Within eleven days, I’d be dead, and there I was, squatting in my driveway, hammering away at a brick in the moonlight, wasting what very well might have been the last Saturday night of my life—while the boy I loved slept across town, his own life endangered by his sinister lineage.

CHAPTER 11

FROM THE MOMENT I STEPPED into the kitchen wearing my black funeral dress, I began to suspect that everything was going to go wrong that day.

First of all, Mom was wearing a black pantsuit at the kitchen table, where she was poking at a plate of scrambled eggs. It wasn’t a common occurrence for Mom to get dressed at all on Sundays, so I immediately knew something was up.

“Are you coming with me to the memorial?” I asked, praying that she would say no.

“Of course,” she said. My stomach soured; there was probably no way I could do everything Mrs. Robinson had said without causing a scene at the memorial—at least a small one—and having my mom present was going to be an issue. “I mean, I feel so terrible, especially after reconnecting with Elena back in January when we had that little fender bender. She was so thoughtful back in those days after the fire.”

Damn it, I thought to myself as I poured myself a glass of orange juice.

“Is Glenn coming?” I asked innocently. I prayed that he would be, and that he’d serve as a distraction.

“He’s working. The clinic’s Easter egg hunt is today, remember?” Mom got up from the table to clear her place. I felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. Of course—it was Easter Sunday.

As if on cue, Glenn wandered into the kitchen with an expression of confusion on his face. “This is the darnedest thing. I must have misplaced one of the samples I took from some heifers the other day. I’ll have to go take new ones. I’ve never lost a sample in twenty years of farm visits.”

He joined Mom at the sink and pecked her on the cheek, and she rubbed his upper arm to console him. “Well, you’re under a lot of stress with everything that’s happened in the last week. It’s easy to be distracted when you’re in a new routine.”

With my back to them, I rolled my eyes.

On the drive over to the funeral home, I ran through Mrs. Robinson’s directions repeatedly in my head. My phone buzzed almost constantly inside my bag with texts from Henry and Violet, and they were adding to my anxiety. The rum had to be mixed with the cornmeal. Our bait would have to be positioned near that mixture; Mrs. Robinson claimed that it, like the drums, was appealing to evil spirits and would help to draw them out. We’d have to create a barrier of red brick dust on the ground between our bait and Mischa. That would serve to protect our bait and prevent the spirits from invading her soul. And the drums? Henry would have to start improvising a drumbeat as soon as our bait came within three feet of Mischa.