Maybe he’s gone back to the camp. Or is out gathering more firewood. Or maybe he grew desperate when I didn’t wake, and he went to get one of the counselors who is trained in basic first aid. Wherever he is, I’m alone in the house.
I consider shuffling back across the living room and collapsing onto the couch, letting sleep tug me under once again. But I’m wearing the same T-shirt as when I went out onto the lake. The sweatshirt and jeans I had on are now gone—Oliver must have removed them when he brought me back to the house. All of my clothes soaked through.
I walk to the stairs, knuckles tightening around the railing, and I drag myself slowly up each step to the loft.
But once inside the loft, the room feels different, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The bed is crisscrossed in shadows, no candles lit, and a cold breeze slides over my skin. The window is open, pushed up in the frame, and the thin embroidered curtains sway out from the wall then settle back again, like they’re underwater.
On the floor, a dusting of snow has gathered.
And through the window I see him standing out on the roof.
He didn’t go back to the camp—he’s still here.
I pull on my heaviest sweater from the closet, thick wool socks, my slippers with the rubber soles, and step out onto the roof—into the snow.
My muscles are weak, and the cold almost knocks me over. I feel hollow boned like a bird—a soft wind could surely carry me away.
Oliver hears me and turns. “What are you doing?” he asks urgently, crossing the space that separates us. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s too cold.”
“The air feels good,” I say, my eyes blinking closed, then open again. But he shakes his head. “Just for a little while,” I tell him. “I just want to stand outside.” I need to feel my legs beneath me, the air in my lungs. Alive.
He folds my hand through his arm and helps me to the edge of the roof, where the view of the lake is the clearest, where a few stars even prick out from the dark, clouded skyline.
“I used to come out here when I was little,” I say, my voice still shaky. “My mom hated it, said I would slip off the edge and break my neck. But I did it anyway.” I smile in spite of the cold. “It’s quiet up here,” I add. “The sky feels closer.”
Oliver tilts his head up at the sky, but his mouth turns down, like he doesn’t see what I see. Like he sees only shadows. Only the grim, spiny outline of trees. “I was worried you might never wake up,” he says, his voice thinner than I’ve ever heard it. Like he can still see the image of me in the lake, hair like seaweed, my body limp as he drew me up from the water—and the memory haunts him still.
Perhaps I am now his found thing. The girl he hauled up from the lake and brought home.
“Walkers are hard to kill,” I answer, laughing a little, then instantly regret it—a strange thing to say. The wrong thing to say. I dig a toe into the snow, kicking some off the edge of the roof onto the ground below. “Why are you out here?” I ask, to divert my thoughts away from death. From drowning. So easily I could have sunk and never been found. If Oliver hadn’t woken when he did and pulled me from the lake, the bone moth’s omen would have come true. And I would be just another tale inside the Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine—a brief notation. Another Walker who met her end in these mountains. Died too young, it might say. Died before she ever fell in love. Or just as she was starting to.
Oliver’s gaze lifts, eye level with the branches—with the tangled nests made by birds who have flown south for the winter. Abandoned their homes. And when they return in spring, they will construct new nests, new lives—the old ones not worth hanging on to. “To watch for the others,” he says. “I’ve come up here every night.”
He seems distracted, his shoulders rigid, his eyes straining out into the distance, watching for figures marching up through the pines, coming to take the witch and hang her from a tree, make sure she never talks. Just like locals once did to my ancestors. He’s up here to protect me.
I draw my hands into the sleeves of my sweater to keep out the cold. I count the thuds of my heart. One, two, ten… I lose track. Time is not a measure of seconds, but of breaths in the lungs. “I dropped my grandmother’s ring in the lake when I fell in,” I finally say, my voice small. A thing that doesn’t belong to me anymore—the cold stripped it away.
“I know,” he says, and he looks at me for the first time. “You were talking about it in your sleep.”
What else did I say? What other feverish murmurings that I didn’t want him to hear?
I clear my throat. “How long was I asleep?”
“Three days.” He exhales deeply, as if recalling the hours, the nights that passed when he sat beside me, waiting for me to stir. “You woke up a few times, but you were pretty out of it.”
“I was probably hypothermic,” I say, then chew on the corner of my lip, imagining him feeding me soup while I mumbled nonsensically. When I found him in the woods, he was near death, chilled to the bone, and I made him strip out of his clothes and sit beside the fire. Now we’re even. “Thank you,” I say. “For pulling me from the lake. For taking care of me.”
His sleepy eyes settle on me, and his jaw contracts. “You could have died in that water.” I understand now why he looks at me like this, why the muscles in his arm tense when I speak.
“I know,” I say flatly, feeling my heart rise and then fall, recalling the cold depth of the lake trying to swallow me up. “I’m sorry.”
“Why did you go out there?” he asks pointedly, swiveling to face me, but still keeping my arm looped in his. So I won’t collapse.
I shake my head because I don’t know what to say. Because my grandmother slipped into my dreams and whispered about the lake, about remembering. Because I thought I was brave. Because I thought the lake would give up its secrets to me. Because I’m a Walker. “I found a broken chain on the ice,” I say at last, as explanation. “The chain from the watch I found in your coat.”
Oliver’s expression goes cold, as if his heart darkens in his chest, turns as black as magpie wings. “You still think I killed him?”
I don’t answer, and I pull my arm away from him—afraid to tell him what I think. Afraid to say that even if he doesn’t remember it, he might have killed a boy. And that this single thing might destroy everything.
“I didn’t want to be there that night,” he tells me, his voice tiptoeing around each word.
“But you were,” I say.
He shakes his head and looks back at the sky, a waning moon peeking out from clouds, blurring the stars around it. Devouring them.
Oliver bites down on the words before he says them, and they come out bitter and clenched. “And what happened can’t be taken back,” he says. The wind kicks up over the lake, sending spires of white rising into the air.
“If it was an accident, like the others said, then it was no one’s fault,” I offer, trying to make everything okay. Not as bad as it seems.
“You don’t understand, Nora,” he says, swallowing hard and turning to look at me. “It wasn’t an accident. They knew what they were doing.”