably big enough that we could find jobs at, like, restaurants and stuff without needing real I.D. One of the guys at my school has a big plan to go there. He thinks he can get work doing either construction or as a production assistant on movies."

"Sure," I said, wanting to please him. But in actuality my thoughts were a million miles away from our future after breaking the curse. I had a strong sense that the danger was increasing. We were getting close, and Violet was slipping away. She certainly had the upper hand if she even knew we were coming, which of course she must have suspected if she'd seen the news and known we'd both escaped from our schools. All she had to do was keep us running in circles until the police caught up with us. My pulse was racing constantly as if something was chasing us, even in that solemn, snowy parking lot as the sky darkened from periwinkle into midnight blue while we waited.

"I wonder what's taking so long," I murmured aloud, not realizing that I was cutting Trey off as he continued to talk about the advantages to Northwest Canada as our destination. "I'm sorry," I said, placing my hand over his, knowing that he hated to be cut off or dismissed after so many years of suffering that exact treatment by his father and teachers at the high school. "I'm just starting to get stressed about what we're doing out here. I mean, it's getting late. What are we going to do if Violet's gone—drive back to Weeping Willow straight through the night?"

"Don't know," Trey shrugged. "If she's gone, it doesn't seem to make much sense to drive through the night just to catch up with her. I don't think any of us is thinking too clearly at this point. We could probably all use a few hours' sleep without books flying at our heads or cops interrogating us."

But the following day, my classmates would be boarding buses to drive back to our town. According to the other predictions Violet had made, a tire would blow out and both Hailey West and Abby Johanssen would die. I'd seen what would happen for myself during the meditation that Bachitar had led me through, although I couldn't remember there having been snow on the ground in what I'd seen. I vaguely remembered Mr. Dean assisting Jason Arkadian to climb out of the ravine where the bus landed. It seemed Violet had masterfully put us in the terrible position of having to choose between hunting her down to try to break the curse before the bus accident, and staying put to try to prevent it.

A thought formed in my mind so clearly that for a second I was sure that Trey must have heard it. Ask the pendulum. The command in my head was so solid that my hand slipped into the pocket of my coat so that I could feel the reassurance of the cold metal chain without even pausing to wonder what I should ask it. Spend the night at Fitzgerald's? Rush back to Weeping Willow?

"Maybe," I said, feeling as if something else was moving my lips up and down, and someone else's voice was rising up through my throat from my diaphragm, "we should ask the pendulum."

"Ask it what?" Trey turned to me, looking a little alarmed. "Don't touch that thing."

"But we have sage," I said, remembering that we'd pulled a dried bunch out of the decorative arrangement in the lodge. "We can cleanse this space."

"We might have sage, but I don't have any matches."

I reached for the glove compartment in Henry's dashboard. Surely he must have had matches or a lighter or something in there, I reasoned.

Trey placed his hands on both of my shoulders and shook me gently. "McKenna. Hello, are you in there? We don't need to ask that thing anything right now. I already know what's going to happen. I don't know if Violet's here in Michigan or not, but I know it's going to start snowing soon, and Henry's not going to want to drive tonight."

His words stunned me enough to loosen my grip on the pendulum in my pocket. "How do you know that?"

Trey shrugged. "I dreamed about snow last night. And I think what's in here," he tapped his head, "so far has been more accurate than anything else we've had to work with."

I looked through the windshield of the truck toward the lodge to see if by chance Henry was on his way, and noticed that the night sky was clear enough that stars were poking through; I could see the Pleiades with perfect clarity. There wasn't a snow cloud in sight. We didn't have a cell phone with us to check the weather report and see if there was a forecast for snow, but it seemed highly unlikely that there would be enough snow on the ground to make driving difficult at any point that night.

Another half hour had passed and even Trey had started panicking when we finally saw Henry in the rearview mirror making his way back toward the pick-up truck, carrying our snow boots.

"Sorry that took so long," he apologized as he slid into the cab of the truck on the driver's side, squishing Trey into the middle. Trey handed him his truck keys in exchange for snow boots. "Some guy was hitting on Miss Kirkovic in the lounge and I had to sort of, inch my way in."

Henry's arrival in the truck made me my preoccupation with the pendulum vanish. I imagined some nerdy ski lodge guy trying to make small talk with Miss Kirkovic, who had long red hair and was considered by most of the guys at Weeping Willow High School to be the only crush-worthy female teacher on staff.

"So, Violet's already on her way back to Willow. She may even be there by now," Henry said glumly. He started the engine of the truck and turned the heater on.

"How did you ever get Miss Kirkovic to tell you that?" I wondered.

Henry rubbed his hands together and blew on them to warm them up. He opened his window a crack to aid in clearing out the steam on the windshield from Trey's and my breathing during the hour we'd sat there by ourselves.

"I played it off like I'm here with friends from college on a ski trip and told her I'd heard there'd been some excitement earlier in the day with one of the kids needing to go to the hospital. She just let it all spill out then. She told me Violet had been coughing uncontrollably yesterday and this morning the other chaperones decided that she should go to the hospital. Violet's parents were called and immediately they drove up. The hospital put her on antibiotics and sent her home with them to get some rest."

My heart sank. So, we'd driven all the way to Michigan for nothing. It had been a waste of time, of gasoline, and we were all likely to come down with colds at any given moment from the amount of exposure we'd had to the cold weather. "I guess we drive back then," I said, knowing that the likelihood of us being pulled over and arrested increased exponentially the closer we got to the borders of our own hometown.

"God," Trey muttered. "This was all for nothing."

"Well, not for nothing," Henry said in a quiet voice. In the distance, I heard the wail of an ambulance and the distinctive sound of a helicopter overhead in unison. "Because while I was in the lounge talking to Miss Kirkovic, Mr. Dean came in and interrupted our conversation, all worried. It seems that whoever just did headcount at dinnertime came up one short. Stephani deMilo is missing."

Just for a second, Trey and I didn't react, because we'd just seen her a few hours ago at the burger joint in town. She was probably just still out cavorting around with the ski instructor whose eye she'd caught. I honestly didn't know Stephani well enough to guess whether or not would stay out with a ski instructor so late that she'd get busted by the chaperones. She'd mostly been the kind of girl who followed rules up until junior high when she became more popular. Stephani's dad was involved in state politics at a pretty high level and she lived in the same fancy subdivision as the Portnoys.

"And," Henry added, acknowledging my initial instinct to dismiss the Stephani situation, "all the chaperones in there are freaking out because Stephani rented skis at three o'clock, right after us, and they haven't been returned yet."

That was a reason to be worried, because it wasn't like Stephani would have worn her skis to go somewhere. The fact that she'd rented them at three meant that she'd made it back to the lodge from Burger King, and the fact that she hadn't returned them strongly suggested that she hadn't left the lodge property again since.

"She might still be out on the slope with that guy," I offered up weakly. What had his name been? AJ? RJ?

Henry pointed up at the roof of the truck as the helicopter soared overhead.

"They're starting search and rescue now," Henry said grimly. "Believe me, I thought about telling someone in there that I saw Stephani earlier today in town. I mean, if she's out there somewhere, still alive, it's on me if no one finds her tonight."

The grain of truth in what Henry had said lingered around us in the truck as its engine idled. We hadn't heard Violet's prediction for Stephani with our own ears, and there was a huge difference between someone falling off a cliff and dying instantly, and someone falling off a cliff and anguishing for hours or days without help.

But of greater concern to me than Stephani's potential peril at that moment were the conditions of Mischa and Tracy. If Stephani had fallen off a cliff, then had their predictions already come true?

"I mean, I wanted to say something, but then that would have led to more questions, and maybe more police, and I was thinking about you guys out here in the truck," Henry rambled, trying to clear his conscience.

"There's no point in feeling guilty," Trey said. "If she's over the side of the cliff, she's gone. There's nothing any of us can do to save her now."

He was right. We—I—could have and should have warned her at Burger King, and didn't.

And just then, as we sat in the parking lot in silence, all three of us wondering if we should leave Fitzgerald's or wait to see if there was anything further to be learned about Stephani's status, I looked up and noticed that the sky was no longer starry. Heavy clouds were moving in, drifting into space and covering the star cluster I'd just noticed a little while earlier. One singular, tiny, perfectly-formed snowflake drifted down from the sky and landed right in the center of Henry's windshield, where we stared it its delicate shape until it melted into a drop of water before our eyes.

"No one finds her body for days," Henry murmured. "Of course not. It's going to snow tonight and they won't be able to find her."

We agreed that if police and rescue personnel were on their way to Fitzgerald's, we'd be wise to take off. By the time we'd driven back to the part of town dotted with restaurants and bars and had taken a booth at a pizza shop, the snow was falling heavily in big, lacy wet clumps. After ordering a pie that none of us particularly felt like eating, we debated at length the best way to go about finding out whether or not Mischa and Tracy were still alive. Trey was pushing for Henry to just call home and ask his mother to call over to the Hartfords.' I thought a phone call placed to the hospital might be less risky.

Ultimately it was Henry who figured out the best approach. He looked up the Gundarsson's funeral parlor website on his cell phone and wordlessly flipped it around to show us that a viewing service for Tracy Hartford was scheduled for Monday afternoon. The kids on the field trip in Traverse City probably hadn't even heard the news that would be waiting for them as soon as their buses arrived back in Weeping Willow. Their class secretary had presumably succumbed to complications in the last few days. Without Tracy, herself, to spread the gossip, her own death had passed without fanfare.

"Jesus," Trey said, looking away quickly.

When our pizza arrived, I barely noticed. The restaurant was thankfully quiet and mostly empty due to the snow outside. Henry's weather app predicted at least a foot of snow by morning, and he was leaning toward spending the night in Michigan rather than trying to drive over unplowed roads. "I mean, what if we get stuck or something and have to call Triple A? Anything could happen then. I'll never see you guys again."

But his words were falling on deaf ears. Trey and I were both thinking that if Tracy had died, then surely Mischa had died. I, for one, still felt responsible for the fates of the other kids whose predictions Violet had told, but if I was honest with myself, I cared a lot less about what happened to them if Mischa was dead. Their deaths were their own fault for not listening to us and continuing to be friends with Violet. I knew it was a terrible attitude, but I'd already ruined my own life trying to save theirs, and none of them were the least bit appreciative. I wouldn't have been surprised if Violet had convinced the girls with whom she was sharing a hotel room at Fitzgerald's on the first night of the class trip to play the game with her.

Neither of us put up an argument when Henry pulled into the parking lot of a small motel off the highway. He trudged through the snow on his own to book a room and motioned for us to follow him after he came back outside and flashed the room key at us. The motel was a typical two-story, L-shaped structure, with each room overlooking the parking lot. Our room was in the corner on the second floor, and we could hear the clamor of television sets through the doors of the few rooms we passed that were illuminated from within.

Our room smelled vaguely like mildew. It couldn't have been more different from the beautiful lobby at Fitzgerald's. There were no decorative flower arrangements, no polished wood side tables offering glossy-covered magazines, no softly-playing music or delightful views of mountain vistas through the window when Trey opened the plaid curtains. There were, instead, two double-beds with ugly pink and blue floral comforters on them, a painting of a seascape hung in a tacky frame in the space on the wall between both of the beds, and mismatched lamps on mismatched night stands. A dog-eared bible was in the drawer of the nightstand that I opened out of curiosity, next to a thick Yellow Pages from 2005. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared into space for a while, wondering how I'd ever fall asleep in such a depressing room, while Henry flipped through channels on the television trying to find out if local news was covering Stephani's disappearance.

When I worked up the nerve to venture into the bathroom, I was dismayed to see that it looked like there already an abundance of bright yellow urine in the toilet bowl. "Seriously," I muttered, flushing it before I closed the door to empty my own bladder.

Staring in the mirror, I thought through the odd, disjointed events of the day, and suddenly was seized by the suspicion—and then the certainty—that Miss Kirkovic had only talked so freely with Henry because she thought he'd been hitting on her and she'd been flattered. Jealousy gripped me before I got the better of myself. Why should I care if she thought he was hitting on her, or even if he kind of was? I reprimanded myself. Henry was probably only five years younger than Miss Kirkovic, and he was undeniably good-looking. She'd probably been flattered that the hottest guy from the most recent class to graduate from Weeping Willow High School had sought her out for conversation in the lounge.

I should ask the pendulum if he's interested in her.

I felt my arm move to my side as if I were still wearing Olivia's winter coat with the pendulum in the pocket, which I'd wisely taken off in the other room and hung in the closet on a metal hanger. I was starting to grow annoyed with myself for constantly thinking about asking the pendulum questions. There was no need—there was nothing the universe could tell us that would make our mission clearer to us because none of us even knew where to begin trying to make sense of it anymore.

I could ask it if Mischa is alive, yes or no.

I splashed cold water on my face in the sink to try to drive my inclination to ask the pendulum questions out of my head. My throat tightened and my chest felt empty just thinking about the strong likelihood that Mischa had already choked, if Tracy was dead. Just stop, I commanded myself as I looked in my eyes' reflection in the mirror.

When I reached for the doorknob to leave the bathroom, it jiggled in my hand, spun... but didn't open.

"Oh, come on," I thought, instantly imagining having to involve the motel management and possibly nosy locksmiths to free myself.

I turned it sharply to the left, and then the right. I wasn't imagining things; the knob was broken and the lock was jammed. I was locked inside.

"Hey, guys!" I called, pounding on the door. "I think I'm locked in here."

A second later, Henry and Trey were on the other side of the door, both of them trying to wriggle the knob loose.

"Did you lock the door when you went in?" Henry asked.

I didn't want to admit it, because locking it suggested I didn't trust my current company, but I was pretty sure I had locked it just out of habit. "I think so but I don't remember," I said.

"I have a tool kit down in the truck," I heard Henry tell Trey in a muffled voice. "We can just take the whole knob off."

"Did you hear that, McKenna? Henry's getting his tool kit from the truck so that we can take the knob off if we need to," Trey told me.

I rested my forehead against the door, thinking back to how we'd all thought there was a chance we were going to die in the columbarium when Violet's little spirit friends had locked us in. I should have remembered that locks, steam, and electrical devices seemed to be preferred toys for them... easy to manipulate.

And as soon as I thought about that, I dared to look upward. I saw the shape of some kind of dead bug, a moth perhaps, trapped in the long, white plastic light fixture hung over the sink. It was just then that the light blew out.

I yelped in surprise.

"McKenna?" Trey asked, no doubt seeing that the room had gone dark in the space under the door.

"Trey, they're here," I whispered. I felt a presence in the bathroom with me, although unlike in my bedroom, I didn't hear any breathing noises. A slow, unmistakable chill filled the room as the temperature dipped.

Trey began throwing himself at the door. It jumped on its hinges each time he lunged at it with his shoulder, no doubt trying to break it down.

"Don't," I cautioned him, not wanting to say much while I stood there in the dark. "If people in other rooms hear you, they're going to come over here to investigate."

When he stopped doing that and returned to violently trying to pop the knob hard enough to the left or right to spring the lock, I felt something pressing into my back, not far from my right shoulder blade.

Something sharp—not like a needle, but more like a fingertip. Sharp enough for me to realize that the pressure it was applying against my back was intentional. Meant to capture my attention. The pressure began moving slightly to the left, and moved about two inches before it began traveling down my spine.

Terrified, I held my breath. I couldn't remember seeing anything in the bathroom that could have been used to hurt me prior to the light blowing out, but who knew what could happen in there. Even just the basic toilet and janky hair dryer that were staples of any cheap motel bathroom would have been enough to kill me if a spirit had any kind of understanding of electricity.

Then I realized that the fingertip was drawing a letter on my back. It was forming an "s." Jennie and I, as children, had played a game often at night when we'd write messages for each other on our backs with our fingertips. We had infinite patience for the game, sometimes telling each other long stories using this method. I could remember one time our parents had let us camp out in the living room when she'd told me the entire story of Snow White and Rose Red by writing it on my back, letter by letter, as best as she could remember it. After her death, I'd tried to teach the technique to my cousin, who was too old to be bothered.

S-T-O...

"Stop," I said aloud, letting whoever it was who was sending me the message understand that I knew what they were getting at. My inclination was to think that the spirit joining me in the bathroom was Jennie just because of the communication tactic it had chosen, but I was still highly paranoid. Jennie wouldn't have necessarily locked me in a bathroom and blown the lights out to scare the breath out of me.

"Stop what? McKenna, what's going on in there? Are you all right?"

"Something's trying to communicate a message to me," I said hastily, wanting to focus on whatever came next.

T-H-

"Is she still in there?"

I became distracted when I heard Henry arrive back in the room.

"Something's in there with her, man. We need to hurry," I heard Trey inform him.

A-T 

There was a rubbing on my back, our old symbol for indicating a break between words.

B-U-S.

"We need to stop the bus!" I called through the door, and as soon as I'd pushed out the words, the door knob in Henry's hand jerked to the right and the lock released. Henry pushed the door open slightly and found me standing in the bathroom in the dark, tightly gripping the sink.

"McKenna," Trey said, sighing with relief upon seeing that I was okay. "How are we going to stop an entire bus?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, but I think that was Jennie. Maybe if we stop the bus, we break the curse, or at least put it on hold."

"Wait a second. You think that was Jennie, or you know?" Henry asked skeptically.

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "But I think it was her."

After agreeing that none of us would close the bathroom door all the way again during our stay at Hal's Motor Lodge, we sat down on the edges of the two beds and got to thinking. There were seventy-six kids in the junior class now that I was no longer in it, Tracy was presumably dead but not on the trip at any rate, and Violet had gone home early. Nearly everyone had been planning to go on the ski trip, according to Mischa's boyfriend, Matt. If there were twenty-four seats on the school bus and we assumed two kids would be expected to sit in each seat, there would be at least two buses showing up at Fitzgerald's the next morning to transport everyone back to Weeping Willow.

Our task wasn't really to stop one bus. It was to stop two.

"We could phone in a bomb threat," Henry suggested.

"To who? The high school? The ski lodge? The bus company? I don't think that would delay them for long," I said hopelessly, knowing that someone as neurotic as Mr. Dean would insist that the buses be boarded in an orderly fashion and set upon their return route as soon as the highways were cleared by snow plows.

"I saw this thing once in a movie where these gangster guys poured sugar in gas tanks to destroy cars," Trey offered. "I don't know if it would work the same way on buses, but probably it would."

We all agreed that the idea had potential, as did simply slashing the bus tires, which we assumed would slow the caravan down by quite a while as they waited for spares, but both of those ideas had the unappealing side effects of us potentially causing the bus crash that Violet had predicted. The ideal way to prevent the crash would have been to convince the chaperones or the bus drivers that the trip was unsafe. But of course, that was the most complicated approach of all, since none of us could very well just walk up to anyone from Weeping Willow and say something like that without causing serious suspicions.

"We could call the school pretending to be Stephani's parents and insist that the chaperones not leave Fitzgerald's until she's found," I blabbed aloud, tossing the idea out.

"Yeah, but every other parent from Weeping Willow is probably thoroughly freaking out if one kid is missing," Trey said. "They're all probably already calling Principal Nylander demanding that those kids get back to Weeping Willow as soon as possible."

"True, true," Henry agreed.

By ten o'clock at night, we were all completely knackered. Without any of us making a formal announcement of our sleeping arrangements, Trey kicked off his boots, stripped down to his undershirt and boxers, and climbed into the bed on which we'd both been sitting. Intentionally avoiding Henry's eyes, I took off Olivia's boots and slid her jeans off. I got into bed next to Trey and buried myself beneath blankets, feeling acutely odd about Henry seeing us laying together as if it were no big deal at all (which, of course, by that point it wasn't to either of us).

"Henry," I said, feeling the heavy anchor of sleep tugging on me as soon as I was lying down, "Could you do me a huge favor? Reach into the pocket of Olivia's winter coat and hide the pendulum somewhere in the room. I keep feeling this nagging urge to ask it something, and I think it's Violet's spirits, trying to use it as a homing device to find us."

"Yeah," he agreed. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to fall asleep, and heard him rummaging around the room before he clicked off the lamp next to his nightstand and the motel room was enveloped in blackness.

Hours later, the sound of snow plows scraping the highway just beyond the motel's parking lot stirred me out of a deep sleep peppered with disconnected, colorful dreams. I looked around the room wondering for just a second where I was, and then felt Trey's arm around my waist and remembered everything. From across the room, I could hear Henry snoring slightly, and sensed Trey's light breath on my neck.

And then, with a jolt of horror, I realized that the pendulum was in my right hand, and I'd been clutching it tightly while I slept.