My head begins to buzz, and a familiar sensation skims through me: I’ve been here before. I’ve stood on this ice and thought all these thoughts and felt the ash in my lungs. The feeling of déjà vu rattles over me again so quickly that my head tilts back to the red-stained sky.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, thud.

I blink and refocus. I squeeze the spellbook tighter.

The ice shifts beneath me, so thin I can see the deep black below my feet. I hear Oliver somewhere in the smoke, calling my name. He’s close now.

I grew up in these woods, I think. Every Walker has. It belongs to me, and I to it.

The forest heaves and whines and screams along the shore, flames spurred on by spite and revenge. The ice snaps below me. Fear claws up into my throat.

Oliver shouts again from the smoke, but I don’t listen. I don’t shout back and tell him where I am. Instead, I peer up at the awful sky, at the tips of trees I can just see above the smoke. And I sense the forest watching, listening. It knows who I am.

“I am Nora Walker,” I say softly, just as I have each time I’ve entered the Wicker Woods, but now my words seem tiny. No magic in them at all. No meaning. I think of my grandmother—how sturdy she was. An anchor that could not be moved against her will. Many feared her, the strong tenor of her voice, her wild dark hair—I never saw her take a brush to it and it often caught in the wind and tangled into knots, but moments later it was silk down her back. She was a marvel. And I wish I was her right now, I wish I knew what she knew. How to command the trees around her.

I grip the spellbook tighter, knowing the power inside its pages, the weight of so many words handwritten by all the Walkers before me. I know the meaning in them. That they once commanded these trees, these dark skies. The woods and Walkers are bound to one another. We cannot be divided, stripped clean of the other.

I swallow and say, “My mother is Tala Walker.” An invocation, a reminder to the trees of the blood that courses through me. “My grandmother was Ida Walker.” I breathe her name, let it linger on my tongue. “I am a Walker.” Magic once poured through our veins, real magic. We breathed and the forest listened. We shed tears and the forest wept sap down its bark. Many of the old ways have been forgotten, slipped through cracks, but our blood is still the same. Still a fire inside us.