Outside the large windows at the gate, the sky was blanketed by gloomy clouds. I quickly checked the weather on my phone: thunderstorms. Great. I’d been so anxious about getting my parents to agree to this trip that I hadn’t factored in the element about my own life being in danger, and spending over three hours on two different planes during inclement weather definitely put me at risk.

After settling into my seat in first class, I popped in my earbuds and listened for Jennie over the flight attendant’s preflight speech.

“Any ideas on what I’m going to have to do to get this thing off of Mischa?” I asked in a low voice, hoping that the guy in the suit sitting next to me would assume I was on a regular phone call. Now that I would be landing in Wisconsin in a few hours, I had to deal with the fact that I might find myself facing Mischa as soon as the next morning, and I had no plan whatsoever.

Jennie hesitated. “I can’t see into the future. I can’t tell you how this will end.”

“What about when you showed me all that stuff about Violet?” I asked. “In the future? With the doctor?” Back in January, when we’d confronted Violet in Michigan on the ski trip she’d organized and forced her into playing a game of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Jennie had shown me how Violet would die one day.

“That was different. Hard to explain. Someone else was showing me, and I was letting you watch.”

I honestly didn’t want to know enough about life after death to ask her to elaborate on what she meant by that. “Any kind of guidance at all would be helpful. Like…” I side-eyed my seatmate to make sure he wasn’t listening too closely. He appeared to be deeply engrossed in a book. “What if Mischa dies while it’s on her? Wouldn’t that just make the curse jump to someone else?” I wasn’t suggesting that we would kill Mischa. The thought of Mischa dying under any circumstances made my stomach turn. I hadn’t really known Olivia and Candace all that well when they’d died in the fall, if I was being honest. But I’d become much closer with Mischa over the last few months. If she died, I would be devastated; I couldn’t even allow myself to imagine what that might be like.

However, even after being trapped in this horrific loop of predictions and death since September, I still didn’t fully understand how anyone could ever appease the spirits of Violet’s five dead sisters.

“Yes,” Jennie sounded like she was uncertain. “I think it would transfer to whoever killed her. It’s like an electrical charge. It will always jump to whoever’s closest.”

“Well, that’s no good,” I muttered, hoping for everyone’s benefit that Henry had abandoned that line of thinking. I didn’t want to think about the curse transferring to him.

The flight attendant passing my row while conducting the preflight check gave me a cold smile and said, “Please turn off any electronic devices.”