“Nora,” he repeats. “Nora, please.”
I move past him in the doorway before he can stop me, before he can touch my skin with his. The air is humming around me, sparks whirling through the trees. The fire is close now.
I waited too long.
Oliver says my name again, but I’m scrambling down the steps into the snow, into the chaos of cinders.
I’m running down toward the lake, away from the flames, away from Max Caulfield who isn’t dead at all.
From Oliver, who might be.
I know that moths bring omens not to be ignored and that brooms should never be kept on the second floor of your home. I know windows opened to the east can bring bad dreams, but windows to the west can bring fated love and good fortune. Carry an acorn in your pocket to stay young forever, plant chicory root beside your kitchen window to keep the flies away. Throw salt over your left shoulder. And eat dandelion honey on toast before bed to help you sleep.
I know these things because my grandmother knew them too. And her grandmother before her. These things are as true as the North Star, as sure as a beesting will hurt and then itch.
But what of the things I don’t know?
The riddles I can’t decipher.
The strange conjuring that made a boy appear inside the Wicker Woods? A boy who shouldn’t have returned at all. A boy like Oliver Huntsman.
The trees sag and drip.
Snow melts from limbs—a winter forest set ablaze—and the air whirls with sparks. The fire is all around me, burning the wilds and the woods and everything green. Tearing down the row of summer homes.
I reach the lake, and my breath is a wheeze, sparks singeing the sleeves of my coat, my hair. One even lands on the tip of my nose and I swat it away. Everything is burning and I waited too long to leave. The night has come alive—bursting—a carnival of firelight, of soot and sparks and heat.
And then I see it, bobbing through the smoke, weaving between the embers like a needle stitching through fabric.
The bone moth.
Death is a winged creature who won’t leave you alone—not until it gets what it wants, a passage from the spellbook reads, one I’ve recalled over and over in my mind.
It’s beautiful, I realize for the first time: a rare white moth from some deep part of the forest.
But it doesn’t flutter closer to me, it quivers just past my shoulder into the trees, where Oliver is moving quickly toward me. But he stops short when he sees me looking up at him.
“The bone moth,” I say aloud, finally understanding.
It draws closer to Oliver, hovering, meeting his gaze.
“The moth was following you,” I say. “Not me.”
Its wings flutter softly, paper-thin like fabric brushing together. Flammable. And then it lifts up, higher into the trees, and shivers out toward the center of the lake—escaping the flames, disappearing into the eerie golden light. It was never following me. Never a warning of my death. The moth had been a warning that death was in my home, death kissed me in my room, death slept beside me with his hands against my ribs. Death kept me warm.
I was wrong about the moth. And I was wrong about him.
Oliver moves closer to me, and maybe I should back away, sprint up the shore, but I let him come stand beside me, his shoulder just barely touching mine.
Another burst of déjà vu pours over me. He looks just like he did the morning after I found him inside the Wicker Woods. A boy about to set off on a journey—or perhaps he is a boy who has just returned from one. Weary and threadbare, with aching feet and sore shoulders, but with wild stories to tell. Of the places he’s been and the vast oceans he’s seen. Villains he narrowly escaped. A boy who left and then returned. Who came back.
Except now we might be at the end of the tale. Ash spilling down around us. The moon above stained a savage shade of red from the flames—a blood moon.
I hold the spellbook to my chest and close my eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly I might be able to blot out the sky and the fire and everything that couldn’t possibly be real. But when I open them, Oliver is still there. Standing beside me beneath the crimson moon.
“Did you drown?” I ask. The words come out a syllable at a time—tasting strange on my tongue, like sandpaper and wax. Like fairytales. A thing that cannot be true.
I hear him breathing, the inhale and exhale of lungs contracting. Breath in his lungs—the breath of a boy who sounds alive. But what do I know of dead boys’ lungs? What do I know of any of it? His skin smells of pine and fern—the scent of someone who is more wilderness than boy.
He nods. “Yes.”
My eyes want to well up with tears, but the air is too dry and it saps the moisture from my skin. “I don’t understand,” I say. Any of it. All of it.
“Neither do I.” He shifts slightly, every motion like the battering of wings—an inch too far away, an inch too close. Never close enough. “After you found me in the woods,” he says quietly, as if it were a confession, “you told me that I shouldn’t have survived that long—two whole weeks in the forest. You were right.”
Because he was already dead.
I don’t know if I want to touch him or scream. Pound my fists against his chest and claw at his skin until he bleeds—I’ll make him real. I’m make him bleed and feel pain and then he’ll be a real boy again. The anger is a jagged lump in my throat.
A knife in my back.
His gaze slides to mine, heavy lidded and familiar while the world burns around us. Fire and heat and lies. “I didn’t know,” he tells me, like it’s something he needs to say. To get off his chest. “Not at first. But no one could see me, like I wasn’t even there. Except you.”
Flames devour whole trees on the farthest shore, licking up into the sky, and there is a fire inside my gut, burning me alive. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would you have believed me?” he asks. “Do you believe me now?”
“No.” How can I believe you.
His gaze lowers and his mouth dips open, his throat fighting against the words. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”
The roar from the fire behind us fills my ears, a beast coming for us—a creature set loose from the woods. It ignites the summer home where Max had been hiding, the trees around it already glowing red-hot as flames chew them apart. Max might still be inside. Or maybe he fled in time. But I don’t care either way. Or maybe I want him to burn—for what he did. He is the killer, not Oliver.
“I’m not afraid,” I say, I admit, even though I know I should be. Of what you are. Of what you aren’t: alive.
But Rhett and the others were afraid: They heard things in their cabin, something that terrified them. It wasn’t Max. It was Oliver all along, moving among them, unseen. Even Suzy never saw him—not once. Not in the house. Not at the bonfire. I thought she was lying, a cruelty I didn’t understand. Now I know she was telling the truth.
She never saw Oliver. I was the only one.
He looks out at the lake, and my heart is splitting into halves. Severed in two. The before and the after. “I don’t know why you can see me,” he says. “And they can’t.”
I grip the spellbook tighter and feel the air leave my lungs. “Because I’m not like them,” I say. “Like any of them.” Walkers have always been able to see shadows—we see what others can’t. Mostly in the graveyard—those slipping between this life and the next. The ones who aren’t entirely sure they’re dead. The night my grandmother passed away, she woke me in my sleep and sat at the edge of my bed. With trembling hands, she removed the moonstone ring she had worn most of her life and slid it onto my hand. “My gift to you,” she said, before she sank back in with the shadows. Hours later, Mom told me that Grandma had passed away during the night, long before she gave me the ring. I had seen her phantom passing through the house on her way out. Mom saw her too, long black hair braided down her back as she pushed out through the front door. But she was only a ghost moving among us, passing through the in-between.