Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 34

The tip of Violet's nose was turning blue, and the color was spreading across her face. Her head was so cold beneath the fingers of my left hand that it seemed like if someone were to tap her body with a hammer, she'd shatter like a ceramic vase. In the second that I turned my attention away from the compact and dared to look at her, the scene I'd been watching unfold in the mirror of the compact vanished, and it returned to just being a regular old mirror.

"Mckenna! We have to stop! We're killing her!"

I would have thought that if Violet were still breathing, her breath would have poured out of her frozen nostrils and through her parted, frosty lips as steam, but she appeared to be as solid as a block of ice. Unbreathing. Cheryl was right; we'd perhaps gone too far. If her body was truly frozen, her internal organs were frozen too, and her life functions had stopped.

"Are we done? Did we reverse the curse?" I asked the pendulum.

It swung in an affirmative clockwise circle. Yes.

"Stop touching her!" I commanded my friends in a shrill voice, and they all withdrew the hands they'd been using to hold Violet down. Cheryl set her compact down on the floor.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and smiled at Henry and Trey. Color quickly returned to Violet's cheeks. The frost on her lips melted into drops of liquid reminiscent of dew. None of us dared to move or speak until she finally wiggled her fingers and then mashed her lips together. Before even opening her eyes, she managed to croak out, "It's cold in here."

"Is it over for good?" Trey asked eagerly, nodding at the pendulum. "Ask it."

I didn't see the harm in posing the question in the way Trey had phrased it, since there was certainly a huge difference between the curse being reversed and our ordeal being over for good. We'd learned by then that spirits liked to play tricks and speak in riddles. I asked the makeshift pendulum, "Is it over for good?"

It stopped swinging abruptly, which I interpreted as its refusal to respond one way or another. This unsettled me, but I wasn't surprised in the least that we weren't going to get any comfort out of messages from the pendulum.

Violet sat up and rubbed her eyes. She broke into a violent coughing fit, curled her knees to her chest, and her shoulders wracked with each bark. "What did you guys do?" she asked when she was finally able to get words out.

"We think we reversed the curse," I informed her. It seemed like perhaps the game had stunted her memory, and slowly she began to remember her reluctance to play just moments before we'd started playing and she'd fallen silent.

"Please, you have to let me call my mother," she said, her huge blue eyes round with worry. "I need to know she's okay."

Suddenly, having seen Violet's future death, the girl in front of me didn't seem like such an evil threat anymore. I'd spent so very many months despising her, fearing her, and wishing I'd never crossed paths with her, but now she sat before me in a dark corridor scared, sick, and defenseless. If everything she'd said about how she'd come to understand the curse upon her was true, I couldn't feel anything but pity for her. I knew in my heart that if I'd been in her position, I would have done anything to save my own mother, such was my fierce love for her. Maybe she wasn't such a heartless monster, after all. It had probably been pretty awful for her, having to do such terrible things and not being able to confide in anyone about it.

Before we could let Violet call her mother, we had to make a game plan. Even if we allowed her to call home on Cheryl's cell phone, we had every reason to believe that the police and possibly even the Feds had tapped the Simmons' phone lines so that they could trace calls to wherever she was being held.