Winterwood

I didn’t run away. But I don’t say this, because I can’t explain how I ended up in that dark forest. Where only bursts of light reached me through the never-ending dark, where trees swayed like long skeleton arms moving to some macabre ballet, the wind the only music that filled my ears. Always the wind. Cold and biting and cruel.

I blink away the memory, sharp as a nail, and let my eyes stray across the living room again—the woodstove is the only light flicking up the walls, illuminating a small kitchen, a narrow hallway, and a set of stairs near the back.

“The power’s out?” I ask.

She nods. “Landlines too. Cell phones have never worked this high in the mountains. Our only contacts with the outside world—with the nearest town—are landlines and the road. Both of which were knocked out in the storm.”

“So, we’re trapped?” I ask.

She shrugs. “The road will clear eventually. We’ve had bad winters like this before.” Her gaze slips away from mine, as if remembering. “Three years back, it was two months before the road thawed and the power flickered back on. We’re used to being on our own.” She pulls in her lower lip, like maybe she’s said too much, revealed a weak spot. “We’re used to the solitude,” she clarifies, her voice dissolving away, vanishing up into the high ceiling. “You’ll get used to it too,” she says, as if I’ll never leave these mountains. As if I’m one of the residents now, stuck here until they bury me in the ground.

A shiver rises up along my arms and I wonder: Maybe what they say about her is true—maybe I shouldn’t be here, in her home. A place of darkness and rot.

“You found all these things?” I ask, swallowing hard and diverting my attention to the magnifying glasses, the old perfume bottles, and the belt buckles lining the windowsill. My mind is pulled back to the stories I’ve heard, the stories the boys tell about how she goes into the dark woods—a place no one else will enter—where she finds lost things. How she is the only one who can, that she is made of the forest, that if you cut her open she will bleed sap just like a tree. How her family is cursed and damned and more dangerous than a winter storm. That her hair is made of stinging nettle and she grows talons through her fingernails.

“Yes,” she answers cautiously. “Just like I found you.”

A strange winding silence ropes itself around us, and it feels like we might choke on it. She steps closer to me and lifts her arm, brushing her palm across my forehead, her warm fingers against my skin—gauging my temperature. I feel myself draw in a breath and hold it there, trapped inside my lungs. “You need to sleep,” she says. “You might have a fever.”

Her dark brown eyes blink back at me, as dark as the woods, but she seems as if she’s looking into the past, a soft slant to her mouth that I can’t read. She smells like the wind, like rain on grass, and she can’t possibly be all the terrible things the boys say about her.

She can’t possibly steal boys from their bunks and bury them beneath the floorboards. She can’t possibly turn herself into a fanged beast and crash through the forest, knocking down trees. She can’t possibly be a witch who boils toads for breakfast and ties knots in her hair to bind curses that can’t be broken. She is just a girl.

With raven hair and crush-your-heart-in-half eyes.

“You can sleep on the couch,” she says softly, lowering her hand and stepping away from me, and I know I’ve stared at her too long. “It’ll be close to the fire.”

Outside, the sky is dark, not even a hint of light, and I can’t be sure of the time. Or how long it will be until the sunrise. Perhaps my memories will slip back into focus once I feel the morning sun on my face. Once the shadows are scared back into their dusty corners.

“Thank you,” I say, sleep tugging at me.

She places a pillow and two more blankets on the couch, smiling once, before she turns for the stairs, the wolf trailing after her. She pauses on the bottom step, like she’s forgotten something. Tomorrow you’ll feel right as rain. Tomorrow you won’t remember the woods at all. Tomorrow you won’t even remember me.

But she doesn’t speak, her hair falling over her eyes just before she starts up the stairs. I listen to the sound of her footsteps, small depressions in the wood, the creak of the ceiling overhead. And I feel unsettled, alone, a spike of uncertainty wedging itself into my thoughts.

I am in the home of the girl who lives across the lake. The girl who should never be trusted. Her name rises up into my chest, the name whispered by the other boys at camp when they tell stories about her late at night in our bunks. Stories meant to scare and frighten.

The name that rings between my ears: Nora Walker.

The girl with moonlight in her veins.

NORA