Winterwood

Only a couple yards away, the tree sinks into the black water, into a gaping hole. Ice fracturing out around it. Run! my head screams. But my heart has stalled in my chest, my legs afraid to move. The ice makes an eerie sound beneath me, like metal bending to the point of breaking. Like a long, pent-up howl. I suck in a breath just before it happens.

My eyelids blink.

Time slows.

And then the ice snaps—a quick giving way—and I drop into the water.

The air is pushed straight from my lungs. My head dips all the way under and the spellbook slips free from my grasp—sinking into the deep, just like my grandmother’s ring—and I scramble to the surface, fighting for air. I try to scream, to call Oliver’s name, but no words come out. My throat is too dry, the air too thick with smoke. My hands slap against the surface of the water as I try to swim to the edge of the ice, but there is no edge. The lake has shattered, broken apart, and now only chunks of ice bob at the surface—just like me.

The shore is too far, not even visible through the smoke.

Again I try to scream, but a wave of numbness pours through me, the cold too cold, the weight of my wet clothes too heavy. How long have I been in here? A couple seconds, an hour. Too long. My eyes blink up at the ash-choked sky and my arms become useless. My legs stop kicking. Everything numb. Everything a smear of black.

Without even realizing it, my head slips below the surface. Slips beneath the waterline.

I sink.

It’s worse than before. The cold feels razor-edged, my lungs swollen in my chest, burning against my ribs—needing air. When I fell in before, it had seemed like a dream. Like I wasn’t really there. But this is sharp and painful and terrifying.

I pinch my eyes shut and feel the depth carrying me down, sinking to the bottom without an end. But still I hold my breath, afraid to let the water spill in. Afraid to feel it in my lungs.

I won’t die like this, I think.

I won’t be an offering to the lake, to the forest. I won’t drown like Oliver and become a phantom in these woods. This isn’t how it ends.

This isn’t my story.

I am a Walker.

My eyes flutter open. And see only dark.

A ticking sound enters my ears, soft at first and then louder. The water vibrates around me, like a kite whipping in the air, lashing across the sky. Something isn’t right.

I sink deeper. Into the coldest cold I’ve ever felt. I sink and my thoughts spin quickly. Too fast to catch them, but also slow and lazy, pinging between my ears.

The ticking grows louder, and I feel for Max’s watch in my pocket. It trembles in my palm, the hands clicking nervously forward and back.

I wait to feel the rocky bottom of the lake, for my lungs to give out. But the watch quivers, seconds that thud against my skin, and the water feels like air, like I’m floating, sent adrift among dark clouds.

I pretend I’m not cold.

I pretend I’m not sinking endlessly into a lake without a bottom.

I pretend a fire doesn’t burn along the shore and I never went into the forest with those boys. I pretend the moth never thumped against my window and Suzy never asked to stay at my house. I pretend I never found Oliver inside the Wicker Woods and he never placed his lips on mine. I pretend he didn’t drown.

I pretend I am a Walker who is just as powerful and brave as the women who came before me.

I pretend I can make things right.

I am a Walker, I think again. The words sliding across my skin like oil.

I squeeze the watch tight, the cold metal branded against my palm, the only thing I have to hold on to.

When you need it, your nightshade will come, Grandma told me once.

My heart rises and then collapses. A ball inside my ribs.

I know what I am.

My eyelids blink and everything, everything, tilts off axis, the lake tumbling toward the sky. The silver watch pulses in my hand, tiny infinitesimal movements—tink, tink, sputter. The hands click once, twice, in the wrong direction.

Little prisms of light scatter across my eyelids. I squeeze my fingers tighter around the watch, my nails against the glass.

And I let the dark take me.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

TALA WALKER was born under a buttermilk moon at the end of October.

Honeybees dozed at the edge of her crib, and their fat, winged bodies got tangled in her soft cotton blankets while she slept. When she learned to walk, she tottered out into the woods, sticking her fingers into the hives of wild bees and waddling home with honey stuck to the bottom of her white lace-up ballerina slippers.

But she was never stung—not once.

Tala Walker could enchant wild honeybees with the quick flutter of an eyelash, and they fell into a deep, restful slumber whenever she was close.