I reach the gate, my heels bumping into it, my boots getting stuck in the snow.

I stagger through the opening and press my hands to my temples. A boy died that night, Nora told me. A boy died and I vanished into the woods.

The wind howls against my ears, a scream that sounds like a warning, like the trees remember, they know who I am. I stumble toward the lake, away from the cemetery—I let my legs carry me toward camp. Anywhere that isn’t here.

A boy is dead, my head repeats, the wind screeches.

And one of us who stood in this cemetery that night is to blame.

NORA

The old house facing the lake has sheltered nearly every Walker who has ever lived. Aside from the earliest few who I know little about—the ones who were said to emerge from the forest, hair woven with juniper berries and foxglove, feet covered in moss, eyes as watchful as the night birds.

Legend says we appeared as if from a dream.

Early settlers claimed they saw Walkers weaving spells into the fibers of their dresses: moonscapes and five-pointed stars and white rabbits for protection. They said Josephine Walker stitched the pattern of a severed heart into the fabric of her navy-blue dress, with a dagger splitting it in two, blood dripping down the folds of her skirt to where it met her shoes. And two days later, the boy who she loved—but who loved another—fell from his porch steps onto the hunting knife he kept sheathed at his side. They say it tore straight through his rib bone to his beating heart, slicing it clean through.

And the blood on Josephine’s dress trickled down the fabric and made perfect round drops on the floor of the old house. The spell had worked.

After that, locals knew with certainty that we were witches.

Whether the story is true, whether Josephine Walker really did stitch a spell into the folds of her dress or not, it didn’t matter. The Walker women would forever be known as sorceresses who should never be trusted.

And in this town, we would never be anything else.

It can be a burden to know your family history—to belong in a place so completely that you understand every hiss from the trees, the familiar pattern of spiraling ferns, the sound of the lake crackling in winter. The certainty that something isn’t right, even if you can’t quite see what it is.

“It’s so fucking cold in here,” Suzy says when I step through the front door.

She’s sitting on the edge of the couch, a blanket draped over her shoulders, legs twitching.

“Fire went out last night,” I say, shedding my coat and boots to bend down beside the stove.

“Where were you?” she asks.