Winterwood

He smiles a little, then walks across the room and looks out the window at the snow-covered lake while I shed out of my coat and sweater. I wonder what Mom would say if she knew a boy was in my room. I’ve never even come close to having a boyfriend, or even a friend who slept over. She would likely smile—pleased that she was raising a normal daughter after all, and not the girl my grandmother wanted me to be.

“Why do they call you a witch?” he asks, still facing away.

I sit on the edge of the bed, a little caught off guard by the question, and begin plaiting my hair into a braid—a woven pattern my grandmother would teach me each night, until I got it right. “Because they don’t know what else to call me.”

The dull glow of the moonlight barely touches his skin, his silhouette draped in shadow. “Are you?” he asks, looking back at me. “A witch?”

I release my hair and touch the edge of the bedspread, playing with the hem. No one has ever asked me this—not to my face. But there is no malice in his tone, not even curiosity, it’s something else. A calmness, like he is only asking me my favorite color. My middle name. My favorite book.

“My family is older than witches,” I tell him, crossing my hands in my lap, knowing I’m revealing more than I’ve ever said to anyone. “Older than the word itself.”

“But you can do things,” he says, his voice slightly strained, like this is the root of what he’s asking—what he’s been trying to get at all along. “You made that bag of herbs for me.”

“That wasn’t real magic,” I say, shifting my eyes away, feeling strange talking about this—about magic, about what I really am. Things I’ve never talked about with anyone who wasn’t a Walker. “That was only medicine.”

Grandma often talked about the old way. How our ancestors spoke to the moon and slept under the trees and didn’t fear anything. How they used magic from their fingertips as if it were as common as whipping butter for toast.

But the old way was lost. Spells forgotten—the ones not written down in the book. The heartiest kind of magic slipped away. Not for any single reason, merely because time dilutes what once had been strong. Only our nightshades remain now, that glimpse of magic inside each of us that recalls what we are. The parts of us that are still witches.

Walkers began using herbs and small blessings, instead of conjuring dark spells to hex those who had done us wrong. We merely will the moon to bend in our favor, Grandma would say. We no longer command it.

Oliver steps out of the moonlight and moves closer to the bed. “So you can’t undo something that’s already been done?”

“Like what?”

“Like someone who’s dead.”

I swallow and my fingers grip the edge of the bed, nails digging into fabric. I know what he’s asking. “Like Max?” I ask. And I wait for him to answer, but the words are lodged like little thorns in his throat. “I can’t bring anyone back from the dead,” I tell him. “No one can.”

That kind of magic was used by a different kind of witch, an old form of witchery that’s been lost almost entirely. And for good reason.

The dead should never return from where they’ve been.

What they’ve seen.

Oliver walks across the room, his footsteps stirring up lavender-scented dust, and he sits at the end of the bed, pressing his hands against the bones around his eyes, and my heart sinks in a way I didn’t expect it to. He thought maybe I could fix this, bring back the boy who died. And I suddenly feel worthless that I can’t—that I can’t undo what’s been done. That I’m not that kind of witch. The kind he wants me to be.

A familiar feeling of dread rises up inside me, the feeling that I’m hardly a Walker at all. Only in name. But lacking any true magic—lacking a nightshade.

“How did he die?” I ask, I try. Maybe he knows, maybe he remembers. Maybe he will finally say. And maybe I don’t want to hear the answer.

“I don’t know,” he says. And when his chin lifts and his eyes sink into mine, I see the forest reflected back in them. I see the dark, clouded sky and the slow slippage of time. “I want to remember,” he says, a hint of unease running through him. “But it’s like the memories have been replaced by something cold, like I’m back in the forest and I can’t see a thing.” Emotion catches in his voice, and I know he’s telling the truth. He might be lying about other things, but not about this.

“Sometimes our minds want us to forget,” I say, my own voice sounding raw, like gravel along the banks of the lake. And there is a hurt growing inside me, expanding. My own things I’d like to forget. Like the day my grandma died and left me alone. Left me with a mom who doesn’t want me to be what I am. “It’s less painful that way.”