“All right, everyone, settle down,” a voice booms from somewhere in the dark—one of the camp counselors. “Take a seat and we’ll do a head count.” A flashlight is flicked on across the room, and then a couple more, the eerie beams of light slicing across faces and the towering walls.

“Please,” Suzy says furtively, as if each word were a secret. “Can I stay with you, just until the road clears?”

I feel both my eyebrows raise. Suzy Torrez has never stepped foot inside my house. Suzy Torrez wouldn’t be caught dead talking to me in the halls of Fir Haven High. She’s never asked me to sit with her in the cafeteria during lunch or invited me to one of her birthday parties, and now she wants to spend the night. At my home.

“I’ve been sleeping on a cot in a little room off the kitchen. It’s the only place that isn’t bunking with the boys. I can’t take it anymore,” she urges, she insists. The whites of her eyes too white.

A lantern is lit and it throws more light across the room as boys make their way back to the long wood tables. “I—” I start to open my mouth to speak, but Suzy cuts me off.

“At least until the phones come back on, then I can call my parents, they’ll find a way to come get me.” Her eyes bore into me now, pleading. Her hair falling about her face. Her fingers twitching like there’s an itch somewhere along her skin she can’t reach.

I feel sorry for her, the desperate curve of her mouth, the watery rims of her eyes. I wouldn’t want to sleep here either, in this damp, cold place. And a part of me—a part I don’t want to admit to—thinks it might be nice to have someone else at the house. To fill the silence. Last night, sleeping in my room with Oliver downstairs on the couch, felt oddly comforting. Another warm body and beating heart within the walls. “Okay,” I say at last.

A smile breaks across her face, revealing her perfectly straight teeth. “I’ll go grab my bag. Meet you outside?”

I nod and she spins around, crossing the immense room and vanishing into a dark doorway that must lead back to the kitchen.

Candles are relit across the thick wood tables, flames becoming little points of light in the dark, shining up the walls. But before I can slip out through the open doorway, I notice something flitting down from the ceiling—something I couldn’t see before in the dark.

A moth.

It must have been hovering up in the rafters, and now it quivers through the air, drawn toward the candlelight. Its white-gray body is paler than it should be. Its antennae too long and bleached white. Not a common moth.

It’s the same kind I saw in the Wicker Woods.

A bone moth.