But his face twists when I say his name, arms stiffening at his sides.He doesn’t remember me.He doesn’t know who I am. And the realization breaks me apart. Makes me want to scream. To cry out. To grab him and dig my fingernails into his flesh.
I breathe and each inhale is a rattle.
The other boys are almost to the lakeshore—they haven’t yet seen me. And Rhett is shoving Lin playfully, laughing, their voices muffled by the falling snow.
“We can’t stay here,” I say to Oliver, snapping my eyes back to his. But still, he sways away from me. Just out of reach.
My head begins to clack and drum. My jaw chattering. I know I need to get warm, I need to get inside. My body is too cold. But Oliver only looks at me with the distant look of a stranger. Who won’t reach out and touch me. Who doesn’t remember anything from before, who looks into my eyes and sees only a girl. Nothing more.
But the silence is broken by another voice.
By Rhett, shouting through the snow. “Who the fuck are you?” he calls. My eyes lift only briefly, to see that Rhett has moved backto the cemetery fence—probably having realized that Oliver didn’t follow them out.
I open my mouth, and my lips begin to quiver.Oliver doesn’t know who I am.None of them do. “I’m—” I start, but my voice catches at the back of my teeth.I’m a witch.A witch who might have moonlight in her veins after all. Who jumped into the lake and woke on a night that’s already happened. A witch who has felt time slipping around her, who believed she didn’t have a nightshade. But maybe,maybe, I was wrong. Maybe I can’t bring back the dead—maybe no witch can. But I can do something else.
The wind grows stronger, and it blows my hair away from my neck. Up toward the sky. Wild and woven into knots.
Maybe I wanted it bad enough. My heart cracked so deeply it split open and my shadow side spilled out like black mud.When you need it, your nightshade will come.Maybe it’s been there all along. The part of me that felt time tumbling just out of reach. The moments when I was certain I had been there before, the déjà vu. Over and over and over. A thing I couldn’t hold on to long enough, a thing I didn’t understand. A thing I couldn’t control.
Until now.Now.
“She’s that moon girl,” Jasper answers, and he’s standing at the fence now too, watching me. In his hand is the lighter, and he flicks it open, letting the small flame burn a moment before closing it again. “She’s a Walker,” he says with confidence.
My eyes skip back to Oliver, but he doesn’t soften his gaze. He only stares, as blank and heartless as the others.
“What are you doing here, moon girl?” Rhett asks.
I ignore him.
“Oliver,” I say again, to keep his attention on me, even though he hasn’t once looked away. “Don’t go out on the lake,” I hiss quietly, so the others won’t hear. I feel myself inching closer to him again, wanting to touch him, to run my fingers up his jaw to his temple. To pull him close and make him remember. “Promise me, okay?” I suck in a deep breath, my head spinning, eyes having a hard time focusing. As if I’m still in the lake, water pressing against my pupils.
But Oliver’s expression doesn’t change—his mouth a stiff, puzzled line.
He has no idea who I am.
“What’s she talking about?” Lin interjects.
“She’s a witch,” Jasper says, grinning. And for the first time I notice his left cheek—where the tree branch tore through his skin the night of the bonfire and left a deep, bloody gash. But it’s gone. The skin pale and white. No scar marring the flesh.
It hasn’t happened yet.
“She’s probably casting some curse on him,” Jasper continues, swinging himself over the fence and taking several sloppy steps toward Oliver and me, eyebrows raised. “She’s going to drag him back to her house and bury him under the floorboards. Like all Walkers do.”
Oliver’s breathing turns swift and strange, but still his eyes don’t pull away.
“Shut up, Jasper,” I snap, swiveling around to point a long finger at him. He clamps his mouth closed, like he actually thinks I might turn him into a sad little toad or stitch his lips together with spiderwebs and string.
“How the hell do you know my name?” he asks, his voice suddenly shaking, his lower jaw pulled down in shock.
Because I am the witch they think I am.I am the one to fear.
I look back to Oliver, breathing so deeply I feel dizzy. “Please,” I say. I smile a little, and for a moment I think he’s going to smile back, his eyes turning a soft, sunrise green. “Come with me.”
His lips part just slightly, the tension in his shoulders drops.
But then Jasper barks from behind him, “She’s definitely messing with you, man. Don’t let her touch you.”
“I know you don’t remember me,” I say to Oliver, ignoring Jasper. “But I remember you. And if you stay here with them, something bad is going to happen.” I swallow and find my voice again. “Please.”
