Winterwood

I hold the spellbook to my chest and close my eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly I might be able to blot out the sky and the fire and everything that couldn’t possibly be real. But when I open them, Oliver is still there. Standing beside me beneath the crimson moon.

“Did you drown?” I ask. The words come out a syllable at a time—tasting strange on my tongue, like sandpaper and wax. Like fairytales. A thing that cannot be true.

I hear him breathing, the inhale and exhale of lungs contracting. Breath in his lungs—the breath of a boy who sounds alive. But what do I know of dead boys’ lungs? What do I know of any of it? His skin smells of pine and fern—the scent of someone who is more wilderness than boy.

He nods. “Yes.”

My eyes want to well up with tears, but the air is too dry and it saps the moisture from my skin. “I don’t understand,” I say. Any of it. All of it.

“Neither do I.” He shifts slightly, every motion like the battering of wings—an inch too far away, an inch too close. Never close enough. “After you found me in the woods,” he says quietly, as if it were a confession, “you told me that I shouldn’t have survived that long—two whole weeks in the forest. You were right.”

Because he was already dead.

I don’t know if I want to touch him or scream. Pound my fists against his chest and claw at his skin until he bleeds—I’ll make him real. I’m make him bleed and feel pain and then he’ll be a real boy again. The anger is a jagged lump in my throat.

A knife in my back.

His gaze slides to mine, heavy lidded and familiar while the world burns around us. Fire and heat and lies. “I didn’t know,” he tells me, like it’s something he needs to say. To get off his chest. “Not at first. But no one could see me, like I wasn’t even there. Except you.”

Flames devour whole trees on the farthest shore, licking up into the sky, and there is a fire inside my gut, burning me alive. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me?” he asks. “Do you believe me now?”

“No.” How can I believe you.

His gaze lowers and his mouth dips open, his throat fighting against the words. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”

The roar from the fire behind us fills my ears, a beast coming for us—a creature set loose from the woods. It ignites the summer home where Max had been hiding, the trees around it already glowing red-hot as flames chew them apart. Max might still be inside. Or maybe he fled in time. But I don’t care either way. Or maybe I want him to burn—for what he did. He is the killer, not Oliver.

“I’m not afraid,” I say, I admit, even though I know I should be. Of what you are. Of what you aren’t: alive.

But Rhett and the others were afraid: They heard things in their cabin, something that terrified them. It wasn’t Max. It was Oliver all along, moving among them, unseen. Even Suzy never saw him—not once. Not in the house. Not at the bonfire. I thought she was lying, a cruelty I didn’t understand. Now I know she was telling the truth.

She never saw Oliver. I was the only one.

He looks out at the lake, and my heart is splitting into halves. Severed in two. The before and the after. “I don’t know why you can see me,” he says. “And they can’t.”

I grip the spellbook tighter and feel the air leave my lungs. “Because I’m not like them,” I say. “Like any of them.” Walkers have always been able to see shadows—we see what others can’t. Mostly in the graveyard—those slipping between this life and the next. The ones who aren’t entirely sure they’re dead. The night my grandmother passed away, she woke me in my sleep and sat at the edge of my bed. With trembling hands, she removed the moonstone ring she had worn most of her life and slid it onto my hand. “My gift to you,” she said, before she sank back in with the shadows. Hours later, Mom told me that Grandma had passed away during the night, long before she gave me the ring. I had seen her phantom passing through the house on her way out. Mom saw her too, long black hair braided down her back as she pushed out through the front door. But she was only a ghost moving among us, passing through the in-between.

A talent all Walkers possess. To see the ones who have gone.

And the night I found Oliver inside the Wicker Woods, I saw him plainly—our eyes meeting as soon as he woke. Nothing dark or ghostly—ghastly—about him. Maybe I have made him more real by finding him, touching him. My found item. If there had been nothing rooting him to this forest, this lake, these mountains, he might have slipped away just like my grandmother, just like the other shadows I’ve seen. Here and then gone.

But instead he stayed.