Near the bottom of the page there is a notation about the best way to lure an insect into the loft:
Open window after sunrise.
Burn a blue-lavender candle to its nub, to lure insect.
Catch insect in a glass jar and whisper desired spell into its ear.
*spell not advisable for those who fear creatures of a winged or creepy-crawly sort
The spell seems simple enough. No blood or sacrifice or special pagan holiday needed to perform it. And if I can catch the moth, maybe I can compel it to go away. To leave me alone and takedeathwith it.
I have to try.
I find one of my mother’s empty honey jars in the kitchen and bring it upstairs. I dig out a lavender candle from my dresser drawer, the one that’s nearly burnt down to the base, and I light it, placing it on the floor.
When I open the window in the loft, snow drifts into the room. Little dancing flakes that slide across the sill, in no particular hurry.
I look for any signs of Oliver or Suzy out among the trees. But nothing stirs—the forest is silent and humanless.
I’m truly alone. Last night, two people slept in my house, swelling lungs and tired eyelids. But now a well of sadness rises up inside me, salty tears wanting to stream down pale cheeks—but I don’t let them.I’m a Walker.We’re used to being on our own. Surviving. Calloused hands and sharp eyes and sturdy hearts.
And I don’t want Suzy or Oliver to return—not really. I fear what Oliver may have done, and I fear what Suzy might’ve seen.I’m safer without them.Locked doors are better than friends you can’t trust.
Still, the quiet of the house is a burden inside my chest.
I walk back across the floor and sit beside the flickering candle. I hold the glass jar in my hand, and I wait for the moth to flutter through the open window, to be beckoned by the light. But it never comes and the room grows cold.
The daylight fades to evening.
The shadows turn to full darkness.
And I lay my head on the hardwood floor.
Fin stretches out beside me. His paws touching my shoulder, his breathing quick in his lungs. And again my eyes want to sting with tears.
I know the bone moth will never come into the loft.
I know it won’t be so easily fooled by a lavender candle on a bedroom floor. A bone moth is not the same as catching a locust or a bee or a buckthorn firefly.
And even if I had caught it, I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to whisper a spell powerful enough to compel it to leave me alone. A spell to banish it from these woods. And what good is a Walker who can’t even charm an insect? A witch who doesn’t know the simplest of spells? Whose grandmother died before she could teach me how to summon the moonlight inside me, whose mother would prefer I never utter a spell within the walls of this house again.
I’m a Walker who is barely a witch at all.
I thought I wanted to be alone, that I was brave and strong and didn’t need a single thing from anyone. But now I’m not so sure. Now my heart crumbles inside the cave of my chest, and I wish I was the size of a gnat, so small I could fold myself into a crack in the floor and disappear. Tiny and forgettable.
I let the candle burn down to nothing, wax dripping onto the wood floor beside my feet until the flame fizzes and blinks out. I let the glass jar roll away from my fingertips and thud against the bedpost. I draw my knees to my chest and curl my toes under the rug. But I leave the window open—I want to feel the cold—and I listen to the wind bite against the eaves of the house.
A soft pain forms inside my ribs, a hurt that won’t go away. Empty and hollow, like my gooey insides have been carved out with a blade. Jack-o’-lantern slop.
Eventually my eyelids sink closed and I drift into an awful sort of sleep.
My dreams are strange and green, and I feel myself being pulled under by moss and golden leaves. Rich, dark soil blots out my vision, it clots my ears and mouth, it suffocates, it buries me alive. I can taste the earth, the cold frozen ground caving in on top of me.
But then there is music, metallic and thin and far away, vibrating through the soil of my dreams. I wake, choking and grabbing at my face as if to pull the roots away, to claw my way back aboveground. But I’m still on the floor of the loft. Not buried—not dead.
The night sky fills my room, the sun long set.How long have I been asleep?
Snow blows in through the open window, along with something else.
