Oliver’s breathing turns swift and strange, but still his eyes don’t pull away.
“Shut up, Jasper,” I snap, swiveling around to point a long finger at him. He clamps his mouth closed, like he actually thinks I might turn him into a sad little toad or stitch his lips together with spiderwebs and string.
“How the hell do you know my name?” he asks, his voice suddenly shaking, his lower jaw pulled down in shock.
Because I am the witch they think I am. I am the one to fear.
I look back to Oliver, breathing so deeply I feel dizzy. “Please,” I say. I smile a little, and for a moment I think he’s going to smile back, his eyes turning a soft, sunrise green. “Come with me.”
His lips part just slightly, the tension in his shoulders drops.
But then Jasper barks from behind him, “She’s definitely messing with you, man. Don’t let her touch you.”
“I know you don’t remember me,” I say to Oliver, ignoring Jasper. “But I remember you. And if you stay here with them, something bad is going to happen.” I swallow and find my voice again. “Please.”
I know he doesn’t understand, I know none of this makes sense, but I lift my hand, slowly so he won’t flinch away, and I touch his cheekbone, his neck, hoping he will see. Some part of him will know that I’ve touched him before. That he’s looked into my eyes just like this and leaned forward to put his lips on mine. Some deep, unknowable part of him will still remember.
“Dude,” Rhett says, his voice pitched. “She’s probably hexing you right now. Stealing your soul. You won’t even remember your own name by morning.”
But I keep my gaze on Oliver, willing him to remember, and he finally does touch me—yet, it isn’t soft and gentle and kind. He grabs my hand and lowers it away from his cheek, firm and quick. Then releases me.
“Get the hell out of here, witch!” Rhett says, at the same moment my heart sinks into my stomach. He clambers over the fence and starts moving toward me, waving his hands in the air as if I’m a bird he can frighten back up into the sky. Scare back into my roost, into my hovel in the forest. Small and cold and alone. “Or we’ll tie you to that tree over there and light a match and see how flammable witches really are.”
I know now that Rhett will actually do it. That all of them are capable of awful things. They broke into my house and dragged me up into the woods—I wouldn’t be shocked if they actually tied me to a tree and started a small fire, just to see. Just to see if black smoke poured from my mouth and ears when I burned. They’re just drunk enough. And stupid enough.
“Oliver,” I whisper again, taking a step back, away from the boys—my heart cleaved into halves. A muscle that beats too fast, that has lost track of time. While my head wheels forward and back to the things that haven’t yet happened. The things that still might if Oliver goes out onto that lake.
The wind blows up through the trees, and the sky is full of snow. The storm is getting worse.
“Told you she’s dangerous,” Jasper remarks, just loud enough that I can hear. I take another step back, and another, keeping my eyes on Oliver. I want him to say something, to yell at the boys to stop, to leave me alone. I want him to come after me. But he stands mute. Everything he ever felt for me, everything he ever said, now lost. Slipped away into the darkest corners of his mind.
The Oliver I knew is gone.
Rhett follows my movements, and for a moment he looks like he might come after me, grab my arm and pull me back into the cemetery. Like I am just the thing he needs to occupy his buzzed mind.
So I hurry through the snow, around the lake, until I can no longer see them through the blowing wind, and I swear I can hear my heart break—the fizz and crack of it.
I stop when I’m almost to the marina and press my hands to my eyes to keep the tears from coming. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.
This isn’t how the story ends.
A deep scar is branding itself inside me—a place that will scab over but never heal. I hold in a breath, I hold it until my chest aches, until my lungs burn for a fresh gulp of air. The storm thrashes overhead and I exhale, long and deep, a chill shuttling down my spine, tucking itself firmly between each rib bone. I’ve always been afraid I wasn’t a real Walker. Afraid I would end up like my mom, cynical and scared of what she is. I always thought I wanted to be alone, alone in these woods. Where I can’t get hurt, where no one can call me moon girl and winter witch and wild.
But I was wrong. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want sleep in my room in the dark and never feel Oliver’s hands on my skin again. I don’t want a life without people in it. Without Oliver. Without my heart rapping wildly inside my chest and knowing someone else’s is doing the same thing.
My life feels spare and thin without it.
I am a Walker who found her nightshade. I am a Walker who wants to be called more than a witch. More than a girl who is feared. I want to be a Walker who can trust her heart, who will chase down this feeling welling up inside me every chance I get. I want to be loved.
Loved.
Loved.
Loved.
Recklessly, foolishly. Without reason or caution or always looking for ways to ruin it.
I want him.
I drop my hands from my eyes and take a step back toward the cemetery, back through the storm. Because I don’t have a choice. Because I have to drag him away and keep him safe and not let him drown. Whether he remembers me or not, I won’t give up on him. Because I am a Walker. And my story doesn’t end like this.
But I only make it a few steps, I only blink once, when I see someone moving up the shore, through the blizzard—an illusion. A boy.
I blink again.
Him.
I stop and a humming begins in my skull.
Doubt and fear make nests beneath my skin. I want to cry.
He reaches me and time slows. He lifts his head and my heart climbs back up into my chest, braiding itself together—thin fibers of thread to make it whole.
His eyes rove the ground at first, then click to mine. We stare at each other, and I see him searching my face for memories. For moments in time he won’t find. Because when I peer into his eyes, I know he doesn’t remember me. The girl who pulled him from the Wicker Woods and let him sleep beside her. He lifts his hand and I hold in a breath; I watch him without blinking. I think he’s going to touch my neck, my face, my collarbone, but his fingers graze my hair, so gently I hardly feel it. My eyes flutter closed, and his hand draws back again.
When I open my eyes, I see he’s holding something between his fingers—a small twig, a green spiny leaf clinging to one end, as if it were awaiting spring.
“The forest sticks to you,” he says. Without knowing it, he repeats what I told him the first time he pulled a bit of the forest from my hair. The morning after I found him and we walked back to the boys’ camp.
A sob catches in my throat and a smile splits across my face.
He holds the leaf in his hand, a remnant from when I woke in the trees, my hair lying across the ground, and maybe, maybe he remembers some small part of me. Something that nags at him.
His eyes narrow, and for a moment he looks pained, like he’s trying to pick apart the bits of shadows from forgotten memory. The things that haven’t happened yet.