"Oh, the snow. Right. Yeah. Well, I hope you have a safe drive tomorrow, Charlie. Sleep tight and sorry to bother you at this hour," Officer Mulvaney said. The disappointment in his voice that he didn't have reason to cuff Henry and march him away was audible.

The police apologized (in a tone that suggested that they weren't truly sorry at all) to Henry and told him they just had to dot every i and cross every t. Surely, they said, he could understand. I wasn't sure what had just happened; I recognized Charlie's name as the fraternity brother who Henry had brought home to the Richmonds' as a guest the weekend of Olivia's sixteenth birthday party. But if Henry had had the foresight to warn Charlie that cops might be calling to verify a cockamamie story about a ski trip at an absurd hour, Henry was more of a logistical mastermind than we'd given him credit for being.

The racket in the parking lot had subsided and Henry thanked them for their vigilance and assured them he'd contact them if he came across any information about the missing teens from his hometown. We heard him flip the deadbolt on the door and pull the chain lock as a secondary measure to make sure any attempted reentry by the police wouldn't take us by surprise. Even though the coast was clear, Trey and I held our positions under the bed.

"Stay down there, guys," he said in a low voice. "Let's give it a few minutes to make sure they're not outside listening."

So, we waited. Trey spotted a pair of lacy panties on his left side and fired them like a slingshot toward the wall for my amusement. "Gross," I mouthed at him.

Henry flipped on the television set and then walked into the space in between the beds and dropped to his knees.

"It's cold out, and it's late," he said. "They probably have a ton of traffic stuff to deal with because of the snow.

We waited what felt like an eternity but was probably more like fifteen minutes, and then we crawled out on our bellies and brushed ourselves off. I was covered in a film of dust.

"How did Charlie know what to tell the cops?" I asked Henry as quietly as I could.

"I was texting with him earlier when I was chilling in the ski lodge. I figured it might come in handy to have my cover story ironed out since I've been lying to cops left and right for the last twenty-four hours," Henry said. "We're frat brothers. He's supposed to have my back." It felt like years had passed since the accident we'd witnessed on the Mackinac Bridge, but it had only been one day. I wondered about that guy whose car had gone over the side of the bridge whether or not the police had ever found his car in the icy lake.

"Good thinking, man," Trey congratulated Henry. "I thought it was over. The end of the line."

The t-shirt of Olivia's that I'd worn as pajamas was smeared with black and probably all sorts of gross allergens. If I'd had any options, I would have changed before climbing back into the clean bed wearing it. But Henry was adamant that we turn out the lights and at least make it appear to the outside world like he was going back to sleep for the night, so I pulled the blankets over myself and accepted that sleeping covered in grime was just one more thing I'd have to get Violet back for.

Unlike earlier that night, this time our breathing was ragged. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell that neither Trey nor Henry was anywhere close to dozing off again. Antsy and distracted despite my own exhaustion, I opened my eyes and looked up at the blank ceiling, wondering when and if I'd ever sleep in my own bed at home in Willow again, and realizing for the first time since I'd escaped from Dearborn how desperately I wanted to. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glint of moonbeam bouncing off the pendulum.

"Hey guys?" I propped myself up on my elbows. "What should we do with this pendulum?"

I heard rustling blankets and knew that I'd caught Henry and Trey's attention.

"We might need it," Henry said, no doubt thinking about the wide variety of crazy things we'd have to face the next day.

"I don't know," Trey said apprehensively. "I think Violet's using it to track us. It's giving me a bad vibe."

"Well, what do you guys suppose we should do with it?" Henry asked, sounding testy. "I can't exactly open the door and chuck it out into the parking lot if there are still cops out there watching our room. I mean, that would be kind of suspicious, right?"

Trey reached over me and grabbed the pendulum where it rested on the night stand beside me before he pushed back the blankets and climbed out of bed. I saw his pale torso move through the room past Henry's bedroom, the shadows collected beneath his sharp shoulder blades and the vertebrae that ran down the center of his back. "I've got this," he muttered as he entered the bathroom.

Henry and I exchanged glances across the room – the whites of his eyes the most visible part of his face. We heard the whoosh of the window sliding open in the bathroom, and then the soft slap of it closing again.  A moment later, Trey returned and climbed back into bed, his bare legs noticeably colder than they'd been just moments earlier. "If that thing ends up back in this room before the sun rises, I think we should just use Mrs. Richmond's credit card to book ourselves flights to the Vatican to get exorcized."

This time, before we fell asleep, Trey wrapped his arms tightly around me, either to make Henry jealous or to keep me in one spot, I wasn't sure. There had once been a time when we'd shared my bed back in Willow when Trey's presence had been comforting. Although I was grateful beyond measure that he was with me in Traverse City, I knew that there was nothing he could do to protect me—or himself, for that matter. Violet's spirits seemed intent on showing us that they had the upper hand, and the chill that had settled into my chest cavity made me strongly suggest that they were, in fact, winning.

The following morning, awareness that Henry and Trey were still sleeping slowly bloomed. The curtains were drawn but I could see through the part in them that the early morning light was a harsh shade of gray. Without getting out of bed to see if it was still snowing outside, I could tell by the crisp scent in the air even inside our motel room that it was. There had to be at least a foot of snow out there; the roads must have been disastrous. The early morning events involving the pendulum and the car alarms came back to me in a wave of panic, and then I realized that the pendulum wasn't in either of my hands, and it hadn't found its way back on to the night stand. I was safe... or at least as much as I could be under the circumstances.

The predicted events of the day played out in my head in vivid detail. Hailey West would die in a fiery bus crash, according to the story Violet told at her Halloween party. Hailey's body would be pulled out of some kind of scorched wreckage. Abby Johanssen would also die in some kind of vehicular accident, although I was fuzzier on the details about Abby's prediction. Nausea gripped me for the first time that day as I considered how utterly stupid those girls had been to play a game at Violet's suggestion. Around the time when all of the rumors had been going around at school about Olivia's death, I remembered being in my own room on Halloween night, and being so distraught about the predicament my cursed friends were in that I'd completely overlooked the holiday until I heard trick-or-treaters running around outside.

"Stop thinking about it," I heard Trey whisper behind me, and turned to face him. His eyes weren't even open yet but I could tell he'd been awake for a few minutes and I hadn't previously noticed.

"I'm trying to stop," I lied. But the truth was, I couldn't stop. We still hadn't figured out a way to keep the buses from leaving Fitzgerald's. Somewhere, a few miles away from our motel, Hailey and Abby were probably still sleeping peacefully in the hotel rooms they were sharing with classmates. It was unbearable, knowing in my heart that they were fated to die that day and that anything I did to try to change fate would most likely mean I'd not see Trey or my mom again for a very long time. Staring at Trey, I got the sense that the visuals I'd just been allowing to run wild in my head were now displaying on the insides of his eyelids, like somehow we were both imagining the same movie trailer. "Did you dream about it?"

Without answering, he pulled me closer and stroked my hair. "Yeah."  

"What did you see?" I whispered, afraid of how he would respond.

"Doesn't matter," he shrugged, finally opening his eyes to let me see their magnificent blue. "It's not going to come true. I won't let it."

"What?" I demanded, lightly pounding on his bare chest with my fists. The color of his eyes brought out the animal in me. I wished Henry wasn't just twenty feet away, because there was a good chance that morning was the last time I'd ever see Trey's sleepy morning face, with his puffy eyelids and rosy cheeks. Whenever my thoughts drifted toward him while I was away at Dearborn, this was my favorite way to think of him, in the mornings, when he was mine alone to observe. He looked so very different now with blond stubble on his head than he'd looked in the fall, but his face was still the most familiar sight in the world to me. "Now you have to tell me."

Trey bashfully smiled and fixed his gaze on a point past my head, toward the window, to avoid eye contact. "Nah, it's just..."

"Trey," I said sternly.

His smile faded and his eyes returned to mine. "I dreamed something impossible. So it doesn't matter because it's not going to happen."

 "Come on," I heard myself say. Nothing was impossible. An abundance of seemingly impossible things had happened to us over the course of the previous six months. If inaudible, invisible spirits had managed to shatter Mr. Richmond's windshield with an icicle, lock us into a freezing cold columbarium, and remove a pendant necklace from a locked safe in a motel room, surely they could manipulate the events of a random Sunday.

"Seriously, don't worry about it," Trey said, probably just to make me feel better. "Sometimes my dreams are way off base."

After we'd all taken fast showers (I skipped drying my hair, figuring that messing around with a hair dryer and electricity the way my luck was going was probably a bad idea), and redressed in our stale-smelling outfits, we had to figure out the safest way to check out of our hotel room. Henry insisted on going down to the truck solo to see if any police were still keeping an eye on our room, even though none of us could think of a viable reason for him to be venturing down to the parking lot in the freezing cold in case they asked him what he was doing. It wasn't as if we'd left suitcases in the truck, or really anything of value at all.

But still, insisting on taking the precaution before we all stepped outside together, Henry dashed down to the truck after bundling up and returned a few minutes later covered in a thin layer of snow. He carried with him a crumpled map that he must have pulled from the glove compartment.

"There's a police car parked at the entrance to the parking lot. I don't know if they're specifically watching us, or just lingering there waiting for the snow plow to come through," Henry said. "The roads don't appear to be as bad as I thought they'd be. I mean, there's probably about two feet of snow out there, but it looks kind of like plows have been working all night."

We were essentially trapped. If we were to leave the room with Henry, there was a good chance the police lurking in the lot would figure out immediately what was going on. We also couldn't wait much longer to check out of the motel and get over to Fitzgerald's because we didn't know what time the buses bound for Weeping Willow would be leaving. The return drive to our hometown would take nearly seven hours, and we assumed they'd want to get off to an early start considering that it was Sunday, there was school the following day, and they'd probably want to finish the drive before the sun set.

"Maybe you could drive around the back of the motel in your truck, and we could jump out of the bathroom window and into it, like in the movies," Trey joked.

"It's too high!" I exclaimed instantly out of fear that one of the boys might actually consider the bathroom window stunt a possibility. "Trey, that's at least twenty feet. We'd break our legs."

Henry sat down in the stained chair near the window to think. The roar of a snow plow filled the room, making us all more aware that it was almost eight in the morning. I had a strong hunch that we were running out of time; my former classmates were probably at the Fitzgerald's restaurant by that point, giggling and teasing each other over pancakes before the long drive home, having no idea how vulnerable they were at that moment to the curse that awaited them on the snow-covered highway. The snow plow's blade scraped the pavement, it dragged, and the vehicle made a distracting beep-beep-beep each time it backed up to begin the process again.

"Wait a second," Trey said suddenly, rising to his feet. He hurried into the bathroom and lifted the window for a better look outside. The snow plow had made its way to the back parking lot, visible from our bathroom window. The back lot was empty except for one VW Golf due to the motel's low vacancy. As the plow cleared the lot, it piled snow against the base of the building. We watched in hopeful silence as it began piling snow directly under our bathroom window, since fortunately no guests had chosen to park in the spaces there.

"That's a dumb idea," Henry muttered. "When that melts, it's going damage the foundation of the building."

Dumb idea or not, the twenty foot drop from our bathroom window down to the snow below was reduced to more like fifteen feet by the time the snow plow had cleared the back parking lot. It was still a long distance to drop, but at least it was a drop directly into snow instead of bone-breaking blacktop.

"What do you think?" Trey asked me, ignoring Henry.

"I guess," I said, still not thrilled about the concept of jumping out of a window. "We could try it."

"If we get out of the building this way and are careful, we can climb into the passenger side of the truck without the police seeing us," Trey hypothesized.

"No way," Henry said, now catching on to what we were planning to do. "Too risky. What happens if one of you guys breaks an arm or a leg? If you show up in a hospital, you're going to be arrested. It's as simple as that. We should just wait until the police get called away. Their shift has to end eventually. Let's just be smart about this and wait it out."

"We can't," I reminded him. "If we don't stop the buses before they leave, we'll never be able to keep the accident from happening."

After a little more arguing, Trey and I got our boots and winter coats back on, and with Henry watching us, we decided Trey would jump first. He stood on the toilet seat and lifted both the window and the torn screen. With his puffy winter coat on, squeezing his torso through the window was a bit of a squeeze.

I assured him, "You don't have to do this if you think you're going to get hurt. Really, Trey, it's not worth it."

"It's okay," he said distractedly. "I just don't think there's any elegant way to do this. I'm just going to have to go for it." And then he added with a daredevil's smile, "This is completely crazy."

And with that, he used his arms to hoist himself up a little higher. With a hop, he squeezed half of his body through. Henry and I rushed to grab his legs, and he yelled over his shoulder, "Just give me a push."

Naturally neither of us felt good about literally shoving our friend out of a window, but after an anxiously exchanged glance, we did exactly that. I stuck my head through the window and watched as Trey turned once in the air, landing more or less flat on his back on the enormous pile of snow that had just been aggregated. For a moment, he didn't move after impact. He just lay there, stunned.

"Are you okay?" I called out, perhaps a little too loudly. My voice echoed out over the empty parking lot.

"I think so," he said, finally turning over on the snow pile on his hands and knees. Sliding on his stomach, he eased himself over the sloping edge of the snow pile and my heart stopped thumping from panic as soon as I saw him standing with his feet on the ground, brushing off his pants.

"Do you want me to help?" Henry asked me now that it was my turn.

"Yeah, maybe just hold my legs until I'm ready?" I asked. I didn't want him to see that I was shaking with fear. I wasn't a boy and I hadn't grown up with brothers. Jumping out of a window was one of the last things I ever would have expected to do in my lifetime. Gingerly I climbed up on top of the toilet seat and hoisted myself up through the window as I'd seen Trey do, until my hips were parallel with the bottom of the window frame and my center of gravity was already extended out over the snow pile.

"Just drop," Trey encouraged me from below. "It's less scary than you think."

But it was freezing outside, and the snow pile looked so very, very far down. I wasn't sure how Trey had been able to flip himself over during his free fall to prevent himself from landing on his head. Maybe he'd had diving lessons as a kid—I'd never asked him—but I certainly hadn't. As I tried to work up the nerve to just go for it, I felt Henry's tight grip on my legs and couldn't shake the suspicion that I was going to break my neck on my way down. My breath was quickening and becoming inconsistent; I felt like I was having an anxiety attack.

"You don't have to do this if you're scared, McKenna. We can find another way," Henry said tenderly. It occurred to me—not for the first or last time—how truly lucky Olivia had been to have him for an older brother. He was always careful, always sensitive to feelings.

I wanted to tell him to just pull me back inside. But I knew I couldn't, because at that very moment, poor Hailey West and Abby Johanssen were probably rolling their suitcases down to the front lobby of Fitzgerald's, thinking they'd be back at home in their own safe, warm bedrooms before nightfall. I had no choice but to drop into the snow and try to save their lives.

"Okay," I said.

I wiggled forward and let go of the window frame, and felt myself drop like a ton of bricks down to the snow. The fall was over before I really had a sense of it beginning, but in that one tangible moment of pure gravitational pull, I was so afraid that the next sound I'd hear would be that of my own neck snapping that I was pretty sure my heart stopped.

Unlike Trey, I fell inelegantly on my face, arms flailing. My fall was kind of like a belly flop, only the snow was harder than water and I felt the impact of my weight colliding with the snow in my rib cage. Every bone in my body felt jostled a few centimeters out of place. If I hadn't been awake before I'd made the jump... I was more awake than I'd ever been in my whole life after I'd hit the snow.

"See? Not so bad," Trey said as he assisted me down from the snow bank.

Henry urged us to be careful as he tossed the key to his truck down to Trey and then closed the bathroom window. Our plan was to make our way around to the front and climb into the passenger side of the truck, creeping along the wall of the motel and trying as much as possible to hide behind other guests' parked cars. We'd open the driver's side door so that Henry could slip in and drive away after checking out of the hotel, hopefully without me and Trey being seen.

"Here goes nothing," Trey said, taking the lead. We walking along the perimeter of the back parking lot at the base of the snow pile until we reached the corner of the building, and then Trey peeked around the side to make sure no cars were coming. At the next corner, before we strode out into the main parking lot that faced the highway, Trey poked his head around first to see what kind of situation awaited us in the lot. "He was right, the cop car is still there, right at the entrance of the lot. It looks like they're watching the motel, not the highway."

I panicked a little. Of course those police were still lingering around the motel because they hadn't entirely bought Henry's story. It was just too suspicious that a kid from Weeping Willow, Wisconsin—a town that happened to be missing two teens known for bad behavior—would turn up in Michigan and be involved in a car crash resulting in a morbidity.

"What should we do?" I asked.

Trey seemed a little squeamish. "Just wait a second. Some guy is walking across the lot toward his car."

We stood waiting in silence out in the cold, and I marveled at how pretty everything looked covered in a fresh blanket of snow. It was still snowing lightly, but not as heavily as it had been when we'd first gone to bed the night before. We heard a trunk open and close, and then an engine start. Trey took my hand in his. "It's now or never," he said.

Crouching, we inched forward into the parking lot. We had less cover than I had anticipated because several cars had already left the lot that morning. A Corolla blocked the police car's view of us until we trotted twenty feet to hide behind a huge GMC truck. From there, Henry's truck was a good twenty feet away. We'd be totally exposed as we ran the distance, so we paused for a second as if timing was going to make any difference. The crunch of footsteps in hardened snow echoed across the lot, and Trey peeked around the front of the GMC.

"Henry's coming!"

I had no clue how he'd managed to check out of the motel so quickly, but it was imperative that we get into the truck before he reached it so that he wouldn't be left standing there without his key. We made a mad dash for the truck, squatting and running, and Trey opened the passenger side door with one swift motion. He urged me in and I tried as best I could to stay low so that the police potentially watching from one hundred feet away wouldn't see me as I got situated crouching below the dashboard. After so many months of listlessly shuffling around the fenced property at the Dearborn School, all of this sudden physicality was taking my body by surprise.

"The door!" Trey whispered as he climbed in behind me and left the passenger side door open a crack. I reached over to the driver side door and lifted the lock just as Henry reached it and got into the truck without acknowledging either of us, trying to act natural.  Trey closed the passenger side door behind him in perfect unison with Henry's slam of his own driver's side door so as not to tip off the cops with two door slams. We both continued crouching below the dashboard as best we could—my chin rested on Trey's knee since we were smashed together in such a tight space—as we felt the truck back out of our parking space, cross the lot, and slow down to turn onto the highway. I looked up to see Henry nodding at the police, and then it was over. We made a left onto the highway and were on our way toward Fitzgerald's.

"Okay, so what's our game plan?" Henry asked when Trey and I wiggled out from under the dashboard and took proper seats at a stop light. "If the buses are in the lot, as we just going to march right up to the drivers and tell them that we forbid them from driving back to Willow?"

"Maybe we should slash the tires," Trey suggested in all seriousness.

"Right," Henry said, "I don't even have a sharp knife on me, so if that's really going to be our plan, we need to stop at a K-Mart or something."

"I don't know," I stammered, imagining the buses toppling over because of slashed tires. My greatest worry was that in some way or another, our attempt to prevent the bus accident would end up being its cause. That kind of dark trickery seemed to be how Violet's spirits operated. "That could backfire, right? I mean, have you ever—"

Words escaped me as we approached the entrance to Fitzgerald's Lodge. Out from the thick, snow-topped trees drove a bright yellow school bus, which turned right ahead of us on the highway. Following it and making the same right turn was a second yellow school bus.

"Oh, no," Henry murmured.

"We're too late," Trey said.

Henry let the truck idle on the empty highway for a moment as we watched the buses drive away from us along the slushy highway. Without any of us saying a word, it was as if a common thought ran through all of our heads in unison: those buses weren't driving toward Weeping Willow, they were driving toward doom.

I was the first to break the silence. "We have to stop them."

Henry's foot eased on to the gas and slowly we began moving forward. We rounded a bend in the highway and saw the back of the second bus again. The silhouettes of our former classmates through the large back window of the bus could be seen. Heads bopped along to music, hands sporadically appeared over seats. As Henry gained on the second bus, I was able to see that Justin MacKenzie, the lead singer of the only band at our high school, the Cheeseballs, was sharing one of the back seats with Roy Needham, one of the stoner guys with whom Trey used to smoke cigarettes behind the dumpster outside the cafeteria. On the other side, Michelle Nylander and Cat Warren, both of whom were heavily involved in the drama club, were sharing a seat.

"Get closer," I urged Henry even as we were starting to close in on the bus.

"It's kind of dangerous," Henry said. "I mean, if you guys think the bus is really going to crash, I don't want to be following it too closely, you know?"

Trey's eyes narrowed. "We have to get around them."

Both Henry and I looked at Trey as if he was crazy, but he was adamant. "If we want to stop them, we have to get around them, and force them to stop. From back here, all we can do is watch when something awful happens."

Henry, who was growing irritable, snapped, "How should I do that, man? This is a two-lane highway. The only way I can get around the bus is to drive into oncoming traffic."

I heard Trey's response in my head before he said the words aloud, and even though I wished he wouldn't say them, I knew there was no other way.

"What oncoming traffic? The highway's empty, dude."

My knuckles were white from clutching the front seat so tightly. I sympathized with Henry's reluctance to just swerve into the other lane to bypass the buses; I'd had to take a similar risk months earlier on the day when Trey and I made a mad dash for White Ridge Lake to hide Violet's locket. But it hadn't been snowing that day, I'd only had to pass one truck (not two buses), and I had almost gotten myself and Trey killed.

I saw the muscles in Henry's jaw harden as he checked in his rearview just once to make sure there weren't any drivers behind us to witness this catastrophic driving move. We couldn't see around the bus, so he slowed the truck's speed so put a little distance between ourselves and it. Then, preparing for the possibility that he'd have to swerve us back into our current lane if unexpected oncoming traffic was barreling toward us in the other lane, he crossed over the double yellow lines. The lane ahead was clear of traffic, fortunately, but it was slushy. The truck's back wheels fishtailed slightly as he hit the gas and attempted to speed ahead of the buses before we encountered any traffic headed directly toward us. The speed to which we accelerated terrified me and I pressed my lips together to keep myself from making a sound.

It was as we passed the first bus on our right that we realized kids from school on the left side of the bus were looking through their steamy windows at Trey. Some kids gave him the finger. Others, like Josh Taubman, the president of the Spanish National Honor Society, waved. The bad news was that the secret was out—half of the kids in the junior class at Weeping Willow High School were aware that Trey and I were on the loose and traveling with Henry by the time we reached the front of that first bus. And the other half of the junior class became aware by the time Henry sped ahead of the bus in front of it.

He continued to floor the truck until we were a good two hundred feet ahead of the buses, and then he slammed on the brakes. The back wheels of the truck skidded in the slush until the pickup was positioned at about a forty-five-degree angle in the lane, and Henry let the truck idle.

"This is it," he said. We all watched through his driver side window as the first bus slowed to a stop to avoid smashing into us. "Are you guys sure you want to do this?"

Trey and I nodded. I wasn't sure what we would say just yet, but the good thing was that we had stopped the buses. The drivers would have no choice but to hear us out at that point. Trey opened the passenger side door and I followed him out into the cold air.

The first bus rolled to a stop, and we saw the second bus slow and idle behind it. Henry shut off the pick-up truck's engine. The first person to step off the bus and confront us, surprisingly, was Mr. Dean. Not the bus driver. My lips began to form a smile. Mr. Dean had once liked me enough to single me out and ask me to run for student government. Of all the teachers at Weeping Willow High School to have been chaperoning the class ski trip, I assumed he might be more likely than others to listen to what I had to say.

But I assumed incorrectly.

"McKenna Brady!" he said sternly as he stepped out into the snowy road. "You are in serious trouble, young lady. Half the police in the state of Wisconsin are out looking for you."

"I know, Mr. Dean," I said, figuring politeness wouldn't hurt my cause. "You can call the police and tell them to come take us away, but please, listen to me. These buses are in danger. I can't tell you how we know this, just—please, believe us. One of these buses is going to flip over and the other's going to burst into flames."

Miss Kirkovic stepped off the bus behind him with a state of sheer shock on her face when she saw me and Trey.

"I think I speak for everyone in Weeping Willow when I say that I've just about heard enough about this curse nonsense," Mr. Dean told me sharply. "I don't think you understand the seriousness of the trouble you're in, Miss Brady. Your parents must be worried sick about you."

I flinched when he mentioned my parents; I was pretty sure my mom actually was worried sick about me, but that my dad probably knew in his gut that if I didn't have things under control, I'd call him.

"She's not playing games, Mr. Dean," Trey said. I heard footsteps behind us and turned to see Henry shoving his hands in his coat pockets. He'd joined us, essentially made himself susceptible to trouble with the police for aiding runaways. "We really do think something bad is going to happen to these buses. We're asking you to be responsible and just consider the lives of all the kids on board."

"Listen to him," Henry told Mr. Dean, nodding at Trey, in his deep voice, so much more mature and authoritative than ours. "You have to call these kids' parents and arrange for some other way for them to get home. These buses aren't safe."

This was the cue for the bus driver from the second bus and Mrs. Knutsen, the French teacher, to walk up to where we had all gathered on the side of the road to find out what was going on. "What's happening?" the bus driver asked, trying to make sense of all of us. Kids on the first bus were pointing at us and pounding on windows trying to get our attention.  A tiny flame of resentment ignited within me and I tried my best to ignore it; didn't they realize I was trying to save them?

But Mr. Dean had already whipped out his cell phone and was dialing. "I'll tell you what's going to happen. I am calling the police and asking them to get over here as quickly as possible to pick up you two...menaces to society, so that you can be taken back to your military schools and we can get the rest of our students back home safely to their parents."

Miss Kirkovic rested one hand gently on Mr. Dean's shoulder. "We don't have to do that here, Tim," she said. "Let's deal with this when we get back to town. There's no sense in involving the police in Michigan."

She looked up once at Henry, as if making some kind of deal with him, and then I began panicking because I wondered what had happened in Trey's dream.

Mr. Dean's phone was raised to his ear, and a 911 dispatcher had answered. "Yes, hello? I'd like to report those two runaways from Wisconsin. I'm on Highway 31 just north of Five Mile Road, and those two kids are here. They're trying to stall two buses full of students bound for Weeping Willow, Wisconsin. Yes, sure. All right."

Trey reached for my hand and we stood, united, listening as Mr. Dean told the cops to come fetch us. When he ended the call he looked up smugly at Miss Kirkovic and said, "With all due respect, Christina, these kids are dangerous. There could be legal ramifications of us not reporting them here in Michigan. I want to play this by the book."

Trey smirked. By the book was one of his most hated sayings from high days at Weeping Willow High School. It was true, everyone in our small town believed wholeheartedly in playing things by the book.

"And you. You, Mr. Richmond. Don't think that you're not going to find yourself in a world of trouble. It's against the law to harbor runaways. I can't imagine your parents are going to be too thrilled to hear that you were driving these two all over tarnation, avoiding the law," Mr. Dean said to Henry.

Henry looked at both me and Trey and said, "Let's go. If they don't want to hear what we have to say, then there's nothing we can do to help them."

I knew that he was suggesting Trey and I leave with him right there, at that very moment. He was probably right; if we'd gotten into the truck and booked it right then, we probably could have avoided the police. But just as I was considering tugging on Trey's hand and saying, "he's right," I looked up at the bus and saw Abby Johanssen's face pressed against the window. She was watching with intense interest, and my heart began beating faster. If we couldn't get Mr. Dean to believe us, Abby would die. Looking right at her was too much for me to bear; I just couldn't give up and get back in Henry's truck.

"Please, Mr. Dean. You used to think of me as a good kid. Nothing's changed. There's nothing we could stand to gain just by trying to delay you guys from getting home. We really think something bad's going to happen," I pleaded.

Trey interjected, "We think one of the tires on the bus is going to blow out."

I saw red and blue lights bouncing off the snow on the trees before I even heard the police car approach. We were in for it, I knew, and all I could hope for was that the cops who'd investigated the cacophony of car alarms at the mote were off-duty at that point and wouldn't recognize Henry. But this was the moment we'd been dreading... the face-off with cops. If Trey and I were pulled into custody and returned to our respective schools, we could only hope that preventing Hailey and Abby's death that day would somehow break the curse. If it didn't, the game was over; we'd never get anywhere close enough to Violet to end things on other terms.

Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble, I heard in my head, as clear as a bell, and right then, I knew we'd messed up. On Christmas Eve when Jennie had visited us in the form of Bloody Heather, she'd told us we'd have to play the game again. Maybe I hadn't paid close enough attention, or I'd deprioritized that direction in our wild, desperate attempts to figure out how to end this thing as quickly as possible. But Jennie had told us how to do it and now I'd gone and blown it by insisting on trying to save Hailey and Abby. The whole point of going to Michigan had been to try to corner Violet and force her into the game, but she'd evaded us. As far as we knew, her bronchitis had just been a trap.

I was shaking as the cops walked around the front of the bus. They were both middle-aged, big-shouldered guys. Whether or not they recognized Henry, I couldn't tell, since Trey and I had been hiding under the bed, unable to see the faces of the cops who'd investigated our motel room the night before. Neither of their badges said MULVANEY, which gave me a little hope that they were newly on duty that morning.

"Here they are," the first cop said, looking me and Trey over. He had wire-rimmed glasses and looked like he probably wasn't a terrible guy when he wasn't in uniform. "You two have led the police on quite a goose chase."

Trey squeezed my hand more tightly and Henry took a step closer to me on my other side.

After a lot of heated ranting from Mr. Dean, the police began to understand that Mr. Dean, Mrs. Knutsen, and Miss Kirkovic all worked at the high school where Trey and I used to be students, and that the kids in the buses were our former classmates. Another police car arrived, and those police called the cops back in Weeping Willow to inform them that we'd been found in Michigan. I reasoned that it was only a matter of time at that point before someone called my mom and told her I'd be back in Willow in a matter of hours. Despite a lot of begging and pleading from Miss Kirkovic to let me and Trey ride back to school on the bus with the other kids since they were headed back to Weeping Willow anyway, the police insisted that they drive us.

"Sorry, miss," the youngest and most handsome of the police officers told her. "These two are just too slippery. We can't run the risk of either of them breaking away."

Miss Kirkovic was, however, instrumental in convincing the cops not to arrest Henry.

"This guy helped you two escape from your schools?" the cop with the glasses asked me and Trey while angling his thumb at Henry.

"No, that guy's an asshole," Trey said. I cringed before turning to watch him continue and realized he was lying to save Henry's hide. "We ran into him this morning in Traverse City and he was going to give us a lift back to town so we could turn ourselves in."

"But then we saw the school buses and thought we should try to stop them," I added.

"It's true. I ran into Henry at Fizgerald's yesterday. He's just here to ski with friends. His involvement in this is purely coincidence," Miss Kirkovic insisted.

Ultimately Henry was allowed to leave without being arrested, but he was told to drive his truck immediately back to Weeping Willow in case the cops there wanted to interview him. He watched helplessly through the windshield of his truck as we were loaded into the back of one of the police cars.

The back of the police car smelled like cigarette smoke and stale coffee. I wanted to laugh at myself since it was the second time in less than a year that Trey and I had landed ourselves in the back of a police car, bound for punishment. Thankfully, this time we weren't handcuffed, but both of us knew it was a heck of a long drive back to Weeping Willow, and one that would be agonizing considering that we both could do nothing for its duration other than reflect on how miserably we'd messed up. Violet's spirits had gotten us. They hadn't even had to work too hard; they'd gotten the best of us by using our own best intentions against us.

The buses parked ahead of the two police cars started their engines again and creaked into forward motion. The police officer behind the wheel of the car radio'd in that he had both of us in his car and expected to make it to our town in Wisconsin for the hand-off in approximately six and a half hours.

"Buckle up back there," he instructed us through the mesh grate separating the back seat from the front. "We'll stop in an hour or so in case either of you need to use a bathroom."

Oddly enough, because we'd already been on the highway that was the most direct path to take back over Lake Michigan to our home, we were essentially following the buses. After the police car picked up a little speed, we could see the back of the second bus up ahead through the windshield. The buses had picked up the pace significantly since earlier that morning, probably in an attempt to make up for lost time. It had also stopped snowing, and as the morning dragged on, breaks in the heavy clouds overhead revealed puzzle pieces of bright blue sky.

I couldn't shake the visual of all of our classmates pressing their faces against the bus windows to gawk at us as we'd driven past the buses out of my head. The nerve of them, to taunt us and make fun of us when everything we'd sacrificed had been in one way or another, for them. This time, when Trey and I were separated and sent back to our lousy schools, I wouldn't be gratified by the punishment. I'd be resentful that I was essentially doing time for bothering to try and save the lives of kids who weren't the least bit appreciative. Kids who dared to mock us for the lengths we'd gone to just trying to protect them.

And then there was Henry. His life had already been destroyed by Violet and her game, and now he was headed back to Weeping Willow alone without having gotten the revenge he so justly deserved. It made me feel like crying to think of him pulling back into his parents' driveway and having to tell his mom that he'd failed. I felt worse thinking about Henry's next few hours than I did about my own, which should have been some indication to me of what the future held for me.

"This is what you dreamed," I said to Trey. It must have seemed impossible to him earlier that morning back at the motel that we'd essentially have turned ourselves in to the authorities within just a few short hours.

"Yeah," he admitted, "but this isn't all of it."

Just then, we saw the back of the second bus far up ahead of us on the rural highway swerve dramatically. The wheels skidded in the slush until the bus had spun almost completely around to face us, at which point we saw that the front of it had been smashed and was on fire. Its windshield was cracked as if the bus driver's head had crashed into it. And it was at that point we realized that it had crashed into the back of the first bus, because the first bus was careening over the side of the highway and into the snowy ravine that ran alongside it as if in slow motion... upright and then... on its side.