Nora Walker fell in love only once, with dizzying ferocity, with a boy who knew precisely what she was. She remained at Jackjaw Lake for the remainder of her life, in the old house set back in the trees, and she wrote many stories within the spellbook. Like the winter a storm blew over the lake and not everyone made it out alive. Not at first. She became a storyteller, not just of her own tales, but of the lost items she found inside the Wicker Woods. Of the people she met. She told their stories so they wouldn’t be forgotten.

Her own death, however, is a blank spot never noted here. For time was not easily measured for her—the year and age of her death, of most events in her life, could not be certain.

But Nora is said to have lived the longest, strangest, most wholehearted life of any Walker who ever lived.

Some even say her tale might not yet be over.

That the story of a witch, one who slips through time, can never really have an end.

How to Bend Time:

• Light a black candle beside a south-facing window—let it burn for ten winter minutes.
• Hold a piece of green glass over the flame, casting a prism onto the floor.
• Write the desired date and time on a white sheet of paper and burn over candle.
• Close both eyes, then blow out flame.

EPILOGUE

There is no such thing as a common forest.

A place of ordinary trees and unremarkable terrain.

Woods are formed of mischief and misdeeds, thorns to bite at exposed skin, roots to catch a loose shoelace dragging down a path. Malediction lives in the dark, it festers beneath thick canopies of evergreen limbs, burrows into the damp wood like needle worms.

But some forests are older than most. The oldest kind. Some forests grow hatred in their bark and moth-eaten leaves so that no safe passage can be made through such a place.

Unless you are built of the forest. Unless blood as black as tar swells through your veins.

Unless you are a Walker.

Walker women have never feared the trees—the ancient sway of limbs clawing at their long, sooty hair.

Locals say they were sprouted from the ground itself, pushed up like green saplings greedy for sun and warmth. That their bones are built of roots and briars and stinging nettle.

They belong to these woods. To the Black River where gold was found along the rocky shore. To Jackjaw Lake, dark and bottomless. To the fattened moon, tethered in the sky—awaiting the whispered words of a Walker’s furtive spell.

The history of Walker women is strange and storied and woven in folklore.

And that’s how they prefer it—to be made into legends.

More from the Author
The Wicked Deep

Acknowledgments