But Rhett and the others were afraid: They heard things in their cabin, something that terrified them. It wasn’t Max. It was Oliver all along, moving among them, unseen. Even Suzy never saw him—not once. Not in the house. Not at the bonfire. I thought she was lying, a cruelty I didn’t understand. Now I know she was telling the truth.

She never saw Oliver. I was the only one.

He looks out at the lake, and my heart is splitting into halves. Severed in two. The before and the after. “I don’t know why you can see me,” he says. “And they can’t.”

I grip the spellbook tighter and feel the air leave my lungs. “Because I’m not like them,” I say. “Like any of them.” Walkers have always been able to see shadows—we see what others can’t. Mostly in the graveyard—those slipping between this life and the next. The ones who aren’t entirely sure they’re dead. The night my grandmother passed away, she woke me in my sleep and sat at the edge of my bed. With trembling hands, she removed the moonstone ring she had worn most of her life and slid it onto my hand. “My gift to you,” she said, before she sank back in with the shadows. Hours later, Mom told me that Grandma had passed away during the night, long before she gave me the ring. I had seen her phantom passing through the house on her way out. Mom saw her too, long black hair braided down her back as she pushed out through the front door. But she was only a ghost moving among us, passing through the in-between.

A talent all Walkers possess. To see the ones who have gone.

And the night I found Oliver inside the Wicker Woods, I saw him plainly—our eyes meeting as soon as he woke. Nothing dark or ghostly—ghastly—about him. Maybe I have made him more real by finding him, touching him. My found item. If there had been nothing rooting him to this forest, this lake, these mountains, he might have slipped away just like my grandmother, just like the other shadows I’ve seen. Here and then gone.

But instead he stayed.

Again, I feel the urge to reach out and place my hands along his temples—to see if he is flesh and bone. Roots and knees. To know for sure if he’s real.

But I’m too afraid, so I swallow down the urge. I push it into the back of my mind.

“The others were there too?” I ask, my lungs struggling to find air among the ash. “When you drowned?”

Another nod, his skin turning pale—the memory of that night flickering across his eyes, slicing over his skin, cutting him open where he will bleed dead-boy blood.