But the moment he yanked out its safety pin, the flames vanished. The wind stopped abruptly.

“What the hell?!” Henry yelled at no one in particular.

Mischa, Violet, and I looked around the room—which had just been in total chaos—completely baffled. The letters and petals dropped to the floor. The kitchen table didn’t show a single sign of just having been on fire… although the four tarot cards Mischa had set on it remained piles of ash.

Violet sobbed softly as she inspected her right arm. The sleeve of her sweater looked as if nothing at all had happened, but it was rolled up over her elbow. “My arm was just completely burned. I could feel it blistering! I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.”

Mischa’s lower lip trembled as she glanced at the tarot card in her hand. “Ten of Swords, reversed,” she said. She held it out toward me so that I could see it for myself.

The card that had been chosen by the spirits for me had an illustration on it of a guy wearing a tunic lying on his stomach with what appeared to be a bunch of swords jabbing into his back and neck. It took me a second to piece together what was being depicted, since Mischa was holding the card upside down, so at first it looked like someone lying on top of a picket fence. Never having had my tarot cards read before, and having no familiarity with the practice at all, I was clueless as to what this meant.

“Ten of Swords is about resistance. It’s usually shown to a person combating inevitable change or loss,” Mischa explained, her eyes enormous. She tossed the card down on the table and yanked her hand back as if the card were a dirty tissue. “Someone who has a choice to move on with their life after a bad situation, but they may not realize that they’re free to welcome change.”

“I don’t like any of that,” Violet said as she joined us at the table and took a look at the card.

“But because they showed it to you upside down, that’s a reversal,” Mischa continued, her tone growing more serious as she shook her head. “I’m not very good at this yet, and we can Google the meaning if you want, but I think they’re trying to tell you that you’ve already lost a battle, and you just refuse to accept the loss. You still believe a victory’s possible, but it’s not. It’s time to call it quits.”

I huffed loudly in annoyance. “How is that supposed to be a death prediction?”

Mischa bit her lower lip and hesitated, making timid eye contact with me before continuing. “It’s part of the suit of Swords in the minor Arcana. Wands is associated with air.”

“Air,” I repeated numbly. My heart stopped for a second before it occurred to me that perhaps this had been Jennie’s way of protecting me. She’d shown the spirits her own death instead of mine when we’d played the game with Olivia, tricking the spirits into thinking my soul wasn’t theirs to claim—maybe she’d done the same thing again. Air could mean… smoke. “Jennie?” I asked, clinging to hope that she’d been in control this whole time. “Did you show them the fire?”