The lake remembers, my grandmother used to say. It’s been here as long as the forest. Longer maybe. Her words hiss through my ears, stirring the dust inside my skull, and I take a slow, deliberate step out onto the frozen lake.

Doubt skips through me. Hesitation.

I swallow and twirl my grandmother’s ring on my finger and think of how I’ve always compared myself to the women in my family, even the women I’ve never met. Who lived long before I was born. Women whose stories ink the pages of the spellbook—who stare out at me from the past, leering, bewitching, unafraid. But without a nightshade, I can’t help but wonder if I’m really like any of them at all. If my name deserves to be listed in the spellbook among them.

I take another step forward.

The lake remembers. Each word a drop of water against my skull.

The lake remembers. Each word a midnight spell.

The ice is solid along the shore, frozen down to the rocky bottom, but as I inch farther out onto the lake, the sound of the ice changes, little tiny cracks opening up beneath me—tension skipping out toward the center.

I know this is a bad idea—I know creeping out over the lake in the middle of the night is how people go missing, how they slip through the ice and are never seen again. Not even a trace. But my grandmother’s words make loops along my skin, they singsong and fill my ears until it’s the only thing I feel. The lake remembers.

And maybe Max was here that night, out on the ice. Oliver, too. They were here and something happened. Death and cries for help and breaking ice and water in lungs.

I shuffle forward, and the lake flexes beneath me—water bubbles rising up, looking for a way out. I glance over my shoulder. I’m only a third of the way from the shore, not anywhere near the center of the lake, but it feels like I’m fathoms away. Too far to turn back now. Or maybe I’m too far to keep going.

But I don’t want to be afraid—not of the lake. Not of anything. I want to be like the women who came before me, brave and clever with the shimmer of dark moonlight in their veins. I need to do this, to prove something—to know what happened that night. Because if I can’t see the truth, if I can’t see what’s right in front of me, then I’m not a Walker at all.

Keep moving, I tell myself. If I stop, I might break through the ice—the water flat and black beneath my feet.