I swallow and stiffen my jaw into place, taking a step forward. The moth led us here. To something just beyond my vision. I scan the dark, looking for eyes—something blinking out from the trees.

But there’s nothing.

I shake my head and let out a breath, about to turn back to Fin, when my left foot thuds against something on the ground. Something hard.

I squint down at my feet, trying to focus in the dark.

A mound of snow. A coat sleeve, I think. The tip of a boot. A thing that doesn’t belong.

And then I see. See.

Hands.

There, lying beneath a dusting of snowfall, in the middle of the Wicker Woods, is a body.

Snowflakes have gathered on stiff eyelashes.

Eyes shuttered closed like two crescent moons. Pale lips parted open, waiting for the crows.

Even the air between the trees has gone still, a tomb, as if the body is an offering that shouldn’t be disturbed.

I blink down at the corpse and a second passes, followed by another, my heart clawing silently upward into my windpipe. But no sound escapes my lips, no cry for help. I stare in stupefied inaction. My mind slows, my ears buzz—an odd crackle crack crack, as if a radio were pressed to my skull. I inch closer and the trees quiver overhead. For a second I wonder if the entire forest might snap at the roots and upend itself—trunks to the sky and treetops to the ground.

I’ve seen dead birds in the woods before, even a dead deer with the antlers still attached to the hollowed-out skull. But never anything like this. Never a human body.

Fin makes a low whine behind me. But I don’t look back. I don’t take my eyes off the corpse, like it might vanish if I look away.

I swallow and crouch down, my knees pressing into the snow. Eyes watering from the cold. But I need to know.

Is it him? The boy who went missing from the camp?

His face is covered by a dusting of snow, dark hair frozen in place. There are no injuries that I can see. No trauma, no blood. And he hasn’t been here long, or he wouldn’t be here at all. The dead don’t last in the mountains, especially in winter. Birds pick apart what they can before the wolves close in, scattering the bones across miles of terrain, leaving barely an imprint of what once had been. The forest is efficient at death, a swift wiping away. No remains to bury or burn or mourn.

A soft wind stirs through the trees, blowing away the snow from his forehead, his cheekbones, his pale lips. And the hairs along the base of my neck prick on end.

I lift my hand from the snow, my fingers hovering over his open palm, trembling, curious. I shouldn’t touch him—but I lower my hand anyway. I want to feel the icy skin, the heaviness of death in his limbs.