“It doesn’t matter, it’s mine.”
His smile is faint but familiar. “Somehow I doubt that.”
He’s dressed in a sherpa jacket, his hair buzzed short. The last time she saw him, he was leaving for boot camp. She and Camellia watched the scene unfold from across the street—crouched behind the curtains of Poppy Zahar’s bedroom window as he’d argued with his father, his duffel bag banding his chest.
He didn’t want to enlist, Camellia said, watching her brother through the steam of their breath on the glass,but we need the stipend. Dad’s been out of work for months.
The Asher standing before her is incongruous with the way she remembers him. His face is more harshly defined, his shoulders broad. Even the way he carries himself is unfamiliar—at attention, his shoulders thrown back instead of rounded against the mountain cold. He looks unyielding as a wall, the playfulness drilled out of him. Only his eyes are the same—a rich golden brown. The color of Fletcher’s field in late summer. In his free hand, he grips his sister’s poster. Shea’s heart plummets to her feet.
“I didn’t know you were home,” she says, eager to get the focus off her backpack.
“I’m on leave.”
“Oh.”
It’s not that she’s been counting the days since he left, it’s only that she knows he’s not due back for several more months, which means he’s been granted special permission.Emergencypermission. The happy, gap-toothed smile of Camellia Thorley is a bulwark between them. This time, when she tugs at her backpack, he lets it go.
“I’m sorry,” she manages. “About Camellia.”
His face closes up like a fist. “Everyone’s sorry. Her teachers. Constable Foster. My parents.Sorrydoesn’t bring her back.”
Shea thinks of how her mother retreated into herself after her father left. How she visibly recoiled each time someone offered up their empty condolences, their shallow sympathies.Sorrywas a poison. It tainted everything it touched.
“I know.” She hopes her tone conveys just how deeply she means it. “I know it doesn’t.”
“Sorryis what people say when someone dies.”
There’s a worrying determination in his eyes. It’s the same conviction she saw etched into her mother’s face, in the days and then months after her father disappeared. The same resolve that drew Ivy Parker to the forest’s edge night after night, barefoot and shivering, chasing the sound of Calhoun Parker’s voice on the wind—ignoring her daughter as she pled with her to come home:Mom, it’s the trees. It’s just the trees, it isn’t Dad.
“Ellie’s not dead,” says Asher. “She’s missing. And missing people can be found.”
Still on the floor, Shea’s heart forms a single, deep fissure. “She’s not missing,” she tells him as gently as she can. “She’s in the Gravewood.”
She shouldn’thaveto say it. She shouldn’tneedto remind him. It’s been beaten into them from the moment they were born: Don’t go into the forest. Don’t answer if it calls. Don’t bleed where the trees can taste it.
No one comes back from the Gravewood alive.
She ghosts a thumb over the bite at her wrist and thinks:Not without the devil’s permission.
“I thought you weren’t afraid of the trees.” His teasing falls flat, their rapport rubbed thin by his time away, by his missing sister, by the awful things she’s done in the months since he left. Her guilt is a wild, clawing thing.
She tugs the sleeves of her blazer lower just as he says, “You look different.”
“Youlook different.” It’s a feeble comeback, and both of them know it. A band of worry runs through her. She wonders if he can tell. If he can see it on her—the pale skin, the glassy eyes, the tremor in her hands. If he knows, after months of training, how to recognize signs of a bite.
“Combat training will do that to you.” The look on his face invites no further inquiry. “Did you talk to my sister? Before she left? Did she say anything strange?”
The question is like being doused in ice water. Every answer she could possibly give feels like the exact wrong one. In the end, she settles on a partial truth.
“I’ve already told Constable Foster everything I know.”
“Well, he’s not asking,” says Asher. “I am.”
He says it like it ought to count for something, and maybe it should. She thinks of six years past—when she’d been eleven years old and perpetually angry, every part of her itchy and ill-fitting. Earlier that day, Mr. Belrose had pulled her aside and chastised her for disrupting the lesson—made her stand and write lines on the board while the rest of the class read silently from the textbook:I won’t talk back to my elders. I won’t talk back to my elders. I won’t talk back to my elders.
When school was done, she’d raced home with tears in her eyes and wrath in her throat, furious at the terrible injustice of it all. It wasn’t that she’d misbehaved on purpose, it was only that she hadn’t heard Mr. Foster call for order. The harder she’d tried to explain it to him, the less he’d listened, until she’d finally accused him of being the one with non-working ears.
Still bristling from the encounter, she’d wedged herself into the top of an old dogwood tree at the forest’s edge. She sat and watched the trees undulate in the wind, wishing she could hear the promises swaying in their branches.
