by Zoe Aarsen
But I shook my head again. This was the plan. Jennie’s plan, our plan. It was time to prove to myself that I was brave enough to see it through.
Violet’s arm shook violently, and her lower lip trembled. “McKenna,” she warned in a hoarse voice. A tear spilled from her eye and down her cheek.
“Don’t do this, Violet,” Henry said from behind me.
“This is the only way. We have to make her die in a way that’s different from how they predicted. This ends it. I know. I’ve been dealing with this longer than all of you.”
Violet was going to squeeze the trigger. It was at that moment that I knew the gun was going to be fired, and it was all I could do to look over at Trey one last time. His blue eyes were already fixed on me. It took every ounce of strength I had to resist the urge to even allow a muscle in my face to twitch so that he would know that this was the moment—right now—when he had to remove those pins from my voodoo doll. The spirits were sure to notice anything I communicated to him, so gesturing or shouting was unthinkable—
And then…
Bang!
A powerful force, sudden and unexpected, knocked me off my feet. I smelled something like burned sugar before my eyes opened, and it took a second for me to make sense of what I was seeing. Violet stood several feet in front of me with her eyes squeezed shut. She still gripped the gun, which continued to quiver in her raised hand. My heart was thumping so loudly in my chest that I felt like I’d been shot; adrenaline flooded my body in a way that made me feel as if I could jump through the ceiling.
But I hadn’t been shot. I was alive. I’d been hurled against the sofa, and I’d fallen halfway onto it at an odd angle. My arms were spread across the cushions, but my hips hadn’t quite cleared them, so my legs were sprawled on the floor—
And Henry lay across them, his body, unmoving, turned away from me.
My hands cupped over my mouth, and when Violet opened her eyes and saw what she’d done, a high-pitched noise emerged from her body, a noise I didn’t know a human was capable of making.
Kindhearted, courageous Henry. Just earlier that day I’d decided I couldn’t ask Trey to kill me because I believed he’d die before he’d let anything happen to me, and now Henry had taken a bullet for me. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that Henry would give up his life to save mine—primarily because I never would have asked him to make a sacrifice like that. The way he was slumped over on his side, I didn’t see the blood at first. But then it began to pool around him, dark as ink, pouring from the left side of his chest, which was pressed to the floor.
I attempted to turn my head to the right to see if Trey had made his way over to the piano to take the pins out of my voodoo doll. But my neck didn’t twist immediately, and when it did, I became distinctly aware that my body seemed to be operating on a delay. My eyes didn’t automatically follow the movement of my head. I felt disconnected to my physical motions, as if someone else was controlling my body like a puppet and I was simply observing.
Then my realization of what had happened when Violet had fired the gun clicked into place. Trey had pulled the pins out at the exact right second. I wasn’t the one operating my body anymore. I wasn’t really even sure that I was in my body anymore.
Jennie was.
Trey was there, behind the piano, looking over at me in such terror that I don’t think he was even breathing. And Mischa’s body had slumped back against the sofa where she’d been sitting. Color was returning to her face, and the spidery veins visible beneath her skin were fading. But her glassy eyes stared straight ahead, showing no sign of life behind them.
Confirming my worst suspicions about having been pushed out of my body, I heard my own voice yell across the room at Trey, “Open the jar!”
He hesitated during a moment of suspended animation, looking confused as to whether or not to trust me. But then—still carrying the gun—Violet, who was closer, leapt toward the coffee table. She set the gun down and twisted off the mason jar’s lid, then gaped at the open jar in horror as it occurred to her that she’d just released Mischa’s soul into the expanse of her parlor.
Just then, I looked down and saw my own hands clutching at my throat as if I was trying to strangle myself. Strangulation. That was a death associated with air. That might have been the spirits’ prediction for me all along.
I heard my garbled voice shout, “Under her nose!”
Violet yanked Mischa’s head upright by a handful of the hair on the back of her head. She shoved the open jar underneath Mischa’s nose, but Mischa’s expression didn’t change. “Come on, breathe!” Violet shouted at her. Trey dashed across the room to assist, and clapped a hand over Mischa’s mouth, giving her no choice but to breathe through her nose if, in fact, her lungs were actually working. Then, switching tactics, he frantically pumped on her chest as if giving her CPR, and hopped backward when she suddenly sputtered.
As Mischa blinked and coughed, Trey reached across the coffee table to grab the handgun. Violet was a split second ahead of him, snatching the gun and aiming at him. “Don’t even,” she warned.
Both of them turned to face me—or my body, rather—as I heard myself coughing and sputtering. I was detached from my body but still watching the outside world through my eyes, and I couldn’t hear anything but static coming across the earbud nestled into my right ear. But surely the five spirits were inside me, wrestling with Jennie for control of my body. We hadn’t considered what this experience would be like for me while she tried to send them to the dark place, and I panicked, believing that even a few seconds of this was a sure sign that something was wrong. Jennie was outmatched. They were too powerful for her.…
And of course they were.
How had I ever thought she could take them on by herself? After all I’d endured since the fall, after all that Trey and I had done… Now Henry was either dead or dying on the floor, and Mischa was blinking around the room as if she didn’t recognize any of us or her surroundings.
There’s no way to accurately describe in mere words the sensation that I felt next, because it was incorporeal, but I sensed myself—my soul—being pulled further into the core of my body. Not into the core as in my stomach, but inward, as if being sucked into a whirlpool leading to another place. Another dimension, perhaps. I sensed Jennie vanishing there, as if she was being pulled into a black hole, but tightening her hold on me as she slipped. She was pulling me with her.
I could only trust that it was best for us to stay together. As much as I loved Mom, Dad, and Trey, nothing was quite the same as the bond I shared with Jennie. If she wanted me to accompany her wherever it was that the spirits were taking her, then I would go. I sensed my presence in the living room fading away. Violet’s voice was shouting, “What’s happening?” Trey was yelling my name. My view of the room bounced up and down, and I realized it was because he had grabbed my body by the shoulders and was shaking it.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
A cold blast of air blew right through me, or at least it felt as if it swept right through my body—from my feet, up, and out of the top of my head. I had no idea what had happened except that all of my bodily sensations returned in an overwhelming rush. My fingers were wrapped tightly around my neck, and I released them, allowing air to pass into my windpipe and lungs in a dizzying gust. I felt warm wetness on my feet and realized that Henry had been bleeding onto me, soaking my shoes. My left hip ached from where it had hit the wooden frame of the sofa, and a scratchy burn crept up my throat. I hacked to try and clear it, as well as catch my breath.
I knew, without even checking the radio waves, that Jennie was gone. Our connection was broken. My attempt to command my fingers to remove the earbud from my right ear failed; I couldn’t seem to make my hands obey all of my mind’s orders yet.
But Trey and Violet weren’t paying attention to what was happening to me. They weren’t looking at Mischa, either, where she sat as if hypnotized. Both of them had fixed their eyes on the front door
, and when I found the strength to raise my head, I understood why.
Mr. Simmons was barreling toward us. I hadn’t even heard the front door open and close, and yet he was there, racing through the room. His ice-blue eyes darted from Henry’s body on the floor to where Violet stood in front of me with the gun dangling from her fingertips at her side.
“What the hell are you doing?” His voice echoed strangely after he roared, but I had gained back enough awareness to recognize that the echo was all in my head as my soul settled back into its rightful place within my body. He wasn’t supposed to be back yet. This was all wrong.
Violet stammered something about being sorry, but she was breaking into sobs. Mr. Simmons grabbed the gun away from her, and in a nightmarish flash, he aimed it at Trey.
I was regaining clarity and control over my body by the second. Fast enough that when Mr. Simmons addressed Trey, there was no echo or delay in the words leaving his mouth. “You. You have no right to be here!”
Never one to resist an opportunity to stand his ground, Trey didn’t hold up his hands as if to plead for mercy or beg for his life. Instead, he stared his biological father right in the eye. “According to the attorneys you sent to threaten me, I have just as much right as your precious daughter to be here. That’s what you wanted me to believe, right? Why am I not surprised that it’s turned out not to be true?”
Mr. Simmons was so furious that his lips quivered. Violet gestured toward her father but didn’t dare take a step toward him, or toward Trey. “Daddy, please! You don’t understand what’s going on! He’s here to help us! Something terrible has been happening. We’re just trying to make it stop!”
Mr. Simmons seemed to calm down long enough to glance down at the floor and truly register that Henry had been shot—with the gun that he now held in his hand. Although Violet had been holding the gun when he’d first walked in on us, he focused his ire once again on Trey. “You did this? You shot someone in my home?”
Finally able to find my voice, I managed to bark out, “Call nine-one-one.”
Crying tears of terror now, Violet sputtered, “Where are they? Where are the spirits?”
Mr. Simmons turned to Violet and shouted, “You said this was over! You said it had moved on to someone else!”
I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. Unable to contain myself, I gasped, “You knew.” Either Violet had told him, or he’d known all along. And it made perfect sense that he’d known. It was his mother who’d cast the original spell, possibly at his insistence so that Violet’s mother wouldn’t leave him.
Mr. Simmons narrowed his eyes and scowled at me. “This one.” With one swift flick of his wrist, he aimed his gun at me. “This never had anything to do with you. You should have minded your own business.”
Now Violet placed her hands gently on her father’s forearm as if urging him to lower the gun. She tried to smile convincingly through her tears. “Just listen, Daddy! We figured it out! We know how to end it! McKenna’s next, so we’re going to trick them into thinking she’s dying some way other than how they predicted, and then it’s over!”
She was describing our plan as if we hadn’t already executed it, making me realize that she and Trey had no way of knowing that it was over. They hadn’t sensed Jennie carrying the spirits away with her like I had, and Violet had just given her father a simple way to protect his family—by killing me. I could see in his eyes that he was thinking exactly that. He raised the gun and pointed it at me again, and I backed away, feeling nauseous as I saw Henry’s body lying there, immobile.
“No, no, no,” I murmured. “Don’t do this!”
In my panic, I dropped my phone to the floor, and it yanked the earbud out of my ear on its descent. There was nowhere to run. Mr. Simmons was less than ten feet away from me and advancing as quickly as I was maneuvering around the sofa. He stepped over Henry as if Henry were nothing more than a pile of clothes, and instantly I understood how he was planning to carry this out. He was going to kill me and tell the police that Trey was responsible for my murder and for Henry’s.
“This ends now!” he roared. But as he squeezed the trigger, Trey barreled toward him and knocked him over. Mr. Simmons’s arm shifted just as he fired the gun, and the bullet grazed my shoulder blade as I dashed toward the front door.
“Run!” Trey yelled.
I extended my fingers for the door handle as my feet carried me into the foyer, and Mr. Simmons fired again. The bullet ricocheted off the brass of the handle, missing my hand by centimeters. I snapped my hand to my chest and ran in the only direction my brain seemed to acknowledge: up the grand staircase.
As soon as I began scrambling up the stairs, I knew I’d chosen poorly. The black pumps on my feet were just loose enough to be treacherous when I tried to move quickly. I didn’t know my way around the upper floors of Violet’s house beyond the hallway leading to her bedroom and Mr. Simmons’s office. Doors and windows could be locked. There was a back staircase that led into the sunroom—however, I didn’t know from where on the upper floors I could access it. But there was no time to change my mind. I could hear Mr. Simmons’s heavy footsteps on the stairs behind me, and he was skipping steps to catch up to me. At least he’d temporarily forgotten about Trey and was completely intent on catching me. But as I reached the top of the staircase and stole a glimpse over my shoulder, I saw Trey chasing after us at the bottom of the steps.
A chunk of drywall inches from my eyes exploded, and I realized that Mr. Simmons had fired again, this time at my head. Without another fraction of a second to spare, I bolted down the hallway and ran past the open doorway of Violet’s bedroom, and past the closed door of Mr. Simmons’s office.
But in this narrow hallway, although I was a moving target, it would have been hard for Mr. Simmons to miss me if he took another shot. My left shoe fell off, and I didn’t give it a second thought as I continued on, hobbling for a few steps until I kicked off my right shoe. Looking ahead, I could see that the hallway turned a corner at its end, and presumably wrapped around the perimeter of the house. With all my might, I tried to run faster, but still screamed in surprise when I heard the gun fire again behind me. This time, the bullet whizzed past my left shoulder and struck the window toward which I was running. I heard the glass pop but not shatter as the bullet broke through it.
Just as I thought for sure that I didn’t stand a chance of rounding the corner without Mr. Simmons hitting me with his next shot, I heard a scuffle behind me. When I reached the corner, I threw myself around it, took a deep breath, and realized I didn’t hear footsteps from the hallway, but thuds and grunting instead. I dared to peek around the edge. Trey had thrown himself at Mr. Simmons and pulled him to the floor. One of his knees pinned Mr. Simmons’s shoulder down, but even as Trey attempted to grab at Mr. Simmons’s neck, it was clear that he wouldn’t be able to subdue him for long.
Mr. Simmons’s gun had been thrown in my direction. It was probably about eight feet from where I stood watching, angled on the long vintage runner rug.
“Get the gun!” Trey shouted, snapping me out of my reverie.
I dashed forward and bent my knees to raise the gun, which was heavier and colder in my hand than I had expected. I aimed it at Mr. Simmons, but he was entangled in such a way with Trey that there was no way I could get a clear shot at him—even if I’d known what I was doing with the gun, even if I’d had practice aiming and firing it.
So instead I spun on my heel and ran.
CHAPTER 19
I TORE AROUND THE CORNER again, this time running down the next stretch of hallway lined with windows, and paused in front of a closed door at the very end of it. My scalp tingled, although so lightly that I wondered if I was imagining it out of desperation. As I reached for the ornate brass doorknob, from behind me I heard a ragged voice shout threateningly, “Don’t go up there!”
It was Mr. Simmons, standing at the far end of the hallway with a bleeding lip and his hair on end. Up there. Whatever was b
ehind this door would take me to the higher floors of the house. I twisted the knob, and behind the door, I found another staircase, this one far more narrow and plain than the one in the front foyer. I ran up the first flight and didn’t bother opening the door on the landing. There was no time to think clearly, but I guessed that this floor only had bedrooms and bathrooms on it. At the time that this estate was built, there were probably servants hired to run the household, so this floor was probably where they were boarded. Small bedrooms, possibly locked small bedrooms, would only have been helpful to me if I could have ducked into one of them to call 911. But I’d left my phone in the living room.
So I dashed across the landing to the next flight of stairs, climbed them, and at the top, I found myself faced with a choice: either opening a door directly in front of me, or running around another landing to my right, at the end of which a second door awaited. Hearing footsteps below me, I panicked and opened the door in front of me.
I’d entered into a small room cluttered with cleaning supplies and ladders. It smelled musty, and dust sparkled in the dim light creeping into it from a tiny window overhead. It appeared to be a utility closet, and it was most certainly not in frequent use. Another set of stairs, a much shorter set, ascended toward a small landing with a hatch door on its ceiling, and I noticed once my eyes adjusted to the dark that the small window was part of the hatch. Barely thinking about the danger in climbing higher, I dashed up the stairs and fumbled with the dead bolt on the hatch door. The door creaked on old hinges when I pushed it upward to throw it open, and I hesitated momentarily before climbing the last two steps and hoisting myself out into the harsh daylight.
I’d reached the roof, only that fact didn’t fully register in my mind until I saw clouds overhead.
The roof. I was standing atop what was probably the tallest building in town, aside from the high school.
The door below me at the bottom of the stairs opened, and Mr. Simmons burst through it. Although he’d been chasing me like a crazed animal, when our eyes connected, I could see that he was in complete control of his actions. He knew exactly what he was doing; he was going to kill me.
