Rhett and Jasper and Lin are arguing. About the woods, about being lost, about whose idea it was to come in here in the first place.
“I’m not going to fucking die in here!” Jasper shouts.
“Maybe if you weren’t so wasted, you wouldn’t have led us deeper into this screwed-up forest,” Rhett says.
“It was your idea to come looking for Oliver,” Jasper barks back, shoving Rhett in the chest.
“Stop it!” Suzy yells.
But Rhett shoves Jasper back and their faces are twisted in anger, hands curled into fists.
“Cut it out,” Lin says, and he ducks between them, pushing them apart. “You guys can bloody yourselves up when we get out of here.”
“If we ever get out here,” Rhett snaps.
Jasper’s face twists into an odd shape—eyebrows peaked sharply into his forehead—like he’s thinking something wicked and dark. Something we couldn’t possibly imagine. “I’ll fucking get us out of here,” he says suddenly, lip curling upward.
The next few motions happen quickly.
Jasper pushes his hand into his pocket, reaching for something—the lighter. “We’ll burn our way out,” he says defiantly, chin raised, eyes so huge he looks half-crazed. “We’ll burn this whole fucking forest to the ground.”
He holds the silver lighter out in front of him, and Lin exclaims, “What the hell are you doing!” But Jasper flicks the lighter and it sparks to life in his hands.
I can feel the trees inching closer; the ground shudders, roots pushing upward. “What’s happening?” Suzy asks, glancing back at me. A tendril of spiky roots has begun to circle around her ankles, slithering up her calves.
I’ve never seen the forest like this—violent and angry.Awake.
Suzy hasn’t yet noticed the root rising up from the soil—she’s staring at me, pleading for me to do something. And in the next second, Jasper drops the lighter onto a nest of leaves and pine needles near the base of a tree.
“No!” I shriek, stepping toward Jasper, as if I could stop him. But it’s too late.
“You idiot,” Lin cries out. “You’ll burn us alive with it!”
I don’t expect the flame to catch, to ignite. The woods are too damp, too cold—but the fire licks through the pine needles quickly and expands to a nearby bearberry bush, the sudden burst of light illuminating the forest for the first time. And I see what I couldn’t before. The Wicker Woods have lowered over us, forming a cage of branches and limbs and roots. A web to ensnare us.
This is how it kills. It traps and suffocates. It smothers the life from living things who have intruded where they shouldn’t have. This is why no deer pass through the Wicker Woods. No rabbits or mice or birds. They fear this length of forest. They know what hides inside it: death.
The forest shivers with the rupture of firelight. The trees howl—a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard.
The flames move swiftly now, spiraling up a dead tree into the night sky. The roots that had entwined themselves around Suzy’s ankle slither back down beneath the soil, retreating. “Nora?” Suzy asks, looking like a small child, terrified.
“We have to run,” I say. Fire leaps from one tree to the next, roaring, creating its own wind, sparks catching on limbs and scattering across the forest floor. Fury igniting them, malice and anger more flammable than any fuel.
“Which direction?” Suzy asks.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Rhett is squeezing his hands against his hat, Jasper’s eyes are too wide, and Lin is looking back at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do.
Ash already begins to flit down from above, burnt remains of pine needles, some still lit and smoldering. And then, between the particles that fill the air, I see the subtle flicker of wings.
White wings beating.
White wings that won’t leave me alone.
White wings zigzagging through the strange air—sparks and burning trees and the night sky opening up above us.
My moth.A bone moth.
