I set my jaw in place and my eyes flash to Lin, who stands with his hands in his jean pockets, looking not entirely comfortable with what’s happening, but not trying to stop them either. “He wasn’t hiding,” I say. “He just didn’t want to stay with you assholes.”
Rhett sneers. “If Oliver was staying with you, then why isn’t he in your house?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t trust anything she says,” Jasper interjects. “She’s just trying to protect him.” He winces, and I see that his sweatshirt is bloody where Fin bit into him.
“You’re taking us up to those woods,” Rhett announces, the decision made.
Jasper grabs onto my arm again, but I yank it back. “We can’t,” I tell them, my thumb itching at the finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, wishing I still had it, wishing she was here now. “It’s not a full moon.”
“So what?” Jasper says.
“The forest will be awake. It will see us.”
Jasper laughs—an unpleasant sound—and Rhett moves to only a few inches from my face. “I don’t care if it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and you’re worried about leprechauns stealing your gold, you’re taking us to where he’s hiding. And no more of your witchy bullshit.”
Jasper pushes a palm against my back, and I move forward just to keep him from touching me again. We march down the steps, little tin soldiers all in a row. They’re drunk and desperate. Whatever happened that night, out on that lake, whatever they’ve been hearing in their cabins, they can’t escape it—and it’s starting to make cracks along their minds.
But then I see someone else standing in the trees, chin lowered, waiting for us.
Suzy.
She came with them—she’s part of this. And a raw, acrid pit sinks into my stomach. Rotting me from the inside out. This must be what betrayal feels like.
But none of them realize, none of them understand: If we go into the Wicker Woods now, under a half waning moon—when the trees are awake—we won’t come back out.
“You guys don’t have to do it like this,” Suzy says, running toward us when she sees me, a deep set of lines across her forehead. “You could have just asked her to take us into the woods.”
“She never would have done it,” Rhett argues, barely glancing her way.
Suzy falls into step beside me, chewing on the edge of her fingernail. “Nora, I’m so sorry,” she whispers nervously, shooting me a helpless look. But I don’t want to hear it. “I told them about Oliver, how you found him in the woods. They just want to see him and—” She stops before finishing and starts chewing on her fingernail again.
And hurt him, I think. They want to find him and hurt him, because when bad things happen, you have to blame someone. And maybe Oliver really is to blame.
“Just show them where you found Oliver,” she says now, eyebrows sloped together, pleading with me. “It’ll make it easier.”
She looks like a broken porcelain doll, missing all her insides, like she’s been gutted clean. But I refuse to let myself feel sorry for her—like I have before.
“Yeah, don’t make it any harder on yourself,” Jasper chimes in, walking behind me, his tall, gaunt frame looming over me.
We march along the lake’s edge, then turn north, toward the mountains, toward the mouth of the Black River. Rhett leads the way and I follow, the other boys close behind me—in case I decide to run. And Suzy is last, dragging her feet, probably wishing she hadn’t come—parading behind three drunk boys who are forcing me up the mountainside in the dark.
Maybe I should feel afraid, of what might happen, of what they might do to me.
But I’m only afraid of the woods.
The clouds move farther south, the moon winks out from the black sky, and an owl calls from somewhere in the trees to our left—it doesn’t want us here, we’ll scare away the rodents it hunts at night.
Our troop of drunken boys, staggering through the snow, is not passing through the wilds unnoticed. And we haven’t even reached the Wicker Woods yet.
We trudge higher up into the mountains, until we reach the two steep slopes, the ravine, the cairn of rocks standing guard. The entrance.
The boys fall silent for the first time, each staring into the dark, opening through the trees—the boundary of the Wicker Woods.
“I don’t like it,” Lin says, standing back, away from the border. “It’s fucking creepy. Doesn’t feel right.”
A cold wind slides out from the entrance, smelling like the darkest dark, like wet rocks and soil that have never felt sunlight, like the place where monsters sleep. Not imaginary ones, but ones that hunt and slink and creep. Ones that stare out at us, hoping we’ll step inside. Hoping we’re dumb enough. “That’s because we shouldn’t be here,” I say, a shudder sliding along my voice. “This is the only way in,” I tell them, “and it’s the only way out.”
Suzy swallows, an audible gulp. “Maybe we should wait until it’s light,” she suggests. “When we can see.” The fear is evident in her voice. Gone is the girl I remember from school, who buzzed down the halls of Fir Haven High laughing loudly so everyone could hear, kissing as many boys as she could on Valentine’s Day. Keeping count. Now she looks deflated, a girl who’s lost all her air.
Rhett ignores her. “You go in first,” he says to me, pushing a hand against my shoulder. I bite back the urge to turn around and shove him in the chest, to scratch and claw at his face, to make him bleed. But I still feel weak, my muscles tensing against the cold, and so far they haven’t hurt me—I’m not going to give them a reason to.
“It’s not a full moon,” I repeat. “We can’t go in there.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Rhett replies. He shoves me again and I stagger forward, one foot at the very edge of the entrance into the woods. I glance back at Suzy, who is biting her lower lip, watching me like I’m about to be swallowed up by the trees. Like she has never felt more terrified in her life. And in her eyes, I think I see her urging me to run—to turn and dart back down the mountain. But she doesn’t know how weak I am, that I’m having a hard time even standing.
“You don’t have to hurt her,” Suzy pleads, but Rhett has stopped listening to her.
Knots bind together inside my stomach, and I crane my head up to the night sky—clouds sailing away, the moon a deflated half circle. Not full. Not safe to venture into these dark, vengeful woods.
I blow out a breath and whisper the words I’ve said so many times before, hoping they will protect me, hoping the woods will remember me and let me pass unharmed. “I am Nora Walker,” I say softly so the boys won’t hear. And then I repeat it twice more, for good measure, for luck.
But I sense it might be too late for that.
Walker or not, perhaps none us will survive the night.
So I stiffen my arms at my sides and take a step past the threshold, into the Wicker Woods.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
IONA WALKER was born under a black harvest moon—the darkest night of the year.
Even as a baby, she cast no shadow across the ground. Even on the brightest afternoon, even when the sun burned at her neck.