Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 13

When I woke up after two hours of fitful sleep, I was sitting upright in the chair in the corner of the bedroom. After Trey had left, I’d promptly stepped away from the bed, not wanting to be any closer to Laura than necessary considering that I still suspected that she was setting us up for ruin. In the moments after Trey had left, I half-expected to hear him scream for help, but from within the room where I was being held, I couldn’t hear any noise at all from the rest of the house. Laura had rolled over to face the wall, and her body was just a lump beneath the blankets. Despite everything going on, she seemed to be having no difficulty at all with sleeping, which totally resented. Personally, I was exhausted. My eyes burned and muscles ached. I thought about the cushy mattress in my bedroom at my dad’s house in Tampa and for the millionth time wished that Violet Simmons had never moved to my town and disrupted my life.

Through the window that overlooked Esther’s street, I could see the first glimmers of golden sunrise. Without any kind of warning like approaching footsteps on the stairs or the metallic clicking of a key entering a keyhole, the door opened inward into the room. From where I sat, I couldn’t see who had opened the door until the person took a few steps inside. Then I was completely baffled: it was Laura who had opened the door and looked at me over her shoulder.

Awakened by the sudden shift in the room’s energy, the person on the bed—which I instantly realized could not have been Laura—stirred and rolled over. “Is it time to go yet?” a male voice asked. The voice belonged to Trey.

“What in the…” I muttered under my breath. Naturally I remembered that Laura had cast a glamour spell right before Trey had left the room a few hours earlier, but it hadn’t seemed to work. When Trey had left through the open door, he was still—without a doubt—Trey. But now it was most definitely Trey who was looking at me from across the room with crystal blue eyes still swollen with sleepiness and messy morning hair. And it was unquestionably Laura who had come to fetch us, her teal hair as bright as ever, her tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves of her sweater.

“McKenna’s supposed to come with me,” Laura said, looking directly at Trey on the bed in wonderment. Her head whirled around to find me in the corner again. “Let’s go.”

Trey bolted straight up in the bed and loudly whispered, “No mirrors! Don’t look at your reflection in anything until you’re far away from this house!”

Logically, I knew that the person on the bed was Laura and the person standing at the center of the room was Trey despite appearances, but the spell was so confounding that I was too confused to stand and follow the person who looked like Laura. Never had I imagined that a witch’s spell could be so wholly convincing, but it was, especially in the dim half-light of dawn.

“Okay, okay,” the person who looked like Laura said, urging the lanky boy on the bed to keep his voice down. “We have to go. We have a train to catch in two hours.”

Now I was doubly confused. If there was any chance that my eyes were deceiving me and I was about to leave the real Trey behind in Esther’s house, I couldn’t take it. If I left the genuine Trey behind in this madwoman’s house, not only was I pretty sure I’d never see him again, I’d also never be able to get anyone to believe me about what had happened to him. “Wait a second. You guys have me totally confused. I’m not going anywhere with her, whichever one of you is Laura right now.”

“McKenna,” the boy on the bed said. “Don’t start trouble. Just go with Laura right now. You’ll be back before next week.”

He certainly sounded like Trey. I shook my head emphatically. “I don’t know which one of you…”

Laura lunged toward me and grabbed me by the wrist, pulling me out of the chair. “Pedro dice que se hace tarde. Es hora de ir a casa,” she told me emphatically.