Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

Author:Shea Ernshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2019-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

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 take death with 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.

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