“I was on my way to Florida to find you,” Trey said. He wasn’t smiling about the irony of the two of us running into each other by happenstance at O’Hare airport. The grave expression on his face deepened my fear about his reason for not being at Northern Reserve Academy at that very moment.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “How are you even here right now?” He looked terrible. He was pale and seemed to have lost even more weight than when I’d last seen him in January. A fading green-and-yellow bruise encircled his right eye. He wore a heavy black winter coat that I didn’t recognize, which served as a reminder that it was still cold in the Midwest. I took his hands in mine and stared down at his familiar fingers, at the slim, slightly raised pale scar across his left palm. “Why? How?”

Trey looked around suspiciously, and his eyes lingered on an airport security guard standing outside the Hudson News convenience market. “It’s a long story. Why are you here?”

The line of passengers waiting to board my flight advanced. The flight attendant announced, “Now boarding passengers for Flight 4632 to Green Bay in Group B. Seating all passengers in Group B.”

“I’m going home,” I stated the obvious. “You know there was a tornado, right? Two days ago?”

“I saw it on the news.”

“Two people in Willow died,” I told him cautiously, knowing that he didn’t have access to the Internet at Northern Reserve and usually didn’t talk to his mom and brother on the phone until the weekend. If he’d heard about the Portnoy family somehow, he probably would have already guessed—based on how I’d hinted on our weekly call that trouble was brewing—that the evil spirits behind the curse were somehow involved with the weather in our hometown. But when he remained silent, waiting for me to continue, my heart sank. I was going to have to be the bearer of bad news. “It was Mischa’s mom and dad. And her sister has a spinal cord injury. From what I’ve heard, her chances aren’t good.”

Before saying a word, Trey shook his head. “No way.”

“Way,” I confirmed. I went on to quickly give him a recap of the last two and a half months with details that I couldn’t share on our monitored phone calls—about how Mischa had been resisting the spirits’ orders to predict deaths.

As I backtracked in the story and told him about how Violet had visited me in Willow before I moved down to Tampa, I noticed him balling his hands into fists at his sides.

The flight attendant announced into the microphone, “Now boarding all passengers in Group C. If you are in Group C, you are now welcome to board.”

I winced, knowing that there wasn’t enough time remaining for us to keep talking. “I can’t miss this flight,” I said. “Henry’s on his way back to Wisconsin from France, and I’m afraid he’s going to try to hurt Violet. Or worse. And I have to stop Mischa from doing something stupid to try to save Amanda’s life.”