Winterwood

I can’t stop myself, I shift forward and press both my hands to his chest. He doesn’t jerk away. I feel the steady thump, thump, thump pulsing from inside him. A boy who is alive. I could never find his heartbeat before—his lungs breathed, his eyes blinked closed, his skin went warm and then cold. Yet, his heart had been missing. As if it were unable to recall the cadence it once strummed. But now I can feel it beneath my flattened palms, and my whole body begins to shake.

An exhale leaves his lips, and he steps closer to me, only a few inches away, and he takes my hand in his. He doesn’t remember any of it—not really—but he knows that I do.

And maybe that’s enough.

“You’re shaking,” he says, cupping my hands in his and drawing them up to his lips where he blows warm air against my fingers. “Can we go somewhere?” he asks.

I nod but my legs don’t move, my heart clattering too fast, the trees swaying and snapping back.

“This storm is getting bad.” He looks up to the sky, and snow lands in his hair, the tips of his ears, his cheekbones.

I smile and more tears come. I smile and know that maybe, perhaps, everything’s going to be okay. “I’ve seen worse,” I say, smirking.

The black at the rims of his eyes recedes—the darkness I remember from before, that was always inside him. The cold has slipped away—as if it were never there at all.

And with his hand in mine, we walk around the shore of the lake, past the boathouse, where inside Mr. Perkins’s cabin I can see him at the window, watching the snow come down. He waves again and gives a little nod, and I wave back.

Time has been undone. Sent back in reverse.

A storm is coming, the worst we’ve had all year. The road will be blocked and the power will flicker out and we’ll be trapped for weeks.

But we’ll have time. Plenty of it.

I always will.

OLIVER

Her name is Nora Walker.

I don’t know anything about her, yet somehow I remember the arch of her smile. The soft river of her hair. The flutter of her eyes when she watches me. The scent of her skin like jasmine and vanilla. And when her lips purse together and she hums a song under her breath, memories I can’t possibly have pour through me.

She is a name and a heartbeat that lives inside me. In a way I don’t understand.

The snow falls and the power blinks out and the road down the mountains is blocked. But she doesn’t seem surprised—not by the storm, not by any of it.

The lake freezes and Nora takes me up onto the roof. She tells me stories—fables that couldn’t possibly be real. About a boy who drowned, who appeared again inside a dark wood, how he couldn’t escape the memory of the trees. The cold. And sometimes I think she’s talking about me. She tells me how the boy saves a girl from inside a room, how he believes she’s a witch but he’s not afraid. How neither of them fear the other even though they should.

She recites her tales, and we peer up at the stars and wait for spring to settle over the lake. For the seasons to change. We listen to the night insects buzz from the tall beach grass. We listen to the spring flowers bursting from the cracked soil, nights growing long and warm. We lie on the roof even when the summer rain pelts from the sky, cool drops against our heated flesh. I tuck a wave of hair behind her ear and she kisses me on the lips—and I’m certain there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

I’m certain that love can be a wound, deep and saw-toothed and filled with salt. But sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes I’m certain I’ve loved her before. That this is the second time my heart has knitted itself too tightly around hers.

The second time I’ve kissed her for the first time.

The second time I’ve placed my lips on her neck and let my hands drift up her spine. The second time I’ve fallen in love.

The second time I’ve known that I’ll never leave these mountains, the cold dark of the forest, the bottomless lake beyond her room.

The second time I’ve known—without question—I’ll never leave her.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

NORA WALKER was born beneath a paper moon at the end of February, during an especially windy leap year.

Her birth was quiet—her mother, Tala Walker, barely made a sound—while her grandmother, Ida, hummed a tune from an old nursery rhyme to draw the baby into the world.

As a child, Nora preferred pomegranates over strawberries, midnight over midday, and she often trailed after her grandmother, tugging on her skirts, begging for the ginger candies Ida kept in her pockets.

Nora’s mother assumed Nora had been born without a nightshade. The first Walker to lose the old magic completely. But during one cold winter moon, Nora and her wolf found a dead boy inside the Wicker Woods, and while trying to flee a wildfire, she slipped into the lake and discovered her shade hidden inside the black hollow of her witchy heart.

Nora Walker could bend time as if it were a prism of light on blue-green sea glass.