Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

I take another step away from Oliver, trying to swallow, trying to find the right words, but they never form.

  I thought the boys were worried I would find Max’s body. But they were worried I’d find him in here, alive. They were worried I’d turn him in, tell the counselors where he was hiding—a boy who drowned another boy.

  One boy missing, one boy dead—a girl who couldn’t see the truth.

  “You drowned,” I say aloud, staring up at Oliver, not caring if Max hears, if he thinks I’ve lost my mind. The thoughts are spiraling fast now, too many moments, too many things I missed. All this time. I didn’t see. I didn’t know.

  Oliver’s jaw tightens. “Nora,” he pleads.

  But I shake my head. I don’t want to hear my name on his lips. I don’t want to hear anything.

  “Nora,” he repeats. “Nora, please.”

  I move past him in the doorway before he can stop me, before he can touch my skin with his. The air is humming around me, sparks whirling through the trees. The fire is close now.

  I waited too long.

  Oliver says my name again, but I’m scrambling down the steps into the snow, into the chaos of cinders.

  I’m running down toward the lake, away from the flames, away from Max Caulfield who isn’t dead at all.

  From Oliver, who might be.

  * * *

  I know that moths bring omens not to be ignored and that brooms should never be kept on the second floor of your home. I know windows opened to the east can bring bad dreams, but windows to the west can bring fated love and good fortune. Carry an acorn in your pocket to stay young forever, plant chicory root beside your kitchen window to keep the flies away. Throw salt over your left shoulder. And eat dandelion honey on toast before bed to help you sleep.

  I know these things because my grandmother knew them too. And her grandmother before her. These things are as true as the North Star, as sure as a beesting will hurt and then itch.

  But what of the things I don’t know?

  The riddles I can’t decipher.

  The strange conjuring that made a boy appear inside the Wicker Woods? A boy who shouldn’t have returned at all. A boy like Oliver Huntsman.

  The trees sag and drip.

  Snow melts from limbs—a winter forest set ablaze—and the air whirls with sparks. The fire is all around me, burning the wilds and the woods and everything green. Tearing down the row of summer homes.

  I reach the lake, and my breath is a wheeze, sparks singeing the sleeves of my coat, my hair. One even lands on the tip of my nose and I swat it away. Everything is burning and I waited too long to leave. The night has come alive—bursting—a carnival of firelight, of soot and sparks and heat.

  And then I see it, bobbing through the smoke, weaving between the embers like a needle stitching through fabric.

  The bone moth.

  Death is a winged creature who won’t leave you alone—not until it gets what it wants, a passage from the spellbook reads, one I’ve recalled over and over in my mind.

  It’s beautiful, I realize for the first time: a rare white moth from some deep part of the forest.

  But it doesn’t flutter closer to me, it quivers just past my shoulder into the trees, where Oliver is moving quickly toward me. But he stops short when he sees me looking up at him.

  “The bone moth,” I say aloud, finally understanding.

  It draws closer to Oliver, hovering, meeting his gaze.

  “The moth was following you,” I say. “Not me.”

  Its wings flutter softly, paper-thin like fabric brushing together. Flammable. And then it lifts up, higher into the trees, and shivers out toward the center of the lake—escaping the flames, disappearing into the eerie golden light. It was never following me. Never a warning of my death. The moth had been a warning that death was in my home, death kissed me in my room, death slept beside me with his hands against my ribs. Death kept me warm.

  I was wrong about the moth. And I was wrong about him.

  Oliver moves closer to me, and maybe I should back away, sprint up the shore, but I let him come stand beside me, his shoulder just barely touching mine.

  Another burst of déjà vu pours over me. He looks just like he did the morning after I found him inside the Wicker Woods. A boy about to set off on a journey—or perhaps he is a boy who has just returned from one. Weary and threadbare, with aching feet and sore shoulders, but with wild stories to tell. Of the places he’s been and the vast oceans he’s seen. Villains he narrowly escaped. A boy who left and then returned. Who came back.

  Except now we might be at the end of the tale. Ash spilling down around us. The moon above stained a savage shade of red from the flames—a blood moon.

  I hold the spellbook to my chest and close my eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly I might be able to blot out the sky and the fire and everything that couldn’t possibly be real. But when I open them, Oliver is still there. Standing beside me beneath the crimson moon.

  “Did you drown?” I ask. The words come out a syllable at a time—tasting strange on my tongue, like sandpaper and wax. Like fairytales. A thing that cannot be true.

  I hear him breathing, the inhale and exhale of lungs contracting. Breath in his lungs—the breath of a boy who sounds alive. But what do I know of dead boys’ lungs? What do I know of any of it? His skin smells of pine and fern—the scent of someone who is more wilderness than boy.

  He nods. “Yes.”

  My eyes want to well up with tears, but the air is too dry and it saps the moisture from my skin. “I don’t understand,” I say. Any of it. All of it.

  “Neither do I.” He shifts slightly, every motion like the battering of wings—an inch too far away, an inch too close. Never close enough. “After you found me in the woods,” he says quietly, as if it were a confession, “you told me that I shouldn’t have survived that long—two whole weeks in the forest. You were right.”

  Because he was already dead.

  I don’t know if I want to touch him or scream. Pound my fists against his chest and claw at his skin until he bleeds—I’ll make him real. I’m make him bleed and feel pain and then he’ll be a real boy again. The anger is a jagged lump in my throat.

  A knife in my back.

  His gaze slides to mine, heavy lidded and familiar while the world burns around us. Fire and heat and lies. “I didn’t know,” he tells me, like it’s something he needs to say. To get off his chest. “Not at first. But no one could see me, like I wasn’t even there. Except you.”

  Flames devour whole trees on the farthest shore, licking up into the sky, and there is a fire inside my gut, burning me alive. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would you have believed me?” he asks. “Do you believe me now?”

  “No.” How can I believe you.

  His gaze lowers and his mouth dips open, his throat fighting against the words. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”

  The roar from the fire behind us fills my ears, a beast coming for us—a creature set loose from the woods. It ignites the summer home where Max had been hiding, the trees around it already glowing red-hot as flames chew them apart. Max might still be inside. Or maybe he fled in time. But I don’t care either way. Or maybe I want him to burn—for what he did. He is the killer, not Oliver.

  “I’m not afraid,” I say, I admit, even though I know I should be. Of what you are. Of what you aren’t: alive.

  But Rhett and the others were afraid: They heard things in their cabin, something that terrified them. It wasn’t Max. It was Oliver all along, moving among them, unseen. Even Suzy never saw him—not once. Not in the house. Not at the bonfire. I thought she was lying, a cruelty I didn’t understand. Now I know she was telling the truth.

  She never saw Oliver. I was the only one.

  He looks out at the lake, and my heart is splitting into halves. Severed in two. The before and the after. “I don’t know why you can see me,” he says. “And they can’t.”

  I grip the spellbook tighte
r and feel the air leave my lungs. “Because I’m not like them,” I say. “Like any of them.” Walkers have always been able to see shadows—we see what others can’t. Mostly in the graveyard—those slipping between this life and the next. The ones who aren’t entirely sure they’re dead. The night my grandmother passed away, she woke me in my sleep and sat at the edge of my bed. With trembling hands, she removed the moonstone ring she had worn most of her life and slid it onto my hand. “My gift to you,” she said, before she sank back in with the shadows. Hours later, Mom told me that Grandma had passed away during the night, long before she gave me the ring. I had seen her phantom passing through the house on her way out. Mom saw her too, long black hair braided down her back as she pushed out through the front door. But she was only a ghost moving among us, passing through the in-between.

  A talent all Walkers possess. To see the ones who have gone.

  And the night I found Oliver inside the Wicker Woods, I saw him plainly—our eyes meeting as soon as he woke. Nothing dark or ghostly—ghastly—about him. Maybe I have made him more real by finding him, touching him. My found item. If there had been nothing rooting him to this forest, this lake, these mountains, he might have slipped away just like my grandmother, just like the other shadows I’ve seen. Here and then gone.

  But instead he stayed.

  Again, I feel the urge to reach out and place my hands along his temples—to see if he is flesh and bone. Roots and knees. To know for sure if he’s real.

  But I’m too afraid, so I swallow down the urge. I push it into the back of my mind.

  “The others were there too?” I ask, my lungs struggling to find air among the ash. “When you drowned?”

  Another nod, his skin turning pale—the memory of that night flickering across his eyes, slicing over his skin, cutting him open where he will bleed dead-boy blood.

  I meet his gaze, needing to see, needing to ask the question I’ve wanted a real answer to since the day I found him inside the woods. “Do you remember what happened that night?”

  A long icy breath leaves his lungs. “I remember everything.”

  OLIVER

  I don’t want to go to the cemetery. But the others insist.

  “It’s your initiation,” Rhett says coldly. “Everyone who arrives at camp has to be initiated. It’s tradition.”

  I’ve only been at the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys one week, and up until now they’ve left me alone, barely even said hello. And that’s how I prefer it—to be a shadow, to be someone they don’t remember. Whose name sinks into the background whenever they try to draw it up. But all day, during breakfast and after lunch, when the snow started falling from the sky in sheets, I’ve had the sense that something is coming. My cabinmates eyed me with renewed interest, whispers made just out of earshot. They’re planning something.

  And now that the sun has set—the rest of the camp asleep and the counselors no longer checking cabins—the boys stand over me and prod me from bed.

  Max is with them too, standing rigid beside the door, waiting.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Jasper says, wearing his ridiculous reindeer sweater. The first day I arrived at camp, the reindeer’s eyes blinked red, until one night during dinner the blinking began to slow, a twitch and a shiver, and then they stopped completely. And have never blinked again.

  I rise from bed and pull on a coat—what other choice do I have? I don’t want to make enemies so soon. In a place where I might be stuck for some time. Months. Even a year.

  We leave the cabin and march along the shore, the boys laughing when someone trips on a branch, followed by urgent shushes to be quiet. We reach the cemetery, and Jasper pulls out a bottle of whiskey from his coat, passing it around the group. The dark liquid burns my throat.

  I expect them to make me chug too many beers or blindfold me and spin me around and force me to find my way back to camp on my own. But it isn’t any of these things. They lead me deep into the cemetery, to a row of graves. Some are old and some look like they’ve been placed in the ground only a few years ago. But they all have the same surname: Walker.

  “Walkers are witches,” Jasper explains, as if he is giving a history lesson, running his hand over the top of a gravestone.

  “They’ve lived here longer than anyone else,” Rhett interjects. “Back before there were trees or a lake. When it was a desert.”

  Max frowns. “That’s not true. This place was never a desert.”

  “Whatever,” Rhett balks. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You have to tell it right, or it doesn’t sound true,” Max argues.

  Rhett rolls his eyes and looks away.

  “They’re witches,” Jasper continues. “That’s all you need to know.”

  Max steps closer to me, his blue eyes unblinking. “And there’s one that still lives across the lake.”

  “I thought no one lived in those homes,” I say, my arms crossed, not wanting to be here. “I thought they were all boarded up for the winter.”

  “The Walkers stay during the winter,” Max answers. “They’re the only ones.”

  I swallow sharply, certain that whoever lives across the lake isn’t actually a witch, but I keep my mouth shut. If they want to believe a witch lives in one of those homes, I couldn’t care less. I just want to get this over with.

  “You have to say her name three times,” Jasper instructs now, resting his long, gawky elbow on the edge of a gravestone.

  “Whose?” I ask.

  He points a finger at the grave below him. Etched into the stone is the name WILLA WALKER.

  “If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” Rhett says, wagging an eyebrow for effect, as if it makes his words more creepy. Or more true.

  “Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, as if reciting it from a book—perhaps the very thing a boy said to him when he first arrived at camp.

  I make a sound I don’t intend, a sound of cynicism, and Max steps closer to me, shoulders rigid. “You don’t believe us?”

  I pull my jaw tight—I know how these things go. How initiations work. They want me to keep my mouth shut and obey whatever they say. The sooner I fall in line, the sooner I’ll be back in my bunk asleep. And if I do what they ask, they won’t pick on me after tonight. I’ll be one of them. And when the next new kid arrives, they’ll want me to make him do the same stupid shit.

  Max backs away from me and even Jasper stands up from the grave where he had been slouched. They give me room to summon this old dead witch. I exhale through my nose and say the name three times. “Willa Walker Willa Walker Willa Walker.”

  A hush settles over the graveyard, and for a moment, it feels as if the wind stops blowing. As if time falls still. My eyes skim the cemetery, the old dead trees and the snow falling between the markers, and for the briefest moment I think maybe they’re right. Willa Walker has been summoned from her grave. But then Jasper breaks into laugher, followed by Rhett, and it echoes over the gravestones.

  “Dude, you should see your face,” Jasper says, slapping me hard on the shoulder. “You look like you actually believe a hand is going to rise up from the dirt.”

  Rhett shoves the bottle of whiskey at me, as if it were my prize for doing what they said. I take a slug, then hand it back.

  I think we’re done, that we’ll head back now. The snow is falling in thick sheets, and I follow them out through the cemetery gate. When we reach the shore, I turn left. But Jasper calls out to me. “Where you going?” he asks. “Did you think that was it? All you had to do was say some dead lady’s name three times?”

  Rhett laughs beside him, but Max looks just as serious as ever.

  This next part is why we really came out here.

  This is what they’ve been waiting for.

  I walk to the edge of the lake where they stand, snow blowing sideways through the trees. A storm is coming. The counselors warned us at dinner to add more logs to
our woodstoves, to shut our doors tightly so the wind wouldn’t blow them inward.

  But now we stand out in it, the mountains to the north obscured by black clouds.

  “You have to walk out on the frozen lake,” Rhett says, his voice buoyant and light, enjoying this. The main event for the night. “All the way out to the center.”

  “And then you have to twirl in a circle like a ballerina,” Jasper explains, grinning so wide the gap in his teeth seems broader than usual.

  I don’t look at them—I stare out at the frozen surface of the lake. At the dark water still visible beneath.

  “You’re getting off easy,” Rhett says. “We could make you sleep outside in the cold.”

  I shake my head slowly. “The ice won’t hold me,” I say. I can see that it’s still too thin—not frozen solid. Only a month or so ago, I’m sure there was water splashing onto the pebbled shoreline.

  “You don’t have a choice, newbie,” Rhett answers, his voice cold now, his mouth grinning with self-satisfaction. He enjoys this part of initiations—he enjoys the brief sense of power.

  “I’m not doing it,” I say, refusing to look away from Rhett. I want him to know that I’m serious. Saying the name of a long-dead witch three times is one thing. But this is something else completely. I’d rather sleep out in the cold all night—I’d rather fight all of them—than risk walking out there.

  “He could drown,” Lin offers—the only one who seems to recognize how dangerous it is. That someone could actually die. “No one’s ever had to go out on the ice before,” he argues. “We usually make them swim in the lake in the summer, and see if Willa Walker pulls them under.”

  “He’s not going to drown,” Jasper interjects, scoffing and brushing a hand through his shaggy hair. “The ice will hold.”

  “And if he does, it’s his own fault,” Max says, his eyes like two black orbs, as if something is boiling beneath the surface. The others might still be unsure whether they’re going to let me into their little group. But Max knows that he hates me. I stole his bunk when I first arrived. I didn’t want to, I would have preferred to go unnoticed, to be the boy whose parents died, who arrived late in the season but kept to himself and hardly took up any space at all.