Winterwood

I pull out the pocket watch and hold it in my hand, running my thumb over the engraving of Max’s name. The broken chain falls between my fingers—a clue I don’t understand. There is no blood on the watch. No tiny spots of red scattered across the glass. And there was no blood on Oliver when I found him in the woods. Blood can be wiped off, I think. But not easily. Not when you’re lost in the forest, freezing to death.

Something else happened. I just can’t see it. Can’t make the pieces fit.

A moth follows you, Mr. Perkins said when I left his house, the bone moth fluttering up into the trees. Always close.

Death is coming for me.

But I don’t want to end up like Max. A corpse—lies buzzing around like flies.

I pick up the spellbook from the bedside table and set it in my lap, flipping through the pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for: an explanation, a remedy, a way to make the bone moth stop following me. To destroy it, maybe. To keep death at bay.

I read the stories of my ancestors, the strange accounts of years past: the autumn a palomino horse went missing inside the Wicker Woods, and Dodie Walker found it using a water-witching stick. She rode the horse out of the woods bareback, and locals said her eyes had turned the same mustard brown as the horse’s. The summer a plague of prairie locusts descended over Jackjaw Lake, covering porch lights and spilling down chimneys. It wasn’t until Colette Walker caught one of the locusts inside a glass jar and muttered a tiny spell into its ear that the air finally cleared and the prairie locusts left the mountains.

Near the bottom of the page there is a notation about the best way to lure an insect into the loft:

Open window after sunrise.

Burn a blue-lavender candle to its nub, to lure insect.

Catch insect in a glass jar and whisper desired spell into its ear.

*spell not advisable for those who fear creatures of a winged or creepy-crawly sort

The spell seems simple enough. No blood or sacrifice or special pagan holiday needed to perform it. And if I can catch the moth, maybe I can compel it to go away. To leave me alone and take death with it.

I have to try.

I find one of my mother’s empty honey jars in the kitchen and bring it upstairs. I dig out a lavender candle from my dresser drawer, the one that’s nearly burnt down to the base, and I light it, placing it on the floor.

When I open the window in the loft, snow drifts into the room. Little dancing flakes that slide across the sill, in no particular hurry.

I look for any signs of Oliver or Suzy out among the trees. But nothing stirs—the forest is silent and humanless.

I’m truly alone. Last night, two people slept in my house, swelling lungs and tired eyelids. But now a well of sadness rises up inside me, salty tears wanting to stream down pale cheeks—but I don’t let them. I’m a Walker. We’re used to being on our own. Surviving. Calloused hands and sharp eyes and sturdy hearts.

And I don’t want Suzy or Oliver to return—not really. I fear what Oliver may have done, and I fear what Suzy might’ve seen. I’m safer without them. Locked doors are better than friends you can’t trust.

Still, the quiet of the house is a burden inside my chest.

I walk back across the floor and sit beside the flickering candle. I hold the glass jar in my hand, and I wait for the moth to flutter through the open window, to be beckoned by the light. But it never comes and the room grows cold.

The daylight fades to evening.

The shadows turn to full darkness.

And I lay my head on the hardwood floor.

Fin stretches out beside me. His paws touching my shoulder, his breathing quick in his lungs. And again my eyes want to sting with tears.

I know the bone moth will never come into the loft.

I know it won’t be so easily fooled by a lavender candle on a bedroom floor. A bone moth is not the same as catching a locust or a bee or a buckthorn firefly.

And even if I had caught it, I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to whisper a spell powerful enough to compel it to leave me alone. A spell to banish it from these woods. And what good is a Walker who can’t even charm an insect? A witch who doesn’t know the simplest of spells? Whose grandmother died before she could teach me how to summon the moonlight inside me, whose mother would prefer I never utter a spell within the walls of this house again.

I’m a Walker who is barely a witch at all.

I thought I wanted to be alone, that I was brave and strong and didn’t need a single thing from anyone. But now I’m not so sure. Now my heart crumbles inside the cave of my chest, and I wish I was the size of a gnat, so small I could fold myself into a crack in the floor and disappear. Tiny and forgettable.