It was all starting to fit together in my head: the foreboding sense that had overcome me the first time I’d ever visited this place with Violet; the way that the trees along the private drive seemed to envelop this house, hide it from the outside world. I would die here, and I had felt that in my bones every time I’d ever come here.

“No,” I told Violet.

On my right, I heard Trey say, “McKenna, just play the game. Please.”

But I shook my head again. This was the plan. Jennie’s plan, our plan. It was time to prove to myself that I was brave enough to see it through.

Violet’s arm shook violently, and her lower lip trembled. “McKenna,” she warned in a hoarse voice. A tear spilled from her eye and down her cheek.

“Don’t do this, Violet,” Henry said from behind me.

“This is the only way. We have to make her die in a way that’s different from how they predicted. This ends it. I know. I’ve been dealing with this longer than all of you.”

Violet was going to squeeze the trigger. It was at that moment that I knew the gun was going to be fired, and it was all I could do to look over at Trey one last time. His blue eyes were already fixed on me. It took every ounce of strength I had to resist the urge to even allow a muscle in my face to twitch so that he would know that this was the moment—right now—when he had to remove those pins from my voodoo doll. The spirits were sure to notice anything I communicated to him, so gesturing or shouting was unthinkable—

And then…

Bang!

A powerful force, sudden and unexpected, knocked me off my feet. I smelled something like burned sugar before my eyes opened, and it took a second for me to make sense of what I was seeing. Violet stood several feet in front of me with her eyes squeezed shut. She still gripped the gun, which continued to quiver in her raised hand. My heart was thumping so loudly in my chest that I felt like I’d been shot; adrenaline flooded my body in a way that made me feel as if I could jump through the ceiling.

But I hadn’t been shot. I was alive. I’d been hurled against the sofa, and I’d fallen halfway onto it at an odd angle. My arms were spread across the cushions, but my hips hadn’t quite cleared them, so my legs were sprawled on the floor—

And Henry lay across them, his body, unmoving, turned away from me.

My hands cupped over my mouth, and when Violet opened her eyes and saw what she’d done, a high-pitched noise emerged from her body, a noise I didn’t know a human was capable of making.

Kindhearted, courageous Henry. Just earlier that day I’d decided I couldn’t ask Trey to kill me because I believed he’d die before he’d let anything happen to me, and now Henry had taken a bullet for me. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that Henry would give up his life to save mine—primarily because I never would have asked him to make a sacrifice like that. The way he was slumped over on his side, I didn’t see the blood at first. But then it began to pool around him, dark as ink, pouring from the left side of his chest, which was pressed to the floor.