by Zoe Aarsen
Sacrifice. One sacrifice for each cycle of the moon.
Henry looked at me as if seeking permission before asking, “Is there any significance to making a monthly sacrifice that coincides with the phases of the moon?”
Kirsten looked blank-faced at Henry for a long moment before breaking into hysterical laughter. “You’re kidding, right?” She continued howling, rocking back in her chair before recovering. “You just described pretty much every natural phenomenon on planet Earth and the basis of Wiccan practice! The lunar calendar influences everything from our sleep patterns to the tide. I mean, hello, menstruation—if that’s not a metaphor for a monthly sacrifice, I don’t know what is.”
“Right,” Henry said, turning red.
“But seriously,” Kirsten continued as she calmed herself down. “Yes, there’s a connection between casting spells and the moon. A lot of spells can only be effectively cast during full moons or new moons. I guess the same is probably true for curses, which is essentially just a bad-intentioned spell.”
Trey cleared his throat and bobbed his head in the direction of the store’s front windows. “It’s starting to really come down.” The snow had picked up and was falling in larger flakes. I glanced at my phone and noticed that it was almost six o’clock. Even under ideal driving circumstances, it would take us more than three hours to get home.
“We should get going,” I said.
“Wait! What about breaking the curse?” Mischa demanded. “So Violet sacrifices someone every month—how do we stop that?”
Kirsten held up her hands in defeat. “I’d need more time to figure that out. This is way over my head. If you guys don’t mind, I want to contact my boss in London and ask if she has any advice for you. You should give me your contact info so that I can get in touch with you. Are you from around here?”
“We’re from Wisconsin,” Henry said.
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Kirsten said, and this time I was sure she was flirting with Henry. I felt my lips twist into a little bit of a frown. It shouldn’t have bothered me at all for a girl to show interest in him. My own boyfriend was sitting right next to me, and Henry looked like a dreamy movie star. Girls probably flirted with him all the time.
But it still struck me as kind of inappropriate considering that we’d just summoned the ghost of his dead sister into a pocket mirror.
At the front of the store, we traded e-mail addresses and phone numbers with Kirsten so that she could pass along messages from her boss. I had an annoying hunch that Henry was going to hear from her first. Trey passed Kirsten’s phone to Mischa when it reached him, announcing to no one in particular, “I’m pretty much unreachable these days.”
Kirsten threw one pointed finger in the air and said, “Before I forget!” From one of the bookshelves, she pulled a paperback and handed it to me. Understanding the Spirit World was printed across its cover, and its pages were yellowed as if it had been on the shelf for decades. “Read this and you’ll have a better idea of what the forces aiding this girl Violet can and can’t do to you.”
I examined the book in my hands skeptically. It looked like it had been printed in the seventies, and when I flipped open the cover and checked out the copyright, my assumption was confirmed. “So you think they’re spirits and not demons, after all?”
“That would be my assumption, yes,” Kirsten said. “I don’t think the spell would have shown us anything if your friend were being controlled by a demon. Demons have a will of their own. They don’t submit to influence.”
I realized that I was still holding the pendulum, and offered to return it to Kirsten. However, she refused it. “You should keep it. It works well with your energy, and now that you’ve used it, it won’t ever work quite right for anyone else.”
“I’ve only got twenty bucks,” I blurted, not really wanting to take anything intended for communicating with spirits home to my mother’s house. I wasn’t lying about the money; I wasn’t allowed to carry cash at Sheridan and wasn’t exactly allowed to have a part-time job while enrolled there.
“I’ll buy it,” Henry offered. “It could be really helpful. We should keep it around, just in case.”
I felt the weight of the pendulum in my coat pocket as Henry gave Kirsten his credit card to pay for it, and as he signed the receipt, he said, “I’ll go get the car and come back to pick you guys up. There’s no point in all of us walking to the garage in the cold.”
Mischa was lingering near the front window texting someone on her phone when Kirsten called her over to the counter. “Mischa, is it? Come here. I want to give you something.”
She pulled one of the rainbow-striped candles in a jar off of a shelf and set it down on the counter. “I want you to have this. It’s a gift.”
Mischa sniffed the top of it and wrinkled her nose. “I thought it would smell good.”
“It’s not scented,” Kirsten clarified. “It’s a seven-day candle. See? There are seven colors. Tonight, before you go to bed, sit on the floor and light the wick. Put your hands on both sides of the glass, like this, and as you watch the flame burn, just think about your life, and your future. And survival. Do that for at least ten minutes. Then, don’t blow the candle out, but put it somewhere in your room where there aren’t any drafts and where it’s not likely to get knocked over. Let it burn for seven days straight.”
“Seven days! Are you serious?” Mischa asked. “If I leave a candle burning in my room for a week, my mom will flip out!”
“Just… trust,” Kirsten said kindly, smiling sadly at Mischa.
Outside, Henry pulled up in his dad’s Mercedes and honked the horn. Mischa thanked Kirsten for her help and for the candle and left, but I lingered. My feet felt like cement blocks. I had more questions for Kirsten now than I’d had when we’d first arrived, and this might have been my only chance to ask them. Trey held the door open for me, waiting.
Kirsten asked, “McKenna, can I talk to you for a second?” It was as if she had heard my thoughts about needing to speak to her privately before I left.
For a second, it looked like Trey was about to reply on my behalf, but I said, “I’ll just be a minute.” He pulled the door closed behind him and followed Mischa to the car.
“Your whole thing as a medium,” she said, smiling bashfully, “it’s real. You can take classes to learn how to develop it, you know. You’ve probably experienced weird things and weren’t sure what was causing them, right?”
“Why is this happening to me?” I asked, cutting right to the chase. “My whole life, up until a few months ago, I never heard weird stuff or had inexplicable things happen to me. And now it’s like there’s more and more of it. I don’t know how to turn it off.” In September, I’d thought my life was going to change for the better because people at school started treating me differently. Suddenly, I was no longer the shy girl whose sister had died in a house fire and who everyone wanted to avoid. But receiving messages from the spirit world was pulling me back, away from the normal life I wanted. I was already worried that my getting sent away to boarding school was going to wreck my future. Ongoing communication with dead people wasn’t the kind of future I wanted either.
Kirsten smiled encouragingly at me. “That’s just how it is for some people. There was probably one event, one little tiny crack in the wall between our world and the spirit world, and that was the beginning.”
I thought of the moment on the night of Olivia’s party when Violet had announced that she could think only of fire when she touched my temples. That may very well have been the beginning, even before the first time Olivia’s ghost had ever visited me.
“Once your body knows how to interpret those vibrations, it’s impossible to ignore them, you know what I mean? So it’s less like you’re experiencing it more often, and more like you’re just aware of it now.”
Kirsten handed me a few sticks of palo santo, which she said was a kind of sacred wood I could burn at home prior to using my pendulum to cleanse the space. She t
hen tore off a tab from a flyer taped to the wall promoting classes for learning how to have out-of-body experiences. “The guy who teaches this class, Brian, could probably really help you develop your gift, if you were interested in that. I mean, he does this out-of-body stuff just to make some money because people are always curious about dabbling in paranormal abilities, but that’s kind of, like, child’s play. I think he’d be psyched to meet you.”
I thanked her and put the bit of paper she handed to me in my pocket alongside the pendulum.
“And Mischa,” Kirsten said, looking at me with pity. “She’s next, isn’t she?”
I didn’t know how to answer. We’d mentioned to Kirsten that Violet had told a prediction for Mischa, but none of us had specifically said that Mischa’s turn was next.
“I can read auras,” Kirsten said, shrugging. “It’s the only paranormal thing I’ve really been able to master. Yours is this zany purple color, really saturated. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Does that mean anything?”
Kirsten shrugged. “Indigo is supposed to be associated with higher spiritual awakening, like if your third eye is open. It’s the color associated with the crown chakra. It means—and I hope this doesn’t scare you—that someone’s here for a higher purpose than other people, but it also usually means that the person has to overcome some kind of obstacle to achieve it.”
“What does Mischa’s look like?” I dared to ask.
“She doesn’t have one. That’s how I know she’ll be the next to die. She’s doomed.”
I swallowed hard, feeling as if I was about to cry. The sun had set while we were in the store, and my mom had already texted me once to ask what time I was coming home. It was easy to imagine having to attend Mischa’s funeral within the next few days, and having to endure the rest of my life knowing that I’d failed to save one of the most important people in my life. Since September, I’d come to think of Mischa and me as being in this nightmare together. I couldn’t fathom going back to Sheridan and moving on if she were to die. Even the promise of a future with Trey might not have been enough to lighten the weight of grief I’d carry around in my heart if I couldn’t break the curse in time to save her. There must be a point at which a heart exceeds its capacity for sadness, and I had to be close to reaching it.
“She has to burn that candle like I told her,” Kirsten insisted. “And one last thing.” She took a step toward me and placed her fingertips gently on my shoulders. “That guy? Your boyfriend?”
“Henry’s not my boyfriend,” I corrected her, feeling a blush creep into my cheeks.
“Oh, I know that. I meant the other one. Sexy danger with the ice-blue eyes.”
Trey.
“What about him?” I asked, terrified of the answer.
“You can’t trust him. I don’t know what his connection to this whole thing is, but when I blew out the candle earlier after saying Violet’s name? The smoke drifted directly toward him. That usually means something… and something not good.”
CHAPTER 5
WE WERE ALL IN A moody state of heightened sensitivity, and our conversation was tense as we rode home, each of us processing all we’d learned from our short visit to Sticks & Stones. Mischa was jumpy and irritable in the front passenger seat—understandably so, since we hadn’t gotten a definitive answer about how to prevent her from dying within the next twenty-four hours.
“What’d that girl want to talk to you about alone?” Mischa asked as if already suspicious that I’d lagged behind to discuss her impending death.
I considered telling her what Kirsten had said about her lack of an aura in the hope that she would take to heart the need for her to burn the candle Kirsten had given her. There was no way I was going to divulge Kirsten’s suggestion that I take lessons to further develop my ability to receive messages from the spirit world. My friends had already heard her talk more about my paranormal abilities than I would have preferred. I was especially edgy about giving Trey any more reasons to think that I had special abilities to communicate with ghosts after Kirsten had cautioned me against trusting him. So instead of telling the truth, I told a lie that slightly twisted my heart. “She wanted to know if Henry has a girlfriend and what his deal is.”
“Oooh,” Mischa teased. “I could totally see Henry with a hot hipster witch.”
Henry replied, “We’ve got to break this curse on you before I’ll have any time for wedding planning.”
I got the sense that even though I hadn’t told Mischa about Kirsten guessing her death was imminent, the candle she had been given had heightened her awareness of the fact that her prediction was due to come true within hours. As we sat, frustrated, in jams caused by fender benders, she asked Henry if he’d mind if she lit the candle from Kirsten in the car.
“Driving on these bad roads with an open flame in the car while we’re all wearing highly flammable polyester coats is a really bad idea, Mischa,” he said. She didn’t ask a second time.
The falling snow had made a mess of the toll road, and just before crossing over from Illinois into Wisconsin, we witnessed an accident involving a plow and a minivan.
“Side streets it is,” Henry announced as we took the next exit.
Henry navigated state highways through forests and small towns as I fired off text responses to my mom’s increasing concern that Mischa and I were out screwing around in dangerous weather.
One of the main roads we could potentially take through Ortonville over to Willow had not yet been plowed, so we had to drive about thirty miles north out of our way and then backtrack south toward our town. Henry was about to make a right turn onto South Marx Road, which would take us most of the way home, when suddenly my scalp began tingling so much that I impulsively scratched at it.
“No! Go straight. Let’s take Route 32,” I suggested, surprising myself. I hadn’t been thinking about potential travel routes, but out of nowhere it just seemed imperative that we take that street home and no other.
Henry lingered at an intersection with his right signal clicking. “Are you sure about that?” Luckily, ours was the only car on the road.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know why. It just seems right.”
“Okay,” Henry agreed, sounding surprisingly open to it. “If the medium in the car feels strongly about the path home, listen to her.” He winked at me in the rearview mirror, and Trey snorted quietly next to me.
Route 32 was a wide-lined rural state highway that had mysteriously already been plowed. As we passed the part of the highway that was heavily dotted with gas stations and convenience markets and entered into the section that cut through the Brillion Wildlife Area, thick with trees on both sides of the road, it began to feel like it was a lot later than ten thirty at night.
“Could we turn on some music?” Mischa asked Henry. We’d been listening to the weather and traffic report for the last twenty minutes due to Henry’s paranoia about impassable roadways. “It’s starting to feel like we’re Hansel and Gretel, leaving crumbs to find our way back out of the forest.”
“We’ll be home in an hour and fifteen minutes,” Henry assured all of us. To appease Mischa, he switched the satellite radio station to hip-hop.
Knowing I’d be home soon didn’t make me feel any better, even though the tingling across the top of my head had settled down again. Kirsten’s parting words at the store had rattled me. Trey was the only person I’d trusted completely since all of this began, and now I had reason to believe that my paranoia about his explanation for being in Green Bay at the mall the night of Olivia’s accident was justified. Although we were holding hands in the back seat of the Mercedes, my fingers were numb to his touch. More than once I’d sensed him looking over at me in the hope of catching my eye, and I refused to meet his gaze. What I’d wanted most in the world that morning when I’d gotten up was to see him again, but now I wondered if he even knew what his connection to Violet was, or that he posed a threat to me.
There
was also still the possibility—although I didn’t want to believe this because I’d known him my whole life—that he was intentionally allowing me to get closer to the danger, and had even aided me in confronting Violet back in November because he wanted me to get in trouble and be removed as an obstacle from her mission. It seemed far-fetched that he’d go to such an extreme in order to ensure Violet could continue killing people, but I would be naïve to rule out the possibility that he was working as her accomplice, whether he was aware or not.
“So what do you guys think the moon has to do with Violet exactly?” Henry asked. “Like maybe once every thirty days, she has to make a sacrifice, so her power to predict one death is renewed—”
Although Henry had fessed up to leaving the lunar calendar at my house, it suddenly struck me as odd that he’d done so days before Mischa had told him anything about what we’d been up to for the last few weeks. “Wait a second. I thought the moon theory was yours?” I asked. “You said you were the one who left the calendar and the obituaries in my mailbox?”
Henry clarified, “Oh, it’s not my theory. Someone sent that calendar to my house anonymously. No return address, but it had a Lake Forest postal—”
“Henry, stop the car.” Mischa’s voice was a low growl.
“What do you mean? Are you going to be sick?”
“Just stop. Right now.”
Henry rolled to a stop, and the tires crunched on the half inch of snow that had collected since the plows had come through. I leaned forward over the back of the front seat to peer through the windshield in the space between Henry and Mischa, and my heart stopped beating when I saw what Mischa had seen first.
Our headlights were shining on the back of a slim girl with long dark hair walking barefoot in the snow about one hundred feet ahead of our car. She wore a silky pastel dress with a floral pattern on it, and a pink cardigan. In her right hand, she carried a pair of eggshell-colored ankle-strap pumps.