My face burned with humiliation as well as anger at myself. Even after all this time, the spirits were outsmarting me. They’d even changed the atmosphere around Mischa’s house the moment I’d picked up the brick and I’d been too scared to realize what it meant. They’d been warning me, teasing me, cocky about my ignorance.

“Do you think,” I asked in a tiny voice, “there’s a possibility that Mischa’s soul was lured out along with the evil spirits, and that maybe I caught her in the jar?”

Mrs. Robinson fell silent for a moment and then hummed a little melody before answering. “I’ve never heard of that. But I guess it could happen. If you’re dealing with some real bad spirits, then I guess they could have pulled the good out along with them and then locked her out.”

Locked her out. That sounded about right.

As well as horrifying.

If we weren’t sure how we’d allowed her to be locked out of her own body, how were we ever going to help her get back in?

“If Mischa’s not in her body, then can the loa do whatever they want with her?” I dared to ask.

“Well, I would imagine they could.”

I had to remind myself that it wasn’t fair to expect Mrs. Robinson to have an answer for every one of my questions. No matter what she’d seen growing up in Louisiana, I was sure that what was happening right there in Willow was more outrageous than anything she’d ever personally witnessed. “Is there any way to know for sure?” I asked. “I’m sorry to be so desperate, but I don’t have a lot of time to figure this out.”

“Well, you’d have to get close to your friend again to observe her behavior. If someone’s possessed by more than one loa, then they’re probably fighting over which one’s in charge. You might be able to hear them talking over one another in her voice. Or see her shaking as they all struggle for power over her movements. Sometimes possessed people have seizures, and this is why; the loa’s inhabiting an unfamiliar body, and it doesn’t always know how to operate it properly.”

Great, I thought to myself. It was already dark outside, and there was absolutely no way I was going to show up on the Galanises’ doorstep and demand to see Mischa. Not when I wasn’t even sure where Mom and I were going to sleep that night. I didn’t have a change of clothes with me. And it was truly by pure luck that Glenn and the pets hadn’t been killed that afternoon. I couldn’t risk infuriating the spirits again without having a solid plan in place to banish them; there was no doubt in my mind that they had sparked the fire in our walls the second they’d settled into Mischa’s body. Getting anywhere near Mischa before arming myself with knowledge was a bad idea, and it occurred to me for the first time since leaving Gundarsson’s that I had better hope like hell she didn’t come looking for me.