“What the hell are you doing?” His voice echoed strangely after he roared, but I had gained back enough awareness to recognize that the echo was all in my head as my soul settled back into its rightful place within my body. He wasn’t supposed to be back yet. This was all wrong.

Violet stammered something about being sorry, but she was breaking into sobs. Mr. Simmons grabbed the gun away from her, and in a nightmarish flash, he aimed it at Trey.

I was regaining clarity and control over my body by the second. Fast enough that when Mr. Simmons addressed Trey, there was no echo or delay in the words leaving his mouth. “You. You have no right to be here!”

Never one to resist an opportunity to stand his ground, Trey didn’t hold up his hands as if to plead for mercy or beg for his life. Instead, he stared his biological father right in the eye. “According to the attorneys you sent to threaten me, I have just as much right as your precious daughter to be here. That’s what you wanted me to believe, right? Why am I not surprised that it’s turned out not to be true?”

Mr. Simmons was so furious that his lips quivered. Violet gestured toward her father but didn’t dare take a step toward him, or toward Trey. “Daddy, please! You don’t understand what’s going on! He’s here to help us! Something terrible has been happening. We’re just trying to make it stop!”

Mr. Simmons seemed to calm down long enough to glance down at the floor and truly register that Henry had been shot—with the gun that he now held in his hand. Although Violet had been holding the gun when he’d first walked in on us, he focused his ire once again on Trey. “You did this? You shot someone in my home?”

Finally able to find my voice, I managed to bark out, “Call nine-one-one.”

Crying tears of terror now, Violet sputtered, “Where are they? Where are the spirits?”

Mr. Simmons turned to Violet and shouted, “You said this was over! You said it had moved on to someone else!”

I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. Unable to contain myself, I gasped, “You knew.” Either Violet had told him, or he’d known all along. And it made perfect sense that he’d known. It was his mother who’d cast the original spell, possibly at his insistence so that Violet’s mother wouldn’t leave him.

Mr. Simmons narrowed his eyes and scowled at me. “This one.” With one swift flick of his wrist, he aimed his gun at me. “This never had anything to do with you. You should have minded your own business.”

Now Violet placed her hands gently on her father’s forearm as if urging him to lower the gun. She tried to smile convincingly through her tears. “Just listen, Daddy! We figured it out! We know how to end it! McKenna’s next, so we’re going to trick them into thinking she’s dying some way other than how they predicted, and then it’s over!”