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.
My eyes water from the cold, and my head thuds.
A fog sinks over the lake, the gloom as thick as wet alder smoke, and it reminds me of the day we buried my grandmother in the small cemetery at the west end of the lake—a place where old miners are laid beneath the ground, the headstones worn and crumbled and sinking into the dark earth.
Funeral fog, Mom called it that day. The kind of weather only suitable during a buriaclass="underline" for grief, for masking tears that stream down cheeks, for numbing hearts that have split in two. But now the funeral fog has descended over the lake, rolling down from the mountains in endless waves. A reminder—or maybe a warning.
It’s a good day to bury the dead.
OLIVER
When I was ten, my dad took me camping deep in the Blue Mile Mountains. We spent the night sleeping in a tent while the rain beat down outside and dripped through a hole in the thin nylon fabric. The rain made a puddle around our sleeping bags, and I shivered all night.
I had never been so cold in my whole life.
Until now.
These woods are a ruthless kind of cold. The kind that gets inside you, beneath clothes and socks and skin, and down to the marrow of your bones. I escape the mess hall through a back door, before any of the counselors can see me—before anyone does. The candlelight is dim and I am just another shadow passing through.
Fog lies heavy over the trees, and I weave my way through the snow, past cabins tucked back in the pines. The cabin numbers are out of order. Cabin four, then twenty-six, then eleven. It makes no sense. But I reach cabin fourteen—the place where I was assigned to sleep when I first arrived, weeks ago now—and I push open the small door, ducking inside.
Most people have never heard of Jackjaw Lake, or a boys’ camp hidden deep in the mountains. Even the nearest town is an hour’s drive down a steep, winding road. It’s a place not marked on most maps. An easy place to get lost, to be forgotten.
But I never intended to go missing.
Inside the cabin, there’s a bunk bed against each of the two walls—four boys to a cabin—and the air smells of damp wood and campfire smoke. It’s a smell that has settled into the bedsheets and starched-white pillows and the frayed green rug in the center of the room, into everything.
I crouch down beside the potbellied stove set in the corner.
The counselors tell us not to let the fires go out in our stoves—to keep them burning day and night, to keep the cabins warm. But most of the boys forget. And our stove has gone dark.
I place dry logs on the embers, coaxing the fire back to life, but the room is still cold, wind howling at the windows, rattling the thin glass. I kick off my boots and walk to the wood dresser on the right-hand wall. I kneel down and pull open the bottom drawer—the drawer that was mine. But it’s empty. My clothes, the backpack I brought with me, the handful of books, the dead cell phone—they’re all gone.