“Love… is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring…”

In pure terror, I looked at the radio in the dashboard. “What radio station is this?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

Mom idled at the exit of the funeral home with her right turn signal clicking. “I don’t know. It’s satellite. Glenn’s always changing it.”

Whatever it was, I was certain that my mom didn’t regularly listen to music stations that would play Johnny Cash songs. My scalp broke into another fit of tingles, and this time they were strangely painful. “Mom,” I said in a trembling voice, not wanting to alarm her—not wanting to be right about what I suspected was happening at our house at that very moment. “We need to go straight home. Fast.”

Mom pulled out onto State Street at a moderate speed. There weren’t any other cars headed in our direction. “Why? Are you okay?”

I couldn’t find the words to even lie to her about having to go to the bathroom. With my fingers wrapped tightly around the mason jar, I just stared ahead through the windshield and thought about the text Mischa had sent me the day after the tornados touched down.

This is your fault, and I’m going to make you pay.

Maybe those spirits had completely taken over Mischa’s mind and body now, but they probably still had access to her memories. They’d been in her soul when she’d sent that text, anyway, and they’d obviously been paying close attention to me since that first night at Olivia’s house. So I knew as we drove the streets of our small town back to Martha Road that the deep sense of doom I felt wasn’t just an effect of paranoia.

The bitter smell of smoke tickled my nostrils before we even reached our corner.

“Oh God!” Mom shouted behind the wheel, noticing black smoking drifting upward from the middle of our block and instantly realizing that it was coming from our rooftop. She hit the gas so hard that my head was thrown back against my seat, and then she slammed on the brakes seconds later when she parked haphazardly in the middle of our street. Elderly Dr. Waldbaum, a retired dentist who lived down the block, was pacing in front of our house with his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“No,” I said where I sat in the front seat of the car, watching Mom sprint across our lawn. All these months, I’d managed to elude the spirits. I’d tried to undo everything. Everyone kept telling me that I was so brave. But now I regretted my courage. It was a fair assumption that the spirits that carried out the curse had always been restrained up until that point by the will of the unfortunate person who was issuing death predictions. But they’d never been able to inhabit a human body as if it were their puppet before, like they could now. I couldn’t even imagine what they might be capable of with Mischa’s body as a host, leveraging her physical strength and the fact that everyone in town pitied her at the moment.