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.
Pedro says it’s getting late. It’s time to go home. It was the same phrase that Violet’s spirits had used to terrify us back in January when Trey and I had no choice but to get ourselves locked into a library overnight in Michigan to avoid freezing to death outside. I stole once last glance at the boy on the bed who looked oblivious as to the significance of the phrase. Sensing that if I didn’t leave the room with Trey-disguised-as-Laura right then and there, Esther was going to suspect that something was going on, I admitted to myself that I had no choice but to trust that the real Laura couldn’t have possibly known anything about that night in the library when the language lab tapes had switched themselves on at top volume.
As soon as we stepped into the hallway, the door to the bedroom closed behind us, locked, and when I looked over my shoulder at it, it ceased to exist. It had been covered over instantaneously with floral wallpaper. Since I’d been unconscious when I was brought into the room, I had no memory of the rest of the house that I must have passed through at some point. I followed Laura along a carpeted balcony overlooking a parlor and realized that I was on the second floor of the house, vaguely remembering the view of the parlor I’d gotten when we’d first stepped inside the previous night.
We descended the long staircase, and Laura (or Trey as Laura) nodded at the pair of shoes I’d left on the mat near the front door. “Shoes on, please. And don’t get any bright ideas about trying to make a run for it out the front door.”
She crossed her arms over her chest while I bent over to shove my feet into my sneakers and lace them up. In my peripheral vision, I saw movement in the kitchen and guessed that Esther was already up and about. I wondered if Trey actually felt like Laura, like if he could feel her soft bosom beneath his crossed arms, and how totally freaky that must have been if it were the case. Oddly, I noticed that the shoes Trey had been wearing when we arrived at Esther’s, which had been positioned alongside mine on the mat, were now missing.
“Come on. You should eat something before we head out.” Emotionlessly, Laura waved her hand for me to follow her into the kitchen. I hesitated, not seeing the point in facing Esther again and risking being caught if we were about to leave anyway. But it was too late to protest, Laura was already stepping into the kitchen.
“Well, I hope you had a nice rest,” Esther greeted me cheerfully. Once again, she was dressed in a cashmere sweater with a sophisticated designer silk scarf knotted at her neck. She looked more like she was going to spend her day sitting in the corner office of a corporate publicity firm than at a dingy occult book store on the North Side, and it occurred to me for the first time that she’d probably cast a glamour on herself and I was perceiving her appearance as she wanted me to rather than as she actually looked. A tea kettle was whistling on the stovetop, and the dog that had greeted us yesterday was nowhere to be found. “Please have a seat and eat something before you leave,” Esther said, nodding at the table in the dining area of the enormous room, on which bowls of oatmeal with fruit had been placed.
Standing next to one of the chairs at the table, I regarded the oatmeal with skepticism and strongly preferred to just leave the house instead. I didn’t trust Esther one bit, and for all I knew there was some kind of truth-telling spell on the oatmeal that would have gotten me to blurt out Father Fahey’s name and confess that Trey and Laura had swapped appearances. “I’m not hungry. I don’t feel well,” I lied. The truth was, I was famished and I had to concentrate to prevent my stomach from growling. I hadn’t eaten since we’d stopped for hamburgers on the drive to Esther’s from the airport the previous afternoon.
“Suit yourself,” Esther said with a nonchalant shrug. “Now, to reiterate your assignment, you and Laura will board a train this morning bound for California. Laura can book a return trip for you once you’ve convinced your gymnast friend to join you, since obviously traveling by air may be a little problematic, considering your situation. You will come immediately back here with your friend, and then you and your little boyfriend will be free to go on your merry ways wherever you’d like.”
The way her voice seasoned the words little boyfriend with antagonism put me on edge. This woman was dangerous. Her icy eyes revealed nothing of her intentions, and when she offered me a quick, superficial smile, I knew that even if Trey (disguised as Laura) and I were successful in escaping her house that morning, she would pursue us doggedly until she got her hands on Mischa. Whatever power Violet’s curse held, Esther quite obviously intended to claim it as her own.
“Now, one last thing before you depart,” Esther said. She approached me with her hands clasped together until she stood about two feet in front of me, and then revealed a golden pressed powder compact. “Since law enforcement officials are going to be searching high and low for you over the next few days, I can’t let you venture out into the world looking like yourself.” She opened the compact and raised its lid, which contained a mirror. “Please look into your own eyes in your reflection.”
Reluctant to follow orders from this woman, I instead sought out a reaction from Trey, who lingered nervously near the kitchen counter, wringing his (or rather, Laura’s) hands. Upstairs in the hidden room, which may or may not even have been a real room in this crazy house of magic illusions, Laura had cautioned us about mirrors. I certainly didn’t want Esther casting any kind of glamour on me that was going to permanently alter my appearance, even if that might have been pretty convenient at least for the next few days. “Are you casting a spell on me?” I asked in a shaky voice.
“Just focus on your eyes,” Esther commanded, ignoring my question. “Look into the mirror and fill your head with color blue. A bright blue sky, a deep blue ocean.”
Sensing that I didn’t have much room to refuse, my eyes fell to the mirror in the lid of the compact and I saw my familiar reflection. Following Esther’s directions, which had started to seem practically hypnotic, I let a flood of deep royal blue fill my head as I gazed into the mirror. Although my thoughts fell into a rhythm dictated by the pace of Esther’s voice, I remained vaguely aware that the color of my eyes in the mirror’s reflection stayed the same muddy shade of brown as they’d always been.
“Now raise your eyes and look at me,” Esther instructed. Lulled into submission, I obeyed. She snapped the compact shut so that my eyes couldn’t drift back down to the mirror. “There. Perfect. This should last just about one complete cycle of the moon. But if you should be inspired to try to run off from Laura while you’re in her care, I can repeal this glamour with a snap of my fingers at any time, no matter how much distance you put between yourself and me. Keep that in mind. It’ll be impossible for you to do anything about Romeo upstairs if you’re in a juvenile detention center.”
Her remark suggested that whether by magic or Google, she’d done her research about my past brushes with the law in Wisconsin. I wasn’t in any hurry to end up in another military-style boarding school like the Dearborn School for Girls, where I’d spent most of November and December the previous year. She was right; if I had to face Judge Roberts in Ortonville again, I’d stand no chance of preventing Esther from keeping Trey locked up for as long as she wanted, or… worse. She also perhaps possibly unintentionally informed me that people were already looking for me. This was probably not a good thing for Trey. While I would never want Judge Roberts to think that Trey had influenced me to run away from home in violation of the court order that allowed me to live with my dad in Florida, I was pretty sure my mom and the attorney that she kept on retainer to deal with my ongoing legal woes would have happily allowed him to believe that. The news media was already presenting Trey as a dangerous figure, one who could easily have convinced his impressionable young girlfriend to run off with him.
“Okay,” I agreed numbly, already quite aware that despite Laura’s advice, I’d look in a mirror the first chance I got.
“Come on,” Laura said suddenly. “We should hit the road. The last thing I want is to be lingering around the train station for a few extra hours if we miss our train.”
Esther stared me down for another uncomfortable long moment before turning to acknowledge Laura. “Very well, then. Laura knows that I expect to be phoned every six hours with an update on your progress. If, for whatever reason, Laura can’t make the call, then you will make it,” Esther dictated without even looking at me.
Trey, as Laura, moved closer to a closed door with a bolt on it next to the fridge. We were so close to stepping into the garage, where I presumed Laura’s car was waiting for us, my heart was beating twice as fast as normal.
“Just one more thing,” Esther said right as Trey reached to unbolt the garage door. She held up the compact and opened it, and the mirror in its lid cast a glimmer on Laura’s face. “I just need to be certain that it’s really my trusted assistant who’s about to leave the house, and not a meddling teenager whose girlfriend’s knack for manipulating magic is more dangerous than she realizes. Please take a look in this mirror.”
Laura—Trey—sighed in great annoyance and took a quick downward glance at the compact in Esther’s hand. It happened too rapidly for me to even fear that Laura would transform back into Trey before my very eyes, incurring Esther’s wrath. It could have all been over in that second if Laura had been right about what might happen if Trey were to look at his appearance in a mirror, but by some miracle, nothing happened. “Satisfied?” Laura’s voice asked.
“Very well,” Esther said, sounding pleased with herself. “Safe travels, and I’ll speak to you both at one o’clock this afternoon.”