“And that’s why it’s glowing now?” I asked, a little anxiously. “Because you’re, uh, fraternizing as we speak?”

She nodded, still trailing her fingers over the jewel’s facets. “There are shades in the Witch Woods, what you might call active ghosts. And they’re very eager to latch on to anything alive.”

“I knew it!” I hissed, flinging a panicked look at the whirlpool of mist curdling around the edges of our makeshift picnic blanket. “That’s what the mist is made of, right? Ghosts?”

“No, no, the ghosts live in the trees,” she said, waving my concern away.

“Talia. In no way is that better.”

“Maybe not, but it’s true,” she said, with a little shrug. “They slip through the tears in the veil, and then they affix to the brightest life they can find—which, here, happens to be the wood itself. Sometimes they stay for a long time, even centuries. Long enough for their inhabitation to distort the tree’s shape.”

I shuddered a little, twitching my wrap tighter around me. “Honestly, that sounds like it super blows for the tree.”

She patted the oak’s hideous trunk, smiling at it as if at an old friend. “I don’t think they mind so much. Unlike a person, an inhabitation doesn’t drive the tree insane. And the lodged shades are anchored, less restless. No real danger to anyone who wanders into the woods.”

“What is it that the shades want, anyway?” I asked, trying to understand why she seemed so sympathetic to them.

She drew her lower lip through her teeth, considering. “To be alive again, mostly. Which is a tall order, but understandable; I think we can all agree that being dead and restless sucks the big one. Barring a do-over, I think they just want to be seen by someone. To be touched. You know, pretty much the same things everyone wants, even while alive.”

She leaned closer to the tree, stroking the trunk in a slow, deliberate way, like you’d pet a skittish horse or some other leery animal. As if beckoned by her touch, a dark vapor began rising from the bark.

It sifted through the tree’s rough skin, coalescing into ferny fronds of ectoplasm; glistening, gelatinous, inkily alive. Once freed, it curled and roiled, churning itself into a roughly humanoid silhouette. Something that insinuated a feminine shape, with the suggestion of overlong and thinned-out limbs, and a smoky curlicue like a plume of hair. It had no discernible features, save for two eyelike patches of deeper darkness in the smudge that passed for its face. In the green-skewed light of our lantern, it looked like some baleful specter conjured up by Maleficent.

When the apparition bent toward us, I thought my heart might leap out of my mouth and go tearing off into the undergrowth. The only thing that kept my shit remotely together was the utter lack of fear on Talia’s face as she looked up at the shade.

“Hey, sweet pea,” Talia crooned to it, her voice low and even as she reached up to cup the general vicinity of the thing’s cheek. “How’ve you been, hmm?”