So I’d been the one to keep us knitted together after the shattering earthquake of loss. As much as any eleven-year-old girl could. I’d learned how to change diapers. I’d done some trial-and-error laundry. I’d insisted on things like puzzle nights, and taco dates, and other things that removed us from our suddenly too-empty home. And I’d babied the baby when Dad hadn’t been whole enough to attempt it.

I’d done all right. Up until tonight. When I’d finally reached the moment I’d always known would come sooner or later—though I never would have dreamed it would arrive this way. The moment when I wasn’t sure I could handle being the glue. When my years of life experience and my book knowledge didn’t add up to enough.

On the bright side, it certainly felt better not to have to face this moment alone.

I shut my eyes to stave off the tears that I’d managed to hold at bay this long. Instead of more sadness and fear, though, a gratitude so intense that I began to shake washed through me. And now, in order to keep from having a total breakdown, I had to squeeze the big warm hand that felt nothing like the last one I had clasped.

Exhausted and numb, I tried to fit some of the puzzle pieces of the nightmare together.

Zedok. He had to have been responsible for the chandelier. While that part seemed obvious, nothing else did.

All those masked figures. Who or what were they? Prisoners just like Erik?

According to Lucas and the Paranormal Spectator documentary, only four people counting Erik had died as a direct result of the curse. But Lucas said that the mummy-unwrapping party had taken place during a masquerade . . . Could everyone who had attended the party have become trapped in the house? Victims of the curse?

If that was the answer, it still didn’t explain the masked girl in the cellar doorway. The one who had looked just like . . .

I glanced toward Lucas again, suddenly wanting to let everything come spilling out. Clearly, he suspected the cause of the chandelier crash. What must he be thinking?

He wasn’t asking me for the same reason I wasn’t telling him. And that was because of Charlie.

“Rastin,” I said, my voice sounding like a stranger’s to my own ears. “Tell me you heard back from him.”

“Ah,” Lucas said, his grasp on my hand tightening, the squeeze telling me that yes, he had been reading between the lines. “N-no.”

I shut my tired eyes, allowing the force of that one word to detonate through me in a bomb of silent devastation.

Over the intercom, someone paged a doctor. Various beeps floated this way and that.

Soon, it would be morning. Dad would wake up. He would ask me again what had happened. After that, only one thing was certain. He would insist that we, all three of us, go back to the house that Erik had told me never to enter again.