Another pang follows, more painful than the first. Shea thinks of the long walk to Mercy Ridge, roots grown over bone. The forest is full of the dead. Rib cages pried apart by pines, pale white femurs wedged between the branches. Human skulls, their jaws gaped open, peering out from the hollows of the old oaks. Picked clean by birds, or else offal for wolves.
She wants to find Camellia alive, she does.
Her doubt doesn’t make her cruel, it only makes her a realist.
“We kissed,” Poppy blurts out, invading her thoughts. “Me and Ellie.”
Shea blinks, startled. “Oh.”
“Well, she kissed me.” Poppy rolls onto her back, folding down the blanket. The air outside their cocoon is cold. The light has gone mauve. “Or, I don’t know, I kissed her. The whole thing was kind of a blur. And I should have told you. I reallywantedto tell you, but Ellie said not to. Not yet. She wanted it to be just for us a little while longer. I think she was worried you’d feel like our friendship would change. Like it’d be me and her, with you on the outskirts.”
“It’s okay,” says Shea, sitting up. “It’s fine that you didn’t tell me. We all—”
We all have secrets, she’d been about to say. But Poppy and Ellie’s secret hadn’t hurt anyone. Hers had. She swipes a finger over a raised half-moon at her wrist. It doesn’t feel remotely the same.
“It’s just that everyone keeps saying she ran away,” says Poppy. “They said she was unhappy, and she left. That maybe the trees promised her something better, and she followed where it led.”
Outside the window, the sun has nearly set. The last dregs of daylight gild the heavy bottoms of the clouds. Poppy’s eyes glitter in the fading light.
“She wasn’t unhappy. And she didn’t run. Somethingtookher.”
Silence blankets the room. Shea isn’t sure how to fill it, and so she doesn’t try. Eventually, Poppy drifts off to sleep.
Shea watches the sky sink into black and tries to do the same, but sleep doesn’t come. Neither does hope. She tosses this way and that, restless and bitter and overheating, until the creature wriggles free to hiss at her. It’s Kit, his eyes glowing and his fur spiked.
“Sorry.” She slips out of bed, yielding the blankets to the sharp-toothed terror.
For the fourth time that night, she thinks about it.
Turning.
Out in the hall, Tristan has abandoned his post. To hunt, most likely. She can feel Mercy Ridge coming slowly alive in the pads of her feet. Floors creak. Doors slam. The rhythmic thud of bass settles into the stone. It gives the lodge a heartbeat, like it’s a living, breathing thing. Another insatiable part of the Gravewood. Another mouth waiting to swallow her whole.
Her mind made up, she heads downstairs.
Outside, the weather has turned. The air smells cold, like wind over ice. She picks her way along the path, heading for the rose-engulfed gazebo on the western lawn. She’s never come this way before, but she knows what’s out here. What it’s used for.
Up close, the gazebo is so thoroughly encased in canes of winter-dormant vines that only the steepled cupola is visible. Several whippy shoots of green curl off the handrails, reaching for her as she ducks beneath the matted roof. Inside is still and dark, both the wind and the moon snuffed out by the leaves. An old hand pump rises out from the pebbled earth. Strange, she’d expected more opulence—a well with a pulley and bucket, or else a gleaming fountain, water frothing out into the basin. Instead, the pump is ugly and plain, its cast-iron spigot orange with rust. There’s nothing to hold the water but her own two hands, already stiff with cold.
Sometimes it keeps her up at night—wondering if her mother drank from the Gravewood’s waters willingly, or if she was tricked by something in the trees. If she’d been too brokenhearted to go on, or if she’d fought with everything she had to come back home to her only daughter. Sometimes, in Shea’s very worst moments, she thinks maybe her mother has done something she can’t forgive.
Sometimes, she feels like all that’s left of her are the bitter bits.
It takes several pumps of the handle before water sluices out. She cups her hands beneath the flow, letting it pool like quicksilver in her palm. Her fingers shake as she lifts it to her lips.
“I wouldn’t.”
She glances up, startled, to find Lys standing just outside the pavilion. With his hood obscuring his features, he looks like some sort of ineffable winter god. A midnight Boreas, approaching on the wind.
“Why not?” She dries her hands against her pants, teeth chattering. “It was part of our deal.”
“But it’s windy tonight.”
“What does the wind have to do with anything?”
“You might blow away.” His voice is light, but his gaze is heavy. It sinks into her.
“That’s a bullshit answer.”
