Winterwood

Again, I feel the urge to reach out and place my hands along his temples—to see if he is flesh and bone. Roots and knees. To know for sure if he’s real.

But I’m too afraid, so I swallow down the urge. I push it into the back of my mind.

“The others were there too?” I ask, my lungs struggling to find air among the ash. “When you drowned?”

Another nod, his skin turning pale—the memory of that night flickering across his eyes, slicing over his skin, cutting him open where he will bleed dead-boy blood.

I meet his gaze, needing to see, needing to ask the question I’ve wanted a real answer to since the day I found him inside the woods. “Do you remember what happened that night?”

A long icy breath leaves his lungs. “I remember everything.”

OLIVER

I don’t want to go to the cemetery. But the others insist.

“It’s your initiation,” Rhett says coldly. “Everyone who arrives at camp has to be initiated. It’s tradition.”

I’ve only been at the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys one week, and up until now they’ve left me alone, barely even said hello. And that’s how I prefer it—to be a shadow, to be someone they don’t remember. Whose name sinks into the background whenever they try to draw it up. But all day, during breakfast and after lunch, when the snow started falling from the sky in sheets, I’ve had the sense that something is coming. My cabinmates eyed me with renewed interest, whispers made just out of earshot. They’re planning something.

And now that the sun has set—the rest of the camp asleep and the counselors no longer checking cabins—the boys stand over me and prod me from bed.

Max is with them too, standing rigid beside the door, waiting.

“You don’t have a choice,” Jasper says, wearing his ridiculous reindeer sweater. The first day I arrived at camp, the reindeer’s eyes blinked red, until one night during dinner the blinking began to slow, a twitch and a shiver, and then they stopped completely. And have never blinked again.

I rise from bed and pull on a coat—what other choice do I have? I don’t want to make enemies so soon. In a place where I might be stuck for some time. Months. Even a year.

We leave the cabin and march along the shore, the boys laughing when someone trips on a branch, followed by urgent shushes to be quiet. We reach the cemetery, and Jasper pulls out a bottle of whiskey from his coat, passing it around the group. The dark liquid burns my throat.

I expect them to make me chug too many beers or blindfold me and spin me around and force me to find my way back to camp on my own. But it isn’t any of these things. They lead me deep into the cemetery, to a row of graves. Some are old and some look like they’ve been placed in the ground only a few years ago. But they all have the same surname: Walker.

“Walkers are witches,” Jasper explains, as if he is giving a history lesson, running his hand over the top of a gravestone.

“They’ve lived here longer than anyone else,” Rhett interjects. “Back before there were trees or a lake. When it was a desert.”

Max frowns. “That’s not true. This place was never a desert.”

“Whatever,” Rhett balks. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You have to tell it right, or it doesn’t sound true,” Max argues.

Rhett rolls his eyes and looks away.

“They’re witches,” Jasper continues. “That’s all you need to know.”

Max steps closer to me, his blue eyes unblinking. “And there’s one that still lives across the lake.”

“I thought no one lived in those homes,” I say, my arms crossed, not wanting to be here. “I thought they were all boarded up for the winter.”

“The Walkers stay during the winter,” Max answers. “They’re the only ones.”

I swallow sharply, certain that whoever lives across the lake isn’t actually a witch, but I keep my mouth shut. If they want to believe a witch lives in one of those homes, I couldn’t care less. I just want to get this over with.

“You have to say her name three times,” Jasper instructs now, resting his long, gawky elbow on the edge of a gravestone.

“Whose?” I ask.

He points a finger at the grave below him. Etched into the stone is the name WILLA WALKER.

“If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” Rhett says, wagging an eyebrow for effect, as if it makes his words more creepy. Or more true.

“Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, as if reciting it from a book—perhaps the very thing a boy said to him when he first arrived at camp.

I make a sound I don’t intend, a sound of cynicism, and Max steps closer to me, shoulders rigid. “You don’t believe us?”

I pull my jaw tight—I know how these things go. How initiations work. They want me to keep my mouth shut and obey whatever they say. The sooner I fall in line, the sooner I’ll be back in my bunk asleep. And if I do what they ask, they won’t pick on me after tonight. I’ll be one of them. And when the next new kid arrives, they’ll want me to make him do the same stupid shit.