Winterwood

Maybe I wanted it bad enough. My heart cracked so deeply it split open and my shadow side spilled out like black mud. When you need it, your nightshade will come. Maybe it’s been there all along. The part of me that felt time tumbling just out of reach. The moments when I was certain I had been there before, the déjà vu. Over and over and over. A thing I couldn’t hold on to long enough, a thing I didn’t understand. A thing I couldn’t control.

Until now. Now.

“She’s that moon girl,” Jasper answers, and he’s standing at the fence now too, watching me. In his hand is the lighter, and he flicks it open, letting the small flame burn a moment before closing it again. “She’s a Walker,” he says with confidence.

My eyes skip back to Oliver, but he doesn’t soften his gaze. He only stares, as blank and heartless as the others.

“What are you doing here, moon girl?” Rhett asks.

I ignore him.

“Oliver,” I say again, to keep his attention on me, even though he hasn’t once looked away. “Don’t go out on the lake,” I hiss quietly, so the others won’t hear. I feel myself inching closer to him again, wanting to touch him, to run my fingers up his jaw to his temple. To pull him close and make him remember. “Promise me, okay?” I suck in a deep breath, my head spinning, eyes having a hard time focusing. As if I’m still in the lake, water pressing against my pupils.

But Oliver’s expression doesn’t change—his mouth a stiff, puzzled line.

He has no idea who I am.

“What’s she talking about?” Lin interjects.

“She’s a witch,” Jasper says, grinning. And for the first time I notice his left cheek—where the tree branch tore through his skin the night of the bonfire and left a deep, bloody gash. But it’s gone. The skin pale and white. No scar marring the flesh.

It hasn’t happened yet.

“She’s probably casting some curse on him,” Jasper continues, swinging himself over the fence and taking several sloppy steps toward Oliver and me, eyebrows raised. “She’s going to drag him back to her house and bury him under the floorboards. Like all Walkers do.”

Oliver’s breathing turns swift and strange, but still his eyes don’t pull away.

“Shut up, Jasper,” I snap, swiveling around to point a long finger at him. He clamps his mouth closed, like he actually thinks I might turn him into a sad little toad or stitch his lips together with spiderwebs and string.

“How the hell do you know my name?” he asks, his voice suddenly shaking, his lower jaw pulled down in shock.

Because I am the witch they think I am. I am the one to fear.

I look back to Oliver, breathing so deeply I feel dizzy. “Please,” I say. I smile a little, and for a moment I think he’s going to smile back, his eyes turning a soft, sunrise green. “Come with me.”

His lips part just slightly, the tension in his shoulders drops.

But then Jasper barks from behind him, “She’s definitely messing with you, man. Don’t let her touch you.”

“I know you don’t remember me,” I say to Oliver, ignoring Jasper. “But I remember you. And if you stay here with them, something bad is going to happen.” I swallow and find my voice again. “Please.”

I know he doesn’t understand, I know none of this makes sense, but I lift my hand, slowly so he won’t flinch away, and I touch his cheekbone, his neck, hoping he will see. Some part of him will know that I’ve touched him before. That he’s looked into my eyes just like this and leaned forward to put his lips on mine. Some deep, unknowable part of him will still remember.

“Dude,” Rhett says, his voice pitched. “She’s probably hexing you right now. Stealing your soul. You won’t even remember your own name by morning.”

But I keep my gaze on Oliver, willing him to remember, and he finally does touch me—yet, it isn’t soft and gentle and kind. He grabs my hand and lowers it away from his cheek, firm and quick. Then releases me.

“Get the hell out of here, witch!” Rhett says, at the same moment my heart sinks into my stomach. He clambers over the fence and starts moving toward me, waving his hands in the air as if I’m a bird he can frighten back up into the sky. Scare back into my roost, into my hovel in the forest. Small and cold and alone. “Or we’ll tie you to that tree over there and light a match and see how flammable witches really are.”

I know now that Rhett will actually do it. That all of them are capable of awful things. They broke into my house and dragged me up into the woods—I wouldn’t be shocked if they actually tied me to a tree and started a small fire, just to see. Just to see if black smoke poured from my mouth and ears when I burned. They’re just drunk enough. And stupid enough.

“Oliver,” I whisper again, taking a step back, away from the boys—my heart cleaved into halves. A muscle that beats too fast, that has lost track of time. While my head wheels forward and back to the things that haven’t yet happened. The things that still might if Oliver goes out onto that lake.