They were the ones who’d pushed Delilah. Who’d drowned people in the lake.

Those spirits did as they chose. Took what they wanted.

And what they wanted now was Maria. They’d sent Brandon as a warning.

But they couldn’t have her. She wouldn’t let them.

Altagracia had taught her well. She knew what she had to do.

It had been easy to talk the health center nurse into letting her leave early. But the Ouija board was in shards, and she couldn’t go back to the mirror in her bathroom without Lily getting in the way. She’d tried to go to the old dining hall, but the door wouldn’t budge, even when she threw herself against it with all her strength.

So she’d come to the woods, beyond the borders of the lake. She’d always felt something dark here. Tonight it felt darker still.

She’d come looking for the spot where Brandon died. Spirits always lingered at the site of a death. If Maria could find Altagracia by the lake path, she could find out what the spirit knew. Seek her advice. Renew her protection.

But Maria had been out here for hours, and she still hadn’t found the oak tree she’d hidden behind that day. Everything looked different from how it had that morning. Upside down and inside out. She’d wandered from tree to tree, and now she’d gone too deep into the woods to be at the right place.

Still, her legs propelled her forward even when her sense said to turn back. Leaves and branches were all she could see in every direction. Shadows flitted from one tree trunk to another each time she turned her head. Her black dress was sticky with sweat and tree sap.

She couldn’t see the glint of moonlight off the lake any longer, but she could hear the water lapping at the shore. A strange, unfamiliar sound. The lake was usually still as glass.

Maria reached for a trunk to steady herself and felt a strange, rough pattern under her fingers. She looked up. Twisted branches wound toward the sky, higher than she could see.

This tree was old. Gnarled. Ancient. Maria turned and saw another tree that looked just like it, and another. Behind her was a trunk so massive she couldn’t see around it. It had to be eight feet wide.

But there weren’t any ancient trees on this campus. The plantation grounds had been destroyed in the fire three centuries ago. Then the Union soldiers had chopped down every tree the fire had spared. The trees that made up the woods now had been put here by the school’s landscapers in the 1970s. Yet the trees she was facing looked like they’d been standing since the dawn of time.