She knew death was coming—the bone moth was a sign.
And when we woke to find that Grandma had wandered down to the lake in the middle of the night, taken her last breath on the shore, autumn leaves scattered around her—sad shades of orange and golden-yellows—we knew the moth had been right. Death was coming. Just as we’d feared.
And now, one follows me.
“Why do you stay here in the winter?” Suzy asks, touching her fingertips to the window.
I pinch my eyes closed, shoving away the memory of the moth and my grandmother. “It’s my home.”
“I know, but you could leave in winter, like everyone else.”
“I like the winters,” I say.I like the quiet. The cold, unending silence.But it’s more than that.I belong here.Every Walker for generations has lived in these woods. Between these ancient pines. It’s just how it’s always been.
We don’t know how to live anywhere else.
“Your house is older than the others,” Suzy notes, still peering out the window where she can just barely see the outline of other homes along the lake.
“My great-great-grandfather built it,” I tell her. “Long before any other houses lined the shore.” Her gaze is soft, and the light from the candle she holds flickers across her cheekbones and tawny hair. “He was a gold miner,” I continue. “He made his fortune in the Black River.” But like most of the men in my family, he came and went just as swiftly as the hours fell into night. It wasn’t their fault—Walker women were known to be fickle, uncertain when it came to love. And men were only ever a passing fascination. Much like the man who was my father. Whether by bad luck or our choosing, men never stayed long in our lives.
I walk to the closet and change into black sweatpants and a thick, knobby sweater. But Suzy stays at the window, pressing her palm to the glass. “You said you found that missing boy?” she asks.
I close the closet door, catching my reflection in the closet mirror briefly—sleepy eyes and hair that needs to be brushed. “Up in the woods,” I say cautiously.
Locals know of the Wicker Woods. They speak about it in a hush, in tones never above a whisper. As if saying it aloud will draw the darkness out.Never speak of the Wicker Woods behind its back, a notation inside the spellbook warns.
“He survived out there all this time?” she asks, dropping her hand from the window.
“He got lucky,” I say. Or maybe it’s opposite of luck. To find yourself lost inside the Wicker Woods is catastrophically unlucky.One of the ill-fated, my grandmother would say if she were here.Doomed. A boy to steer clear of.
An itch trickles down my vertebrae, cold as ice, lodging itself like concrete in my chest.
“He could have ended up like that other boy,” Suzy says.
My gaze snaps to hers, her silhouette outlined against the huge windows, snow swirling against the glass. “What other boy?”
She lifts one shoulder. “The one who died.” She swivels around to face me. “The same night your boy went missing.”
He’s not my boy, I want to say. But instead I ask, “A boy died?”
Her mouth pinches flat and severe. “Yeah, the night of the storm.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. Just overheard the other boys talking about it. They wanted to call the police, but the phones have been down.”
I step closer to her. “Who was he?”
“Not sure.” She weaves a bit of hair through her fingers. Not nervously, just out of habit. “They kept it pretty quiet, no one wanted to talk about it. But I overheard their whispers in the hall, when they thought I couldn’t hear.”
“Did they say how he died?” I ask. My lungs have tightened in my chest, the breath held still at the back of my throat.
She shakes her head, her eyebrows drawn close—wincing at the thought of someone meeting their demise way out here, in these woods, in the bitter cold. “I only heard them say that a boy was missing and another was dead.”
I sink onto the edge of the bed, looking past Suzy to the window. “Someone died,” I say softly, mostly to my myself, and I run my finger over my grandmother’s ring, feeling the oval shape of the graymoonstone. As if I could summon her, hear the soothing tenor of her words whenever she told me one of her stories. But she doesn’t appear.
Suzy and I are silent for some time, the cold slipping through the walls as the fire downstairs begins to die. The room feels strangely hollow, a ringing starts in my ears, and when I blink, I think I see the walls vibrate before snapping back into place.
I must be tired. It must be from lack of sleep.
