Winterwood

A farewell or long goodbye in a dream means you should bury a lock of your hair under the front porch.

But tonight, in my dreams, I saw only the lake. A calm frozen eye—the center of everything. Deep and black and bottomless, where nothing good can live. So I left the loft and walked through the snow and came to see for myself. Is this where Max died? Where he drowned—out beneath that ice?

Is this the place where it all makes sense?

The lake remembers, my grandmother used to say. It’s been here as long as the forest. Longer maybe. Her words hiss through my ears, stirring the dust inside my skull, and I take a slow, deliberate step out onto the frozen lake.

Doubt skips through me. Hesitation.

I swallow and twirl my grandmother’s ring on my finger and think of how I’ve always compared myself to the women in my family, even the women I’ve never met. Who lived long before I was born. Women whose stories ink the pages of the spellbook—who stare out at me from the past, leering, bewitching, unafraid. But without a nightshade, I can’t help but wonder if I’m really like any of them at all. If my name deserves to be listed in the spellbook among them.

I take another step forward.

The lake remembers. Each word a drop of water against my skull.

The lake remembers. Each word a midnight spell.

The ice is solid along the shore, frozen down to the rocky bottom, but as I inch farther out onto the lake, the sound of the ice changes, little tiny cracks opening up beneath me—tension skipping out toward the center.

I know this is a bad idea—I know creeping out over the lake in the middle of the night is how people go missing, how they slip through the ice and are never seen again. Not even a trace. But my grandmother’s words make loops along my skin, they singsong and fill my ears until it’s the only thing I feel. The lake remembers.

And maybe Max was here that night, out on the ice. Oliver, too. They were here and something happened. Death and cries for help and breaking ice and water in lungs.

I shuffle forward, and the lake flexes beneath me—water bubbles rising up, looking for a way out. I glance over my shoulder. I’m only a third of the way from the shore, not anywhere near the center of the lake, but it feels like I’m fathoms away. Too far to turn back now. Or maybe I’m too far to keep going.

But I don’t want to be afraid—not of the lake. Not of anything. I want to be like the women who came before me, brave and clever with the shimmer of dark moonlight in their veins. I need to do this, to prove something—to know what happened that night. Because if I can’t see the truth, if I can’t see what’s right in front of me, then I’m not a Walker at all.

Keep moving, I tell myself. If I stop, I might break through the ice—the water flat and black beneath my feet.

Miners dropped things into the lake to appease the wilderness, Mr. Perkins said. A place to make offerings. To quell the forest. But I have not brought an offering. Only myself.

I’m nearly to the center when I see it: the change in the surface of the ice, the reflection of stars on water. A hole has been broken away in front of me.

A hole in the ice.

I inch closer to the edge of the jagged opening—spiderweb cracks fanning out around it, turning the black ice white along the veins. A hole in the ice. Large enough for a person to fall through.

Is this where Max broke through the ice and fell into the deep, hands pawing at the surface? His eyes wide while his limbs went numb—becoming useless—and the others only looked on? I try to imagine Oliver standing over him, watching as Max drew in his last breath—his chin, his eyes, dipping beneath the surface. Did Oliver stare in shock with the others? Or did they laugh side-splitting laughs? Did they want him to die?

Did Oliver want him to die?

They aren’t my friends, he said. So why was he here that night? Why was he with them?

And how did he end up in the forest?

I shuffle an inch closer, wanting to see the dark water, to imagine a person sinking, sinking, sinking, falling into a bottomless chasm, never to come back up. Never to return. Did he stare up at the pinhole of light through the broken ice, the last thing he saw before he was swallowed by the black? I shudder and take a quick step back. But my boot slides over something—something thin and shiny.

I bend down and pick it up, hold it in my hand. It’s a tiny thing, silver and glimmering. A chain. And it’s broken at one end, with a silver ring at the other.

I know what it is—and I wish I didn’t. I almost drop it, a shiver slicing up my spine, my pulse pounding against my throat.

It’s the missing chain from the pocket watch I found in Oliver’s coat.

The watch with Max’s name engraved on the back.