“You’ve probably heard,” he greeted me as I climbed into the front seat. He sounded grim, which was rare for him.

“Mom’s fine. Nothing happened on our street,” I replied stonily.

Before pulling away from the curb, he said, “You’ve gotta remember, McKenna… extreme weather systems have nothing to do with ghosts or spirits or occult games.”

“I know, Dad,” I replied because I had to, although he really had no idea what he was talking about. On one hand, he was right. Bad things happened everywhere, to a lot of innocent people. But surely by now—after Olivia’s accident, and the meningitis outbreak that had almost killed my classmate Tracy Hartford, Stephani deMilo’s tragic “suicide,” and the avalanche that had endangered every eleventh grader from Willow High School on the ski trip in January—he realized that something was very suspiciously wrong in our town.

The trouble in Willow, Wisconsin, was painfully obvious to anyone whose mind was open to the possibility of paranormal interference with the regular world. Kirsten texted me before Dad and I even got home asking simply, WTF? She didn’t need any convincing.

I didn’t write back. I couldn’t. My whole chest ached with heaviness because Mischa still hadn’t replied, which meant either she was completely—and understandably—emotionally devastated, or furious.

With me.

Mom had tried calling me twice by ten p.m., and knowing that it probably seemed unforgivably rude that I hadn’t answered, I called her back. Our house was completely unscathed, but a tree had fallen over on Glenn’s property and wrecked his roof as well as one of his walls. He’d be staying with her at our place for a while. She hadn’t heard any news about the Portnoys, but that wasn’t surprising. Mom didn’t socialize much around town, and said she hadn’t ventured past the corner to check out the damage since getting home from campus earlier that day. In futility, she urged me not to worry as we said good-byes, and tried to assure me that the fire department was taking care of “everything.” Figuring that following Mrs. Robinson’s wacky instructions couldn’t hurt, I still felt a little self-conscious as I strung an old shoelace through the hole punched in the gris-gris so that I could tie it around my neck. She’d told me to put something inside of it that had belonged to Jennie, which was easier said than done since I was at Dad’s and not in Willow, where Jennie’s few remaining possessions were stored in Mom’s garage. But then I remembered that I had an old school photo with me in Florida, tucked into a page in a photo album with all of the Polaroids I’d taken in middle school. It was one of two wallet-size school portraits I had of her, first grade and second grade.

I snapped a picture of it with my phone before I cut the original photo to fit inside the leather pouch.

All night, I kept one eye on the WBAY-TV website for local news from the Green Bay area while testing out various radio apps on my phone, trying to find a signal that would allow me to hear Jennie’s voice. Ever since Trey had read Requests from the Dead in the fall and had assured me that it was difficult for spirits on the “other side” to manipulate objects in our world, I’d trusted that they were limited in their ability to make good on their threats. Perhaps their stronghold in our realm was increasing now that they’d made the leap from Violet to Mischa, or they’d always been stronger than I’d realized. I fell asleep wondering if causing three tornados and nearly killing Amanda Portnoy was just a modest sneak preview of their capabilities.