Mrs. Prattle was no shivery old woman afraid of her own street. Not one to check under beds or hurry past dark rooms. The late-night noises her big empty house made were no more worrisome than her own settling stomach.
Leb clutched the mason jar like it was full of hornets. The thick glass held nothing, technically, but some smudges and a promise of trouble, the kind of trouble only Leb and Luther seemed to ever get into. Fling themselves into most times. Mostly Luther. “You gotta bury it just so,” he’d said, way too confident for a kid who once tried to deep-fry a banana with a Zippo. Way too loud, too, holding the jar out in the school hallway the same way Leb did now in the dark. “It can go any which way otherwise.”
After eleven-year-old Leb buries a mason jar of “pure evil” for good luck, to liven up his graveyard, the graveyard caretaker’s son gets a deadly dose of just what he wanted. His whole island does—adults, kids, and animals from half the state of Florida flung together outside the graveyard gate. It’s up to Leb and his friends, the island ratcatcher’s son and the mysterious new girl at school, to keep this flood of good fortune from sinking the island … and getting more people killed.
But even an island of outcasts has its outcasts, and Leb’s “friends” barely know each other. They barely know their own island, turns out. And they don’t know enough to run the other direction. If they can get past the press, police, pent-up crowd, graveyard ghosts, cutthroat treasure hunters, and black-cloaked witches, something far worse still awaits them. That much they know for sure, now.