When you need it, your nightshade will come, Grandma told me once.

My heart rises and then collapses. A ball inside my ribs.

I know what I am.

My eyelids blink and everything, everything, tilts off axis, the lake tumbling toward the sky. The silver watch pulses in my hand, tiny infinitesimal movements—tink, tink, sputter. The hands click once, twice, in the wrong direction.

Little prisms of light scatter across my eyelids. I squeeze my fingers tighter around the watch, my nails against the glass.

And I let the dark take me.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

TALA WALKER was born under a buttermilk moon at the end of October.

Honeybees dozed at the edge of her crib, and their fat, winged bodies got tangled in her soft cotton blankets while she slept. When she learned to walk, she tottered out into the woods, sticking her fingers into the hives of wild bees and waddling home with honey stuck to the bottom of her white lace-up ballerina slippers.

But she was never stung—not once.

Tala Walker could enchant wild honeybees with the quick flutter of an eyelash, and they fell into a deep, restful slumber whenever she was close.

Tala left Jackjaw Lake when she was nineteen, wanting to forget what she was, to go somewhere the Walker name had never been uttered. She fell in love swiftly with a boy whose face was covered in sun-made freckles, and when a baby started growing inside her, she knew she needed to return home. To the place where all Walkers are born—in the old house beside Jackjaw Lake. And her daughter would be no different.

She gave birth to a sable-haired girl she named Nora. A girl with starlight in her galaxy-colored eyes. But Tala hoped her daughter would never know magic, never need her shadow side. The thing that made all Walkers different. Strange. Outcasts.

But she was wrong. Her daughter did possess a nightshade—perhaps the most powerful kind ever written about inside the spellbook.

Tala Walker had tried to escape what she was.

But her daughter, Nora, wanted nothing more than to be who they really were: pure-blooded witches.

How to Train Honeybees:

• Wear netting over bare skin.
• Burn two hickory twigs, let smoke drift into hive.
• Count to eleven, then whisper Tala Walker’s name into smoke.
• Collect honeycomb in glass jars before twigs burn down to nubs.

NORA

Wake up, Nora,” a voice says, clear and sharp like bell. “Wake up.”

It’s my grandmother’s voice. Chasing me up from my dreams, up from the dark of the lake, the soft tenor of her words whispered against my skull.

My eyes snap open and I feel the snow against my cheek. Cold and wet. The scent of silty earth and green filling my nostrils.

I’m no longer in the lake.

Moonlight peeks through the trees, pale and lonely, bathing my skin.