I sat straight up in bed.

I was in Traverse City, Michigan, a long way home from my familiar bedroom and even from the steamy, stuffy dorm room at Dearborn to which I'd grown reluctantly accustomed.

How could that pendulum have gotten into my hand? Both Henry and Trey were asleep. My muscles ached from deep rest, and the spot on the bed where I'd just woken up was still warm. It seemed very unlikely that I'd gotten out of bed during the night to ransack the room in search of the pendulum, which I'd told Henry to hide right before I'd drifted off to sleep.

I set the pendulum down slowly on the night stand, allowing the metal chain on which it hung coil around the pendant. Even more terrifying than finding the pendulum in my hand was my fear—or rather, suspicion—that I'd asked questions of it while I was sleeping. I didn't need to reach out to Laura the shop girl at the occult book store on the North Side of Chicago for confirmation that the pendulum would still provide me with answers even if I was asking questions of it with my mind rather than with spoken words. Just seeing it resting there, its chain coiled around it like a snake... I knew what I'd done.

But what had I asked it? As I'd been falling asleep, finding a way to stop the buses from embarking on the drive back toward Weeping Willow had been on my mind. Maybe I'd asked it how to stop the buses, or if a particular tactic like talking to the bus drivers before they sat behind their wheels might be most effective. Leaning forward, I parted the curtains hanging on the window to take a look outside. Not surprisingly, it was snowing. It was hardly a blizzard but the flakes were large and lazy, and from the looks of the parking lot blanketed in white, it was sticking.

Easing back down on the bed, the unmistakable sensation that something was in the room with me made me get goose bumps. I didn't dare to look around, but I got the feeling that whatever it was, it wanted me to look in the mirror hanging on the wall near the closet. To keep myself from looking over there in the dark and most likely getting a bad fright, I fixed my eyes on the pendulum and tried not to move. The question formed in my head as clear as a bell, "Will we be able to stop the buses?" My fingers longed to reach out and lift that pendulum, to feel its weight, and watch how it might answer the question I was now certain I'd asked in my dreams.

"McKenna."

I heard a girl's voice and didn't turn... just kept my eyes on that pendulum.

"McKenna!"

This time I felt fingers on my shoulders, and when my name was repeated, it was Trey, not some kind of ghoul or evil spirit, trying to get my attention.

"What are you doing?"

I heard the click of Trey turning on the lamp next to our shared bed and it was as if someone had slapped me across the face, waking me up completely.  "I don't know," I stammered, not wanting him to think I'd intentionally gotten up to play with the pendulum and risk getting us all in trouble. "I just woke up and that was in my hand, and I thought something bad was watching us in that mirror," I continued.

"How did that get into your hand?" Trey asked, sounding a little impatient. "Henry hid it when you told him to. I saw him. He put it in the safe and tapped in a four-digit code to lock it."

I shivered. "Look, either something wants me to ask it a question, or it wants me to ask. If I keep trying to suppress this urge, inevitably I'm going to be tricked into doing whatever this thing wants."

Trey's blue eyes shone even deeper and more royal in the darkness, lit by the sliver of street lamp light stealing into our room through the parted curtains, than they did in broad daylight. He looked troubled, and a bit like he was unsure if I was sane enough to be trusted. "I don't know, McKenna. It sounds really risky. I really don't like that hunk of cheap metal determining our next moves. Don't you think it's kind of... easily influenced?"

I knew what I was going to say before the words left my mouth, and I felt horrible about it, knowing that there was no way Trey would perceive this as anything other than my allegiance shifting over to Henry, but I also knew that I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep that night. Even if we opened the door of our motel room and hurled that pendulum out into the snow, it was going to find its way back into my hand before the sun rose and we had to decide on our course of action for trying to prevent the bus accident.

"I think we should wake up Henry," I began, "and vote."

My hunch about Trey's reaction was correct, and I saw in his eyes a mixture of anger and hurt that told me instantly that he felt like I was betraying him. But he didn't know; he hadn't been in that occult bookshop with us the day I'd first played with the pendulum. He didn't understand how naturally it came to me, feeling its energy move through my arm, and how overwhelming the compulsion was to just touch it. To feel its weight hanging from my fingertips.

"Alright," he agreed. I turned on the overhead light in the room and Trey shook Henry awake, moving more quickly to the bed than I could presumably because he didn't like the idea of me climbing over Henry's sheets to touch his bare shoulders.

"What's up, guys?" Henry asked as he stirred awake, obviously not having been sleeping very deeply.

"We have to cleanse the room," I said sternly. "Something is adamant that I ask the pendulum some questions."

Henry blinked a few times, digesting what I'd said, and then sat up in bed. "Okay. I'll get the pendulum."

"She's already got it, bro," Trey told Henry, sitting back down on the edge of the bed where we'd been sleeping.

"How is that possible?" Henry asked, wiping his eyes. "I locked it in the safe." He looked up at me with a look of sheer terror on his face. "You didn't... guess the combination."

"No! I swear I didn't," I insisted. In fact, the small safe in the room was still locked.

Henry punched in the four-digit code he'd made up only a few hours earlier. "Zero, nine, one, eight. September eighteenth, Olivia's birthday," he said as he tapped buttons. The door of the safe popped open kind of like the door of a microwave, and naturally, the safe was empty because the pendulum was already sitting innocuously on the nightstand.

"No way," Henry said firmly. "No way did that pendulum just magically transport itself out of a locked safe."

I wrung my hands, not wanting either Henry or Trey to think for a second that I was channeling evil, at least not intentionally. "I swear, you guys. I can't read minds. I can't teleport items across rooms. I have no idea how the pendulum got out of there on its own, but it did."

"Okay," Trey said sternly, cutting through the tension in the room. "McKenna thinks we have to clean the room so that she ask the pendulum something important."

With a nod of the head but lingering confusion, Henry gave me permission to begin.

I dug through the crumpled Burger King napkins I'd been using as Kleenex the entire day in the pocket of Olivia's winter coat until I felt the dry, crunchy leaves of sage beneath my fingertips. Surely some of them had broken off in the hours that had passed since Trey and I had plucked the bunch from the dried flower arrangement in the lobby at Fitzgerald's. There was a book of matches from a nearby bar in the nightstand next to Henry's bed (which wasn't too surprising, since there was an old plastic ashtray in the bathroom and presumably guests smoked in our room from time to time).

Naturally as soon as I lit the dry leaves and began walking through our motel room, waving them slightly, thick smoke poured from the bunch in my hand.

"Is that supposed to happen?" Trey asked.

Making all three of us nearly jump out of our skin, the smoke detector on the ceiling just outside the entrance to the bathroom began beeping like crazy.

"Aw, jeez," Henry muttered. He dragged one of the heavy, stained upholstered chairs over from near the windows to directly underneath the smoke detector and climbed on top of it. He pulled the smoke detector right off the ceiling, silencing it, but we were all still on edge. "Do you think anyone heard that?"

Trey shrugged. "I don't think there are guests in the rooms on either side of us. The parking lot's kind of empty. I think we're okay."

I was standing there watching like an idiot, letting the sage burn in one spot near the windows. I snapped back into action, waving the smoke into all four corners of the room we were sharing. None of us spoke or made a move for the pendulum until I rushed into the bathroom to run the sage under water, wanting to save at least a little bit of what remained of the bunch to cleanse the room after we were done.

"Okay," I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Trey sat next to me and Henry sat on the edge of his bed, across from us. I slid my fingers through the chain of the necklace, and let the pendulum swing. It automatically began swinging in a clockwise motion.

"Why's it saying yes?" Henry asked. "You haven't even asked it anything yet."

"I think I did while I was asleep," I confessed. "It was the question on my mind when we went to bed. Will we be able to stop the buses?"

The pendulum was swinging wildly now in a clockwise loop.

"How the hell are we ever going to be able to physically stop two buses?' Trey wondered aloud.

Just then, an unholy cacophony of honking and beeping began outside our room. It sounded like the car alarms of every single vehicle in the lot went off in unison.

"Oh, my god," Henry shouted, jumping to his feet.

Trey rushed to the window and parted the curtains, and Henry  began tugging on his jeans. "Trey, stay away from the window!"

Trey let the curtains close. We began hearing footsteps on the balcony outside our window racing down to the parking lot, and yelling coming from the parking lot as other guests at the motel struggled to be overheard over the alarms. I had a terrible, sickening feeling that I'd just fallen directly into a trap set by Violet's spirits. The timing was just a little too suspicious that I'd no sooner posed my question to the pendulum than strange occurrences had started happening at our motel.

Henry slipped his feet into his snow boots and pocketed his truck keys. "You two stay in here and don't come outside, not for any reason!"

I was panicking. "Maybe we should leave. Right now. I think the spirits want the cops to find us here."

"It's just a car alarm, McKenna. Anything could have set it off. An icicle, even," Henry said and exited our motel room while he was still pulling on his winter coat.

"He's right," Trey said after a moment passed. "I can't imagine cops coming over here just to deal with a couple car alarms going off."

But then, of course, the next thing we heard was the jagged wail of a police car siren. Trey's eyes popped wide open. "What do we do?"

We had no reason to be afraid... yet. Presumably the cops would talk to the other guests, stick around until all of the alarms had been silenced, and then go along on their merry way to fight crime elsewhere. But every time we heard one alarm cease in the overall symphony of noise, a few seconds later, it would resume.

I shook my head, backing away from the door. "I don't know. If they figure out that Henry's from our hometown, or if Cheryl or Kelly said anything back at the hotel..."

Trey's eyes searched the room wildly. "Is there another way out of here?"

"Just the window in the bathroom. But it's a sheer drop, two stories, and it's two-thirty in the morning, Trey!"

Trey's eyes landed on our bed. "Okay, let's just think about this for a second... if the cops ask even what he's doing here, he'll tell them the same story he told Miss Kirkovic and those other cops up near Mackinac Island. That he's here skiing with friends. So we have to make it look like he's staying in this room alone."

At warp speed, we hastily made the bed we'd been sleeping in, trying to smooth out the wrinkled sheets as fast as we could without taking the time to actually remake the bed and give it hospital corners. We shoved our winter coats and snow boots under the bed, and Trey dove under before I did. At least two of the car alarms out in the parking lot had fallen silent, but it was still impossible to hear what was going on out there over the persisting alarms. I hesitated after dropping to my knees. The space under the bed was very cramped. Maybe eight, nine inches.

"It's dusty down here," Trey warned, which shouldn't have surprised either of us. Vacuuming regularly underneath beds was probably a huge waste of time for motel maids. But the dark space scared me. If there was dust down there, there were probably other things, like dead bugs. Junk left behind by previous guests.

Just as my fear had gotten the better of me and I was about to sit down on the edge of the bed, I heard keys jam into the lock on our door, and I scrambled under the bed.

"It's just... uh..." Henry entered the room, and other footsteps followed his. "Just me in here."

Trey and I struggled to control our breathing as we were both simultaneously relieved that we'd gone to the trouble of hiding, and freaked out that police who presumably thought we were armed and dangerous were within mere inches of us. The bedspread on our bed was long enough to nearly reach the floor, which both succeeded in hiding us and making it impossible for us to see what was going on. The only thing preventing me from screaming bloody murder was the electric charge between us, the attraction that made me eager for all of this madness with Violet to end so that we could get on with our lives and be a normal couple.

The bed above us sagged as presumably someone sat down on it. Trey and I saw the springs dip toward the edge of the bed on my right side. "So, you said you're here skiing with your friends. I don't see any friends here, pal," deep voice said.

"Yeah, well, I mean, I'm here in Traverse City to ski with friends. But they're not here yet. They're delayed because of the snow," Henry lied.

"These friends wouldn't happen to be those missing kids from Wisconsin, would they? Because every cop from here to Windsor's looking for them."

"No, no," Henry insisted. "My friends from college. I dropped out of Northwestern last semester because of some family problems. My frat brothers are supposed to meet me here. But they're driving up from Chicago and got off to a late start because of classes, and the storm kept them from getting here tonight."

"So," another deep voice said from closer to the door. "If we call them right now and ask them to verify that, they will?"

"Um, sure," Henry said, sounding a little surprised. Trey and I both cringed. There were no friends back in Chicago planning to join Henry on a ski trip. He was busted, and if he was busted and hauled off to jail in Michigan, what would happen to us? "Here, you can call my friend Charlie. Although he might not be awake at this hour. It's kinda late."

After a moment of tension, the second cop said, "Hi there. Is this Charlie, Henry's friend? Great. This is Officer Raymond Mulvaney with the Traverse City police department. Your friend Henry tells me that you boys have a ski trip planned."

There was a pause, and Trey and I stared into each other's eyes. It all could have gone to pieces at any moment at that point. Mischa, Violet, Tracy Hartford's wake... none of it would have mattered because we were going to have handcuffs slapped on us and be marched out of our motel room down the snowy stairs to a police car waiting in the parking lot.