Better light a candle, better light two.
The trees are watching closely, and they might snatch you.
Shea stayed on the swings and looked on from a distance. She imagined—as she so often did—that she was a part of the forest. Quiet and overlooked. Alone on the fringes. She’d kicked her feet into the air and tried to feel like the branches felt, scrabbling at the sky.
The mist had turned to rain by the time old Mr. Bosch blew his whistle, summoning the students back inside. In the mad dash across the glistening blacktop, Shea accidentally trod right atop Owen Davies’s shoe.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he’d asked, catching her in the rib with an elbow.
Next to him, River Albero wrinkled his nose. “She probably didn’t.”
“She didn’t see me, either. I said ‘move it,’ Helen Keller.”
She’d scurried out of the way, embarrassed and angry, the cold in her lungs. The forest at her back felt like a wildebeest. A physical embodiment of her anger, wind snarling through its branches. Like Daphne, she sent the forest a silent plea for protection. Only, instead of transformation, she asked the trees for something with teeth. She didn’t want to be hidden away. She didn’t want to fit herself in.
She wanted to bite back.
•••
Poppy is knitting. In the middle of the day, in the heart of the Gravewood, in the house of the devil, Poppy Zahar is knitting a scarf. She’s made quick work of it. Already, the fabric spills over her lap in wefts of brilliant pink and royal blue. She looks perfectly at ease, and Shea is met with the sense that Poppy could make herself feel at home anywhere.
Her serenity is the exact antithesis to Shea’s current state of being.
“I’m going to die,” she announces, falling back onto the bed.
Poppy doesn’t look up from her knitting. “You’re not going to die.”
“You don’t know that.” She shuts her eyes. She feels as though her bones have been wrenched out through her mouth and then shoved back in, out of order. Everything hurts. Everything throbs. She pulls a pillow over her head and screams into it. Falling slack, she adds, “I need something with sugar.”
Poppy plucks the pillow off her face and lobs it onto the floor. “Maybe it’s a good thing.”
“What is?”
“The fact that Lysander won’t be feeding on you anymore. You’re making each other sick.”
She told Poppy everything as soon as she’d arrived back at the room, crawling into bed with blood still drying on her wrist. Conall Sullivan. What happened on the bridge. The unsent letters and the pump out in the gazebo and the strange encounter between Lys and Asher in the snowy room. She left out the details about Lys in the rain, the heart throbbing in his hand.
She skipped over the bit where she reached for him and felt bone.
“Lys isn’t sick,” she counters. “He’s perfectly fine.”
“Are we sure?” Poppy’s needles click soothingly. “He didn’t look fine when I saw him.”
Shea flops onto her stomach, burying her face into the quilt. “It’s not even Asher’s decision to make.” Her voice is muffled by the mattress. “It’s mine.”
“It is,” agrees Poppy.
“He has no right to stick his big, stupid nose in my personal business.”
“He doesn’t.”
Shea picks up her face, aghast. “You agree with him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re doing that thing you do.”
“What thing?”
