by Zoe Aarsen
Without any movement from my hand to inspire the pendulum to begin swinging, it slowly began rotating in a clockwise motion. “Oh my God.” I winced. It gained momentum and broadened the diameter of the circle in which it swung.
“This is crazy!” Kirsten gasped, shaking her head, quite happy with how the pendulum was reacting in my hand. “You’re a medium, did you know that? I’ve never seen a pendulum move like that for anyone before!”
There was fear in Henry and Mischa’s eyes, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t insisted that we come to the store that day.
CHAPTER 4
MCKENNA’S A MEDIUM?” HENRY ASKED. “What does that mean?”
“It just means that for one reason or another, she’s more receptive to energy and messages from the spirit world than other people,” Kirsten explained. “I think that’s why she’s the one who received visits from Olivia’s ghost. More accurately, Olivia may have tried to connect with all of you, but McKenna was the one who was easiest for her to communicate with.”
I don’t want to be a medium. I don’t want messages from the spirit world, I thought. Henry was staring at me as if I were a monster.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Kirsten told me, interpreting the look of fright on my face. “It may very likely have something to do with the fact that you have a twin on the other side. It sounds like she managed to establish contact with you when you played that game, which just made the wall between your world and hers a little more transparent. You know? Like, that first contact kind of made a little path for the others to follow, and the more often spirits reach out to you, the wider and clearer that path becomes.”
“Can I make it stop?” I asked impulsively, not wanting to be the only one among my friends who carried the burden of communicating with dead people.
“Stop? Why?! Damn. I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat, you know that? I take classes to try to develop my communication powers, and you just have them naturally. So not fair.”
“What should she do next? This is freaking me out,” Mischa said, watching the pendulum continue to swing from my fingers.
“Try it out,” Kirsten instructed me. “Ask it a question with a yes-or-no answer.”
Nervously, I looked at Trey for direction. “Ask it if Violet knew she was killing Olivia and Candace when she predicted their deaths during the game.”
I licked my dry lips and queried in my hoarse voice, “When we played Light as a Feather at Olivia’s house, did Violet know that Olivia and Candace were going to die exactly how she said they would?”
The pendulum had slowed its speed, but picked up again, continuing in a clockwise direction. Yes. A chill ran up my spine. I’d suspected that all along, but the confirmation stunned me anyhow. Violet was a murderer. Olivia and Candace’s deaths were not accidents.
“Jesus,” Kirsten said, sucking in her breath in a way that made a whooshing sound. “This is heavy.”
“Ask it if it skipped me because I’m safe,” Mischa urged.
I hesitated, not sure I really wanted to know the answer. “I don’t think that’s—”
“God, Mischa! Why would you think that?” Henry exclaimed. “Did she predict your death too?”
Mischa nodded, her eyes enormous. It was starting to seem like Mischa hadn’t told Henry very much at all before arriving at my house that day. “I can’t believe this,” Henry muttered.
Before I could pose the question to the pendulum, Kirsten held her arm out toward me to suggest I stop. “Don’t ask it that. It can only answer based on what it knows right now at this second. Our actions can still change the future, and it’s important to remember that we have some control over what happens to us.” I was grateful for her explanation, even if I wasn’t sure if I believed her.
Like the tenacious pit bull she often was, Mischa wouldn’t drop the issue. “Then why did it skip me? There has to be a reason or none of the rest of this makes sense.”
“Not too many things can block a powerful spell,” Kirsten told her. “A counterspell would do it. But no offense, it doesn’t seem like you guys know your asses from your elbows well enough to cast anything. The prayers of a saint—”
“Wait a second,” Mischa said, holding up her hand. “What if a bunch of nuns were praying for me every day? Because they were. The nuns at my new school.”
“Maybe,” Kirsten said hopefully. “Nuns often pray the rosary with beads that have roses inside of them. Sometimes they have a set of beads that were blessed by the Pope, or even more rarely, they have beads with roses inside of them that were blessed by actual saints. Any chance the nuns at your school might have that kind of swag?”
Mischa looked dumbfounded for a second and then turned to me. “Ask that thing.”
“Right,” I said. I looked down at the dangling hunk of rose quartz and asked, “Pendulum. Did Violet’s curse skip Mischa because the nuns at St. Patrick’s were praying for her?”
Again, clockwise, swift and certain.
“Are they still praying for her?” I asked. The pendulum’s trajectory grew wobbly and then slowed down. It then began moving in the opposite direction, reestablishing its orbit around my hand in a counterclockwise movement. “I’m guessing that’s a no,” I said, looking to Kirsten for confirmation.
She nodded.
“Those bitches!” Mischa hissed. “Why are they slacking on their prayers just because it’s Christmas break?”
“Maybe it’s not the best idea to refer to nuns as bitches right now,” Trey suggested.
“Well, where can I get some magic rosary beads? I need to start praying, like, right now!” Mischa said.
“You’re in the wrong store,” Kirsten informed her.
I dropped the pendulum into my left hand. “I think I’ve seen enough. This is kind of scaring me. What we really need to know is how Violet’s able to do what she does, and what we have to do to save Mischa’s life. And that’s way too complicated to ask in yes-or-no questions.”
Kirsten looked around at all of us, drumming her fingertips on the tabletop. “I don’t suppose you have anything of hers here with you,” she murmured. “This would be a lot easier if we actually had one of her possessions.”
Trey frowned at me. “We never should have thrown that damn locket over the bridge at White Ridge Lake.”
He was right. The only possession of Violet’s I’d ever held in my hands even for a short while was the locket we’d torn off her neck, and now it sat at the bottom of a lake, irretrievable. It was pretty ironic that we probably could have both spared ourselves the courtroom drama and banishment from our hometown if we’d not gone to such extremes to keep Violet from ever getting it back.
“What about a picture?” Henry asked hopefully. “I have a picture on my phone.”
Kirsten reached for the phone. “Not ideal, but we could try.”
Henry swiped through his photos until he found one of the five of us posing around Olivia’s red Prius in the Richmonds’ driveway the morning of her sixteenth birthday. I had forgotten that Olivia’s parents had asked us to pose together in our pajamas so that Henry could snap a pic. Mischa and I both indulged in a moment of quiet reflection examining the picture. In it, we all looked so young. Even though it was only a few months ago, so much had happened since that morning, when my friends had already been doomed but just didn’t know it yet. It had been weeks since I’d seen a picture of Candace’s face, weeks since I’d thought about how funny her scratchy voice and endless flirting had been. It had been even longer since I’d seen a picture of Olivia, since I didn’t have access to social media at Sheridan, and I’d forgotten just how pretty she’d been. And there, next to Olivia, smiling coyly, was Violet, the architect of their untimely deaths.
“That’s my sister, the blond one,” Henry said, flipping his phone around so that Kirsten could see the picture. He rested his finger on Olivia’s face. “And that’s Candace, the second girl who died. And right here, with the dark hair? That’s Violet.”
Kirsten bit her lip as she studied the picture for a second, then said, “All right. I have a crazy idea. I need to get some stuff to make this work.” She got up from the table and hurried to the front of the store.
In Kirsten’s absence, I apologized to Henry. “I’m sorry, Henry. We should have warned you about how messed up all of this is. Maybe you should go back to the car and wait for us.”
Henry didn’t move a muscle. “She was my sister. I have to know what happened.”
With a slight edge in his voice, Trey said, “He’s a big boy. He can make his own decisions.”
Just as I began wondering if Trey was trying to start something with Henry, Kirsten returned to the table with a tall, thick white candle and two circular mirrors that looked like ordinary, medium-size cosmetic mirrors. She positioned the white candle at the bottom of Henry’s phone and lit its wick. Next, she picked up the sage smudge stick from the dish where she’d left it, and waved it in the air around the white candle.
“Actually, is there something more you could do to keep us safe?” I asked. “What we’re dealing with is, like… no joke.” If whatever was helping Violet had the power to make an eighteen-wheeler crash head-on into Trey’s Corolla—or, hell, had the power to conjure up a hailstorm—I doubted sage was going to do much to protect us.
“You mean a spirit other than Olivia’s?” Kirsten asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted. “There may have been some others we contacted when using a Ouija board. And Violet told us that when she tells stories for people, something shows her what to say. That could only be spirits, right?” Kirsten had mentioned demons playing a role in the game, and I hadn’t forgotten about that.
Kirsten’s shoulders heaved. “It most likely means spirits. But it could mean a demon’s possessing her, or a hellhound is on her tail. There are a lot of different kinds of demons, all of which need to be dealt with differently.”
Mischa and I both gasped in unison. It felt as if the temperature in the store had dropped by twenty degrees, even though the overhead light still filled the store with a cozy glow. “That all sounds… really bad,” Mischa managed to reply.
“Yeah, well. Let’s try to figure out what exactly it is and hope it’s just a bad ghost or two. Spirits would be the easiest of the mix to deal with because they’re pretty limited in what they can do to us on their own. I can give you a book about their abilities to take with you,” Kirsten offered. “But if it makes you guys feel any better…”
Taking a stick of chalk from a pile on the herb shelves, she bent over and awkwardly made her way around the table at which we sat to draw a large pentagram on the floor. She dropped to her hands and knees to crawl underneath the table as she drew the star on the inside of the circle. “Scoot in,” she ordered Mischa so that her chair fit within the outline. Now that a literal border had been drawn around our safety zone, I checked the legs of my chair to make sure I was entirely within it. I had a suspicion this was not the first time a pentagram had been drawn on the floor around this table, nor would it be the last.
“Whew,” Kirsten said, sitting back down in her seat. “That’ll have to do, since it would be impossible to get a shaman over here on such short notice.”
The top of the white candle had started to melt, and a slim bead of melted wax rolled down its side. Kirsten handed one of the mirrors to Mischa and asked her to hold it at shoulder height.
“Like this?” Mischa asked, raising the mirror so that it faced Kirsten. Then, with her left hand, Kirsten held the second mirror up to the flame so that we could see ourselves in it, and she took her time angling it until she could see its reflection in the mirror that Mischa held.
“What are we trying to do here, exactly?” Trey asked.
Kirsten replied matter-of-factly, “This is a truth spell, to help us see the truth about this girl Violet’s past. You guys said you wanted to know how she came to have the power to predict deaths, right? So, if it works, just… watch the mirror, I guess.” She tapped Henry’s phone on the tabletop to activate its screen again, returning the photo of all of us posing in the Richmonds’ driveway back into view.
Holding her mirror steadily, Kirsten closed her eyes and said in a firm voice, “To see the truth, to know her way, I command of thee, her truth display.” Kirsten then blew out the candle slowly, releasing a surprising amount of smoke from its wick. Directly into the smoke she said sternly, “Violet.”
Trey, Mischa, Henry, and I all leaned forward to look more closely in the mirror in Kirsten’s hand. As the smoke from the candle cleared, all four of us gasped and Trey coughed into his hand. In the mirror, we saw a blurry shape form into the image of a girl around our age with short dark hair. She seemed to be looking in our direction, as if she knew we were there but couldn’t quite see us past the boundary of the mirror.
“That’s Rebecca Shermer!” Mischa exclaimed. “I recognize her from Facebook. She died in Violet’s old town last year!”
“Shh!” Kirsten commanded, and Mischa fell quiet.
Rebecca appeared to fall backward, out of view, and another girl rose into the mirror. This one had fiery red hair to her shoulders. She, too, blinked around in wonderment before falling backward, just as Rebecca had. Her image was replaced by that of a teenage boy who looked a little younger than us, thin and gawky. The blurry shape of a fourth person emerged, and it looked as if she could see us too, which was startling. She blinked a few times and appeared to lean closer toward the mirror to see us better as the features of her blurry face became sharper.
And then there she was…
… Olivia in the mirror, looking right at us. She looked like she was wearing the same baby-pink leather jacket she’d had on the last time I’d seen her as she had walked away from me down the hall at school, on her way to the mall in Green Bay. She seemed to be looking directly at Henry, her eyes huge and filled with urgency, moving her lips and gesticulating as if she was trying to tell him something. But her image in the mirror was too blurry and unsteady for any of us to determine what she was saying.
“What is it, Olivia? I can’t hear you,” Henry said to the mirror. He looked up at Kirsten and asked in desperation, “Can she see us?”
Kirsten answered apologetically, “I don’t know.”
But then Olivia fell backward, just as the others had. Next was Candace, who looked surprised to see us, and blinked a few times as if she couldn’t believe her eyes before she fell backward.
And what happened next made all of us jump—Violet’s mother appeared to rise into the mirror from the space into which the other bodies had fallen. Unlike the kids whose deaths Violet had predicted, Vanessa Simmons didn’t seem to be aware of us watching her at all. As her image lingered, it grew clearer, and then we saw what looked like a store appear in the background of her reflection. It looked as if she was at the grocery store in Willow, and we were watching her shop.
“Is that… Violet’s mother, like, right now?” Mischa asked.
“It looks like it,” Henry said. “It looks like that’s her, doing whatever she’s doing at this very moment.”
Kirsten shook her head and said, “That doesn’t make sense. We asked for the truth about Violet, not her mother.”
The image in the mirror held by Kirsten faded to black, and when nothing else appeared after a few seconds, she put the mirror down. “What could that possibly mean?”
“Maybe the truth about Violet is actually the truth about her mother,” Mischa suggested. “I mean, does this truth spell ever lie?”
“Maybe,” I proposed, taking to heart what Mischa had just said, “we’ve been thinking all along that Violet has been predicting people’s death for some blatantly evil purpose. But what if… Violet’s doing what she does to save someone else? Like her mom?”
Trey raised an eyebrow and leaned forward. “Wait a minute. What’s that quote about the most powerful villains always believing their intentions are good?”
We all looked around with blank fa
ces, having no clue what he was talking about. Kirsten brightened and pointed at him, catching his drift. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Like how in the Superman comics, Lex Luthor is a super genius, and he really thinks that if he can kill Superman and rule the planet, he’ll be able to advance humanity forward with his technological knowledge?”
Again, blank stares. “Um, if you guys say so,” Henry said, sounding doubtful.
“Okay,” Trey said, shaking his head, a little annoyed with our ignorance of comic-book story lines. “Just follow me, here. What McKenna said makes sense. What if Violet knows that killing people is wrong, but she has to? Like, she believes ultimately it’s a good thing because by killing other people, she’s keeping her mom alive? Or protecting her from something?”
We all fell quiet, thinking this over. Before Olivia had died, Violet had never struck me as greedy, selfish, or evil. When we’d accused her of intentionally killing Olivia and Candace, she had tried to convince us that what had happened wasn’t her fault—that she hadn’t had any control over it. Maybe that hadn’t been a total lie. She’d only started acting like a selfish scene-stealer after Olivia had passed away and she’d settled into the role of the most popular girl in the junior class.
“You recognized all those people in the mirror?” Kirsten asked us.
“Not all of them. But enough to assume they’re all the kids who Violet has killed so far,” I said glumly.
“You wanna know what I think?” Kirsten asked with a proud grin.
“We drove all the way down here in a snowstorm to find out what you think,” Henry teased.
Kirsten eased back in her chair, crossed her legs, and folded her hands on her knee. “I think you’re dealing with some kind of a sacrifice curse. The way Violet’s mom appeared in the mirror was the reversal of how the other people left the mirror. That makes me suspect that she—and everything she’s doing right now—is the flip side of the others dying. Get it? Her life is the result of their deaths.”