Winterwood

Jasper tells me to pull on my boots and coat, and I do, then they push me out the front doorway. I see that the door’s been kicked open—the hinges bent, the lock broken. I didn’t even wake at the sound. Only Fin heard them enter.

“You’re wasting your time,” I say. They manage to close the broken door enough to keep Fin from following us. But I can hear his whine from the other side—at least they didn’t hurt him. “Oliver’s not in the woods.”

In the moonlight, standing on the deck, Rhett looks wild eyed and bored and edgy all at once. The boys remind me of a pack of wolves out searching for something to tear apart. They’re fidgety and drunk. Reckless.

“Then where is he?” Rhett asks, leaning so close I can feel the heat of his breath.

“He was here,” I say, glowering up at him. “He’s been staying with me, but now I don’t know where he is.”

“She’s lying,” Jasper says, his voice like a braying cow.

“You’ve been hiding him here this whole time?” Rhett asks.

I set my jaw in place and my eyes flash to Lin, who stands with his hands in his jean pockets, looking not entirely comfortable with what’s happening, but not trying to stop them either. “He wasn’t hiding,” I say. “He just didn’t want to stay with you assholes.”

Rhett sneers. “If Oliver was staying with you, then why isn’t he in your house?”

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t trust anything she says,” Jasper interjects. “She’s just trying to protect him.” He winces, and I see that his sweatshirt is bloody where Fin bit into him.

“You’re taking us up to those woods,” Rhett announces, the decision made.

Jasper grabs onto my arm again, but I yank it back. “We can’t,” I tell them, my thumb itching at the finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, wishing I still had it, wishing she was here now. “It’s not a full moon.”

“So what?” Jasper says.

“The forest will be awake. It will see us.”

Jasper laughs—an unpleasant sound—and Rhett moves to only a few inches from my face. “I don’t care if it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and you’re worried about leprechauns stealing your gold, you’re taking us to where he’s hiding. And no more of your witchy bullshit.”

Jasper pushes a palm against my back, and I move forward just to keep him from touching me again. We march down the steps, little tin soldiers all in a row. They’re drunk and desperate. Whatever happened that night, out on that lake, whatever they’ve been hearing in their cabins, they can’t escape it—and it’s starting to make cracks along their minds.

But then I see someone else standing in the trees, chin lowered, waiting for us.

Suzy.

She came with them—she’s part of this. And a raw, acrid pit sinks into my stomach. Rotting me from the inside out. This must be what betrayal feels like.

But none of them realize, none of them understand: If we go into the Wicker Woods now, under a half waning moon—when the trees are awake—we won’t come back out.

“You guys don’t have to do it like this,” Suzy says, running toward us when she sees me, a deep set of lines across her forehead. “You could have just asked her to take us into the woods.”

“She never would have done it,” Rhett argues, barely glancing her way.

Suzy falls into step beside me, chewing on the edge of her fingernail. “Nora, I’m so sorry,” she whispers nervously, shooting me a helpless look. But I don’t want to hear it. “I told them about Oliver, how you found him in the woods. They just want to see him and—” She stops before finishing and starts chewing on her fingernail again.

And hurt him, I think. They want to find him and hurt him, because when bad things happen, you have to blame someone. And maybe Oliver really is to blame.

“Just show them where you found Oliver,” she says now, eyebrows sloped together, pleading with me. “It’ll make it easier.”

She looks like a broken porcelain doll, missing all her insides, like she’s been gutted clean. But I refuse to let myself feel sorry for her—like I have before.

“Yeah, don’t make it any harder on yourself,” Jasper chimes in, walking behind me, his tall, gaunt frame looming over me.

We march along the lake’s edge, then turn north, toward the mountains, toward the mouth of the Black River. Rhett leads the way and I follow, the other boys close behind me—in case I decide to run. And Suzy is last, dragging her feet, probably wishing she hadn’t come—parading behind three drunk boys who are forcing me up the mountainside in the dark.

Maybe I should feel afraid, of what might happen, of what they might do to me.

But I’m only afraid of the woods.

The clouds move farther south, the moon winks out from the black sky, and an owl calls from somewhere in the trees to our left—it doesn’t want us here, we’ll scare away the rodents it hunts at night.

Our troop of drunken boys, staggering through the snow, is not passing through the wilds unnoticed. And we haven’t even reached the Wicker Woods yet.