“But you understand what I’m suggesting, don’t you?” Jennie asked. “Check under the first cup again.”

I lifted the teacup on the left once more, this time to find that the bean was back. And suddenly I understood.

Jennie was proposing that we trick the spirits again, but this time in a different way. It would be similar to how she showed them her death the first time I played the game with Violet, but actually swapping souls with me this time right when they were about to claim mine. “If we do this, can you send them away?” I asked in a whisper. “To a place they can’t return from?”

“I’m not sure,” Jennie admitted. And without her explaining in detail, I understood why she had prefaced her demonstration of what she planned to do with such a stern caveat. If we hid my soul from the spirits and tricked them by making them interact with hers instead, and she failed to banish them to a place from which they couldn’t escape, it might be Jennie who’d end up trapped there. And… me too.

There was one element of Jennie’s plan I didn’t comprehend. “But they won’t want my soul. They already think they’ve got it lined up. I’m supposed to die next.”

I could hear the alarm on someone’s phone quietly buzzing in the next room. It was only a matter of time before Henry, Trey, or Violet would wander into the kitchen and interrupt our conversation. When we’d gone to Michigan in January, Trey and Henry had collaborated on our strategy to confront Violet out on the ski slopes to force her into playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board again. But this time, I got the sense that only Jennie and I would truly understand the game plan. Her voice came across the radio through the static. “They can only claim your soul if you die according to their prediction.”

Of course. That made sense. But their predictions always came true. They hadn’t specified exactly how I’d die, but I didn’t doubt for a second that it would have something to do with air.

“So, what are you suggesting?” I asked.

“They might be willing to leave Mischa’s body to try to prevent you from dying if they think you’re at risk of dying in a way other than how they predicted,” Jennie explained. “You’re going to have to decide which of your friends you trust the most, and ask them to kill you… because they may have to.”

CHAPTER 16

WE HAVE TO GET MISCHA back to this house somehow.”

Trey, Violet, and Henry sat around me in the living room, listening with such intensity that it made me even more nervous that I didn’t have much of a plan to share with them. The sun was rising outside, turning the sky lavender, from the sliver of it that I could see through the heavy curtains on the windows. Violet had made a pot of coffee, but I didn’t want caffeine to worsen the anxiety that was already making my hands tremble.