There was no index in the back of the book, no rhyme or reason to the order of recipes and spells. Things were merely written down in succession, from one Walker to another. The book is tea-stained and chocolate-smeared, and the first few pages are completely unreadable, the ink having faded to nothing with time. And every few pages, a brief history has been written down—the story of a Walker who once lived, and how she died—recorded like a family ledger, so each tale, each woman, would never be forgotten.

But after my grandmother passed away, only a week before my fifteenth birthday, my mother took the book and shoved it inside the wooden box beneath her bed. Like she didn’t trust me with it, like she was trying to blot out the memory of my grandmother and all the Walkers along with it. But she can’t erase our past, can’t scrub clean the moonlight in our veins. Mom only ever wanted to be normal. To leave the past where it belonged. To no longer be called witches or weird or be forced to avoid sidelong glances when we went into town, catching the last of a muttered word about how spiders lived in our hair and beetles under our toenails.

We are Walkers. And our ancestors have lived in these woods since long before the first miners set up camp along the Black River. We came from this forest. From the roots and brine and weather-worn stones.

We are the daughters of the wood.

One cannot survive without the other.

I sit cross-legged on the white bedspread. Snow floats into the room, catching in my hair, landing on Fin where he’s curled up on the floor, nose tucked beneath his tail.

I flip open the front cover of the book and am met with the musty scent of burnt amber and jasmine. Just like the nights with my grandmother. A thrumming begins in my chest—a peculiar sort of ache. The thrill and also the fear leaping through me. If Mom found out I took it from beneath her bed, she would be angry. She’d hide it where I wouldn’t be able to find it ever again. Maybe she’d even destroy it.

Still, I bend over the pages and my hair falls loose from its braid—fine and inky-black, just like my grandmother’s. Even the sturdy slope of my nose, the dark storm resting behind my eyes, the melancholy curve of my lips—it’s all her. The reminder of my grandma always hidden in my own face.