She was born in 1894 during the winter of an ox moon. A restless baby, she cried even when the summer stars reconfigured themselves in the sky, dancing across her hand-carved crib. Her mother, Adaline Walker, believed something to be wrong with the small child—an omen of illness or bad luck.

When Willa was sixteen, she stood on the shore of Jackjaw Lake and wept into the shallow water. Her tears filled the lake until it overflowed—muddying the banks and turning the lake bottomless.

Willa’s nightshade was more dangerous than most. Her tears could fill oceans if she let them. They could drown men and overflow rivers and turn the forest to water.

The depth of Jackjaw Lake was forever unknown after that day, and Willa’s mother made her carry a handkerchief wherever she went, the thin cotton meant to catch every teardrop that fell from her cheeks. To prevent the world from drowning.

Willa fell in love twice, and twice suffered a broken heart.

She died on the second night of Beltane, after her twenty-third birthday. Cause unknown.

Cure for Heartache & Unexplainable Weeping Fits:

• Two pinches skullcap
• Powder of lemon balm and Saint-John’s-wort
• Nectar from a milk thistle bee
• One horsehair, burnt at both ends
• Combine in wooden mortar. Drink or place beneath tongue.

NORA

I shouldn’t care.

It shouldn’t matter that Oliver was gone from the couch when I woke and came downstairs—just like the morning after I found him inside the woods.

But still, I stand on the porch looking out at a trail of deep footprints cut through the fresh layer of snow, veering around the twin pines that stand guard beside my house, then wandering down toward the lake. A ripple of déjà vu passes through me, just like before—the snow falling in familiar waves, every blink of my eyelashes is a second I’ve felt once, twice before. Time swivels and then lurches back into place.

Tick, tick, thud.

I steady myself against the porch railing, hands gripping the cold wood, and focus back on the footprints leading through the snow.

This is the second time he’s slipped out of the house while I slept, and maybe I should feel angry. But something nags at me instead, a disquiet that won’t go away—a pulsing curiosity just behind my eyes that wants to follow his path, see where it leads. I can’t be sure what time he left the house, but when I touched his pillow, the scent of woods and earth still lingered against the cotton. Yet the warmth from his skin was long gone.

Fin trots down the porch steps and out into the snow, sniffing at the ground.