I sink until I open my eyes again.

Until I reach the bottom of the lake that is not the lake at all.

The cold still bores through me, my skin still feels the chill of the lake, but I shiver beneath a thick canopy of trees. Snow falling over me, breathing air into my lungs.

Alive. Inside a winter forest.

And a girl is there, kneeling in the snow and dark. A girl who bends over me with hair long and black.

A girl. Who just might be a witch.

NORA

A soft pain forms in my chest, darkness running through me like a river.

Max was to blame for what happened that night.

He forced Oliver out onto the ice. And the others, Rhett and Jasper and Lin—they were there too. And when Suzy told them I had found Oliver—alive—they forced me into the Wicker Woods to see if it was true, if Oliver had somehow survived and had been hiding this whole time. If he was alive—if he didn’t drown—it would change everything.

It would mean they weren’t responsible for his death.

Max could come out of hiding, and they could all laugh about it: Remember the time we thought you were dead? A pat on the back and everything would be okay. No one goes to jail for murder. No one has to pretend they didn’t know what happened—he simply vanished from his bunk. No one has to carry the lie with them for the rest of their lives, knowing a boy died one night when they were away at camp.

But I was wrong. I didn’t find Oliver alive.

And everything that happened that night couldn’t be wiped away or forgotten. A boy is still dead. And only I can see him. Only a Walker can see ghosts in the darkest kind of dark. Our eyes are different, strange, able to see what no one else can.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says, like it’s all his fault. Like he’s sorry he’s dead and sorry he let me believe he wasn’t. Sorry that now my skin craves his, that he kissed me in my room and slept in my bed and breathed real-boy breath and let me think it could always be like this.

Bad things happen, I think.

A missing boy is found in the woods. A dead boy.

I lower the spellbook in my arms and watch the sky rain down in scattered bits of ash. I breathe and it feels like razors in my lungs. The fire too close, blazing down toward the shore. So close now. But my heart is caving in, and that hurts worse.

“None of it matters,” I say. It’s too late now anyway. He broke my heart and the forest is breaking around me and there’s no time left.