People like you, I think. People who only pretend to be nice but say awful things about me behind my back. People who form circles that no outsiders can enter. Who like to watch others squirm while rumors are passed ear to ear.
Her mouth hangs open for a second, and then her eyebrows dip back down. “I thought you were my friend,” she says, her voice thin as paper, tearing slowly along a crease. Like she might sink into a crack and disappear. Just like the honey.
But I refuse to feel bad for her. “We were never friends before this,” I point out, my voice bitter and quick. I don’t belong in her world, among her circle of friends. I am lost in that gray in-between. Not quite normal enough to have friends, not quite powerful enough to summon real magic like the Walkers before me. “You’ve never talked to me at school, you’ve never even smiled at me in the hall.” The words are tumbling out. “I’m just a convenience for you. Because I’m all you have right now—because you have nowhere else to go. You’re just using me.” The words have left my mouth before I can even regret them. Before I can feel their full weight slam down inside my skull.
Suzy’s round lips snap shut.
And the anger I felt dissolves on my tongue just as quickly, turns to nothing. And I’m left feeling empty—as hollow as an acorn husk.
Suzy crosses the room to the couch without even looking at me, grabs her bag from the floor, and walks to the front door. As she passes, the air has the hint of stale rose perfume—the last of whatever she dabbed onto her skin days ago. She pauses and flicks her gaze back to me. And for a moment I think I should say something, a string of words to undo what’s been said—a balm for the wounds I’ve just caused. But she speaks before I can. “I always thought everyone was mean to you at school for no reason. I defended you to Rhett and the others, I told them you were nice and that all the rumors weren’t true.” She pulls her jaw back into place. “But maybe I was wrong.”
She yanks open the door and ducks out into the snow, slamming it shut behind her before I can say anything else.
Gone.
* * *
The honey sinks and settles.
I pick up the shards of glass one by one and toss them into the trash. Feeling just as broken. Just as worthless as honey smeared onto the floor.
Upstairs, the loft is empty—no sign of Oliver—just like Suzy said. And I sit on the edge of the bed.
The house feels oddly vacant now, only echoes and exhales and settling floorboards. I’m all alone. And the guilt folds over me like an old blanket—torn fibers and threads unraveling and stinking of mothballs. I never should have said those things to Suzy. Even if I don’t believe her, even if she knows what happened that night but isn’t saying, I never meant to be so mean.
I pull out the pocket watch and hold it in my hand, running my thumb over the engraving of Max’s name. The broken chain falls between my fingers—a clue I don’t understand. There is no blood on the watch. No tiny spots of red scattered across the glass. And there was no blood on Oliver when I found him in the woods. Blood can be wiped off, I think. But not easily. Not when you’re lost in the forest, freezing to death.
Something else happened. I just can’t see it. Can’t make the pieces fit.
A moth follows you, Mr. Perkins said when I left his house, the bone moth fluttering up into the trees. Always close.
Death is coming for me.
But I don’t want to end up like Max. A corpse—lies buzzing around like flies.
I pick up the spellbook from the bedside table and set it in my lap, flipping through the pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for: an explanation, a remedy, a way to make the bone moth stop following me. To destroy it, maybe. To keep death at bay.
I read the stories of my ancestors, the strange accounts of years past: the autumn a palomino horse went missing inside the Wicker Woods, and Dodie Walker found it using a water-witching stick. She rode the horse out of the woods bareback, and locals said her eyes had turned the same mustard brown as the horse’s. The summer a plague of prairie locusts descended over Jackjaw Lake, covering porch lights and spilling down chimneys. It wasn’t until Colette Walker caught one of the locusts inside a glass jar and muttered a tiny spell into its ear that the air finally cleared and the prairie locusts left the mountains.
Near the bottom of the page there is a notation about the best way to lure an insect into the loft:
Open window after sunrise.
Burn a blue-lavender candle to its nub, to lure insect.
Catch insect in a glass jar and whisper desired spell into its ear.
*spell not advisable for those who fear creatures of a winged or creepy-crawly sort
The spell seems simple enough. No blood or sacrifice or special pagan holiday needed to perform it. And if I can catch the moth, maybe I can compel it to go away. To leave me alone and take death with it.
I have to try.
I find one of my mother’s empty honey jars in the kitchen and bring it upstairs. I dig out a lavender candle from my dresser drawer, the one that’s nearly burnt down to the base, and I light it, placing it on the floor.
When I open the window in the loft, snow drifts into the room. Little dancing flakes that slide across the sill, in no particular hurry.
I look for any signs of Oliver or Suzy out among the trees. But nothing stirs—the forest is silent and humanless.
I’m truly alone. Last night, two people slept in my house, swelling lungs and tired eyelids. But now a well of sadness rises up inside me, salty tears wanting to stream down pale cheeks—but I don’t let them. I’m a Walker. We’re used to being on our own. Surviving. Calloused hands and sharp eyes and sturdy hearts.
And I don’t want Suzy or Oliver to return—not really. I fear what Oliver may have done, and I fear what Suzy might’ve seen. I’m safer without them. Locked doors are better than friends you can’t trust.
Still, the quiet of the house is a burden inside my chest.
I walk back across the floor and sit beside the flickering candle. I hold the glass jar in my hand, and I wait for the moth to flutter through the open window, to be beckoned by the light. But it never comes and the room grows cold.
The daylight fades to evening.
The shadows turn to full darkness.
And I lay my head on the hardwood floor.
Fin stretches out beside me. His paws touching my shoulder, his breathing quick in his lungs. And again my eyes want to sting with tears.
I know the bone moth will never come into the loft.
I know it won’t be so easily fooled by a lavender candle on a bedroom floor. A bone moth is not the same as catching a locust or a bee or a buckthorn firefly.
And even if I had caught it, I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to whisper a spell powerful enough to compel it to leave me alone. A spell to banish it from these woods. And what good is a Walker who can’t even charm an insect? A witch who doesn’t know the simplest of spells? Whose grandmother died before she could teach me how to summon the moonlight inside me, whose mother would prefer I never utter a spell within the walls of this house again.
I’m a Walker who is barely a witch at all.
I thought I wanted to be alone, that I was brave and strong and didn’t need a single thing from anyone. But now I’m not so sure. Now my heart crumbles inside the cave of my chest, and I wish I was the size of a gnat, so small I could fold myself into a crack in the floor and disappear. Tiny and forgettable.