Wake up, Nora,” a voice says, clear and sharp like bell. “Wake up.”
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.