“Yeah, don’t make it any harder on yourself,” Jasper chimes in, walking behind me, his tall, gaunt frame looming over me.

We march along the lake’s edge, then turn north, toward the mountains, toward the mouth of the Black River. Rhett leads the way and I follow, the other boys close behind me—in case I decide to run. And Suzy is last, dragging her feet, probably wishing she hadn’t come—parading behind three drunk boys who are forcing me up the mountainside in the dark.

Maybe I should feel afraid, of what might happen, of what they might do to me.

But I’m only afraid of the woods.

The clouds move farther south, the moon winks out from the black sky, and an owl calls from somewhere in the trees to our left—it doesn’t want us here, we’ll scare away the rodents it hunts at night.

Our troop of drunken boys, staggering through the snow, is not passing through the wilds unnoticed. And we haven’t even reached the Wicker Woods yet.

We trudge higher up into the mountains, until we reach the two steep slopes, the ravine, the cairn of rocks standing guard. The entrance.

The boys fall silent for the first time, each staring into the dark, opening through the trees—the boundary of the Wicker Woods.

“I don’t like it,” Lin says, standing back, away from the border. “It’s fucking creepy. Doesn’t feel right.”

A cold wind slides out from the entrance, smelling like the darkest dark, like wet rocks and soil that have never felt sunlight, like the place where monsters sleep. Not imaginary ones, but ones that hunt and slink and creep. Ones that stare out at us, hoping we’ll step inside. Hoping we’re dumb enough. “That’s because we shouldn’t be here,” I say, a shudder sliding along my voice. “This is the only way in,” I tell them, “and it’s the only way out.”

Suzy swallows, an audible gulp. “Maybe we should wait until it’s light,” she suggests. “When we can see.” The fear is evident in her voice. Gone is the girl I remember from school, who buzzed down the halls of Fir Haven High laughing loudly so everyone could hear, kissing as many boys as she could on Valentine’s Day. Keeping count. Now she looks deflated, a girl who’s lost all her air.

Rhett ignores her. “You go in first,” he says to me, pushing a hand against my shoulder. I bite back the urge to turn around and shove him in the chest, to scratch and claw at his face, to make him bleed. But I still feel weak, my muscles tensing against the cold, and so far they haven’t hurt me—I’m not going to give them a reason to.

“It’s not a full moon,” I repeat. “We can’t go in there.”