“If you’re not here to Turn, then you must have a death wish.”
“I don’t want to die.”
The slight quiver in her voice narrows his focus. Suddenly, all he can see is her. All he canhearis her. The too-fast clip of her heart. The frantic rush of her pulse. The softplinkof her blood dripping to the floor. In that moment—her eyes shining with a resolve he feels all the way down in his gut—she doesn’t look like an obstinate girl from Little Hill. She looks like ruination.
If he were smart, he’d send her away.
“If you’re not here to die and you’re not here to Turn, then why come at all?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She holds her hand flat between them. Her palm is red all over. “I’m here to make you a deal.”
Camellia Thorley’s missing poster doesn’t stand out.
It’s one of a dozen overlapping sheets, each one pinned to the wall outside the grocer’s. It’s misting today, the whole of Little Hill swallowed up in a cloud. The paper is wet—nearly translucent. It curls in on itself every time the wind blows.
The girl in the photograph is small and willowy, her smile gapped with missing teeth and her golden hair pulled back in bows. The photo is outdated. At least six years old. The last time anyone at Hornbeam saw Camellia Thorley—two weeks ago, to be exact—she was half a foot taller and in possession of all her teeth. She hadn’t worn bows in years.
No one will find Camellia Thorley.
Just like no one ever found the others.
When the Gravewood swallows someone, it doesn’t spit them back out.
The bell rattles over the door when Shea slips out of the November chill and into Brer’s Corner Mart. The sound is muffled—nearly nonexistent—the way it always is on days when she’s forgone her hearing aids. The air inside the shop is warm and thick. It condenses in a cloud along the wide glass windows. She scuffs her boots against the mat, letting the heat chase the cold from her bones. She tries not to think about Camellia at all.
“Two students at a time,” shouts Silas Brer. The rest of his gripe is incomprehensible. Something about mud, she’s sure. He hates mopping the floors.
Shea’s come in alone, but Silas wouldn’t know that. The elderly grocer is perched precariously atop his stepladder, thoroughly preoccupied by stacking boiled fruits along the topmost shelf. She’s always thought his shop looked less like a grocer’s and more like a root cellar, canning jars arranged haphazardly in every direction. It’s the only way to eat anything grown from the ground—pickled or fermented, boiled and canned, the Rot cooked out of them.
She’s sick to the teeth of cured vegetables and freeze-dried fruits, but food is food, and the pantry back home has been almost empty for weeks. She plucks several jars of canned peaches from the shelf as she heads for the candy counter, weighing them in her palm before easing them into the battered shell of her knapsack.
Silas doesn’t notice. He never does. It isn’t that he’s inattentive, it’s only that Shea Parker is a creature of silence. It’s a benefit of being born in it—she knows how to come and go without making a sound. It’s why she leaves her hearing aids in her pockets whenever she’s sneaking. It hones the world to a point, lets her slink along the tip of it, quiet as a mouse.
The candy counter is picked over, as usual. Scant, the way everything in Little Hill is scant. She can’t remember a time when life wasn’t this way. When she was small, she’d fall asleep with her mother’s secondhand memories looping like a film reel through her head—Christmases in Manhattan, the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue glittering with lights. Summers on the Cape, catamaran sails puffed up with wind. Octobers in Salem, the stores packed with witchy trinkets and cheap souvenirs.
The Rot sprang up overnight, but the end of the world came in increments. Gradual—slow—so that no one noticed it happening until it was over. Once it was done, they carried on as best they could. Even as the stores shuttered. Even as the phone lines went down. Even when Washington went dark.Adaptive as rats, her father used to say—a comparison her mother detested. Unlike Shea’s well-traveled mother, her father never left home until the Rot arrived. The first time he set foot on a train, it was as a soldier of the newly established wood watch. Ready to fight and die to preserve the final echoes of a life he’d never tasted.
These days, there are no tinsel-clad holidays, no jaunts to the city, and no summertime excursions. Food is carefully rationed. Medicine, more so. The only way to get anything extra this far north is through the Mercy Boys, and fraternization with the Gravewood Devil isn’t just prohibited, it’s a death sentence. If something doesn’t snatch you off the path on the way to Mercy Ridge, the watch will gun you down on the return journey home.
No onecomes back from the Gravewood.
Not when a single sip of spring-fed water is enough to Rot the blood. Everyone in Little Hill knows what happened in the neighboring town of Highbush—how the Rot swept through overnight. It’s a ghost town now, bordered in barbed-wire fencing. A cautionary tale, used to frighten children away from the trees.
They don’t take chances anymore.
If you step outside the bounds, you don’t come back.
Fishing through an assortment of old penny candy, Shea pockets a lollipop, cherry red and flat as a coin. It’s hardly substantial, as far as snacks go, but the sugar will stave off the pounding in her head, at least. It’s always like this the day after a feed—her throat dry, her skin aching, a percussive beat at her temples—but today it’s particularly bad. She was barely able to focus in school. She’s positive she failed Mrs. Appledorn’s latest pop quiz—she left the last three pages blank. At the rate she’s going, she won’t be surprised if she’s forced to repeat her senior year.
Not that it matters.
Rounding the shelves, she finds Silas stepping off the bottom rung of his ladder.
“Oh.” He draws up short. “It’syou.”
She watches his mouth shape the words, wariness tightening the corners. It’s the unfortunate side effect of being Calhoun Parker’s daughter. She drags her dead father’s reputation behind her like a ball and chain. She rattles his memory like a Dickensian ghost.
“I brought you something,” she says, before Silas can ask her to turn out her pockets. She twists her backpack forward to better rifle through its side pouch, careful not to shift the stolen contents as she tugs loose several shoots of white cohosh. Silas’s eyes thin in immediate suspicion.
