“You’re going to piss off the trees,” I continue, louder this time. In winter, a fire is less dangerous, the limbs and underbrush less flammable. But I can still hear the restlessness in the trees. The murmur of creaking branches. Fury roiling in the roots beneath our feet. I draw my shoulders back as if I might be able to make myself bigger, a beast from the forest—like the darkling crows rumored to roost at the farthest edge of the Wicker Woods—someone to fear.
But two of the boys laugh. Deep, obnoxious belly laughs, cheeks bright red like smeared thimbleberries.
I shake my head, irritated. They don’t believe me. “Trees have a long memory,” I warn, my voice like gravel. The forest remembers who carved names into their trunks, with little hearts dug in the wood; who dropped a cigarette into a clump of dry leaves and scorched their raw bark. They know who broke a limb and tore off leaves and pine needles by the handful just to start a bonfire.
They remember. And they hold grudges. Sharp branches can draw blood. Briars can snag a foot, causing a person to tumble forward and crack their head wide open.
“You a Girl Scout or something?” one of the boys asks, eyebrows raised severely, mockingly. I can tell he’s holding in another burst of laughter. Reddish-blond hair crowns his head, and a slight gap between his two front teeth stares back at me. He’s not even wearing a coat—only an ugly sweater with a giant reindeer’s face stitched onto the front. Although I suspect the bottle of dark booze he’s holding in his hand—the liquid nearly gone—is keeping him warm.
“She’s Nora Walker,” a voice answers behind me, and Suzy saunters into the circle of light cast by the bonfire.
Her cheeks are rosy from the cold. Her mouth curled up at one side, as if she’s just revealed a perfectly timed secret.
The boys’ faces turn sallow, mouths open, cheekbones slack. But they aren’t staring at Suzy. They’re looking at me.
I am a Walker.
A winter witch, a forest witch, a girl with madness in her veins who belongs in an institution, and all the other things the boys from camp have called me. Names that sting and hurt, but only a little.
“You’re the moon girl,” the boy wearing the ear-flap hat finally says.
But Suzy shoots him a look. “Don’t be an idiot, Rhett.”
He frowns at her—Rhett—the reason she snuck up to the camp in the first place. He’s why she’s here, why she’s trapped like the rest of us. And I eye him, trying to understand why he’s the boy she chose. He’s cute, obviously, with a roundish face and a dimple in one cheek, but his eyes are not soft and warm like the rest of him seems. There is something callous in them. Cruel even. A boy who usually gets what he wants.
“Ignore them,” Suzy says, flicking her hand in the air and brushing a bit of her long wavy hair over one shoulder. “They’re just pissed they have to live way out here in these miserable mountains.”
But that’s not why they call me the moon girl, why they look at me with unease etched into the slopes of their brows. It’s because they’re afraid of me. They believe my blood is the color of the blackest night and my heart is woven with spikeweeds and vinegar. I should be feared. And most importantly, avoided.
They don’t know that unlike my ancestors, unlike the Walkers of the past, there is no nightshade brimming along my edges.
Suzy clears her throat and lifts her chin. “That’s Rhett.” She nods to dimple-boy, and he looks at me but doesn’t smile—a cool, calculating gaze. Like he’s trying to see if the rumors are true. If I could turn his blood cold with a flick of my outstretched finger. And right now, I wish I could.
“That’s Lin,” she continues, glancing to the boy on my left, who nods but doesn’t speak. The oversized navy-blue puffy coat he’s wearing is like a cocoon—hood pulled up, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets. Like he doesn’t plan on taking it off until spring, like he’s never been so cold in his entire life. He must have been sent here from somewhere warm, like California or Florida. Somewhere where the sky is usually aqua blue and the air smells like coconut.
“I’m Jasper,” reindeer-sweater boy interjects, smiling across the fire at me and holding out the bottle of dark liquid, wagging an eyebrow. “Whiskey,” he says, nodding for me to take it. But I ignore the bottle.
I don’t care what their names are; I didn’t come down here to hang out. To drink booze, torch marshmallows, and tell childish ghost stories. “You have to put the fire out,” I say again, sharper this time, my thumb fidgeting with the moonstone ring on my finger, twirling it in a circle.
Rhett sneers and picks up a stick, poking at the fire, sending more sparks up into the overhead limbs. Taunting the trees.
“Maybe we should listen to her,” Lin says, lifting his shoulders in his too-big coat. “After everything that’s happened—”
Rhett raises the stick in the air, a thin coil of smoke spiraling from the blackened tip. “Shut up, Lin,” he says, wrapping his free arm around Suzy, who has inched closer to him. “We’re not talking about that.”
“Who’s she going to tell?” Lin fires back, eyes cutting over to me.
Jasper waves the bottle in the air. “Anyone she wants.”
“This is fucked,” Lin mutters, kicking at a mound of snow at his feet, digging a small trench down to the ruddy soil, mud sticking to his shoe.
Things he wants to say, but can’t, stir behind his eyes.
“The whole thing is fucked,” Rhett agrees, jabbing the smoldering stick into the snow at his feet. And his eyebrows spike upward beneath his fuzzy hat, like he’s giving Lin a warning to stop talking. “But it’s already done.”
I realize now that this isn’t just a few boys who stole a bottle of booze and came down to the lake to get drunk. This is a meeting. They came to talk in secret, in private. About what happened.
“The road will open eventually, and then we’ll have to deal with this,” says Lin, lifting his gaze.
“The Brutes don’t know what happened,” Rhett answers coldly. I’ve heard this name before, the Brutes. It’s what they sometimes call the camp counselors.
“The Brutes are idiots. It’s going to be a lot worse when a detective starts asking questions,” says Jasper, his jaw tensed, the bottle in his hand swaying at his side, spilling little drops onto the snow. “This was my last shot, getting sent here to this camp.” His eyebrows dip together, a weakness there—a flicker of doubt and fear and uncertainty. As if he’s truly afraid of what might happen to him. “If I screw it up,” he continues, “my parents probably won’t let me come home.”
They all fall silent and the trees quiver, wind curling up off the lake and sailing into the surrounding forest, knocking snow from limbs. The wilds of this place dislike our midnight chatter, our rising voices, the flickering flame and the sparks wheeling up through the trees. We have woken it.
“You’re talking about the boy who died?” I dare to ask.
They all seem to wince in unison, recoiling from my words. I swallow hard—feeling too many eyes on me. Feeling suddenly outnumbered. This was a bad idea, coming down here. Even the trees lean in close, listening, stirring awake from their snowy slumber.