Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  “Oliver,” I say softly, my voice terribly small. Terribly, impossibly weak.

  He is slow to react, his gaze sweeping over me, stalling at the curve of my lips, the wet strands of my hair, but there is no recognition in his eyes. No flicker of memory. He doesn’t take my hand and pull me against his chest and ask if I’m okay.

  He only stares.

  The trees surrounding the cemetery begin to shake just a little, and I can’t tell if it’s the wind or my eyes. If things are still trying to snap back into focus—the lake separating itself from the sky.

  “Oliver,” I say again, lifting my fingers and hovering them only a few inches from his chest, afraid to touch him. Afraid to know if he’s real or not. Alive or not.

  His skin is not pale or sallow, his eyes do not look tormented by his memory of the forest. He looks strong. Different. Not how I remember.

  But his face twists when I say his name, arms stiffening at his sides. He doesn’t remember me. He doesn’t know who I am. And the realization breaks me apart. Makes me want to scream. To cry out. To grab him and dig my fingernails into his flesh.

  I breathe and each inhale is a rattle.

  The other boys are almost to the lakeshore—they haven’t yet seen me. And Rhett is shoving Lin playfully, laughing, their voices muffled by the falling snow.

  “We can’t stay here,” I say to Oliver, snapping my eyes back to his. But still, he sways away from me. Just out of reach.

  My head begins to clack and drum. My jaw chattering. I know I need to get warm, I need to get inside. My body is too cold. But Oliver only looks at me with the distant look of a stranger. Who won’t reach out and touch me. Who doesn’t remember anything from before, who looks into my eyes and sees only a girl. Nothing more.

  But the silence is broken by another voice.

  By Rhett, shouting through the snow. “Who the fuck are you?” he calls. My eyes lift only briefly, to see that Rhett has moved back to the cemetery fence—probably having realized that Oliver didn’t follow them out.

  I open my mouth, and my lips begin to quiver. Oliver doesn’t know who I am. None of them do. “I’m—” I start, but my voice catches at the back of my teeth. I’m a witch. A witch who might have moonlight in her veins after all. Who jumped into the lake and woke on a night that’s already happened. A witch who has felt time slipping around her, who believed she didn’t have a nightshade. But maybe, maybe, I was wrong. Maybe I can’t bring back the dead—maybe no witch can. But I can do something else.

  The wind grows stronger, and it blows my hair away from my neck. Up toward the sky. Wild and woven into knots.

  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.

  The wind blows up through the trees, and the sky is full of snow. The storm is getting worse.

  “Told you she’s dangerous,” Jasper remarks, just loud enough that I can hear. I take another step back, and another, keeping my eyes on Oliver. I want him to say something, to yell at the boys to stop, to leave me alone. I want him to come after me. But he stands mute. Everything he ever felt for me, everything
he ever said, now lost. Slipped away into the darkest corners of his mind.

  The Oliver I knew is gone.

  Rhett follows my movements, and for a moment he looks like he might come after me, grab my arm and pull me back into the cemetery. Like I am just the thing he needs to occupy his buzzed mind.

  So I hurry through the snow, around the lake, until I can no longer see them through the blowing wind, and I swear I can hear my heart break—the fizz and crack of it.

  I stop when I’m almost to the marina and press my hands to my eyes to keep the tears from coming. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

  This isn’t how the story ends.

  A deep scar is branding itself inside me—a place that will scab over but never heal. I hold in a breath, I hold it until my chest aches, until my lungs burn for a fresh gulp of air. The storm thrashes overhead and I exhale, long and deep, a chill shuttling down my spine, tucking itself firmly between each rib bone. I’ve always been afraid I wasn’t a real Walker. Afraid I would end up like my mom, cynical and scared of what she is. I always thought I wanted to be alone, alone in these woods. Where I can’t get hurt, where no one can call me moon girl and winter witch and wild.

  But I was wrong. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want sleep in my room in the dark and never feel Oliver’s hands on my skin again. I don’t want a life without people in it. Without Oliver. Without my heart rapping wildly inside my chest and knowing someone else’s is doing the same thing.

  My life feels spare and thin without it.

  I am a Walker who found her nightshade. I am a Walker who wants to be called more than a witch. More than a girl who is feared. I want to be a Walker who can trust her heart, who will chase down this feeling welling up inside me every chance I get. I want to be loved.

  Loved.

  Loved.

  Loved.

  Recklessly, foolishly. Without reason or caution or always looking for ways to ruin it.

  I want him.

  I drop my hands from my eyes and take a step back toward the cemetery, back through the storm. Because I don’t have a choice. Because I have to drag him away and keep him safe and not let him drown. Whether he remembers me or not, I won’t give up on him. Because I am a Walker. And my story doesn’t end like this.

  But I only make it a few steps, I only blink once, when I see someone moving up the shore, through the blizzard—an illusion. A boy.

  I blink again.

  Him.

  I stop and a humming begins in my skull.

  Doubt and fear make nests beneath my skin. I want to cry.

  He reaches me and time slows. He lifts his head and my heart climbs back up into my chest, braiding itself together—thin fibers of thread to make it whole.

  His eyes rove the ground at first, then click to mine. We stare at each other, and I see him searching my face for memories. For moments in time he won’t find. Because when I peer into his eyes, I know he doesn’t remember me. The girl who pulled him from the Wicker Woods and let him sleep beside her. He lifts his hand and I hold in a breath; I watch him without blinking. I think he’s going to touch my neck, my face, my collarbone, but his fingers graze my hair, so gently I hardly feel it. My eyes flutter closed, and his hand draws back again.

  When I open my eyes, I see he’s holding something between his fingers—a small twig, a green spiny leaf clinging to one end, as if it were awaiting spring.

  “The forest sticks to you,” he says. Without knowing it, he repeats what I told him the first time he pulled a bit of the forest from my hair. The morning after I found him and we walked back to the boys’ camp.

  A sob catches in my throat and a smile splits across my face.

  He holds the leaf in his hand, a remnant from when I woke in the trees, my hair lying across the ground, and maybe, maybe he remembers some small part of me. Something that nags at him.

  His eyes narrow, and for a moment he looks pained, like he’s trying to pick apart the bits of shadows from forgotten memory. The things that haven’t happened yet.

  “Maybe we met once before?” he asks, his eyebrows sloped down, his hair curling just behind his ears as the snow falls around us.

  My fingers want to touch him again, but I only let myself nod, afraid he’ll slip away. “I think we did.”

  “I think I liked you then,” he says.

  Tears begin spilling down my cheeks, unstoppable, heavy tears. Salt and sweet. “I think I liked you too.”

  He holds out his arm, and with the tips of his fingers, he wipes away the tears from my chin. He smiles just a little, and I feel like my legs might give out.

  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.

  Time had never moved in a straight line for Nora, but on that night, she learned it could slip forward and back when her heart begged it to. When she asked.

  She could undo the mistakes of the past.

  She could make right her wrongs.