by Zoe Aarsen
“But Mischa’s connection isn’t as strong, so they’re going to give her more like… flashes.” Jennie told me. It seemed like she was struggling to describe exactly how the spirits would communicate the death predictions to Mischa, but I got the picture. “It might not be as easy to trick them this way.”
“But you can try?” I asked. I would have only volunteered myself for this if Jennie was willing to try, and I believed with all my heart that she would find a way to deliver whatever she promised. She’d managed to spare me from Violet’s death prediction back in September, and she’d delivered a prediction for Violet back in January that had saved the lives of a lot of people.
Jennie replied, “Trying isn’t good enough. I’ll convince them.”
I was about to thank her when I heard her continue, “I hope you’re not doing this for me.”
“For you?” I asked, confused.
“Yes. Out of some sense of guilt that I’m here, and you’re there,” she explained. “This was always the way it was supposed to be. It’s my responsibility to protect you, and I’m happy to be here, doing this.”
It took a few seconds for me to swallow the urge to cry. It wouldn’t do me much good to walk back into Violet’s kitchen with tears in my eyes, but Jennie had just answered one of the biggest questions I’d been wanting to ask her. She wasn’t jealous that I was alive and she… wasn’t. “Thank you,” I managed to say, wanting to elaborate but knowing there wasn’t time.
“You aren’t alone,” she reminded me. “We’re together, always.”I headed back inside with an icy feeling lining my stomach despite Jennie’s reassurance that she would show the evil spirits a fake prediction for my death. It intensified when I noticed that Mischa and Violet were anxiously awaiting my return. With numb fingertips, I pulled Mrs. Robinson’s gris-gris out of my shirt to remind myself that it was still there, hanging around my neck.
“Okay. This is the plan,” I said, folding my hands on the table and trying my hardest to prevent them from trembling. “Mischa’s going to predict my death so that I can take Amanda’s place in line, and then we’re going to figure out how to break the curse.”
Both Henry and Violet looked at me in abject horror.
“No. Absolutely not,” Henry stated emphatically.
“Just…” I cut myself off. It seemed like a bad idea to explain the logic, and better for Mischa—and the spirits who’d be conducting their evil through her—to fully believe that what we were doing was real. “This is the only way to save Amanda. You guys have to trust me.”
“McKenna, no! That’s insane!” Henry insisted. “What about your mom? You can’t do this to her. It’s… selfish.”
I glared at him and gave a small shake of my head, trying my best to convey that he should just trust me. Reminding me about how much my mom had already lost wasn’t making me feel any more confident about my proposal. Under the table, I reached for his hand and squeezed it. “It’s the only way.”
Henry’s mouth twisted into an angry frown. He slid his hand out from my grasp, got up from the table, and shook his head furiously. “I won’t watch this.” He balled his hands into fists at his sides, and then pointed a finger at Mischa. “If you do this to her, you’re a monster,” he said, before marching out of the kitchen into the living room.
Mischa looked like she was about to start crying again, but then whispered, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said, trying my best to sound convincing. It wouldn’t have been fair to make Mischa feel like she was being selfish when all she really wanted was to save her sister.
Anticipating that we’d be playing the game that afternoon in one way or another, she’d brought a deck of tarot cards with her. As she began shuffling, I chewed my lower lip and felt my fingers turn increasingly cold with fear. When I’d first thought of this idea, it hadn’t occurred to me that if something went wrong, I could expect to die at any second—even as soon as on the drive home from Violet’s house. Before I ever saw Mom again. Before I had a chance to find out if Rhonda was having a boy or a girl.
But it was too late to rescind my offer. I had to have faith that Jennie would protect me, and that Amanda’s condition would improve. After all, what I was offering wasn’t all that heroic. Mischa had lived with the knowledge of her own impending death from September until January. What I was subjecting myself to wasn’t any worse than what she’d already endured, but I was still scared.
Mischa handed the deck to me and said in a timid voice, “You have to shuffle these while thinking about how you want the cards to predict your death.”
Grim, I thought. To make light of the situation and try to get her to smile, I performed a fancy pivot cut shuffle. Mom and I often played War at home, and I’d practiced shuffling moves as a kid. Neither Mischa nor Violet seemed impressed. I realized suddenly that the shoestring on which the gris-gris hung around my neck began to make the skin it was touching itch with a burning sensation while I handled the cards, and I quickly handed them back over to Mischa. Dread pooled in my stomach. “Tough crowd,” I tried to joke.
“Are you sure?” she asked me. “Are you sure you’re done shuffling? You have to be sure.”
I took a shallow breath and said, “Yes.” How can anyone ever be sure when they’re shuffling a deck of cards that will predict the end of their life? I didn’t want to touch the deck again, though. I wanted this over with.
“Okay,” Mischa said. She set the deck facedown in front of her on the table. “I’m going to take the first five cards and set them down, and then… I’m not sure what will happen.”
Violet lost her patience. “How can you not know what will happen? McKenna’s trusting you with her life!”
“Because that’s all they’ve shown me!” Mischa snapped. “I’m supposed to put five cards down, and then they’ll take over.”
Five. A chill ran down my spine.
I still had Mischa’s AirPods in my ears, and her phone was set in front of me on the table. Jennie had remained quiet since I’d returned inside, but the time had come for me to ensure that she was still engaged. “Jennie, if you’re listening, Mischa’s going to draw the top five cards from the deck.”
“I’m always here,” Jennie told me. I was starting to get the sense that it required less effort from her to repeat certain phrases.
I nodded at Mischa, giving her permission to begin.
As she reached for the deck and touched her fingers to the top card to peel it off the stack, my scalp broke into a raging fit of tingles. Violet and I locked eyes, both of us sensing in unison that the spirits were now present. When Mischa set the first card facedown on the table, I thought perhaps I was imagining things when the table shifted almost imperceptibly. But Mischa noticed the subtle movement too, and her hand hesitated over the stack before she reached for a second card.
This time, right as she placed the card on the table, the table jolted as if hopping up off the floor.
“Um…,” Violet said, with enormous eyes. “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”
It took every ounce of courage I could summon to look at Violet and say, “It’s fine. We have to keep going.”
The third card was set on the table, and the table rattled and shook on its own as if an earthquake was occurring in the Simmonses’ kitchen. Its legs knocked loudly against the kitchen floor, and I slid my chair back a little bit, in fear. Oddly, despite the table’s erratic movements, the stack of cards remained intact without spilling, and the three cards Mischa had already placed in an array stayed fixed to the tabletop as if they’d been glued there.
“I don’t like this,” Mischa said as her fingers hovered over the deck.
“It’s too late. I already shuffled, I already set my intention,” I reminded her. “We have to finish it.”
She set down the fourth card, and a breeze swept through the kitchen, catching all three of us by surprise. Our hair was swept up over our heads and across our faces. A stack of mail on the counter behind V
iolet scattered across the room.
And somehow, the shoestring of the gris-gris became unknotted at the base of my neck. The leather pouch slid down my chest and hit the table in front of me.
The first rush of wind died down to a moment of alarming stillness before another—stronger—blast of air stirred around us. Cabinet doors opened and slammed shut. A wire rack suspended from the ceiling over the stove from which copper pots and pans hung began swaying, and the pots and pans clacked and clanged. I was grateful to Henry for having taken the knives upstairs because it seemed entirely likely that if he hadn’t, there would have been blades flying through the air. Petals were torn from the spring bouquet set atop the kitchen counter in a crystal vase, and bits of pink and peach miniature carnations flew past our faces. The vase skidded across the countertop toward the edge, but none of us dared to get up from the table to keep it from falling off. The table continued to shake, now rocking back and forth on its four legs.
I wondered how it was possible that Henry hadn’t heard the commotion from the next room, but for all I knew, he’d driven himself home.
The blood had drained from Violet’s face, and unexpectedly seeing her appear so genuinely afraid made me more anxious about what was happening than the hurricane unfolding around us. She raised her voice to be heard over the raging wind. “Something isn’t right! We should stop!”
But nothing had been right for months. Fear wasn’t an adequate reason to give up. In fact, if I’d learned anything so far in my dealings with Violet’s spirits, when they were trying to scare me, it was usually a good indication that I was on the right track.
“Jennie, should we continue?” I asked breathlessly. The crystal vase slid over the edge of the countertop and shattered on the tile floor a few feet behind Violet, startling all of us.
Before Jennie could reply to my question, Mischa squealed. A fifth card was rising above the deck entirely on its own, levitating in the air for a moment before drifting into the row on the table to join the other four cards. “I didn’t do that!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t even touch it!”
Violet bolted upright from her chair so quickly that it toppled over behind her. “Enough.” She reached forward to swipe the cards off the table, but in a flash, four of them burst into flames, igniting the sleeve of her sweater.
I jerked backward. I could handle ghosts and loa, shattered windshields and even avalanches on ski slopes. But fire zapped my courage completely. It had made me nervous even to light candles every morning to cast the protection spell on Mischa’s family; even the smell of smoke made my pulse accelerate in terror.
“Oh my God!” Violet screamed, shaking her arm. The fire devoured the cashmere, and in less than a second it looked like her entire right arm was covered in flames. She dashed to the sink and threw on the water, but Mischa’s voice returned my attention to the table.
“McKenna?” Mischa asked.
The two of us watched as the one remaining card of the five—the other four had been turned to black ash—levitated up from the table, which had finally fallen still. The fire from the other four cards had spread to the edge of the circular table, and small tongues of flame danced around the circumference of the table as if it were the main ring of a hellish circus.
The lyrics that had haunted me all morning creeped into my mind. “I fell into a burning ring of fire…”
“Are you watching this?” Mischa asked me, her voice barely audible over the water blasting in the sink and the wind blowing through the kitchen.
“Yes,” I whispered in reply. I was too terrified to reach out and grab the card, although it was hovering in the air to suggest that I should do exactly that.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Mischa said, shaking her head. A single, fat tear rolled down her cheek. “This was a bad idea. I don’t want you to die either! I can’t lose you!”
“Shh. It’s going to be okay.” My voice was quivering. The flames crackling around the edges of the kitchen table were nearly a foot tall, and I’d have to reach over them if I wanted to pluck the card out of the air.
“Don’t touch it!” Either Jennie had been silent all this time, or I hadn’t been able to hear her over the roar of the wind. But now she was adamant. “That’s what they want!”
At the sink, Violet had turned off the water and was clutching a towel to her right arm, but her eyes were filled with tears, and she was yelling something inaudible at me and shaking her head.
Suddenly, Mischa leaned over the flames and grabbed the hovering card. Simultaneously, the smoke alarm went off. Henry appeared in the doorway a split second later. An expression of absolute confusion bloomed on his face when he clocked the envelopes blowing around the room, the pots swaying overhead, the table on fire, and Violet cowering at the sink. Without uttering a word, he tore through the room and vanished into the sunroom, returning with a fire extinguisher.
But the moment he yanked out its safety pin, the flames vanished. The wind stopped abruptly.
“What the hell?!” Henry yelled at no one in particular.
Mischa, Violet, and I looked around the room—which had just been in total chaos—completely baffled. The letters and petals dropped to the floor. The kitchen table didn’t show a single sign of just having been on fire… although the four tarot cards Mischa had set on it remained piles of ash.
Violet sobbed softly as she inspected her right arm. The sleeve of her sweater looked as if nothing at all had happened, but it was rolled up over her elbow. “My arm was just completely burned. I could feel it blistering! I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.”
Mischa’s lower lip trembled as she glanced at the tarot card in her hand. “Ten of Swords, reversed,” she said. She held it out toward me so that I could see it for myself.
The card that had been chosen by the spirits for me had an illustration on it of a guy wearing a tunic lying on his stomach with what appeared to be a bunch of swords jabbing into his back and neck. It took me a second to piece together what was being depicted, since Mischa was holding the card upside down, so at first it looked like someone lying on top of a picket fence. Never having had my tarot cards read before, and having no familiarity with the practice at all, I was clueless as to what this meant.
“Ten of Swords is about resistance. It’s usually shown to a person combating inevitable change or loss,” Mischa explained, her eyes enormous. She tossed the card down on the table and yanked her hand back as if the card were a dirty tissue. “Someone who has a choice to move on with their life after a bad situation, but they may not realize that they’re free to welcome change.”
“I don’t like any of that,” Violet said as she joined us at the table and took a look at the card.
“But because they showed it to you upside down, that’s a reversal,” Mischa continued, her tone growing more serious as she shook her head. “I’m not very good at this yet, and we can Google the meaning if you want, but I think they’re trying to tell you that you’ve already lost a battle, and you just refuse to accept the loss. You still believe a victory’s possible, but it’s not. It’s time to call it quits.”
I huffed loudly in annoyance. “How is that supposed to be a death prediction?”
Mischa bit her lower lip and hesitated, making timid eye contact with me before continuing. “It’s part of the suit of Swords in the minor Arcana. Wands is associated with air.”
“Air,” I repeated numbly. My heart stopped for a second before it occurred to me that perhaps this had been Jennie’s way of protecting me. She’d shown the spirits her own death instead of mine when we’d played the game with Olivia, tricking the spirits into thinking my soul wasn’t theirs to claim—maybe she’d done the same thing again. Air could mean… smoke. “Jennie?” I asked, clinging to hope that she’d been in control this whole time. “Did you show them the fire?”
All I heard over Mischa’s AirPods was static.
“Jennie? Are you there?”
No answer.
Once, in fourth grade, when I had been roughhousing on the playground during recess with Roy Needham, who’d been doing fake karate moves, he accidentally kicked me in the solar plexus. I’d doubled over, unable to breathe, incapable of piecing together how he had totally incapacitated me with one swift blow. The realization that Jennie might not have been able to protect me this time around, and that I might actually die in a way related to air within the next twelve days, made me feel just like I had on the playground that day.
I would be boarding another airplane on Tuesday morning. In four days.
Henry set the fire extinguisher down on the kitchen floor, crossed the room, and wrapped his hand around my wrist. “We’re leaving.”
CHAPTER 8
WE BARRELED DOWN THE LONG private drive and through the gates of the Simmonses’ property in stiff silence. Once we rounded the corner, however, Henry pulled over to the shoulder, yanked the parking brake, and pounded on the steering wheel with his fists.
“Why did you do that? Why did you have to offer yourself up like that?”
I’d never seen Henry so emotional before, not even at his own sister’s wake. His face was pink, and he angrily wiped his eye with the back of his wrist. When I opened my mouth to explain that I’d thought I had it under control, I found that I was at a complete loss for words.
I’d taken a huge misstep, and now it was too late to take it back. I’d been overly confident about Jennie’s ability to protect me—and herself—and now I was next in line to die. Henry had been in such a hurry to leave that I’d left Mischa’s AirPods and phone behind before trying to see if I could find Jennie’s voice on a different channel. She’d just told me that she was always with me, and now she was gone. Maybe forever. Mrs. Robinson had said Jennie was in a “dark place,” and I’d been so focused on trying to be a hero that I hadn’t paused to wonder if Jennie was endangering herself by helping me. Now, if Mischa’s prediction for me came true and I died within the next few days, I couldn’t assume I’d be reunited with my twin… which was just as detestable as the idea of death, itself.