Mischa fell a few steps behind us and when Henry and I turned, we saw her still lingering on the sidewalk in front of the ashram as if having second thoughts about leaving.
"Mischa, come on," I said.
"Guys? What if—I mean, would it be crazy if I stayed here? Do you think they'd even let me?" she asked.
"You're only sixteen," I reminded Mischa. "You'd at least have to ask for your parents' permission." The Portnoys were kind of control freaks, and I could hardly imagine they'd entertain the idea of their precious youngest daughter moving into an ashram on the North Side of Chicago to live with an old man who didn't even wear pants. After all, they were the kind of parents who had forced both Mischa and Amanda into enduring gymnastics practice almost every single day for the last ten years of their lives up until all of the trouble with Violet had started, when they'd finally eased up on Mischa a little. Adam Portnoy, Mischa's dad, was always on local television commercials for his car dealerships. Even though when we were little kids everyone used to good-naturedly tease Mischa about her dad's slogan, "come on down to Portnoy Ford and fall in love with four wheels," everyone in town knew that Mr. Portnoy took his public image very seriously. But I kind of had to admit, staying at the ashram where it felt safe seemed like a good idea for her. We had no better plan to protect our friend from Violet's prediction.
Mischa's face fell. "Yeah, you're right. But maybe..." she dropped the idea and we continued walking to the parking garage.
"So, what was that like, when Bachitar was giving you that guided vision?" Henry asked us as we turned the corner.
"Did we look totally weird when we were sitting on the floor?" Mischa asked.
"Kind of," Henry teased. "Nah, you just looked like you were sitting there with your eyes closed."
"It was pretty amazing," Mischa said enthusiastically. "I just saw all these clouds, and heard this weird music playing. Like harps and a choir. It was so real, I thought maybe someone had turned on a radio in another room, but then when Bachitar ended the vision, I realized it was all in my head. Isn't that crazy? I'm still not sure if my brain made up all that music, or if I was hearing it from, like, another dimension or something."
So far, it sounded like Mischa's vision had been nothing like my own. "Did anything happen in yours?" I dared to ask. "Like, action?"
Mischa shrugged. "No. It was just, like, this very restful, peaceful scenario. I want to try it again at home. Why? Did you see stuff in yours?"
"No, no," I said quickly, vowing to hold off on sharing my vision with Henry until after we dropped Mischa off at the Portnoys' house later that afternoon. It sounded to me like Mischa's vision had been a glimpse of heaven, which freaked me out far more than I wanted her to know. "What was he saying to us while he was guiding the vision? After the part about the spinning blue orb, I kind of tuned out," I said, genuinely curious what Henry had heard the old man say that had resulted in such two very different experiences between me and Mischa.
"A whole bunch of stuff about finding a door in the blue orb, passing through it, finding your own special secret world there, exploring it... a whole bunch of new age-y stuff," Henry said. "Hold on, guys." He stopped in front of the storefront we were passing. "Check this out."
We were standing right in front of a small business with the words, THE OCCULT BOOKSHOP in its front window. I didn't know how we could have passed that without noticing it on our way to the ashram earlier that morning, although it was possible that a metal security gate had been covering the window the first time we'd walked by. On display in the window was an arrangement of a very commercial-looking hardcover book of spells entitled, "Everyday Witchcraft." A hand-lettered poster was also hung in the window, advertising a New Year's sale—25% off all herbs and candles.
"Let's go in," Henry said.
"Freaky," Mischa said, shaking her head.
I saw the woman standing behind the counter inside the store watching us, and felt a little pressured to actually enter and buy something since we'd been standing there like geeks for a minute. "Come on, Mischa. Maybe they'll have something we could use to break a spell. You never know."
As soon as I spoke those words, a shopping adventure in The Occult Bookshop seemed very much like the right thing for us to do. How had we not thought about going to a witchcraft store to research spell-breaking items sooner? A chime sounded as we opened the creaky front door of the store, and I felt a little more at ease about entering into a store specializing in weird horror items as soon as I heard "The Forest," by the Cure playing on the store's sound system. There were two shoppers poking around in the herbs and spice section at the back, and the young woman behind the counter greeted us without a smile.
"Can I help you?" she asked. Even though she appeared to be not much older than Henry, she was very obviously unenthusiastic about having three teenagers who quite obviously knew nothing about witchcraft milling about her store. She had shoulder-length hair dyed bright, Bozo the clown red, and wore black cats' eye glasses frames with little rhinestones on them.
"I hope so," Mischa said firmly, walking right up to the counter on which an old-fashioned register had been set. Beneath the glass counter was an array of strange rings and necklaces. I reviewed the merchandise quickly and noticed with both amusement and shame that many of the jewelry items were replicas of jewels worn by characters in blockbuster fantasy movies, with little display cards next to them featuring images of the actors and actresses from the films wearing them. Arwen's necklace, Lord of the Rings was one such high-priced item in the display.
The other items on the display shelves were exactly what you'd expect to find in an occult shop—rings with dragon heads featuring rubies for eyes, and cast iron skull rings with daggers jammed in the eye sockets. Unable to control himself, Henry nudged me in the ribs with his elbow and pointed discreetly at a ring on the lower shelf of a skull that had fangs.
"We were wondering if you have anything here specifically intended to break evil spells. Like, say, for example, someone put a nasty spell on you, and you wanted to flip it around and put it back on them," Mischa requested, casually placing her elbows on the counter and resting her head on her hands.
The girl behind the counter rolled up the sleeves of her yellow cardigan to reveal colorful tattoos. She raised an eyebrow at Mischa and asked in a deadpan voice, "Well, yeah. But we only sell materials for the practice of witchcraft to people who know what they're doing. If you were serious about lifting a spell, I'd need to know exactly what kind of spell it was, who cast it, and why. This is serious stuff and we don't just send amateurs home with powerful magic."
"Do you know the game, Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?" I asked, cutting to the chase. Obviously this store clerk thought we were just dumb kids, when in reality we probably had a heck of a lot more firsthand experience with occult evil than she did. "Where a storyteller predicts your death, and everyone chants—"
"And a demon lifts the body of whoever's death was just predicted? Yeah, I am familiar with that game. It's quite old, dating back to the plague epidemic in seventeenth century Europe, and probably all the way back to the original plague infestation that killed almost half the population on the continent. Were you kids stupid enough to play that game?" the girl asked us in a condescending tone.
"Yeah," Mischa snapped back at her, "we were, and in the last four months, two of our friends have actually died exactly as someone predicted in that game. So, surely you can understand how we might be interested in finding a spell that reverses the effect of whatever occurs during that game, or something that might protect dumb kids like ourselves."
The expression on the face of the girl behind the counter changed a little bit, and she held up one finger to instruct us to just wait as one of the shoppers from the back of the store approached the counter with some sage smudge sticks and a rainbow-striped candle in a jar. I took a look around the store as we waited for the other customer to pay, and thought it was a little ironic that the old-fashioned register on the counter was just for show; the girl in the yellow cardigan processed the customer's sale on an iPad. The books on the shelf along the wall ranged in topics from vegetarianism to time management for Wiccan professionals. There was one whole shelf dedicated to books on ghosts—both living among them and banishing them.
"Check this out," Henry said, sounding genuinely impressed as he lifted a book from the shelf for me and Mischa to inspect. Its title was "The Littlest Spirits: Caring for the ghosts of children." I took the book from Henry and flipped it over to read the blurb on the back, and it was exactly what the title suggested: a manual for contacting and nurturing the ghosts of children in haunted houses.
"Man, I am going to puke," Mischa whispered. "That is too freakin' scary to think about."
The customer who had just paid for merchandise left the store, and the clerk returned her attention to us. "So. It sounds like you played this game, and it actually worked."
"Well, yeah. It worked the night we played it in that we were able to lift people off the floor, but then one of our friends was killed in a car accident, like, a week later exactly as her death was described in the game. Like, way too similar for it to be a coincidence," I said.
"She was my sister," Henry added.
The girl behind the counter studied Henry. "Wow," she said, finally. "That really sucks." She turned back to Mischa. "You said two of your friends died after playing the game."
"Yeah, our friend Candace drowned in Hawaii about a month after we played the game, too, which also fit her prediction, like, exactly," Mischa said.
"We thought we'd ended the game because the girl who was the storyteller always wore this locket, and we had this theory that somehow the locket connected her to her dead grandmother because a priest told us that sometimes spirits can communicate with people in our world by using an object as a channel for communication. We thought maybe the grandmother was the spirit who had given this girl, Violet, the ideas for the death stories that she told during the game," I continued. "But now we're pretty sure we were wrong. She's still trying to get people at school to play the game, and I think she's got some kind of a connection with the spirit world through the house she lives in."
The girl behind the counter nodded and crossed her arms over her chest. "That's some pretty heavy stuff. You know what?" She looked for a long moment at Mischa and then said, "I want to take an early lunch break. Hold on a second."
She leaned forward over the counter and called to the back of the small store, where a woman in her forties continued to fill a little shopping basket with bunches of dried herbs. "I'm sorry, excuse me? I'm closing in a few minutes for a break. Are you almost ready to make your purchases?"
The woman apologized for dawdling, claiming that she was simply getting carried away with the generous sale on herbs, and quickly checked out. As soon as she exited the store, the girl in the yellow cardigan locked up behind her and flipped the sign dangling over the door from OPEN to CLOSED.
"Uh, are you going to get in trouble for closing in the middle of the day?" Henry asked.
"My boss is in London for the holiday," the girl informed us. "Plus, if she was here right now, she'd want me to shut down and help you guys. At least eighty percent of the people who come in here are just poseurs buying crap to go home and try to get someone in their office to fall in love with them. It's sad, really. But you guys have a legit paranormal problem on your hands. My boss is going to be sorry that she missed this. Let's go in the back."
I hesitated for a second, not liking the implication of "the back," but then I realized she was just leading us toward the back of the small store near the shelves of herbs. There were chairs arranged around one of the small tables displaying books, and she sat down in one and motioned for us to also take seats.
"I'm Laura, by the way," she said, introducing herself. We provided her with our names.
"Henry," she said after Henry introduced himself. I wasn't sure, but I was kind of getting the sense that she was flirting with him. I noticed that Laura kept looking at Mischa, or rather, around her, as if Mischa had a spare head growing out of her shoulders. "So, you probably already know this, but the original way that kids used to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board was not so different from today. One kid would lay on the floor, everyone else would place a finger under the body, the story about how that kid would die was told, and everyone would chant. Here lies a body, cold as marble, stiff as a board. Raise yourself up as high as the Lord. There's historical evidence of the game being played all across Europe in a variety of languages."
Laura noticed all of us trade glances and shift in our seats when she said the words cold as marble. "What?" she asked us. "Did I say something?"
"Well," I said, feeling very weird about telling a total stranger all of the weird stuff we'd done in the last few months, starting with the dumb game played in the Richmonds' basement and including our very reckless Christmas Eve drive with a ghost. "We went out in search of a ghost last week to help us figure out what to do. And the ghost told us that we had to play the game again with this girl, Violet, but this time we had to chant light as a feather, cold as marble."
Laura smiled so wide that her entire face lit up, and for a second, she actually looked very pretty despite her unnatural hair color. "Wait a second. You idiots went out in search of a ghost and found one?"
Even Henry looked a little surprised by that, and I realized that perhaps Mischa hadn't told him about that. "You did?" he asked me.
"Well, yeah," Mischa admitted. "It wasn't like we didn't know where to find one. Everyone knows the Bloody Heather story about the ghost on Route 32."
Laura clapped her hands together in glee. "This is amazing. Stay here for a second." She got up from the table and returned to the counter. With a key she wore on a chain around her neck, she unlocked the glass display case of jewelry and withdrew something from it. From underneath the counter, she dug into her own handbag, and removed from it what looked like a cigarette lighter. She then took a small bunch of sage off of the herb shelf at the very back of the store. Returning to the table, she looked directly at me. "Do me a favor and just hold this in your hand."
I opened my hand and she dropped a cold brass necklace into my palm with an oblong pendant on it. It was heavier than it looked like it would be. "What do you want me to do with it?" I asked.
"Just hold it. Don't worry, it's only a pendulum. Wiccans often use it to pose questions to the spirit world. I just want it to pick up some of your energy," Laura said. I wondered why she had chosen me to hold the pendulum, but her interest returned to the Bloody Heather story. "So you guys randomly find some ghost, and she tells you to play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble. There are a lot of different versions of the game, but it's all essentially the same idea. You guys do realize that playing that game is considered anathema by some religious groups, don't you?"
Out of the corner of my eye, I stole a peek at Mischa, and she looked back at me. Neither of us knew the meaning of that word.
"It means grounds for excommunication," Henry interjected for our information.
"Oh, snap!" Mischa exclaimed. "I didn't know it was that serious. My parents would kill me if I got excommunicated. They go to church, like, all the time."
"Your parents killing you is the least of your worries if you played that game with someone who is really able to communicate with demons," Laura told Mischa, probably not knowing just how much her words would frighten all of us, especially Mischa. Before seeing Mischa's reaction, Laura turned back to me. "Alright, now just hold that up by the chain, and let the pendulum hang," she told me.
Following her instructions, I held the chain between two fingers and let the pendulum dangle. Laura lit one end of the small smudge stick of sage with her lighter, and smoke curled up from it, filling the store with a powerful odor that smelled not unlike fancy pizza with a lot of basil on it. Henry pointed upward at a smoke detector on the wall, and asked, "Is that going to be a problem?"
"Oh, that? No, we don't keep batteries in it," Laura said. She stood up and moved the sage in a circular motion around her view of me while saying the prayer Our Father as fast as possible under her breath. I was officially starting to get very wigged out.
"If you don't mind my asking, what are you doing?" Mischa asked on my behalf.
"...On earth as it is in heaven," Laura finished the prayer before replying to her. "Whenever I use a pendulum or perform even the most minor Wiccan task, I just like to cleanse the room and put up a little spiritual safety screen. Nothing too crazy, but, you know. Safety first."
She sat down on her chair again and smiled at me, clasping her hands excitedly. "Now, McKenna. You're the one holding the pendulum, so you have to establish rules with it. First, ask it to show you what yes looks like."
I looked dubiously over at Henry and Mischa, suddenly very uncomfortable with this whole situation. We had agreed on the ride down from Wisconsin that we wouldn't take any risks, but there I was, practically jumping head-first into occult magic tricks. Neither Henry nor Mischa looked especially concerned about my welfare; both seemed primarily interested in what was going to happen with the pendulum dangling from my fingers once I followed Laura's orders. "Um, I feel kind of weird about this," I admitted.
"It's alright," Laura told me. "This is a safe store. If we get weird vibes from anyone coming in here, we don't sell to them. My boss is a good witch. We spiritually cleanse this space every day before we open and every night when we close. You're much safer here right now than you were when you played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Trust me."
I took a deep breath, reaching out to Jennie in my thoughts for protection just in case I was about to get myself into even more seriously deep crap with the spirit world. "What does yes look like?" I asked aloud, feeling like a total weirdo.
Without any movement from my hand to inspire the pendulum to begin swinging, it slowly began moving in a clockwise circular motion. "Oh, my god," I winced. The movement gained momentum, and it began moving faster, broadening the diameter of the circle in which it swung.
"This is crazy," Laura said, shaking her head, quite obviously happy with how the pendulum was reacting in my hand. "You're a medium, did you know that?" she asked me. "I've never seen a pendulum move quite like that for anyone other than my boss before. Hold on a second—"
She stepped away from the table and dashed back to the counter again.
"McKenna's a medium?" Henry asked. "What does that mean?"
"It just means that for one reason or another, she's more receptive to energy and messages from the spirit world than other people," Laura replied. She returned to the table with her iPhone to shoot some video of the pendulum swinging from my fingers.
A medium? I thought to myself. I don't want to be a medium. I don't want anything to do with the spirit world.
"It's not a bad thing," Laura told me, probably interpreting the look of disgust on my face. "Damn. I'd trade places with you in a heartbeat, you know that? I take classes to try to develop my communication powers, and you just have them naturally. So not fair."
"What should she do next? This is freaking me out," Mischa said, watching the pendulum continue to swing from my fingers.
"Ask it something," Laura instructed me. "Ask it a question with a yes or no answer."
Nervously, I looked at Henry and Mischa for instruction. "Ask if it we're supposed to play the game again with Violet to reverse the curse," Mischa suggested.
I licked my dry lips and said, "Pendulum, if we play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble with Violet, and predict her death, will that reverse the curse?"
I barely breathed as the pendulum's trajectory grew wobbly and then slowed down. It then began moving in the opposite direction, reestablishing its orbit around my hand in a counter-clockwise movement. "What does that mean? Is that a no?" I asked Laura, panicking.
"Maybe it means that the curse can't be reversed, but ask if it will break the original curse," Laura told me.
I inhaled again, and asked, "If we play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble with Violet and predict her death, will that break the curse she put on us?"
This time, when the pendulum slowed, it reversed direction again and resumed its original clockwise orbit. Laura clapped her hands. "That's a yes. That's what you guys have to do."
"Will we play the game in Michigan?" I asked the pendulum. It continued to swing, and picked up speed. "Who has to play the game with us in order for it to work?" I asked, but then it slowed down and just dangled motionless from my fingers.
"You confused it," Laura told me. "Only yes or no questions."
"Okay," I said, wondering how to rephrase my question so as to not approach the topic of Mischa's impending death. I thought of the vision of the white car I'd just had at Bachitar's wellness center. "Will Cheryl Guthries play the game with us in Michigan?"
Clockwise, again. Cheryl would be with us in Michigan to play the game, if the pendulum was to be trusted.
"I think I've seen enough. This is kind of scaring me," I said, offering to hand the pendulum back to Laura.
She refused it. "You should really keep it. It works well with your energy, and now that you've used it, it won't ever work quite right for anyone else."
"I don't have any money," I blurted, not really wanting to take a weird Wiccan object home with me.
"I'll buy it," Henry offered. "It could be really helpful. We should keep it around, just in case."
"What about Violet?" Mischa asked Laura. "Is there anything here at the store you can use to help us get a better idea of exactly what her arrangement is with these spirits who help her predict deaths?"
Laura looked around the store, drumming her fingertips along the tabletop. "Hmm... do you have anything belonging to her here with you?" she asked us. "This would be a lot easier if we actually had one of her possessions to share with the spirit world."
Mischa and I looked at each other and shrugged. I couldn't think of any time when Violet had given me something, other than the cupcake I'd once eaten at her house, and the locket I'd technically stolen from around her neck.
"What about a picture?" Henry asked. "I have a picture on my phone."
Laura shrugged. "Not ideal, but we could try."
Henry put his iPhone down on the table and clicked through his photos until he found a photo of the five of us posing around Olivia's red Prius in the Richmonds' driveway the morning of Olivia's sixteenth birthday. I had forgotten that Henry's friend Charlie, who had accompanied him home for the weekend, had asked us to all gather around the car to pose together in our pajamas so that Henry could snap a pic. Mischa and I both indulged in a moment of quiet reflection examining the picture. In it, I felt that we all looked so young. It had been weeks since I'd seen a picture of Candace's face, weeks since I'd thought about how funny her scratchy voice and endless flirting had been. It had been even more weeks since I'd seen Olivia's face, and was reminded of just how pretty she'd been. And there, next to Olivia, smiling shyly, was Violet.
"That's my sister, the first to die," Henry said, flipping his phone around so that Laura could see the picture. He rested his finger on Olivia's face. "And that's Candace, the second girl who died, and right here, next to Olivia? That's Violet."
Laura bit her lip as she studied the picture for a second, and said, "Alright. Let's try something. I need to get some stuff to make this work."
Restlessly, we waited at the table. I had both butterflies in my stomach at the mere prospect of possibly finding out what gave Violet her powers, and a sickening feeling. Once we knew the truth about Violet, I had an awful feeling that anything could happen to us. That knowledge was the only thing seeming to hold the spirits back.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked Mischa.
She nodded without hesitation. "Of course. We need to know."
Laura returned to the table with a tall, thick, white candle and two circular mirrors that looked like ordinary, medium-sized cosmetic mirrors. She positioned the white candle at the bottom of Henry's mobile phone, and lit it. Picking up the sage smudge stick from the dish where she'd left it, she waved it in the air around the white candle and then around the three of us.
"Is that for safety?" Mischa asked.
"Yep, just a little something," Laura said.
"Actually, is there something more you could do to keep us safe? These spirits that we're dealing with are like... no joke," Henry said.
Laura looked at all three of us and said, "Yeah, sure, I guess. If you promise you won't get wigged out."
Taking a stick of chalk from a pile on the herb shelves, she bent over to draw a large pentagram on the floor around the table at which we sat. "Scoot in," she told Mischa so that her chair fit within the outline. Now that a literal border had been drawn around our safety zone, I checked the legs of my chair nervously to make sure I was entirely within it. Even with the pentagram barely visible as it was drawn on the hardwood floor in white chalk, the slightly odd arrangement of shelves and tables in the store made more sense. I had a feeling this was not the first time a pentagram had been drawn on the floor around this table, nor would it be the last.
"Alright," Laura said, sitting back down in her seat. The top of the white candle had started to melt, and a slim bead of melted wax rolled down its side. She handed one of the mirrors to Mischa and asked her to hold it at around the same height as her shoulder.
"Like this?" Mischa asked, holding up the mirror so that it faced Laura. Then, with her left hand, Laura held the second mirror up to the flame so that we could see our own reflections in it, and took her time angling it until she could see the mirror that she held in the reflection of the mirror that Mischa held. She told us very matter-of-factly, "This is a truth spell, to help us see the truth about this girl's past. So, if it works, just... watch the mirror, I guess."
Holding her mirror steadily, Laura closed her eyes and said in a firm voice, "To see the truth, to know her way, I command of thee, her truth display." Laura then blew out the candle slowly, releasing more smoke from the wick than I would have expected, and directly into the smoke she said, "Violet."
Henry, Mischa and I all leaned forward to look more closely in the mirror held by Laura. As the smoke from the candle cleared, all three of us gasped. In the mirror, we saw a blurry image of a girl a few years younger than us in age with short dark hair falling backwards, out of view. Another girl replaced her, this one with fiery red hair to her shoulders, who appeared to fall backwards in the same way. Her image was replaced by that of a teenage boy closer in age to us, who blinked around curiously, and then fell backwards, out of view. Then another girl appeared, and looked as if she could see us, too, which was startling. She blinked a few times and furrowed her eyebrows as if trying to see us better.
"That's Rebecca Shermer!" Mischa exclaimed.
"Hold still," Laura reminded her. Laura could see everything that we could see in the reflection of the mirror that Mischa held, and she was watching in rapture.
Rebecca fell backwards too, her expression changing as she realized she was falling. She was followed by another teenage boy, and then Henry groaned. "Oh, god. Olivia."
There was Olivia in the mirror, looking right at us. She seemed to be looking at Henry, and looked as if she was trying to tell him something, but the reflection in the mirror was too blurry and unsteady for any of us to determine exactly what she was saying.
"What is it, Olivia? I can't hear you," Henry said to the mirror, but then Olivia fell backwards, just as the others had. Next was Candace, who looked surprised to see us, and blinked a few times as if she couldn't believe her eyes before she fell backwards.
And what happened next made all of us jump—Violet's mother appeared to lift into the reflection up from the space from which the other bodies had fallen. Unlike the kids whose lives Violet had taken, Vanessa Simmons didn't appear to see us through the mirror. As her reflection lingered in the mirror, it grew clearer, and then we saw what looked like a store appear in the background of her reflection. It was as if she was at the grocery store in Weeping Willow, and we were watching her shop.
"Is that... Violet's mother, like, right now?" Mischa asked.
"It looks like it," Henry said. "It looks like that's her, doing whatever she's doing at this very moment."
Laura shook her head and said, "That doesn't make sense. We asked for the truth about Violet, not her mother."
The image in the mirror held by Laura faded, and she put the mirror down. "What could that possibly mean?"
"Maybe the truth about Violet is actually the truth about her mother," Mischa suggested. "I mean, does this spell ever lie?"
"Maybe," I proposed, taking to heart what Mischa had just said, "We've been thinking all along that Violet has been predicting girls' deaths to sustain her life. But what if... Violet's mom traded her own life in order to have Violet? What if Violet's trading all these other kids' lives so that her mom doesn't die?"
"You recognized all those people in the mirror?" Laura asked us.
"They're all the kids who Violet has killed so far," I said glumly. We hadn't told Laura the next part of the story, the part about how Mischa was scheduled to die next. But I felt as if we were to stay in the store much longer, it would be inevitable that one of us would say something we couldn't retract, and we'd have to explain Mischa's predicament.
"Well," Laura said, fumbling with her mobile phone, "If you guys don't mind, I want to send the video of McKenna and her pendulum to my boss in London and see if she has any advice for you. You should give me your contact info so that I can get in touch with you. Are you guys from around here?"
"We're from Wisconsin," Henry said.
"Oh, that's a shame," Laura said, and this time I was sure she was flirting with Henry, and I felt my lips twist into a little bit of a frown. It shouldn't have bothered me at all for a girl older than me to show interest in him. I had a boyfriend, Henry was cute, and there was theoretically nothing between us. Girls probably flirted with him all the time.
But it still irked me.
I wasn't sure if I liked the idea of that video of me and the pendulum going online in any capacity. It really wouldn't have been such a great thing if that were to land in the hands of a paranormal television show producer or something. Despite everything that had happened, I had not yet given up hope that one day, maybe in the distant future, I might be able to have some kind of a normal life again. Becoming famous as a medium was not exactly going to aid in that.
Laura flipped the sign on the door back to OPEN and wrote down our email addresses so that she could pass along any suggestions from her boss. I had an annoying suspicion that Henry was probably going to hear from her first, and I scolded myself inside my own head—there was nothing wrong with Laura and Henry deserved to find a cool girlfriend with a cool job. We thanked her for her time, and I felt like we'd gotten a little bit more concrete direction at The Occult Bookshop than we'd gotten from Bachitar. Between the findings at both of our destinations in Chicago, the day had been a huge success. I felt the weight of the pendulum in my coat pocket as Henry gave Laura his credit card to pay for it, and as he signed the receipt, Laura squinted her eyes at Mischa and said, "I want to give you something."
She pulled one of the rainbow-striped candles in a jar off of a shelf, just like the one that one of the earlier customers had bought, and set it down on the counter. "You can just take it, it's a gift. It's a seven-day candle. See? There are seven colors. Tonight, before you go to bed, sit on the floor and light the wick. Put your hands on both sides of the glass, like this, and as you watch the flame burn, just think about life. And survival. Do that for at least ten minutes. Then, don't blow the candle out, but put it somewhere in your room where there aren't any drafts and where it's not likely to get knocked over. Let it burn for seven days straight."
"Are you serious?" Mischa asked. "I can't leave a candle burning in my room for seven days. If I leave a candle burning in my room while I'm at school, my parents will go freakin' nuts."
"Just... trust," Laura said kindly, smiling sadly at Mischa.
Mischa thanked her for the candle, and Henry held the door open for us to leave. I noticed the assortment of local community flyers and advertisements that had been taped near the door for local Wiccans in training. Who would have guessed there were so many occult practitioners on the North Side of Chicago? There were flyers advertising the services of astrologers, tarot card readers, spiritual cleansers, and more.
"Hey, McKenna?"
I turned, hesitating for a moment in the doorway after Mischa and Henry had already stepped out into the street. "Can I talk to you for a second?"
Laura's intonation took me by surprise—she sounded exactly as Olivia had sounded on the first day of school when she had told me that my bag was cute. "Sure," I said.
"Your whole thing as a medium," she said, smiling bashfully, "It's real. You can take classes to learn how to develop it, you know. You've probably experienced weird things and weren't sure what they were, right?"
I didn't answer, but if there was any truth to her hunch that I had some kind of special receptiveness to communications from the spirit world, that would certainly explain why my bedroom had been haunted by Olivia and possibly Candace, when Mischa's hadn't been. Laura tore off a tab from a flyer taped to the wall promoting classes for learning how to have out-of-body experiences. "The guy who teaches this class, Brian, could probably really help you develop your gift, if you were interested in that. I mean, he does this out-of-body stuff just to make some money because people are always interested in dabbling in paranormal abilities, but that's kind of like, child's play. I think he would be very interested in meeting you."
I thanked her and put the bit of paper she handed to me in my pocket alongside the pendulum.
"And McKenna?" Laura said, looking at me with pity. "Mischa doesn't have much time left. She's next, isn't she?"
I was too shocked to answer.
"I can read auras," Laura said, shrugging. "It's the only paranormal thing I've really been able to master. I can, like, see energy fields around people, and sometimes I can tell if they're healthy or sick. Yours is this crazy purple color. I've never seen anything quite like it before."
"What does Mischa's look like?" I dared to ask.
"She doesn't have one. That's how I know she played the game and she'll be the next to die. She's doomed."