Winterwood

I step through the small metal gate, which sits bent at the hinges, into the plot of land—and I know I’ve been here before. The memory doesn’t wash over me clear and sharp. Instead, it’s a knot that binds inside my stomach—the feeling of the hard, hollow ground beneath my footsteps. The shock of air, like stepping into a cooler. Stepping into a tomb. I’ve felt it all before.

I walk a few paces, listening to the morning birds caw from the nearby pines, and then my feet stop. My legs refusing to go any farther. I’ve stood beside this row of graves before, where the ground is uneven, the headstones decaying in the winter wind. My ears begin to ring, a memory wanting to push to the surface, and I recall the name on the grave at my feet, without even needing to read it: Willa Walker.

I stood here in the dark, snow under my feet, stars smeared out by a low layer of clouds, and peered down at this same grave.

Voices rise up in the back of my mind, back of my throat. Memories scratch and claw at me, drawing blood, violent bursts like a punch to the chest.

I press my hands over my eyes and try to blot them out.

But I hear them anyway. And I know I wasn’t alone that night.

The others were here too—the boys from my cabin. Rhett and Jasper and Lin. They were all here. Snow fell around us, a storm blowing in. I can taste the whiskey at the back of my throat, feel the warmth in my stomach, hear the stiff, sharp laughter.

We were here that night. I was here. My heart thumped too fast, my legs ached to run—I didn’t want to be in this cemetery with a storm drawing close.

But it wasn’t just the four of us.

There was someone else. Another boy.

Their laughter echoes against my ribs and I take a step back. Then another. I don’t want to be here—the memories beginning to slice me open. Raw and serrated.

I reach the gate, my heels bumping into it, my boots getting stuck in the snow.

I stagger through the opening and press my hands to my temples. A boy died that night, Nora told me. A boy died and I vanished into the woods.

The wind howls against my ears, a scream that sounds like a warning, like the trees remember, they know who I am. I stumble toward the lake, away from the cemetery—I let my legs carry me toward camp. Anywhere that isn’t here.

A boy is dead, my head repeats, the wind screeches.

And one of us who stood in this cemetery that night is to blame.

NORA

The old house facing the lake has sheltered nearly every Walker who has ever lived. Aside from the earliest few who I know little about—the ones who were said to emerge from the forest, hair woven with juniper berries and foxglove, feet covered in moss, eyes as watchful as the night birds.

Legend says we appeared as if from a dream.

Early settlers claimed they saw Walkers weaving spells into the fibers of their dresses: moonscapes and five-pointed stars and white rabbits for protection. They said Josephine Walker stitched the pattern of a severed heart into the fabric of her navy-blue dress, with a dagger splitting it in two, blood dripping down the folds of her skirt to where it met her shoes. And two days later, the boy who she loved—but who loved another—fell from his porch steps onto the hunting knife he kept sheathed at his side. They say it tore straight through his rib bone to his beating heart, slicing it clean through.

And the blood on Josephine’s dress trickled down the fabric and made perfect round drops on the floor of the old house. The spell had worked.

After that, locals knew with certainty that we were witches.

Whether the story is true, whether Josephine Walker really did stitch a spell into the folds of her dress or not, it didn’t matter. The Walker women would forever be known as sorceresses who should never be trusted.

And in this town, we would never be anything else.

It can be a burden to know your family history—to belong in a place so completely that you understand every hiss from the trees, the familiar pattern of spiraling ferns, the sound of the lake crackling in winter. The certainty that something isn’t right, even if you can’t quite see what it is.

“It’s so fucking cold in here,” Suzy says when I step through the front door.

She’s sitting on the edge of the couch, a blanket draped over her shoulders, legs twitching.

“Fire went out last night,” I say, shedding my coat and boots to bend down beside the stove.

“Where were you?” she asks.

I bite my lip, not looking at her. I don’t want to tell her the truth, but I can’t seem to think of a lie fast enough.

“Looking for Oliver.”

“The boy you found in the woods?” Her eyebrows lift and so does her upper lip—smirking.

“He was gone when I woke up. I just—I didn’t know what happened. I thought something was wrong.”

“You were worried about him?” she says, her grin spreading wider.

“No.” I shake my head. “I just thought it was weird that he left before the sun was up.”

Suzy stops shaking and she leans forward. Her curiosity has cured the cold inside her.