One night, I tell myself. One more night, I’ll let him sleep here, this boy who speaks as if a soft wind stirs inside him, who can’t remember what happened to him the night another boy died. Whose eyes make me feel slightly unmoored in ways that make me want to scream. Walkers cannot trust our own hearts—our slippy, sloppy bleeding hearts. They are reckless, stupid things. Muscles that beat too fast, that cave inward when they break. Too fragile to be trusted. Yet, I let him stay.

I lock the front door and add more logs to the stove. And when Oliver settles onto the couch, I see he still has the bag of herbs I gave him, clutched in his hand. I was certain he wouldn’t keep it—but he did.

“Thank you,” he says to me, and I stall at the bottom of the stairs, chewing on the side of my lip, twirling the moonstone ring around my finger.

“Can I trust you?” I ask. Too late now, I think. I’ve already let him stay. I’ve already let my heart slip two degrees off-center, let myself believe he might be different. That he isn’t like the others. That he might have the same hole inside him that I do. And if he says no, will I force him to leave? Probably not.

He watches me with his moon-deep eyes, and my head feels fizzy and light, filled with feathers and dust, no rational thoughts skipping around up there. Only seasick thoughts. No compass or stars to steer me back to shore.

“I don’t know,” he answers finally, and my throat feels too dry.

A boy is dead. Dead, dead, dead. The words have now lodged themselves stiffly in my skull—planted there, where they will grow roots and thorns and venomous flowers, burrowing into my thoughts, becoming true.

There is a storm growing inside me, inside this house, and it darkens the doorways—the dark spreading out from corners and from beneath old, creaky bed frames.

Back in my room, I feel alone, out of place in my own bedsheets. The loft ceiling too steep and jagged, like brittle bones that might snap at the knees and shatter. I force my eyes closed, but I see only the moth, the memory of ash-white wings moving toward me in the dark. Hunting me.

Oliver has returned from the woods.

And something happened the night of the storm. Something bad.

When you see a pale moth, my grandmother told me time and again, her eyes like black moons, death isn’t far behind.

Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine

WILLA WALKER wailed and wailed and wailed.