“We can’t trust anything she says,” Jasper interjects. “She’s just trying to protect him.” He winces, and I see that his sweatshirt is bloody where Fin bit into him.

“You’re taking us up to those woods,” Rhett announces, the decision made.

Jasper grabs onto my arm again, but I yank it back. “We can’t,” I tell them, my thumb itching at the finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, wishing I still had it, wishing she was here now. “It’s not a full moon.”

“So what?” Jasper says.

“The forest will be awake. It will see us.”

Jasper laughs—an unpleasant sound—and Rhett moves to only a few inches from my face. “I don’t care if it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and you’re worried about leprechauns stealing your gold, you’re taking us to where he’s hiding. And no more of your witchy bullshit.”

Jasper pushes a palm against my back, and I move forward just to keep him from touching me again. We march down the steps, little tin soldiers all in a row. They’re drunk and desperate. Whatever happened that night, out on that lake, whatever they’ve been hearing in their cabins, they can’t escape it—and it’s starting to make cracks along their minds.

But then I see someone else standing in the trees, chin lowered, waiting for us.

Suzy.

She came with them—she’s part of this. And a raw, acrid pit sinks into my stomach. Rotting me from the inside out. This must be what betrayal feels like.

But none of them realize, none of them understand: If we go into the Wicker Woods now, under a half waning moon—when the trees are awake—we won’t come back out.

“You guys don’t have to do it like this,” Suzy says, running toward us when she sees me, a deep set of lines across her forehead. “You could have just asked her to take us into the woods.”

“She never would have done it,” Rhett argues, barely glancing her way.

Suzy falls into step beside me, chewing on the edge of her fingernail. “Nora, I’m so sorry,” she whispers nervously, shooting me a helpless look. But I don’t want to hear it. “I told them about Oliver, how you found him in the woods. They just want to see him and—” She stops before finishing and starts chewing on her fingernail again.

And hurt him, I think. They want to find him and hurt him, because when bad things happen, you have to blame someone. And maybe Oliver really is to blame.

“Just show them where you found Oliver,” she says now, eyebrows sloped together, pleading with me. “It’ll make it easier.”

She looks like a broken porcelain doll, missing all her insides, like she’s been gutted clean. But I refuse to let myself feel sorry for her—like I have before.