“Yes. Not while it was happening, but I can see what’s left. Everything burned except for the big things inside like the fridge and the oven,” she told me.

Once again, I pictured my bedspread, all of my yearbooks, my color guard uniform—not to even mention all of Mom’s clothes, her computer, our couch—all burned to ash. But there wasn’t time to mourn any of it. They were just objects, and if I didn’t stay focused, I’d die. “Were you watching us at the funeral home? When we were with Mischa?”

The sandwich guy gave me an odd smile as he handed me the sandwich on a paper plate and I mouthed, Thank you, at him.

“No,” Jennie replied as I carried the plate over to the only open cashier. “I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t see what was happening. Everything was dark.”

“Well, we tried to, uh, get something bad out of Mischa.” I selected my words carefully so as to not sound insane to the bearded man standing in front of me, awaiting his turn to pay. “But I think we messed it up, and now they’re stronger than ever.”

I took a step forward as the line advanced.

“They are,” Jennie confirmed. “Before, they could only take one soul for each cycle of the moon. But now they have much more flexibility to hurt anyone who tries to stop them.”

The cashier rang up the sandwich, and I smiled politely as I handed her cash. After walking out of earshot from the checkout area, I griped, “I still just don’t understand why Why would the souls of Violet’s dead sisters want to collect a new soul every month? Just to keep Violet alive because she has this degenerative disease?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Violet anymore now that its connection to her has been broken. The physical world likes cycles. Not just the moon. Photosynthesis. The carbon cycle. Matter and energy fall into patterns, and so does evil. This evil is going to keep repeating as long as it can.”

Something Violet had mentioned to me back in January crept back into my thoughts. She’d referred to the spirits as belonging to her five dead sisters, but had said that maybe they were something else, pretending to be her sisters. I hadn’t asked her what she’d meant by that. But before I had a chance to ask Jennie about it, the familiar prickling sensation broke out across my scalp and down the back of my neck.

“Don’t step into the hallway yet!” Jennie warned me just as I was about to pass through the cafeteria doorway and back into the hall. Holding my phone and Mom’s sandwich in one hand and the mason jar in my other hand, I stepped aside and pressed my body against the wall so that anyone about to walk past wouldn’t easily spot me.

A second later, I heard a man’s voice saying, “… see if they’ll make an exception because it’s a holiday.” I dared to lean forward by a few inches to catch a glimpse of who was walking toward the elevator bank, and I flinched in surprise when I saw Mischa and her uncle Roger. They both still wore all black, as if they’d come straight from the funeral home to the hospital to visit Amanda.