Winterwood

Tala left Jackjaw Lake when she was nineteen, wanting to forget what she was, to go somewhere the Walker name had never been uttered. She fell in love swiftly with a boy whose face was covered in sun-made freckles, and when a baby started growing inside her, she knew she needed to return home. To the place where all Walkers are born—in the old house beside Jackjaw Lake. And her daughter would be no different.

She gave birth to a sable-haired girl she named Nora. A girl with starlight in her galaxy-colored eyes. But Tala hoped her daughter would never know magic, never need her shadow side. The thing that made all Walkers different. Strange. Outcasts.

But she was wrong. Her daughter did possess a nightshade—perhaps the most powerful kind ever written about inside the spellbook.

Tala Walker had tried to escape what she was.

But her daughter, Nora, wanted nothing more than to be who they really were: pure-blooded witches.

How to Train Honeybees:

Wear netting over bare skin.

Burn two hickory twigs, let smoke drift into hive.

Count to eleven, then whisper Tala Walker’s name into smoke.

Collect honeycomb in glass jars before twigs burn down to nubs.

NORA

Wake up, Nora,” a voice says, clear and sharp like bell. “Wake up.”

It’s my grandmother’s voice. Chasing me up from my dreams, up from the dark of the lake, the soft tenor of her words whispered against my skull.

My eyes snap open and I feel the snow against my cheek. Cold and wet. The scent of silty earth and green filling my nostrils.

I’m no longer in the lake.

Moonlight peeks through the trees, pale and lonely, bathing my skin.

My fingers push into the snow, into the soil, hands burrowing up to my wrists. I need to feel the earth, feel rooted to something that isn’t the endless sinking of the lake. My mouth hangs open a moment, and I want to speak, just to hear my own voice—to know that I’m real—but no words fall out. My body heaves, shivers, and I think I might be sick, but I draw my hands out from the dirt and roll onto my back, staring up at the black, starless sky. I can’t be sure of the hour. But it’s well after sunset—the darkest part of night.

A ringing fills my ears, and I suck in air like it’s never felt so good inside my lungs, greedy for it. Desperate. The wind howls through the trees as if it’s coming from straight up inside me. A wailing cry. A hiss and a sputter.

But I’m not inside the Wicker Woods.

Not deep inside the cruelest part of the forest.

I’m in the trees outside my home, near the shore, near the old, slanted woodshed. The pines towering over me. But I can’t be sure how I got here. Can’t be certain how much time has passed since I fell into the cold, cold lake.

I sit upright, my head wobbling. Snow falling around me.

Yet, if I’m not inside the Wicker Woods, then the lake didn’t bring me back—I am not a lost thing returned, not like Oliver.

Something else happened.

Something that makes my eyelids quiver, drops of lake water suspended on each lash, tiny glassy orbs. While sparks swim across my vision.

There is no smoke in my throat. No embers tumbling through the pines, burning my skin. The trees above me are a deep, mossy green and the air is clear.

There is no wildfire roaring through the forest.

I stand and press my hand against the trunk of a tree, breathing, the cold air tickling my neck. My skin pricked with gooseflesh.

A storm is coming. And the air seesaws at the edge of my vision, vibrating—like déjà vu. The sky a familiar shade of dusky black. A feeling, a memory I can’t pin down, classify, or catalog like one of Mr. Perkins’s framed specimens hanging on his wall.

The ringing in my ears becomes a wail, becomes a scream inside my head. I’ve been here before. I’ve stood in these trees. Snow coming down in thick washes of white.

With trembling fingers, I brush the hair away from my face and feel the weight of something on my finger—my grandmother’s ring. The moonstone a pearly gray, reflecting the sky, as if I never lost it in the lake. It never slipped from my finger.

Something else has happened.

My eyes flick to the ground, looking for the spellbook I held in my hands when I went into the lake, but it’s not here.

The ring has returned. But the spellbook is gone.

Something’s happened—to me, to the forest, to everything. I don’t remember drowning. I don’t recall the cold of the water rushing into my lungs. The pain of death.

I spin in a circle, but there is no sign of Oliver, of anyone else.

I’m alone.

On shaking legs, I push myself away from the tree and start down the slope toward the lake. I can feel the trees bending away, giving me space. I force my lungs to breathe, to determine north from south, to orient the sky from the ground. But the seconds totter strangely around me, slippery like a silverfish swimming through reeds.