A feeling I don’t want to.
“No,” I say at last, his gaze on me a moment too long, making it hard to breathe. “You can sleep in the loft.”
His eyes soften and the room starts to quiver, walls melting from the edge of my vision, the clock in the kitchen clicking too loud. Oliver blurs out of focus, and I think about him standing in the trees, watching me at the bonfire. He followed the boys from camp because he was worried about me. And I’m not sure how to feel or what to say, but my heart is spurring against my ribs, causing little fits of pain.
I look away from him, afraid the house is going to splinter around us, afraid the clock on the wall will cease to tick.
“You all right?” he asks, touching my arm, my hand.
But when his eyes meet mine, all the words dissolve on my tongue, catch inside my teeth, so I only nod.Fine, fine, fine.Everything is fine. My head doesn’t feel like it’s going to cleave in half and let all my thoughts spill out onto the floor. The house doesn’t feel like it’s going to cave in. Time doesn’t feel like it’s going to shatter.
I’m fine.
He releases my hand and I walk to the front door to lock it—sensing a storm building outside. Not from the mountains, but from something else.
A storm made of fury and spite woven inside reckless boys’ hearts.
I light a candle—a ritual now—and walk to the stairs. The house no longer swaying. The clock no longer a drum against my ears.
Without a word, Oliver follows.
Maybe he belongs here now, with me, inside this house.
No one has ever belonged to me before—not really.
In the loft, my bed is still unmade, pillows slumped and wrinkled from the previous night. And Oliver stands at the top of the stairs, scanning my room, the stacks of books on the floor, while Fin plods past him—making a lowhuffsound as he settles onto the rug at the foot of the bed. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Oliver says, eyeing the place where Fin has curled into a ball, nose tucked under his tail.
“No, there’s plenty of room,” I say, hastily straightening the quilt and pillows. But Oliver still doesn’t move any farther into my bedroom, like he might turn and retreat down the stairs. “It doesn’thave to be weird,” I say, lifting an eyebrow. “It’s a bed, that’s all. A place to sleep.”
He smiles a little, then walks across the room and looks out the window at the snow-covered lake while I shed out of my coat and sweater. I wonder what Mom would say if she knew a boy was in my room. I’ve never even come close to having a boyfriend, or even a friend who slept over. She would likely smile—pleased that she was raising a normal daughter after all, and not the girl my grandmother wanted me to be.
“Why do they call you a witch?” he asks, still facing away.
I sit on the edge of the bed, a little caught off guard by the question, and begin plaiting my hair into a braid—a woven pattern my grandmother would teach me each night, until I got it right. “Because they don’t know what else to call me.”
The dull glow of the moonlight barely touches his skin, his silhouette draped in shadow. “Are you?” he asks, looking back at me. “A witch?”
I release my hair and touch the edge of the bedspread, playing with the hem. No one has ever asked me this—not to my face. But there is no malice in his tone, not even curiosity, it’s something else. A calmness, like he is only asking me my favorite color. My middle name. My favorite book.
“My family is older than witches,” I tell him, crossing my hands in my lap, knowing I’m revealing more than I’ve ever said to anyone. “Older than the word itself.”
“But you can do things,” he says, his voice slightly strained, like this is the root of what he’s asking—what he’s been trying to get at all along. “You made that bag of herbs for me.”
“That wasn’t real magic,” I say, shifting my eyes away, feeling strange talking about this—about magic, about what I really am. Things I’ve never talked about with anyone who wasn’t a Walker. “That was only medicine.”
Grandma often talked about theold way. How our ancestors spoke to the moon and slept under the trees and didn’t fear anything. How they used magic from their fingertips as if it were as common as whipping butter for toast.
But theold waywas lost. Spells forgotten—the ones not written down in the book. The heartiest kind of magic slipped away. Not for any single reason, merely because time dilutes what once had been strong. Only our nightshades remain now, that glimpse of magic inside each of us that recalls what we are. The parts of us that are still witches.
Walkers began using herbs and small blessings, instead of conjuring dark spells to hex those who had done us wrong.We merely will the moon to bend in our favor, Grandma would say.We no longer command it.
Oliver steps out of the moonlight and moves closer to the bed. “So you can’t undo something that’s already been done?”
“Like what?”
“Like someone who’s dead.”
I swallow and my fingers grip the edge of the bed, nails digging into fabric.I know what he’s asking.“Like Max?” I ask. And I wait for him to answer, but the words are lodged like little thorns in his throat. “I can’t bring anyone back from the dead,” I tell him. “No one can.”
