I feel Oliver is close now, nearly to me, but I don’t look back. “I belong to this forest,” I say aloud, willing the trees to listen. To calm their fury. To stop the flames from burning, from devouring whatever is left. “I am a Walker,” I say again. “You know my name. You know who I am.” It sounds like a spell, like a remnant of real magic rising up inside me, burning my fingertips.

I breathe and lift my chin. Certainty pulsing through me. “I am a Walker!” I scream, commanding my voice to grow louder than the raging fire pummeling around the lake.

I am not afraid.

I hear Oliver only a few yards away. “Nora!” he shouts, more urgent this time. And then there is another sound. A change in the air. A crack and a whoosh.

That’s when I see it: the falling embers, the mammoth pine tree completely engulfed in flames. It must be two hundred feet tall, and its trunk has been uprooted from the soft ground along the shore, fire burning from roots to tip. And now the tree is tipping, leaning, falling. Careening toward the lake, toward me. I stare at it like it’s fireworks erupting in the night sky. In awe. Everything is happening in slow motion—knowing I need to run, but somehow caught by the dazzling sight of such a massive tree, upending, pitching forward.

A second later, the tree crashes across the lake, breaking through the surface of ice in one violent blow. The sound is tremendous and terrifying. Like a thousand glass chandeliers shattering at once. The lake shudders beneath me.

Only a couple yards away, the tree sinks into the black water, into a gaping hole. Ice fracturing out around it. Run! my head screams. But my heart has stalled in my chest, my legs afraid to move. The ice makes an eerie sound beneath me, like metal bending to the point of breaking. Like a long, pent-up howl. I suck in a breath just before it happens.

My eyelids blink.

Time slows.

And then the ice snaps—a quick giving way—and I drop into the water.

The air is pushed straight from my lungs. My head dips all the way under and the spellbook slips free from my grasp—sinking into the deep, just like my grandmother’s ring—and I scramble to the surface, fighting for air. I try to scream, to call Oliver’s name, but no words come out. My throat is too dry, the air too thick with smoke. My hands slap against the surface of the water as I try to swim to the edge of the ice, but there is no edge. The lake has shattered, broken apart, and now only chunks of ice bob at the surface—just like me.

The shore is too far, not even visible through the smoke.