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He’d betrayed them.
Coco watched as Ollie tried to dart past Mother Hemlock. But even as she tried, Coco saw the ghost woman reach out and touch her friend, lightly, on the face.
Ollie tried to keep running. But she couldn’t. Her eyes got heavy; she stumbled and half fell, like she was falling asleep on her feet. Shaking, Coco saw a rime of frost creeping up Ollie’s face, sealing her eyes shut.
Coco remembered the frostbitten ghost girl at the top of the stairs. Knew what would happen to Ollie if Coco couldn’t get her out.
Ollie slumped to the floor, asleep. At least Coco hoped Ollie was asleep, and nothing worse. Coco had both her palms pressed to the glass in the mirror. “Ollie!” she screamed. “Ollie!”
But her friend didn’t twitch. Mother Hemlock had picked her up. She heaved Ollie into one of the rows of narrow beds. The moonlight had a strange blurring effect, flattening Ollie’s face, draining out Ollie’s personality, so that Coco wouldn’t have known which one was her friend at all, except for her curling hair.
“Ollie,” Coco whispered. Ollie didn’t look, though. She didn’t even twitch. No one looked, except for the skier. Gabe. He looked sadly up and straight out at her.
The watch beeped softly. Bleakly.
“They got her, didn’t they?” said Coco. “Seth and Mother Hemlock. Just like that.”
Two beeps. Slow and sad. YES.
Coco felt strangely calm. It was as though she’d burned through all her fear, of the dark, of everything, and now she was calm. Determined. No Ollie, no Brian. But she was still free. Gretel—the ghost girl Coco recognized from the stairs, from her nightmare—was being bundled into a bed next to Ollie. If only Coco could race out into the corridor, find the bones, and then come back and . . .
But then Coco thought, Hang on. Bones? Gabe had told them about the bones. Gabe had betrayed Ollie.
Why was she trusting anything Gabe said? Maybe she didn’t need bones at all. Maybe—
Torn, Coco looked back into the mirror and recoiled.
Right on the other side of the glass was Mother Hemlock. Watching Coco.
She smiled at Coco. Tapped the glass of the mirror. Her lips moved, and though Coco couldn’t hear her, she saw what Mother Hemlock was saying.
Soon.
Coco wanted to say something brave and clever. But she couldn’t really think of anything. She was cold and tired and alone and most desperately scared.
But even as she stared into Mother Hemlock’s dead face, she was still thinking. Seth hadn’t wanted her to have Ollie’s watch. He hadn’t wanted her to have the Ouija board either. He’d come into the basement and taken the board back. But why? If he wanted Gabe to lie to her, tell her the wrong things, then why take the board aw
ay again?
Coco thought of Gretel’s bones. They’d heard a lot about Gretel’s bones. From dreams, from Gabe.
But she couldn’t trust Gabe.
Maybe Seth, Coco thought, wanted her to be chasing Gretel’s bones until dawn.
But if not the bones, then what?
Coco thought of the world behind the mist. To get back from there, they’d needed something that existed on both sides. They’d used a book called Small Spaces. That was why having Gretel and her bones to open the mirror had seemed reasonable to Coco. Because Gretel was something—someone—who existed on both sides.
But what if it didn’t have to be Gretel and her bones? What if it could be . . .
That was when Coco noticed it.
Just peeking out from under Ollie’s bed. The oil lamp. The oil lamp that had broken in her hand down in the basement. It had fallen. It lay on its side, just showing, halfway under Ollie’s bed. It was broken too.
It was on both sides of the mirror, Coco realized. Like the Ouija board.
There is a way to win, Seth had said.
