Winterwood

I blink up at him and suck in my final breath, knowing it’s the last one—the stormy night sky blurring around me—my vision going as the cold sucks all the warmth from my skin, my eyes, my lungs.

I blink and try to grab for the ice one last time, but my arms barely move, and Max only watches. Cold, cold stare.

I close my eyes and the dark pulls me under.

One swift gulp, and everything goes numb.

The lake is just as bottomless as the boys at camp said it would be. An immeasurable depth.

I sink and there is no light. No quality of time. Of how much water can enter a person’s lungs.

I sink until I open my eyes again.

Until I reach the bottom of the lake that is not the lake at all.

The cold still bores through me, my skin still feels the chill of the lake, but I shiver beneath a thick canopy of trees. Snow falling over me, breathing air into my lungs.

Alive. Inside a winter forest.

And a girl is there, kneeling in the snow and dark. A girl who bends over me with hair long and black.

A girl. Who just might be a witch.

NORA

A soft pain forms in my chest, darkness running through me like a river.

Max was to blame for what happened that night.

He forced Oliver out onto the ice. And the others, Rhett and Jasper and Lin—they were there too. And when Suzy told them I had found Oliver—alive—they forced me into the Wicker Woods to see if it was true, if Oliver had somehow survived and had been hiding this whole time. If he was alive—if he didn’t drown—it would change everything.

It would mean they weren’t responsible for his death.

Max could come out of hiding, and they could all laugh about it: Remember the time we thought you were dead? A pat on the back and everything would be okay. No one goes to jail for murder. No one has to pretend they didn’t know what happened—he simply vanished from his bunk. No one has to carry the lie with them for the rest of their lives, knowing a boy died one night when they were away at camp.

But I was wrong. I didn’t find Oliver alive.

And everything that happened that night couldn’t be wiped away or forgotten. A boy is still dead. And only I can see him. Only a Walker can see ghosts in the darkest kind of dark. Our eyes are different, strange, able to see what no one else can.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says, like it’s all his fault. Like he’s sorry he’s dead and sorry he let me believe he wasn’t. Sorry that now my skin craves his, that he kissed me in my room and slept in my bed and breathed real-boy breath and let me think it could always be like this.

Bad things happen, I think.

A missing boy is found in the woods. A dead boy.

I lower the spellbook in my arms and watch the sky rain down in scattered bits of ash. I breathe and it feels like razors in my lungs. The fire too close, blazing down toward the shore. So close now. But my heart is caving in, and that hurts worse.

“None of it matters,” I say. It’s too late now anyway. He broke my heart and the forest is breaking around me and there’s no time left.

He reaches out and tries to touch me, to run his fingers down my cheek, but I flinch away. He’s dead, and even though it’s not his fault, he’s still dead. Dead dead dead. And nothing can undo that. No Walker spell inside the book can bring him back, return real air into his dead-boy lungs.

Nothing can change what’s been done.

I glance up the shore, where the trees between us and the road are already engulfed, flames winding up into the skyline, catching on treetops, cyclones of heat and ash. Even the path back to my house is blocked. There’s no way out now. We waited too long. I waited too long.

The snow has melted away along the beach, revealing black pebbles and ash-coated sand.

“Nora,” he says. But I won’t look at him because nothing is okay. Because everything is burning. Because the fire is too close, surrounding me now. And he is dead. Tears spill down my cheeks.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he says, reaching out to wipe away the tears with his dead-boy palms. A boy I can touch and feel but no one else can. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I wish I could make this right.”

“But you can’t,” I say, bitter words from bitter lips.

He’s so close he could kiss me. He could blot out everything with his mouth on mine. But I don’t want him to. Flesh and bone. I don’t want to feel the heat of his skin knowing it’s not real. None of this will last.

He was never mine to keep.

I shrug away from his touch. My heart seizing in my chest, my lungs burning so bad it feels like they’re on fire, encircled by flames. And I am surrounded by flames—the fire too close, the heat unbearable. Singeing my flesh, my hair swirling up into the cyclone of ash. I can’t stay here. I won’t survive.

“Where are you going?” Oliver shouts.

“Out there,” I answer.