“No, there’s plenty of room,” I say, hastily straightening the quilt and pillows. But Oliver still doesn’t move any farther into my bedroom, like he might turn and retreat down the stairs. “It doesn’t have to be weird,” I say, lifting an eyebrow. “It’s a bed, that’s all. A place to sleep.”

He smiles a little, then walks across the room and looks out the window at the snow-covered lake while I shed out of my coat and sweater. I wonder what Mom would say if she knew a boy was in my room. I’ve never even come close to having a boyfriend, or even a friend who slept over. She would likely smile—pleased that she was raising a normal daughter after all, and not the girl my grandmother wanted me to be.

“Why do they call you a witch?” he asks, still facing away.

I sit on the edge of the bed, a little caught off guard by the question, and begin plaiting my hair into a braid—a woven pattern my grandmother would teach me each night, until I got it right. “Because they don’t know what else to call me.”

The dull glow of the moonlight barely touches his skin, his silhouette draped in shadow. “Are you?” he asks, looking back at me. “A witch?”

I release my hair and touch the edge of the bedspread, playing with the hem. No one has ever asked me this—not to my face. But there is no malice in his tone, not even curiosity, it’s something else. A calmness, like he is only asking me my favorite color. My middle name. My favorite book.

“My family is older than witches,” I tell him, crossing my hands in my lap, knowing I’m revealing more than I’ve ever said to anyone. “Older than the word itself.”

“But you can do things,” he says, his voice slightly strained, like this is the root of what he’s asking—what he’s been trying to get at all along. “You made that bag of herbs for me.”

“That wasn’t real magic,” I say, shifting my eyes away, feeling strange talking about this—about magic, about what I really am. Things I’ve never talked about with anyone who wasn’t a Walker. “That was only medicine.”

Grandma often talked about the old way. How our ancestors spoke to the moon and slept under the trees and didn’t fear anything. How they used magic from their fingertips as if it were as common as whipping butter for toast.

But the old way was lost. Spells forgotten—the ones not written down in the book. The heartiest kind of magic slipped away. Not for any single reason, merely because time dilutes what once had been strong. Only our nightshades remain now, that glimpse of magic inside each of us that recalls what we are. The parts of us that are still witches.