Winterwood

“At least until the phones come back on, then I can call my parents, they’ll find a way to come get me.” Her eyes bore into me now, pleading. Her hair falling about her face. Her fingers twitching like there’s an itch somewhere along her skin she can’t reach.

I feel sorry for her, the desperate curve of her mouth, the watery rims of her eyes. I wouldn’t want to sleep here either, in this damp, cold place. And a part of me—a part I don’t want to admit to—thinks it might be nice to have someone else at the house. To fill the silence. Last night, sleeping in my room with Oliver downstairs on the couch, felt oddly comforting. Another warm body and beating heart within the walls. “Okay,” I say at last.

A smile breaks across her face, revealing her perfectly straight teeth. “I’ll go grab my bag. Meet you outside?”

I nod and she spins around, crossing the immense room and vanishing into a dark doorway that must lead back to the kitchen.

Candles are relit across the thick wood tables, flames becoming little points of light in the dark, shining up the walls. But before I can slip out through the open doorway, I notice something flitting down from the ceiling—something I couldn’t see before in the dark.

A moth.

It must have been hovering up in the rafters, and now it quivers through the air, drawn toward the candlelight. Its white-gray body is paler than it should be. Its antennae too long and bleached white. Not a common moth.

It’s the same kind I saw in the Wicker Woods.

A bone moth.

Seeing it again is like a spark against my eyelids—cold as January frost. Wild as February wind. Like a premonition. But I’ve never been able to foresee what’s to come. Not like Georgette Walker, my great-great-aunt whose nightshade let her see the future in dewdrops suspended on blades of grass. This feeling is something else. A certainty resting at the base of my throat. A dull, stagnant ache. A ringing in my ears.

I turn away, a chill rolling down my spine, and dart back outside—before the camp instructors decide I need to be tallied and counted along with the others—and brace myself against the cold wintry air.

My hands shake at my sides, and my heart slams against the delicate rungs of my ribs. I lean my shoulder against one of the large posts holding up the deck, gasping for air, blinking away the snow. Blinking away the afterimage of wings stained against my eyelids. I told myself the moth I saw in the woods was only a common night moth, a winter moth the color of snow, nothing more. But I was wrong. It’s the kind I should fear. The kind that are mentioned inside the spellbook countless times. Charcoal sketches of wings torn into ribbons at the edges, woolly legs, black orb eyes that seek only one thing: death.

My eyes water from the cold, and my head thuds.

A fog sinks over the lake, the gloom as thick as wet alder smoke, and it reminds me of the day we buried my grandmother in the small cemetery at the west end of the lake—a place where old miners are laid beneath the ground, the headstones worn and crumbled and sinking into the dark earth.

Funeral fog, Mom called it that day. The kind of weather only suitable during a burial: for grief, for masking tears that stream down cheeks, for numbing hearts that have split in two. But now the funeral fog has descended over the lake, rolling down from the mountains in endless waves. A reminder—or maybe a warning.

It’s a good day to bury the dead.

OLIVER

When I was ten, my dad took me camping deep in the Blue Mile Mountains. We spent the night sleeping in a tent while the rain beat down outside and dripped through a hole in the thin nylon fabric. The rain made a puddle around our sleeping bags, and I shivered all night.

I had never been so cold in my whole life.

Until now.

These woods are a ruthless kind of cold. The kind that gets inside you, beneath clothes and socks and skin, and down to the marrow of your bones. I escape the mess hall through a back door, before any of the counselors can see me—before anyone does. The candlelight is dim and I am just another shadow passing through.

Fog lies heavy over the trees, and I weave my way through the snow, past cabins tucked back in the pines. The cabin numbers are out of order. Cabin four, then twenty-six, then eleven. It makes no sense. But I reach cabin fourteen—the place where I was assigned to sleep when I first arrived, weeks ago now—and I push open the small door, ducking inside.

Most people have never heard of Jackjaw Lake, or a boys’ camp hidden deep in the mountains. Even the nearest town is an hour’s drive down a steep, winding road. It’s a place not marked on most maps. An easy place to get lost, to be forgotten.

But I never intended to go missing.