Winterwood

Thorns cut sharply across my hands, moss catches in my hair, and I can feel the trees inching closer, death creaking along each limb, the wind cold and severe.

The trees are awake.

“I can’t see shit,” Jasper remarks behind me. A line of us stumbling through the woods. And then I hear the click of something. A light sparking sudden and bright from Jasper’s hand.

He’s holding a lighter out in front of him, and the trees react instantly.

The woods hiss—like air escaping a basement that’s never known daylight—limbs moan and weave together, suffocating the moon above.

“Put the fire out!” I bark back at him.

The trees respond to my voice, the ground swelling and turning beneath us, roots seething. The forest is awake. It knows we’re here.

In the last bit of light before the small flame blinks out, I see the faces of the boys, of Suzy, and the strange panic in their eyes. The whites too white. Their teeth clenched. Mouths zippered shut. They weren’t expecting this—for the forest to move around us. For their hearts to tighten so quickly in their chests.

“Maybe we should head back?” I hear Lin say.

“We just got here,” Jasper says, the lighter gone dark in his hand.

“We’re not going until we find Oliver,” Rhett declares, but his voice is hoarse, like he’s trying to hide the nagging unease he feels. The cold that’s found him and won’t let go.

“Rhett, please,” Suzy tries. “I don’t like it in here. It feels like the trees are moving.”

The trees are moving, uprooting themselves to shift closer. Awake, awake, awake.

“If we find him, then he’ll prove we didn’t do anything wrong,” Rhett says, his voice sounding desperate now. They need this. As if he thinks Oliver will somehow make it right, that Oliver is the key. “He can tell the counselors, and we won’t be in trouble.”

“He’s not here,” I insist, keeping my voice low, trying not to anger the woods. “We need to leave.” But when I swivel around, I have no idea where we are. We’ve gone too far, I think. But it’s not that—we’ve only been walking for a few minutes. The forest has changed around us, blocked the path back out.

The trees are awake. And they are moving.

“Look!” Jasper says too loudly, and I hear the quick shuffle of his feet. His silhouette drops to the ground, kneeling over something. I think maybe he’s hurt, but then he holds up his hand. “Gold,” he says.

I take a step closer, barely able to make out the object in his hand.

“What is it?” Rhett asks, moving toward Jasper.

“A belt buckle, I think.” He brushes away the dirt and snow from the thing in his palm. “And there’s more.” He fans his hands across the ground then picks up something else. Suzy and Lin step closer, trying to see what he’s found. “Buttons,” he says. “Made of bone.” He holds one up for us to see, but it’s too tiny. “And some look like silver.”

Lin drops to the ground as well, digging through the snow at the base of a tree, down to the soil. “There’s a spoon over here,” he says.

Rhett wheels around to face me. “This is where she finds all that stuff in her house.” He’s close enough that I can see him raise an eyebrow. “And this is why she didn’t want us coming in here—she thinks it all belongs to her.”

Even Suzy crouches down and starts searching the ground with her outstretched palms.

“You can’t keep any of these things,” I say, meeting Rhett’s gaze, my jaw grinding against my back teeth. “You can’t leave the woods with any of it.”

“Yeah, right.” Rhett says with an upturned smirk—no longer afraid. He doesn’t believe me. And suddenly, none of them seem to care about finding Oliver, about the trees inching closer. They only care about the items scattered across the forest floor.

“If you leave with any of these things tonight, the woods will see. They will know what you’ve stolen.”

“So what?” Rhett says, his eyes swaying away from me and then back, still intoxicated.

“You have a whole house filled with this stuff,” Jasper interjects, sitting forward on his knees. “And nothing’s happened to you.”

“I took those things when it was a full moon,” I say, trying to keep my voice low, trying to make them understand: This isn’t an ordinary forest. “I took them when the forest was asleep.” But none of them are listening. Even Rhett begins to scan the ground too, searching.

Misfortune will follow you. Words from the spellbook scroll across my mind. If you take something from the Wicker Woods when it isn’t a full moon, misery and catastrophe will trail you home.