“I don’t give a shit,” Rhett replies. He shoves me again and I stagger forward, one foot at the very edge of the entrance into the woods. I glance back at Suzy, who is biting her lower lip, watching me like I’m about to be swallowed up by the trees. Like she has never felt more terrified in her life. And in her eyes, I think I see her urging me to run—to turn and dart back down the mountain. But she doesn’t know how weak I am, that I’m having a hard time even standing.

“You don’t have to hurt her,” Suzy pleads, but Rhett has stopped listening to her.

Knots bind together inside my stomach, and I crane my head up to the night sky—clouds sailing away, the moon a deflated half circle. Not full. Not safe to venture into these dark, vengeful woods.

I blow out a breath and whisper the words I’ve said so many times before, hoping they will protect me, hoping the woods will remember me and let me pass unharmed. “I am Nora Walker,” I say softly so the boys won’t hear. And then I repeat it twice more, for good measure, for luck.

But I sense it might be too late for that.

Walker or not, perhaps none us will survive the night.

So I stiffen my arms at my sides and take a step past the threshold, into the Wicker Woods.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

IONA WALKER was born under a black harvest moon—the darkest night of the year.

Even as a baby, she cast no shadow across the ground. Even on the brightest afternoon, even when the sun burned at her neck.

But a girl without a shadow can see in the dark. A rather useful nightshade for sneaking and spying.

Iona often wandered through the house while her mother slept, never flicking on a single light, never stubbing her toe on a rocking chair she couldn’t see. Her vision was even better than that of her cat, Oyster, who learned to follow Iona through the dark.

When she was twenty-three, she met a boy who gathered night phlox and coal berries and ninebark leaves after the sun had set. On a cool October night, she kissed him under a full moon, and he swore he’d never leave her side.

Until the night Iona lost sight of him somewhere among the shadowed trees. He wandered too near the Wicker Woods, slipped beyond the forest boundary, where no one but a Walker should enter, and he was never seen again.

Iona banished the dark after that, and never again went into the woods once the sun had dipped below the treeline. She died on a late August morning, sitting on the front porch of the old house overlooking the lake. And as her eyes slipped closed, her shadow stretched out long in front of her.