by Zoe Aarsen
The ski lift seemed like an ideal place for the spirits to tinker with electricity and cause mayhem. As we ascended the mountain, the higher we went, the more positive I became that peril awaited us at the top. My heart was in my throat as I expected Violet’s spirits to take advantage of the fact that we were as vulnerable as canaries in a cage on that lift.
I tried not to dwell on their proven ability to do exactly what I feared most as my eyes combed the mountainside. It was a busy afternoon, and there were group lessons in progress in the three beginner areas. However, from the distance we were at, I couldn’t recognize anyone from Willow. Just as Henry had said there would be, there were a lot more people on the mountain that day than just students from my school.
Henry reached into his jacket and withdrew his phone. He handed it to me and said, “Maybe you should hang on to this in case we get separated.”
“But it’s your phone,” I reminded him.
“But you’ll want to call Kirsten when you’re ready,” he said. “The pass code is Olivia’s birthday. Come on. I’ve got credit cards and can call my mom collect if I need to. Just take it.”
I accepted the phone and tucked it into the interior pocket of my own jacket, praying that I wouldn’t fall while on skis and crack the screen.
Henry coached us on how to tip our skis upward as we hopped off the chairlift at the first beginner area we reached, and I felt so victorious after managing to land without incident that I would have been happy calling it a day right then and there.
“It’s so crowded,” Trey marveled as we looked around. Bundled into ski jackets and ski pants, everyone on the mountain appeared to be around the same height and weight. It was hard to even distinguish the males from the females, and most of the people who weren’t wearing enormous ski helmets were wearing visors that obscured their entire face. “How the hell are we ever going to find her?”
Just then, I recognized a familiar pair of winter coats in the distance standing apart from the rest of the kids in their group.
“I think that’s Cheryl,” I informed Trey. “Do you think I should ask her where Violet is?”
“Might as well,” Henry said. “There are probably a thousand people on this mountain today. Anything to help us find her faster can’t hurt.”
Trey was uncommonly quiet, looking around as if he was expecting an ambush at any second.
“Cheryl!” I called out and raised my goggles. When the girl in the lime-green jacket waved back after spotting me, I breathed a sigh of sweet relief.
“You’re actually here!” Cheryl was smart enough not to shout my name as we made our way over the thick snow to where she and Kelly stood. “This is totally insane!” Cheryl exclaimed once we reached her. I lowered my goggles over my face again so that no one from Willow would instantly recognize me.
Kelly, who—like Cheryl—I’d known since kindergarten, seemed uneasy about even looking at me. I could understand why. Kelly and Cheryl were good girls, the kind who always tattled at school if they thought that telling an authority figure was in the wrongdoer’s best interest. Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, I’d been like them. I’d desperately sought out approval from everyone too, before my friends and I had gotten ourselves into trouble so deep that no one, not even well-intentioned adults, could help us.
“Yeah, we’re here,” I admitted, “but obviously we can’t stay long. We need to find Violet. Do you know where she is?”
Cheryl and Kelly exchanged blank expressions. “I honestly don’t know,” Cheryl said.
But Kelly hesitated before replying and weakly said, “I don’t think you should be here. 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. Probably because she knew she would have the police and just about every parent in Willow on her side. “I saw on the news this morning that authorities in three states are looking for you. McKenna and Trey are presumed by local police to be armed and dangerous.”
This made Trey smile, but it put me even more on edge. Sure, it was funny that the cops thought we were armed, but not if they actually intended to pull guns on us if we encountered them.
“Look, we don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “I just need to talk to Violet. About Tracy. That’s all. Or…” I wondered if a different approach might be more effective. The only kids I knew who’d received personalized predictions from Violet at her New Year’s party were Chitra Bhakta, Jason Arkadian, and Cheryl. Jason’s had specified that his death would be “dark and cold.” If tragedy was going to befall him that afternoon, it would be wise for us to figure out which spots on the mountain were the darkest and coldest. “Jason Arkadian. Do you know where he is?” I asked.
Kelly shot Cheryl a dirty look intended to keep her quiet, but Cheryl stepped forward. “He’s with the snowboarders. Everyone had a choice of either skiing or snowboarding lessons, and the snowboarders took a different chairlift.” She pointed farther down the mountain, where we could see a group of other students gathered around.
“Is Violet with them?” I asked, feeling my pulse quicken.
Cheryl shrugged and frowned. “I lost track of her after lunch when we split into groups. And honestly”—she hesitated—“I don’t think this is the best time or place for you guys to try to talk to her. We had an assembly in the hotel restaurant at breakfast, and everyone was told to alert a chaperone if they saw either one of you.”
Proving Cheryl’s point, we all noticed that Kelly had already stalked off on her skis toward the larger group. “Great,” Cheryl mumbled. “She’s probably telling Miss Kirkovic.”
I turned to Henry and asked, “How can we get down there?”
He opened up one of the trifold brochures I’d tucked into my pocket and examined it. “We’d have to go all the way back down to the base of the mountain and then take this other lift up to Stevens’ Pass.”
Stevens’ Pass. That was what the voices had been saying to me the night before, when I hadn’t been able to make out the second word! Whether Violet’s big event was going to happen on Stevens’ Pass or there was simply something at that location I needed to see, it felt important that we get down there—and quickly.
“Is there any other way to get there faster?” I asked.
“Hey, guys,” Trey interjected. His head was turned in the direction of the larger group, where Kelly had gotten Miss Kirkovic’s attention, just as Cheryl had assumed she would. Kelly was pointing directly at us, and Miss Kirkovic unzipped her ski jacket halfway, reached inside, and withdrew her cell phone from one of the jacket’s interior pockets. “We should really get out of here.”
Henry ran his fingers over the lines on the map in the brochure. “The only other way is for us to ski down this path over to the pass. But it’s not really a novice run. It’s safer to take the lift.”
Miss Kirkovic was marching toward us with her phone pressed to her ear, and a much larger guy on skis, perhaps one of the instructors, was accompanying her.
“No time for the lift,” Trey said. “I think we need a crash course in skiing.”
Henry glanced down the slope to where the snowboarders were gathered for their lesson. Skiing down the mountain and veering off in that direction would require us to dodge all of the other skiers headed straight down the hill. We’d also have to navigate our way down a particularly steep part of the hill through a patch of trees. Mrs. Kirkovic was only about fifty feet away. We were going to have to get moving and hope that she wasn’t a skilled skier.
“Okay,” he said, sounding unconfident. “Don’t point your skis directly downhill. Angle them like this.” He demonstrated by pointing the fronts of his skis toward each other, in a V shape. “To turn, push your weight onto the leg opposite of the direction you want to go in, got it? Lean on your left leg to turn right. And to stop, try to keep your skis parallel as you swerve them to one side, lik
e this.” He slid forward by a few feet and then turned both of his skis to the right and came to a stop.
“Got it?” he asked.
And with that, he took off down the hill, weaving in between two kids from Willow who had just clumsily started their descent. Despite telling us to angle our skis seconds earlier, Henry made his skis parallel and not fixed in a V shape.
“McKenna!” Miss Kirkovic called out my name, and the heads of several kids participating in the group lesson turned in my direction. I couldn’t wait another second, even if I felt unsteady on my skis and was terrified to pick up speed. Ditching Miss Kirkovic like that was lousy of me; she taught art at Willow High and had been one of my favorite teachers. But I angled my skis the way that Henry had shown me and used my poles to push myself down the hill, following after him.
“Here goes nothing,” I heard Trey mutter as he, too, launched himself into motion.
Wind whipped against my body as I picked up more speed than I wanted. I constantly shifted my view from straight ahead to my right, to make sure that any skiers headed my way were doing their best to avoid hitting me. “What the hell?” a girl yelled as she narrowly avoided crashing into me. It was very possible that she was a classmate from Willow.
Ahead of me, I saw Henry disappear into the trees. He was a fantastic skier, even at a high speed, and nimbly dodged in between two tall pines. As I approached the trees and tried to slow down, my heart beating wildly out of control in my chest, I looked over my shoulder and saw that Trey had collided with someone on skis. Cheryl was slowing to a stop to help him back up to his feet, and behind them, Miss Kirkovic and the instructor were hot on our trail. I had to trust that Trey would recover because I couldn’t have slowed down to wait for him even if I’d wanted to.
Avoiding the trees was much more challenging than navigating my way through skiers. I moved through the sparsely wooded area with my arms outstretched in front of me, trying my best to remember Henry’s advice about turning to shift my weight from one leg to the other. Still gaining speed as I descended the mountain, I knocked into one tree with my shoulder and spun around, ending up skiing backward until I fell over on my side and climbed back up on my feet. I could see Trey and Cheryl catching up to me, which encouraged me to use my poles to launch back into motion.
Having finally made my way through the trees, I found myself on the steepest part of the incline I’d experienced yet. Ahead, Henry had made his way all the way down to where the snowboarding lesson was taking place, at which point the slope evened out to more of a landing. It was all I could do to remain upright as my skis moved faster than the rest of my body, making me feel the entire way down the slope as if I was going to fall backward and seriously hurt myself.
And then I saw her.
Violet, in a shiny lavender ski jacket with matching pants and an electric purple helmet. I knew even from a distance that it was her from the shock of dark hair spilling out from beneath her helmet and the poise with which she carried herself. She was standing next to someone taller than her, a guy in a black ski jacket—Pete Nicholson, presumably. She threw her head back and laughed.
Her carefree nature infuriated me.
I was so irate as I reached the area where the snowboarding lesson was taking place that I didn’t turn my skis to the side in unison to stop the way Henry had shown me, and I bumped into someone, nearly knocking them over on their snowboard. The person who turned around to glare at me was Jeff Harrison, one of Pete’s friends from the basketball team with whom I’d been driving to the football game in Kenosha the night that Olivia had died.
“Sorry,” I apologized, grateful that he’d prevented me from cruising right on down to the next steep slope.
“It’s all good,” he said, obviously not recognizing me.
I spotted Henry and half skied/half walked over to him. “She’s there, in the purple,” I informed him, so nervous that I felt like my heart was going to pop out of my mouth.
Trey and Cheryl slid up to us at that exact moment, and Trey asked, “Are we doing this?”
Together, we walked up to Violet. I hadn’t prepared anything special to say for this confrontation; I’d trusted that the words would come naturally. I lifted the helmet off my head just as she turned around and smiled at me with her perfectly lush lips.
“Hello, Violet,” I said. “What a lovely ski trip you planned.”
“So nice to see you here,” Violet greeted us with false sweetness. “It’s a shame that you came all this way only to be thrown in the back of a police car.”
During all the weeks I’d had to prepare for this moment since the night of her New Year’s Party, I’d thought I’d be furious the next time I saw her. I thought I’d barely be able to control my rage, and lunge at her with the intention of tearing her head off. But now I pitied her, in a way. The pendulum had confirmed that she had been sacrificing victims to keep her mother alive. Perhaps she was a cunning killer, but I could sympathize with her reason for fulfilling the requirements of the curse. She may have even resorted to complete denial in avoidance of facing the reality that she was taking away people’s lives.
Unless she was truly evil and relished her ability to issue death sentences. There was still that possibility.
“We figured out a way to end this thing, Violet. It’s easy. You just have to trust us.”
Pete stepped in front of Violet as if to protect her from us. “You guys are not supposed to come anywhere near her.”
Henry took off his helmet and shook his head in disgust. “You’re a real piece of trash, Nicholson. How long did you wait after Olivia died before you hooked up with Violet?”
I’d kind of forgotten that Henry and Pete went way back. It must have been really bothering him that Pete had started dating Violet so seriously, so soon after Olivia’s accident.
We were too late. Miss Kirkovic and the ski instructor had reached us and Miss Kirkovic tore her helmet and goggles off, extending an arm toward us as if urging us to put down guns we weren’t carrying. “Everyone just stay calm!” she shouted. “The police are on their way.”
Trying not to be rattled by the imminent arrival of police, I stared Violet down and removed all sarcasm from my voice. “If you come with us now, we can end this together. You’ll never have to predict another death. But if you let the police take us away, then I think you already know that this will go on forever.”
Violet blinked twice, her mouth tightened into a pout. She was listening. She was curious.
Next to me, Trey chimed in, “You don’t want this to be the story of your life, do you? What happens when you get married? When you have kids? How long can you keep hiding what you do?”
He’d struck a nerve. Her face softened, her eyes downturned slightly, and I knew we’d tempted her. She must have been wondering for quite a while about the very same questions Trey had just posed. I didn’t see the slightest hint of scorn on her face, and she was waiting for one of us to continue.
“Shut up, Emory,” Pete snapped. “You freak. You guys sound crazy, you know that? You should be locked up.”
Violet was staring at me with a serious expression on her face. “Just wait, Pete,” she said as if trying to decide whether or not she wanted to hear what we were there to tell her.
Kids from Willow had formed a group around us, and I heard our names in whispers:
“McKenna Brady.”
“Trey Emory.”
At that point, even if Henry, Trey, and I had wanted to make a run for it, there would have been nowhere for us to go without having to push our way through a wall of people. I felt Henry’s phone inside my jacket buzzing with an incoming call. It was probably Kirsten, calling at the worst possible time.
Violet whispered, “You really have no idea what you’re talking about. There is no way to end it. I’ve tried everything, and no matter what, it always ends the same way.”
Despite every answer the pendulum had provided, for the first time since Jennie had instructed m
e on how to break the curse, the tiniest glimmer of hope sparked in my chest that Violet might actually cooperate with us. Never had I imagined that she would admit to unsuccessfully having tried to rid herself of the curse. Confessing to me that she’d tried to break the curse previously and failed meant that she wasn’t evil. She was, in a way, just as much of a victim of this curse as her sacrifices were.
All of us heard the helicopter overhead in unison and looked up.
“Drop your weapons,” a police officer was shouting at us over a loudspeaker from the helicopter as it dropped a little lower toward us.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed tall, slender Jason Arkadian in the group, watching our confrontation unfold with interest. Behind us, higher up on the mountain, I heard the engines of snowmobiles approaching. That suggested more police were on their way, reaching us as quickly as possible over the difficult landscape. “Oh my God,” I heard a female voice say, and I turned to see Chitra Bhakta a few feet behind me.
And suddenly, my scalp was on fire. My blood felt as if it were freezing in my veins. I knew exactly what was going to happen—and worst of all, our actions had been the catalyst for it.
Henry said to Miss Kirkovic, “We don’t have any weapons. Tell them we’re not armed!”
Miss Kirkovic waved her arms and shouted up at the helicopter, “They’re not armed!”
I charged toward Violet, reaching for her in a panic. “It’s going to happen now! We have to play the game right now or we’re all going to die!”
She stumbled backward, and Pete tried to pry me off of her. Above us, from the helicopter, a single gunshot punctuated the snowy afternoon. It cracked against the sky and echoed around us.
