by Shea Ernshaw
But I can’t undo it. And I don’t lean forward and kiss him under the weight of the sallow moon. I stare at him and wait for him to speak. And when he does, it’s like vinegar and salt, a wound that will never heal. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, his eyes sloped down at the edges.
“You won’t,” I say. As if I can be sure.
He looks back into the trees, and dread burrows into the marrow of my bones, writhing inside me like shipworms making tunnels in my flesh.
He shakes his head—he doesn’t believe me. “I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I tell him. But I know that I am, a wretched knot of fear growing in my gut. I’m scared to trust him, to let this flutter inside my chest become a hammer that will smash me apart. We love painfully, Mom always says. With our whole hearts. But we bruise easily too. She has always been afraid of her own careless heart, of past mistakes, of what she really is. And I don’t want to be like her: cynical and fearful and full of more doubt than anything else.
Oliver steps closer to me, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but his hand touches mine instead. “You’re shaking,” he says.
My body trembles, the cold sapping what little warmth is left inside me. But I say, “I’m fine.”
He squeezes my hand and pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his breath in my hair. He holds me to him and I want to cry—as if this will be the last time. “We need to get you inside,” he says. But I don’t want to, I want to stay out here with him and let the cold turn me to stone.
Still he pulls me back to the window, my muscles too weak to resist, and he lifts me up, placing me back through the open window into the loft.
My legs shake, and I crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to my chin, while he shuts the window with a thud and locks it in place. As if to keep out the things we fear the most.
“Will you stay here with me?” I ask when he starts to move toward the stairs—my voice shaking. “Please.”
I don’t want to be alone, in this awful dark. With my skin like ice. I touch the place on my finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, feeling stripped bare without it. My accidental offering to the lake—just like the miners who used to drop things into the water to calm the trees.
Oliver looks back, his eyes coursing with something I don’t understand. A battle inside him. He wants to stay here with me, but he’s also afraid of what he might do. Or what he might say. He’s constructed an armor around himself, stone and metal and painful memories. Before, there was only confusion in his eyes—the void of what he had forgotten. Now, there is a wall of shadows. Tall and wide.
Still, he nods and crosses the room to lie beside me.
Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone either.
He smells like snow, and I fold myself into him—tiny like a shell. His arm drapes over my ribs, and his breath is at my neck. He could place his lips at the soft place behind my ear, he could run his fingers through my hair, but instead he only lies still. Warming my skin with his. Please, I want to say. Tell me what you did that night. Tell me what you saw out on that ice; tell me what you regret.
Tell me so I can build my own armor. A fortress in this tiny loft, a battlefield you cannot cross.
But I also know it’s too late for that now.
I turn, coiled in his arms, to face him. I take his hand and place it against my chest, over my heart. “I don’t know if I can trust this,” I say, I confess. “This thing inside my own heart.” I let myself bleed for him to see.
His mouth softens but he doesn’t speak, his eyes shivering.
“The women in my family always fall in love then find a way to ruin it.” I smirk, lips drawn up to one side. “I know you think I should be afraid of you. But you should be afraid of me.”
“Why?” he asks softly, carefully.
“Because I will end up hurting you.”
A smile forms in his eyes, and the space between us feels impossibly small. Only an exhale separating us. I don’t wait for him to speak—I don’t want to hear any more words—I cross the fathom between us and I lay my lips on his. And it’s not like before, not like when we kissed in my room to be certain we were both real. Now it’s a kiss to prove that we’re not. A certainty that this won’t last. That perhaps all we have left is here in this bed, lavender pollen against the pillows, air spilling from his lungs into mine. All we have left is this one, singular, fragile night. Snow on the roof and snow in our hearts and snow to bury us alive.
I kiss him and he kisses me back. And all at once, there is heat inside my veins, heat in the palm of his hand as he slides his fingers up inside my sweater, up along my spine. He wipes away the cold. And I feel my body shudder, pressing myself closer to him, touching his neck, his throat, his shoulders where they brace around me, drawing me to him. I exhale and kiss him harder. There is nothing but his hands on my bare skin. The weight of his kiss, of his chest breathing so deeply I can almost hear his lungs aching against his ribs.
Nothing but these slow seconds of time. Nothing but fingertips and swollen lips and hearts that will surely break when morning comes.
His kiss against my ribs, my fingers in his hair.
I close my eyes and pretend Oliver is just a boy from camp who never went missing. A boy I met on the shore of the lake. A boy with clear green eyes and no lost memories.
I pretend I never saw a bone moth in the trees the day I found him.
I pretend this room, with mountain moss and bleeding-heart acorns hung by string above my bed, is the only place there will ever be.
I pretend Oliver and I are in love. I pretend he will never leave—I pretend to make it true.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
RUTH WALKER was born in late July of 1922 under a white deer moon. Her lips were the color of snow with eyes as green as the river in spring. But Ruth Walker never spoke.
Not once in her whole life.
Her mother, Vena, swore she heard Ruth whispering to the mice that lived in the attic and humming lullabies to the bees outside her window. But no one else ever heard such mutterings.
Ruth was short and beautiful with wavy crimson hair that never grew past her shoulders, and she clucked her tongue when she walked through the woods. When she was twelve, she began deciphering messages in the webs made by the peppercorn spiders.
The webs foretold the following year’s weather, and Ruth knew the dates of rainstorms and dry summer weeks and when the winds would blow away the laundry hanging on the line.
In return, Ruth fed the spiders bits of maidenhair mushrooms that she grew in a clay pot in the back of the loft closet. Much to her mother’s displeasure.
When Ruth was ninety-nine, she became tangled in a web while walking through the Wicker Woods. She died under the stars, as silent as the day she was born.
How to Read Peppercorn Spiderwebs:
Harvest maidenhair mushrooms (grown for nine months before picking).
Offer less than an ounce, more than a teaspoon, to peppercorn spider.
Sleep in soil beneath web for one night. Wait for dew to settle on silk strands.
Remain silent, careful not to tear web. Decipher forecast for following season.
OLIVER
It was different before. Before I remembered.
They weren’t lies then, but now they are.
Sprinting across the frozen lake, pulling her up from the water, I felt the sting of that other awful night. Like a brick sinking into my stomach, I remembered what happened.
The cemetery was only the beginning. What came later was the end. The lake and my hands around Max’s throat. The others shouting from shore.
I never should have been there.
It’s not a thousand little lies that amount to nothing. It’s one large lie, so big it will swallow me up. And it will destroy her.
Tonight, with my hands against her skin and my face in her hair, I know I will hurt her. If not by sunrise, eventually. Soon enough she wil
l look at me with sharp, serrated fear in her eyes. She will look and know what I am.
So I hold it inside for as long as I can. I lie beside her, our fingers knitted together, and I pretend it will stay this way forever. Because she is all that roots me here. The only thing that blots out the feeling of the cold forest inside me. The only cure for the dark I can’t escape. She is long auburn eyelashes and little white half-moons on her fingernails and a voice that always sounds like an incantation.
And she just might be a witch.
So I kiss her temple where she sleeps, her breath a tiny sputter of air. Because I know this won’t last.
There is no escaping what comes next.
But for now I let her sleep.
I let her rest without knowing who lies beside her. I let her breathe and think that everything will be fine and there is nothing to fear in this house.
I lie.
I lie.
I lie.
But by morning, I will be gone.
NORA
Walkers are born with a nightshade.
Our shadow side, Grandma called it. The part of us that isn’t like anyone else. The part of us that sees. That compels. And sometimes commands. Our shadow side allows us to slip into the Wicker Woods unharmed. It’s the ancient part of us that remembers.
The quality of moonlight in our veins—the gift we each possess.
For my grandma, her shadow side let her slink into other people’s dreams. My mom can soothe the wild honeybees when she gathers their comb. Dottie Walker, my great-great-grandmother, could whistle up a fire. Alice Walker, my great-aunt, could change her hair color by dipping her toes into mud.
Walker women are lit from within, Grandma said.
But I have never possessed nightshade. A thing I can do that other Walkers cannot.
It will come, Grandma would say. Some Walkers wait their whole lives for it to rise up inside them. But maybe not all of us are born with it. Maybe my shadow side is only a thin sliver, hardly there at all. Maybe there will not be a story to tell about me when I die—a story to be written down inside the spellbook.
For I am a Walker who was never granted her shade.
* * *
Fin is barking. In my dreams. In my sleeping ears.
In my room.
My eyes snap open.
His bark echoes off the walls, and I try to focus, but the room is still dark and my eyes blink, unable to see what’s wrong.
“Shut that thing up!” someone yells.
I sit up quickly, shadows moving across my room, panic ringing in my ears. Fin lunges forward, toward someone standing near the stairs. His teeth sink into their flesh, and they yell in pain. Someone else grabs Fin and pulls him off. “Fucking wolf!” the boy beside the stairs shouts, holding his arm where Fin bit into him. A voice I’ve heard before. Jasper.
My eyes finally focus—finally see the boys in my room.
Rhett is standing over my bed, wearing the same red-plaid hat he had on at the bonfire. “Get up,” he demands. I scan the loft quickly and Oliver is gone. No longer in the bed beside me. He left me alone. “I said get up!” I can hear in Rhett’s voice that he’s drunk. Wasted drunk. Slurring drunk. They’ve probably been up all night—his eyes are bloodshot, skin saturated with the stench of booze.
“No,” I answer defiantly. “You get the hell out of my house.”
Jasper laughs, quick and blunt. He’s wearing the reindeer sweater again, but it’s dirty, slept in, spilled on, frayed along the neckline.
“You’re going to take us into those woods,” Rhett says, a strange smile peeling across his upper lip, like he’s enjoying this. “You’re taking us to Oliver.”
I frown. “Oliver isn’t in the woods.”
He lowers himself closer to me, eyes wide, nostrils flared. “No? Then where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You told Suzy that you found him in the woods, that he’s been hiding there, and now you’re going to take us. You’re going to show us where he’s been all this time.”
“No,” I tell him again.
Jasper moves across the room and grabs me by the arm, pulling me up from bed. The cut on his cheek has healed slightly since I saw him last, white along the edges, but red in the center where the border of the scar will never heal completely. “Yes, you are,” Jasper declares through clenched teeth.
Fin is growling from the corner where Lin is holding him tightly by the scruff at the back of his neck. And in an instant, I’m on my feet and they’re forcing me down the stairs.
Oliver left me. A pain cuts through me, knowing he fled while I slept. And he didn’t say why. He just left.
Jasper tells me to pull on my boots and coat, and I do, then they push me out the front doorway. I see that the door’s been kicked open—the hinges bent, the lock broken. I didn’t even wake at the sound. Only Fin heard them enter.
“You’re wasting your time,” I say. They manage to close the broken door enough to keep Fin from following us. But I can hear his whine from the other side—at least they didn’t hurt him. “Oliver’s not in the woods.”
In the moonlight, standing on the deck, Rhett looks wild eyed and bored and edgy all at once. The boys remind me of a pack of wolves out searching for something to tear apart. They’re fidgety and drunk. Reckless.
“Then where is he?” Rhett asks, leaning so close I can feel the heat of his breath.
“He was here,” I say, glowering up at him. “He’s been staying with me, but now I don’t know where he is.”
“She’s lying,” Jasper says, his voice like a braying cow.
“You’ve been hiding him here this whole time?” Rhett asks.
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.