“Been stuck up here since the storm,” she says. Her eyes slide across the room. “I snuck up to see Rhett Wilkes. Didn’t realize I was never going to leave these mountains again. Camp counselors weren’t happy when they found me hiding in Rhett’s cabin, but what were they gonna do?” She shrugs. “They couldn’t send me home.” Her gaze flicks away then back again, eyebrow raised. “I’ve never hated boys more in my whole life than I do right now.” Her nose twitches like she can’t shake the stench of all these boys, crowded together, smelling of wood smoke and sweat, stuck in the woods. Then her eyes narrow. “You live across the lake, right?” she asks.
I nod. Of course she knows—everyone knows where the Walkers live: the house where witches are rumored to practice the foulest of magic, where Walkers cast spells and drink the blood of our enemies. The house most locals avoid.
“What’re you doing at the camp?” she asks, white teeth gleaming, voice all drippy and cool. As if I were any other girl from school. As if we were friends. The kind of friends who stay up late talking on the phone, giggling, bedsheets pulled over our heads to muffle the sound. A thing I’ve never known. Maybe never will. A feeling that aches, that kerplunks into my stomach like a stone tossed into a deep pond. Sinking, sinking until it’s a gone.
“I found that boy who went missing,” I tell her. “I brought him back.”
She scowls, like the memory of a boy going missing sends odd spikes of pain through her chest. “I assumed he was dead,” she answers, her voice tight. “Frozen somewhere out there in the snow, and they’d find him in the spring.” At this she shudders, yet her description seems oddly callous, as if to die in the woods were commonplace up here. One dead boy, easily replaced by any of the others.
I raise an eyebrow, and she coils her long, dark hair over one shoulder, tapping a foot against the floor as if she were feeling impatient. Our conversation beginning to bore her.
The candles along the two long tables flicker briefly, sending shadows dancing up the walls, and Suzy crosses her arms, moving closer to me. Her chin dips down like she doesn’t want anyone to hear what she’s about to say. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“It gives everyone the creeps,” I answer, eyeing the strange shapes the candlelight makes on the high ceiling. Hands and faces and bones that twist at wrong angles. Boys have always complained that the camp is haunted, that the ghosts of miners rattle the halls and sway through the trees at night. The boys aren’t used to living in the woods, to the constant scratch of branches on windows and the wind against your bare neck while you sleep.
“Yeah,” she agrees softly. But I can see her mind turning it over, the itching of something along her skin. She rubs her palms down her arms and looks away from me, biting her lip. “I can’t stay here anymore,” she murmurs, more to herself. Her chin dips to her chest and she breathes slowly, like she’s trying to pretend she’s somewhere else—three clicks of her heels and poof, she’ll be back home—instead of trapped in these mountains, living with all these awful boys.
The candlelight vibrates again, and the wind shakes the sturdy walls. Another bad storm blowing in. I hear the whoosh of air just before the two double doors behind us tear open, pushed in by the wind, and bang back against the wall with a loud crash.
In an instant, the entire mess hall is dipped into darkness—all the candles extinguished, the fire at the far end reduced to embers. Chairs scrape back across the wood floor, plates are pushed aside, silverware dropped. Faint, gray daylight filters through the open doorway, but it’s hardly enough to illuminate the shadowy mess hall.
“All right, everyone, settle down,” a voice booms from somewhere in the dark—one of the camp counselors. “Take a seat and we’ll do a head count.” A flashlight is flicked on across the room, and then a couple more, the eerie beams of light slicing across faces and the towering walls.
“Please,” Suzy says furtively, as if each word were a secret. “Can I stay with you, just until the road clears?”
I feel both my eyebrows raise. Suzy Torrez has never stepped foot inside my house. Suzy Torrez wouldn’t be caught dead talking to me in the halls of Fir Haven High. She’s never asked me to sit with her in the cafeteria during lunch or invited me to one of her birthday parties, and now she wants to spend the night. At my home.
“I’ve been sleeping on a cot in a little room off the kitchen. It’s the only place that isn’t bunking with the boys. I can’t take it anymore,” she urges, she insists. The whites of her eyes too white.
A lantern is lit and it throws more light across the room as boys make their way back to the long wood tables. “I—” I start to open my mouth to speak, but Suzy cuts me off.
“At least until the phones come back on, then I can call my parents, they’ll find a way to come get me.” Her eyes bore into me now, pleading. Her hair falling about her face. Her fingers twitching like there’s an itch somewhere along her skin she can’t reach.
I feel sorry for her, the desperate curve of her mouth, the watery rims of her eyes. I wouldn’t want to sleep here either, in this damp, cold place. And a part of me—a part I don’t want to admit to—thinks it might be nice to have someone else at the house. To fill the silence. Last night, sleeping in my room with Oliver downstairs on the couch, felt oddly comforting. Another warm body and beating heart within the walls. “Okay,” I say at last.
A smile breaks across her face, revealing her perfectly straight teeth. “I’ll go grab my bag. Meet you outside?”
I nod and she spins around, crossing the immense room and vanishing into a dark doorway that must lead back to the kitchen.
Candles are relit across the thick wood tables, flames becoming little points of light in the dark, shining up the walls. But before I can slip out through the open doorway, I notice something flitting down from the ceiling—something I couldn’t see before in the dark.
A moth.
It must have been hovering up in the rafters, and now it quivers through the air, drawn toward the candlelight. Its white-gray body is paler than it should be. Its antennae too long and bleached white. Not a common moth.
It’s the same kind I saw in the Wicker Woods.
A bone moth.
Seeing it again is like a spark against my eyelids—cold as January frost. Wild as February wind. Like a premonition. But I’ve never been able to foresee what’s to come. Not like Georgette Walker, my great-great-aunt whose nightshade let her see the future in dewdrops suspended on blades of grass. This feeling is something else. A certainty resting at the base of my throat. A dull, stagnant ache. A ringing in my ears.
I turn away, a chill rolling down my spine, and dart back outside—before the camp instructors decide I need to be tallied and counted along with the others—and brace myself against the cold wintry air.
My hands shake at my sides, and my heart slams against the delicate rungs of my ribs. I lean my shoulder against one of the large posts holding up the deck, gasping for air, blinking away the snow. Blinking away the afterimage of wings stained against my eyelids. I told myself the moth I saw in the woods was only a common night moth, a winter moth the color of snow, nothing more. But I was wrong. It’s the kind I should fear. The kind that are mentioned inside the spellbook countless times. Charcoal sketches of wings torn into ribbons at the edges, woolly legs, black orb eyes that seek only one thing: death.