Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 29

I sat straight up in bed.

I was in Traverse City, Michigan, a long way home from my familiar bedroom and even from the steamy, stuffy dorm room at Dearborn to which I'd grown reluctantly accustomed.

How could that pendulum have gotten into my hand? Both Henry and Trey were asleep. My muscles ached from deep rest, and the spot on the bed where I'd just woken up was still warm. It seemed very unlikely that I'd gotten out of bed during the night to ransack the room in search of the pendulum, which I'd told Henry to hide right before I'd drifted off to sleep.

I set the pendulum down slowly on the night stand, allowing the metal chain on which it hung coil around the pendant. Even more terrifying than finding the pendulum in my hand was my fear—or rather, suspicion—that I'd asked questions of it while I was sleeping. I didn't need to reach out to Laura the shop girl at the occult book store on the North Side of Chicago for confirmation that the pendulum would still provide me with answers even if I was asking questions of it with my mind rather than with spoken words. Just seeing it resting there, its chain coiled around it like a snake... I knew what I'd done.

But what had I asked it? As I'd been falling asleep, finding a way to stop the buses from embarking on the drive back toward Weeping Willow had been on my mind. Maybe I'd asked it how to stop the buses, or if a particular tactic like talking to the bus drivers before they sat behind their wheels might be most effective. Leaning forward, I parted the curtains hanging on the window to take a look outside. Not surprisingly, it was snowing. It was hardly a blizzard but the flakes were large and lazy, and from the looks of the parking lot blanketed in white, it was sticking.

Easing back down on the bed, the unmistakable sensation that something was in the room with me made me get goose bumps. I didn't dare to look around, but I got the feeling that whatever it was, it wanted me to look in the mirror hanging on the wall near the closet. To keep myself from looking over there in the dark and most likely getting a bad fright, I fixed my eyes on the pendulum and tried not to move. The question formed in my head as clear as a bell, "Will we be able to stop the buses?" My fingers longed to reach out and lift that pendulum, to feel its weight, and watch how it might answer the question I was now certain I'd asked in my dreams.

"McKenna."

I heard a girl's voice and didn't turn... just kept my eyes on that pendulum.

"McKenna!"

This time I felt fingers on my shoulders, and when my name was repeated, it was Trey, not some kind of ghoul or evil spirit, trying to get my attention.

"What are you doing?"

I heard the click of Trey turning on the lamp next to our shared bed and it was as if someone had slapped me across the face, waking me up completely.  "I don't know," I stammered, not wanting him to think I'd intentionally gotten up to play with the pendulum and risk getting us all in trouble. "I just woke up and that was in my hand, and I thought something bad was watching us in that mirror," I continued.

"How did that get into your hand?" Trey asked, sounding a little impatient. "Henry hid it when you told him to. I saw him. He put it in the safe and tapped in a four-digit code to lock it."

I shivered. "Look, either something wants me to ask it a question, or it wants me to ask. If I keep trying to suppress this urge, inevitably I'm going to be tricked into doing whatever this thing wants."

Trey's blue eyes shone even deeper and more royal in the darkness, lit by the sliver of street lamp light stealing into our room through the parted curtains, than they did in broad daylight. He looked troubled, and a bit like he was unsure if I was sane enough to be trusted. "I don't know, McKenna. It sounds really risky. I really don't like that hunk of cheap metal determining our next moves. Don't you think it's kind of... easily influenced?"