Violet’s lips parted as if she was about to object, but then she asked, “What?”

“The gun,” I told her. She wrinkled her eyebrows as if she was trying to act like she had no idea what I was talking about. But we didn’t have time for feigning ignorance. “I know you had it under your pillow last night, and you left it in the living room. I don’t care; that’s not why I’m bringing it up.”

“I was just—”

I cut Violet off. “Listen. At some point, once we get Mischa back to your house, once we start negotiating the deal and we come to an agreement on whatever the terms will be, I’m going to need you to threaten to shoot me.”

Violet blinked twice and shook her head. “What?”

“The spirits have to believe that you’re going to kill me and prevent their prediction for me from coming true. So that means I need you to pick a fight with me, or I’ll attack you—I don’t know exactly how this will play out. It’s going to have to be convincing. But you might”—I looked over Violet’s shoulder to her parked car, where Trey had hidden himself in the back seat—“actually have to shoot me.”

“You’re crazy. I’m not murdering you.”

“Violet,” I said. It didn’t seem like an appropriate time to remind her that she’d already essentially murdered a lot of people. “If you do, then it dies with me. You know it’s the only way, and you said yourself that the spirits most likely won’t let that happen.”

“No. I said that they won’t let whoever is cursed kill themselves,” Violet argued.

Ahead of us by about twenty feet, Henry had noticed we weren’t following behind him, and he’d paused to watch us. I grabbed Violet by the shoulders to make her pay attention. “I need the spirits to try to get inside of me, okay? That’s all I can tell you, and scaring them into thinking that I might die in a way that doesn’t deliver my soul to them is the only way. Promise me you’ll do this.”

Violet scrunched up her face and shook her head again. I wasn’t getting through to her at all, and I was starting to panic. “Violet,” I repeated, but then my attention was captured by a voice behind me.

“McKenna.”

I turned to find myself looking into the face of Mrs. Emory, and couldn’t prevent myself from gasping in surprise. She looked much more polished than usual, with her hair blown out and rosy blush brushed onto her cheeks, despite the fact that her eldest son was missing and she was presumably providing temporary shelter to Mom as well as all of Mom and Glenn’s pets. I hoped with all my might that she hadn’t seen us driving in the procession, when she might have spotted Trey sitting next to me in the back seat of Violet’s car.

“Hi, Mrs. Emory,” I said uneasily. Though it would have been laughable to suggest that anyone—especially me—could have been considered a bad influence on Trey, I was sure that her opinion of me wasn’t far off from that.