Winterwood

I never should have been there.

It’s not a thousand little lies that amount to nothing. It’s one large lie, so big it will swallow me up. And it will destroy her.

Tonight, with my hands against her skin and my face in her hair, I know I will hurt her. If not by sunrise, eventually. Soon enough she will look at me with sharp, serrated fear in her eyes. She will look and know what I am.

So I hold it inside for as long as I can. I lie beside her, our fingers knitted together, and I pretend it will stay this way forever. Because she is all that roots me here. The only thing that blots out the feeling of the cold forest inside me. The only cure for the dark I can’t escape. She is long auburn eyelashes and little white half-moons on her fingernails and a voice that always sounds like an incantation.

And she just might be a witch.

So I kiss her temple where she sleeps, her breath a tiny sputter of air. Because I know this won’t last.

There is no escaping what comes next.

But for now I let her sleep.

I let her rest without knowing who lies beside her. I let her breathe and think that everything will be fine and there is nothing to fear in this house.

I lie.

I lie.

I lie.

But by morning, I will be gone.

NORA

Walkers are born with a nightshade.

Our shadow side, Grandma called it. The part of us that isn’t like anyone else. The part of us that sees. That compels. And sometimes commands. Our shadow side allows us to slip into the Wicker Woods unharmed. It’s the ancient part of us that remembers.

The quality of moonlight in our veins—the gift we each possess.

For my grandma, her shadow side let her slink into other people’s dreams. My mom can soothe the wild honeybees when she gathers their comb. Dottie Walker, my great-great-grandmother, could whistle up a fire. Alice Walker, my great-aunt, could change her hair color by dipping her toes into mud.

Walker women are lit from within, Grandma said.

But I have never possessed nightshade. A thing I can do that other Walkers cannot.

It will come, Grandma would say. Some Walkers wait their whole lives for it to rise up inside them. But maybe not all of us are born with it. Maybe my shadow side is only a thin sliver, hardly there at all. Maybe there will not be a story to tell about me when I die—a story to be written down inside the spellbook.

For I am a Walker who was never granted her shade.

Fin is barking. In my dreams. In my sleeping ears.

In my room.

My eyes snap open.

His bark echoes off the walls, and I try to focus, but the room is still dark and my eyes blink, unable to see what’s wrong.

“Shut that thing up!” someone yells.

I sit up quickly, shadows moving across my room, panic ringing in my ears. Fin lunges forward, toward someone standing near the stairs. His teeth sink into their flesh, and they yell in pain. Someone else grabs Fin and pulls him off. “Fucking wolf!” the boy beside the stairs shouts, holding his arm where Fin bit into him. A voice I’ve heard before. Jasper.

My eyes finally focus—finally see the boys in my room.

Rhett is standing over my bed, wearing the same red-plaid hat he had on at the bonfire. “Get up,” he demands. I scan the loft quickly and Oliver is gone. No longer in the bed beside me. He left me alone. “I said get up!” I can hear in Rhett’s voice that he’s drunk. Wasted drunk. Slurring drunk. They’ve probably been up all night—his eyes are bloodshot, skin saturated with the stench of booze.

“No,” I answer defiantly. “You get the hell out of my house.”

Jasper laughs, quick and blunt. He’s wearing the reindeer sweater again, but it’s dirty, slept in, spilled on, frayed along the neckline.

“You’re going to take us into those woods,” Rhett says, a strange smile peeling across his upper lip, like he’s enjoying this. “You’re taking us to Oliver.”

I frown. “Oliver isn’t in the woods.”

He lowers himself closer to me, eyes wide, nostrils flared. “No? Then where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You told Suzy that you found him in the woods, that he’s been hiding there, and now you’re going to take us. You’re going to show us where he’s been all this time.”

“No,” I tell him again.

Jasper moves across the room and grabs me by the arm, pulling me up from bed. The cut on his cheek has healed slightly since I saw him last, white along the edges, but red in the center where the border of the scar will never heal completely. “Yes, you are,” Jasper declares through clenched teeth.

Fin is growling from the corner where Lin is holding him tightly by the scruff at the back of his neck. And in an instant, I’m on my feet and they’re forcing me down the stairs.

Oliver left me. A pain cuts through me, knowing he fled while I slept. And he didn’t say why. He just left.