by Shea Ernshaw
I swallow and say, “My mother is Tala Walker.” An invocation, a reminder to the trees of the blood that courses through me. “My grandmother was Ida Walker.” I breathe her name, let it linger on my tongue. “I am a Walker.” Magic once poured through our veins, real magic. We breathed and the forest listened. We shed tears and the forest wept sap down its bark. Many of the old ways have been forgotten, slipped through cracks, but our blood is still the same. Still a fire inside us.
I feel Oliver is close now, nearly to me, but I don’t look back. “I belong to this forest,” I say aloud, willing the trees to listen. To calm their fury. To stop the flames from burning, from devouring whatever is left. “I am a Walker,” I say again. “You know my name. You know who I am.” It sounds like a spell, like a remnant of real magic rising up inside me, burning my fingertips.
I breathe and lift my chin. Certainty pulsing through me. “I am a Walker!” I scream, commanding my voice to grow louder than the raging fire pummeling around the lake.
I am not afraid.
I hear Oliver only a few yards away. “Nora!” he shouts, more urgent this time. And then there is another sound. A change in the air. A crack and a whoosh.
That’s when I see it: the falling embers, the mammoth pine tree completely engulfed in flames. It must be two hundred feet tall, and its trunk has been uprooted from the soft ground along the shore, fire burning from roots to tip. And now the tree is tipping, leaning, falling. Careening toward the lake, toward me. I stare at it like it’s fireworks erupting in the night sky. In awe. Everything is happening in slow motion—knowing I need to run, but somehow caught by the dazzling sight of such a massive tree, upending, pitching forward.
A second later, the tree crashes across the lake, breaking through the surface of ice in one violent blow. The sound is tremendous and terrifying. Like a thousand glass chandeliers shattering at once. The lake shudders beneath me.
Only a couple yards away, the tree sinks into the black water, into a gaping hole. Ice fracturing out around it. Run! my head screams. But my heart has stalled in my chest, my legs afraid to move. The ice makes an eerie sound beneath me, like metal bending to the point of breaking. Like a long, pent-up howl. I suck in a breath just before it happens.
My eyelids blink.
Time slows.
And then the ice snaps—a quick giving way—and I drop into the water.
The air is pushed straight from my lungs. My head dips all the way under and the spellbook slips free from my grasp—sinking into the deep, just like my grandmother’s ring—and I scramble to the surface, fighting for air. I try to scream, to call Oliver’s name, but no words come out. My throat is too dry, the air too thick with smoke. My hands slap against the surface of the water as I try to swim to the edge of the ice, but there is no edge. The lake has shattered, broken apart, and now only chunks of ice bob at the surface—just like me.
The shore is too far, not even visible through the smoke.
Again I try to scream, but a wave of numbness pours through me, the cold too cold, the weight of my wet clothes too heavy. How long have I been in here? A couple seconds, an hour. Too long. My eyes blink up at the ash-choked sky and my arms become useless. My legs stop kicking. Everything numb. Everything a smear of black.
Without even realizing it, my head slips below the surface. Slips beneath the waterline.
I sink.
It’s worse than before. The cold feels razor-edged, my lungs swollen in my chest, burning against my ribs—needing air. When I fell in before, it had seemed like a dream. Like I wasn’t really there. But this is sharp and painful and terrifying.
I pinch my eyes shut and feel the depth carrying me down, sinking to the bottom without an end. But still I hold my breath, afraid to let the water spill in. Afraid to feel it in my lungs.
I won’t die like this, I think.
I won’t be an offering to the lake, to the forest. I won’t drown like Oliver and become a phantom in these woods. This isn’t how it ends.
This isn’t my story.
I am a Walker.
My eyes flutter open. And see only dark.
A ticking sound enters my ears, soft at first and then louder. The water vibrates around me, like a kite whipping in the air, lashing across the sky. Something isn’t right.
I sink deeper. Into the coldest cold I’ve ever felt. I sink and my thoughts spin quickly. Too fast to catch them, but also slow and lazy, pinging between my ears.
The ticking grows louder, and I feel for Max’s watch in my pocket. It trembles in my palm, the hands clicking nervously forward and back.
I wait to feel the rocky bottom of the lake, for my lungs to give out. But the watch quivers, seconds that thud against my skin, and the water feels like air, like I’m floating, sent adrift among dark clouds.
I pretend I’m not cold.
I pretend I’m not sinking endlessly into a lake without a bottom.
I pretend a fire doesn’t burn along the shore and I never went into the forest with those boys. I pretend the moth never thumped against my window and Suzy never asked to stay at my house. I pretend I never found Oliver inside the Wicker Woods and he never placed his lips on mine. I pretend he didn’t drown.
I pretend I am a Walker who is just as powerful and brave as the women who came before me.
I pretend I can make things right.
I am a Walker, I think again. The words sliding across my skin like oil.
I squeeze the watch tight, the cold metal branded against my palm, the only thing I have to hold on to.
When you need it, your nightshade will come, Grandma told me once.
My heart rises and then collapses. A ball inside my ribs.
I know what I am.
My eyelids blink and everything, everything, tilts off axis, the lake tumbling toward the sky. The silver watch pulses in my hand, tiny infinitesimal movements—tink, tink, sputter. The hands click once, twice, in the wrong direction.
Little prisms of light scatter across my eyelids. I squeeze my fingers tighter around the watch, my nails against the glass.
And I let the dark take me.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
TALA WALKER was born under a buttermilk moon at the end of October.
Honeybees dozed at the edge of her crib, and their fat, winged bodies got tangled in her soft cotton blankets while she slept. When she learned to walk, she tottered out into the woods, sticking her fingers into the hives of wild bees and waddling home with honey stuck to the bottom of her white lace-up ballerina slippers.
But she was never stung—not once.
Tala Walker could enchant wild honeybees with the quick flutter of an eyelash, and they fell into a deep, restful slumber whenever she was close.
Tala left Jackjaw Lake when she was nineteen, wanting to forget what she was, to go somewhere the Walker name had never been uttered. She fell in love swiftly with a boy whose face was covered in sun-made freckles, and when a baby started growing inside her, she knew she needed to return home. To the place where all Walkers are born—in the old house beside Jackjaw Lake. And her daughter would be no different.
She gave birth to a sable-haired girl she named Nora. A girl with starlight in her galaxy-colored eyes. But Tala hoped her daughter would never know magic, never need her shadow side. The thing that made all Walkers different. Strange. Outcasts.
But she was wrong. Her daughter did possess a nightshade—perhaps the most powerful kind ever written about inside the spellbook.
Tala Walker had tried to escape what she was.
But her daughter, Nora, wanted nothing more than to be who they really were: pure-blooded witches.
How to Train Honeybees:
Wear netting over bare skin.
Burn two hickory twigs, let smoke drift into hive.
Count to eleven, then whisper Tala Walker’s name into smoke.
Collect honeycomb in glass jars before twigs burn down to nubs.
NORA
It’s my grandmother’s voice. Chasing me up from my dreams, up from the dark of the lake, the soft tenor of her words whispered against my skull.
My eyes snap open and I feel the snow against my cheek. Cold and wet. The scent of silty earth and green filling my nostrils.
I’m no longer in the lake.
Moonlight peeks through the trees, pale and lonely, bathing my skin.
My fingers push into the snow, into the soil, hands burrowing up to my wrists. I need to feel the earth, feel rooted to something that isn’t the endless sinking of the lake. My mouth hangs open a moment, and I want to speak, just to hear my own voice—to know that I’m real—but no words fall out. My body heaves, shivers, and I think I might be sick, but I draw my hands out from the dirt and roll onto my back, staring up at the black, starless sky. I can’t be sure of the hour. But it’s well after sunset—the darkest part of night.
A ringing fills my ears, and I suck in air like it’s never felt so good inside my lungs, greedy for it. Desperate. The wind howls through the trees as if it’s coming from straight up inside me. A wailing cry. A hiss and a sputter.
But I’m not inside the Wicker Woods.
Not deep inside the cruelest part of the forest.
I’m in the trees outside my home, near the shore, near the old, slanted woodshed. The pines towering over me. But I can’t be sure how I got here. Can’t be certain how much time has passed since I fell into the cold, cold lake.
I sit upright, my head wobbling. Snow falling around me.
Yet, if I’m not inside the Wicker Woods, then the lake didn’t bring me back—I am not a lost thing returned, not like Oliver.
Something else happened.
Something that makes my eyelids quiver, drops of lake water suspended on each lash, tiny glassy orbs. While sparks swim across my vision.
There is no smoke in my throat. No embers tumbling through the pines, burning my skin. The trees above me are a deep, mossy green and the air is clear.
There is no wildfire roaring through the forest.
I stand and press my hand against the trunk of a tree, breathing, the cold air tickling my neck. My skin pricked with gooseflesh.
A storm is coming. And the air seesaws at the edge of my vision, vibrating—like déjà vu. The sky a familiar shade of dusky black. A feeling, a memory I can’t pin down, classify, or catalog like one of Mr. Perkins’s framed specimens hanging on his wall.
The ringing in my ears becomes a wail, becomes a scream inside my head. I’ve been here before. I’ve stood in these trees. Snow coming down in thick washes of white.
With trembling fingers, I brush the hair away from my face and feel the weight of something on my finger—my grandmother’s ring. The moonstone a pearly gray, reflecting the sky, as if I never lost it in the lake. It never slipped from my finger.
Something else has happened.
My eyes flick to the ground, looking for the spellbook I held in my hands when I went into the lake, but it’s not here.
The ring has returned. But the spellbook is gone.
Something’s happened—to me, to the forest, to everything. I don’t remember drowning. I don’t recall the cold of the water rushing into my lungs. The pain of death.
I spin in a circle, but there is no sign of Oliver, of anyone else.
I’m alone.
On shaking legs, I push myself away from the tree and start down the slope toward the lake. I can feel the trees bending away, giving me space. I force my lungs to breathe, to determine north from south, to orient the sky from the ground. But the seconds totter strangely around me, slippery like a silverfish swimming through reeds.
If Grandma were here, she would look at the trees, the dark snow-filled sky, my eyes, and she would know if this was all a dream. She would know why I didn’t drown in the lake. Why ash-clouds don’t rise up beneath my feet.
But right now, she feels very, very far away.
I stop at the shore and cross my arms, my mouth dipping open. There are no blackened trees, no spinning sparks weaving through the sky. The row of summer homes and the boys’ camp at the far side of the lake have not been reduced to ash. And up in the pines, my home still stands.
Nothing has burned.
I inch closer to the shoreline, the air crackling and settling, and through the falling snow I hear voices, boys shouting, laughing.
It’s coming from across the lake.
Maybe I should go back to the house, get warm beside the fire, let my skin and hair and clothes thaw. But I don’t. I follow the sound of the boys. The familiar pitch of their voices. Because something is wrong. Something has changed.
Everything is terrifyingly different.
I pass the marina and the boathouse and Mr. Perkins’s cabin. Light gleams from inside—not just candlelight, but buzzing, humming electricity light. The power has come back on. At the window, Mr. Perkins is gazing out at the snow, and he waves a hand at me, smiling. He didn’t flee down the road to escape the fire—because there is no fire.
I’m not dead. I didn’t drown in the lake. Mr. Perkins can see me.
But something is wrong.
Something that flickers across my mind—just out of reach.
Something I can’t explain.
I move quicker toward the sound of the boys, toward a voice I think might be Oliver’s. And when I reach the cemetery—the odd-shaped land where the dead have been buried—the breath hitches in my lungs.
The boys stand among the graves. All of them.
Shadowy figures in the falling snow: Jasper and Rhett and Lin. They laugh, passing around a bottle and taking long gulps of the dark liquid inside. Max is there too, leaning against a gravestone, blond hair nearly the same color as the snow.
And Oliver: his arms crossed, standing apart from the others.
They’re all here. Even though they shouldn’t be.
I pause near the gate, my heart wobbling against my rib cage, unsure why they’ve gathered in the cemetery. Why the trees aren’t burnt. Why nothing is as it was.
“You have to say her name three times,” Jasper coaxes, his bony elbow resting on the grave of my ancestor. Jasper, who is alive. Not buried in the soil inside the Wicker Woods. The scene before me swims in and out of focus, thoughts muddled—unable to pinpoint a memory, a moment that makes sense.
“Whose?” Oliver asks, and Jasper points a finger at the gravestone. The place where Willa Walker has been laid in the ground—the Walker who wept into the lake and made it bottomless. The same grave that Oliver told me the boys made him stand over and whisper her name three times—the first part of his initiation.
“If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” I hear Rhett say, a serious measure to his voice. A grimness that reminds me of when he broke into my house and pulled me from bed.
“Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, smirking.
Oliver makes a sound, and Max moves closer to him, his shoulders pulled back. “You don’t believe us?” Max asks. And my head starts to vibrate again, hearing their words, watching as Oliver peers down at the grave and reluctantly speaks Willa’s name three times—I know where I am.
I know: This is the night of the storm.
This is the night Oliver breaks through the ice and sinks into the dark. This is the night he drowns.
When the electricity will spark and then die. When the road will be snowed in.
Time has spun and tottered and turned itself inside out. Or I have unraveled it. I have done this. Brought myself back to this night. Back, back, back.
I am at the place where it all began.
Little pops of light break across my vision—the now familiar prick of déjà vu. The air wavers against my eardrums, as if I’m falling, tumbling, losing all sense of gravity. This has all happened before.
On that awful, awful night.
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And I feel like I might be sick.
“Dude, you should see your face,” Jasper says now—just like Oliver described. And he claps a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, laughing, the sound carrying up into the treetops, startling a blackbird that caws from a nearby spruce tree and takes to the sky.
This has all happened before.
The boys begin to move through the cemetery, passing the bottle of booze among them. Rhett and Lin hop over the low wood fence, laughing to themselves. Jasper staggers behind while Max moves slowly, fidgeting with something in his hand. The watch. The silver pocket watch. The same one I found in Oliver’s coat pocket—the one that broke just before Oliver slipped beneath the water while Max looked on. Air bubbles rising to the surface.
Anger scrapes up inside me, imagining Max standing over the hole in the ice. Refusing to save Oliver’s life. To reach down into the water and pull him up.
He watched Oliver die. He let him die.
I feel the sudden urge to stride across the snow, out of the cemetery, and wrap my hands around Max’s throat. Stare into his eyes and know that he deserves it. Maybe even push him out onto the ice and wait for it to break—make him suffer just like Oliver. Atone for what he did.
But he hasn’t done it yet.
Not yet.
I watch as the rest of the boys scale the fence and tromp through the snow to the lakeshore.
But Oliver is last to the fence, his hands in his pockets, gaze turned away from the blowing snow. He doesn’t realize he’s following them to his death. That when he reaches the lake, they will force him out onto the ice. Max will shove him in the chest, hands coiled into fists, adrenaline in his veins. And in the end, Oliver will break through the surface and sink down down down down into the lake.
That soon, before this night is over, he will drown.
My footsteps are quick through the snow, my breathing heavy, and I reach Oliver before he climbs over the fence after the others. He doesn’t see me, not at first, his eyes squinting away from the wind, but when I’m close enough, he must sense me because he whips around, startled, and his eyes go wide—a verdant, wild shade of green.