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“There’s a pair of jeans and some other stuff in my purse.” She held up her gigantic black patent-leather bag. “It’s totally stocked. Face wash, moisturizer, disposable toothbrushes.” She paused as I took the bag. “Makeup.”

Definitely a hint.

“Did you bring the prom dress to go with all that stuff?” Jared teased.

Elle put her hand on her hip. I stifled a smile and hauled her purse to the bathroom.

As the door closed behind me, I heard her say, “You obviously never read
Ten Rules for Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse
. Rule number one…”

When I came out a few minutes later, I heard Elle talking softly to someone. I stopped in the narrow hallway leading back into the restaurant and listened.

“She
watched
him go.”

“I don’t get it,” Jared said.

“I mean literally watched,” she said.

“You’re not serious?”

“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” Elle sounded nervous. “Kennedy would kill me.”

That’s right, Elle. So stop talking.

Elle always had my best interests at heart, but this
wasn’t the first time she had overshared in an effort to protect me—something I should’ve considered before I left them alone. I held my breath, praying the conversation was over.

“That’s why she won’t let anyone get too close,” Jared said.

Because I’m screwed up and broken and there’s no way to fix me.

“If Kennedy gets scared, she pushes people away,” Elle said. “It’s what she does. But you can’t let her—”

Jared cut her off. “I did everything wrong.”

Elle was silent for a moment. “Then I guess you’d better start doing things right.”

You need to kill this conversation fast.

I opened the bathroom door and slammed it, as if I had just come out. They stopped talking immediately.

Thank god.

By the time I came out, Jared and Elle had relocated to the front of the restaurant.

They were staring up at a cheap TV mounted on the wall while the waitress tried to close out a check.

“Come on, Henry, I was off at one. I gotta get home.”

The trucker pointed at the TV. “Hold on a minute.”

A reporter stood in a parking garage, red and blue lights flashing behind her. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I didn’t need to once the girl’s photo filled the screen.

The trucker tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter, shaking his head. “Another one of them missing girls.”

Her name was printed under the picture:
Hailey Edwards
.

Number 16.

T
he museum is closed.” Elle cupped her hands around her face and peered through the window.

Priest fished a twisted piece of wire out of his pocket. “I prefer to think of it as temporarily inaccessible.”

Alara rubbed her gloved hands over her arms and huddled closer to the side of the house. “Hurry up. I’m freezing.”

During the ten-hour drive to Massachusetts, the rain had turned to snow. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when the New England temperature won out, because nineteen days’ worth of exhaustion finally won out over my nightmares.

“Think anyone will show up?” Alara glanced down the empty dirt road.

The museum turned out to be a three-story butterscotch-colored Tudor at the end of an unmarked road. We hadn’t seen a single car since we turned off the highway.

“Doubtful.” Lukas pointed at the brass placard next to the door.

“What kind of museum is only open twice a week?” Alara asked.

Lukas tapped on the front window. “One that’s full of revolutionary taxidermy.”

Priest wiggled the wire and a small screwdriver inside the lock. Elle hovered behind him, which seemed to be slowing him down.

“After we destroy the demon and save the world, I totally need a tutorial,” Elle said. “I can never get into my locker.”

“We’re in.” Priest opened the door and waved Alara over from where she was standing at the edge of the porch. “Alara, let’s go.”

She held up one finger, her phone against her ear.

Elle grabbed the elbow of my jacket. “Come on. She’s on her cell again.”

“Who’s she talking to?” I’d never seen Alara call anyone except her parents.

“No idea. But she keeps calling someone.”

Inside, the museum looked like a cross between an eighty-year-old woman’s cluttered living room and a display at a natural history museum. Glass cases full of Revolutionary War memorabilia were crammed between antique curio cabinets that held everything from pocket watches and thimbles to a shoehorn and a butter dish.

The taxidermy collection appeared to be the only thing that wasn’t behind glass. A deer dressed in a wedding gown stood on its hind legs behind a Victorian dollhouse. Inside the miniature rooms, chipmunks positioned in classic fencing stances wielded tiny épée swords.

Elle backed away from a squirrel bronco-riding a saddled rattlesnake. “That is wrong on so many levels.”

Priest poked at it. “Some people have too much free time.”

Alara made her way toward us from the front of the museum, dodging two white mice with unicorn horns, and a beaver wearing a golden crown.

“Talking to your sister again?” Jared asked.

“When who I call becomes your business, I’ll let you know,” Alara said.

“So where’s this giant bottle cap?” Elle asked in one of her not-so-subtle attempts to change the subject.

“In here,” Lukas called from the next room.

Four cables secured the bottle cap to the ceiling.

Elle sighed, unimpressed. “I expected it to be bigger.”

Lukas knocked on the red metal. “It’s the size of a monster truck tire. How big did you think it would be?”

Elle dug through her purse and pulled out a plastic camera.

Alara started to say something when Elle waved the camera in the air. “It’s disposable. I don’t need to hear the ‘only use your cell to call your mom’ speech again.” She handed me the camera and stood in front of the bottle cap. “Take my picture. And I want one of those stickers that says ‘I visited the world’s biggest bottle cap.’ ”

I snapped the photo before World War III could break out between them.

Priest stared into one of the display cases running along the walls. “You can take your picture with John Hancock’s shoelace, too, if you want.”

Someone had taped a laminated note to the glass.

According to the labels, the cases held the personal effects of Revolutionary War patriots: an assortment of muskets and bayonets, tattered flags, broken dishes, a
Bible, and a wooden leg. The highlights of the exhibit were John Hancock’s shoelace, a halfpenny that supposedly belonged to Joseph Warren, and a page from Paul Revere’s Bible.

Priest pointed at the random items. “All three of those guys were members of the Sons of Liberty and the Freemasons. John Hancock’s signature showed up on lodge ledgers way before he signed the Declaration of Independence. My granddad said Paul Revere was a member of the Illuminati, too.”

Alara looked over when he said
Illuminati
. “That’s a joke, right?”

Priest shrugged. “As far as I know, my granddad’s research was always accurate.”

“Back up,” Elle said. “Does someone want to explain the difference between the Freemasons and the Illuminati for the regular kid in the class?”

Alara looked unamused.

“In 1776, the Illuminati surfaced in—” Priest began.

Elle held up her hand to stop him. “I just want the CliffsNotes.”

“My granddad used to say the devil is in the details. Along with the truth.” Priest gave her a sheepish smile. “But I’ll do my best. The Freemasons and the Illuminati are both secret societies that date back centuries, but they had different agendas. The Illuminati wanted to overthrow
the existing governments and churches and create a new world order.”

“Then, the Illuminati were the bad guys?” Elle asked.

“Definitely,” Lukas said. “And it was the Legion of the Black Dove’s job to stop them.”

“What about the Freemasons? Good or bad?”

Lukas grinned at her. “They were stonemasons who formed a group in the Middle Ages to protect their trade secrets and pass down their skills. So the Freemasons were good guys.”

“Why would Paul Revere be a member of both?” I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that the patriot who made the Midnight Ride to warn the minutemen the British were invading was also a member of the Illuminati.

“The Illuminati were a much smaller group than the Freemasons, and they needed a place to hide from the Catholic Church—and the Legion,” Priest explained. “So the Illuminati infiltrated Freemason lodges, and they’ve been hiding ever since.”

“Are you saying they’re still around?” I pictured the Illuminati as a bunch of bearded Leonardo da Vinci types who were long gone, like the Knights of the Round Table.

“My granddad had a run-in with a couple of them when he was a student at Yale,” Priest said. “One night, he was studying in the Beinecke Library, where they keep all
the rare books, and he caught two guys breaking into one of the cases. He tried to stop them, and they beat him up pretty bad.”

“How did he know they were Illuminati?” I asked.

Priest held up his ring finger. “Their rings. Not the crap they sell online with pyramids and pentagrams all over them. These were the original design. The Eye of Providence surrounded by the Rays of Illumination. Between those rings and what they stole, it was obvious. At least to a Legion member.”

“What did they steal?” Lukas’ tone hardened.

“The
Grimorium Verum
.”

“One of the oldest and most dangerous grimoires in history.” Alara shuddered. “A book of black magic. It deals specifically with methods for harnessing the powers of demons.”

“Why would they want that?” Elle asked.

Alara shook her head. “No idea. All I know is that my grandmother didn’t trust the Illuminati. She called them ‘demons among men.’ ”

Elle walked over to the last case, labeled
Modern Patriots
. “The Illuminati totally sound like a Legion thing. I’ll stick with John Hancock and the patriots.” She peered into the case. “I don’t believe this junk is real. That shoelace could’ve belonged to anyone.”

Jared grabbed me around the waist affectionately,
and gestured at the case in front of us. “This is definitely a fake.” Behind the glass, a framed poem attributed to Edgar Allan Poe hung prominently in the center. “I’m pretty sure Poe didn’t use a rollerball.”

We had studied the poem in English class the previous year, and my eidetic memory flashed on mental images of the text. As I scanned the actual poem behind the glass, my mind tripped over the last few words.

“The last line is wrong. It should say ‘Of a demon in my view.’ ”

Jared looked at his brother. “Think it’s a code?”

“I need some paper.” Lukas was already scribbling on his hand.

Elle riffled around in her junk drawer of a purse until she found an old history test. “Here.”

Lukas flipped over the test and held it against the display case. He copied the last line of the poem and began systematically crossing out letters. We watched as he wrote random words down the side of the page, until he had exhausted the possibilities. “It’s not letter substitution.”

Priest studied the poem. “Try unscrambling it.”

Lukas tried different combinations while the rest of us called out words with letters that weren’t even in the line of the poem.

“What if you use the right version—‘of a demon’ instead?” Alara asked.

I stood in front of the poem again. This time, I visualized the words as if they were images in a painting—focusing on the shapes of the individual letters, the shape of the poem as a whole, and the negative space around the words. Nothing jumped out at me, but the label above the poem caught my eye:
Donated by Ramona Kennedy
.

It can’t be a coincidence.

Lukas crumpled up the paper and chucked it on the floor. “The person who forged it was probably an idiot and screwed up.”

Priest stared at the ceiling. “Or we need the Shift to read the message. It’s probably sitting on some firefighter’s mantel right now.”

“Then we’re screwed.” Jared slammed his palm against the display case.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the label. “My dad wrote that copy of the poem, or he had someone else do it for him.”

The script didn’t match the handwriting on the note he left my mom twelve years ago, but the forger had obviously copied Poe’s style.

Jared interlaced his fingers with mine. “How can you tell?”

I pointed at the label. “I hated my name as a kid. Whenever I complained about it, my mom said the same
thing: ‘Maybe I should’ve gone with your father’s first choice.’ He wanted to name me Ramona, after his favorite band, the Ramones.”

Mom was sipping coffee at the chipped round table in our kitchen while my dad stood in front of the stove, in his Jane’s Addiction T-shirt, flipping pancakes.

“Ramona is a unique name, and the Ramones were punk rock gods,” my dad said over the sizzle of bacon frying in the other pan.

Mom balled up her napkin and tossed it at him, smiling. “You’re lucky I let you choose Kennedy’s middle name.”

“From
your
list. Rose was your grandmother’s middle name.” My dad munched on a piece of bacon and winked at me. “Ramona Kennedy would’ve been my pick.”

I forced their voices out of my mind as Alara marched past me. She returned moments later, carrying a taxidermy goat with a mermaid tail from the front of the museum. She walked up to the display case and pulled her sleeve down, covering her hand. “Back up.”

Elle covered her ears. “What if someone hears the glass break?”

Alara turned the goat so its horns faced the glass. “Like Lukas said, this place is closed. And it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Jared reached for the mer-goat. “Why don’t you let me—”

Alara swung the goat by its mermaid tail, releasing it just as the horns hit the case. A crack splintered down the middle of the case, from the spot where the tail was still sticking out of the glass.