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Willow knew exactly who the woman was: Wrenna . She knew the baby, too. The baby was Willow’s mother as a tiny little thing. Not Mercy but Lark, with rosy cheeks and a tumble of blonde curls.

Wrenna carried Lark into a clearing where the high grass had been flattened and tamped down. A quilt lay beneath a massive tree. The Stillwood Tree, so sacred that its name pulsed through Willow’s blood. Its roots pushed up through the ground like ribs. Its branches brushed the sky.

Wrenna knelt and placed Lark on the quilt that lay beneath the tree. Lark was old enough sit on her own. She bounced and clapped her little hands, and Wrenna’s face softened with a smile.

Then Wrenna straightened and turned, startled. A man waited at the tree line. Willow’s heart gave a sick twist. Him. The wolf in a pastor’s clothing. He was older than Wrenna, broad-shouldered, eyes too intent. Willow saw longing in his eyes—a possessive hunger she knew too well.

He strode to Wrenna and took her hand. She let him, but reluctantly. She led him away from Lark. She kept her daughter safe.

They argued. Wrenna cried, and the pastor stood up taller, meaner, stronger. His expression hardened with resolve.

Willow slipped sideways, and the clearing disappeared. The world flew by, skipping hours, maybe days. Then time slowed to its earthly pace, and she saw the pastor in the clearing again, an axe slung over his back. The Stillwood Tree loomed over him. The pastor raised the axe.

Willow’s skin prickled. This was wrong. This was so, so wrong.

The first crack rang like thunder.

The second deepened the cut, and bark went flying.

The third brought with it a low, long moan, and the tree’s great roots clenched and stirred like great long fingers grasping blindly for salvation.

Willow wanted to cry out. To beg him to stop. But she had no mouth here, wherever here was. She had no body—only sight, only knowing.

She slid again, returning to a workshop lit by firelight.

The pastor, with sleeves rolled up and his cruel face damp with sweat, bent over great slabs of wood that were as smooth and pale as bone and carved wretched designs into the grain.

Spirals and keys and eyes frozen wide. A pomegranate tree lush with fruit.

A serpent twining round and round its massive trunk.

He bled three times while carving. Shallow nicks on the fingers, a scrape across the back of the hand. The wood drank his blood, and Willow wished it would do more. Wished it would drink his very soul.

The vision trembled. Another night, the pastor was alone with the finished box, which was the size and shape of a coffin. He touched the lid. He ran his hand over the carvings and smiled with sick pride. He climbed in.

Why? Why would he do such a thing? To test the fit? To admire his own handiwork? Or—Willow felt a cold flicker of understanding—was it something darker? A sick rehearsal of what he planned to do to Wrenna? Had he decided to silence her once and for all?

Wrenna stepped from the shadows, dressed all in white. At the sight of her fierce expression, Willow’s heart swelled. Yes, oh yes!

Wrenna didn’t flinch. She didn’t falter.

She closed the lid and bore down with all her weight.

Bumps and rustlings came from inside.

Wrenna smiled.

The pastor’s grunts grew strained, his efforts more labored. A grown man trapped in a box, with only a woman—and a slight one at that—applying pressure to the lid? It made no sense, but Willow rejoiced in its warped logic, watching eagerly as if she herself were the eye frozen wide.

Wrenna’s fingers curled around the box’s edges. Her face went rapt.

The box rattled. Slowly at first, then faster and faster—a devil’s dance and a fiddler who couldn’t stop fiddling. Wrenna juddered, and Willow saw her skull beneath her flesh. There was a deep, guttural sound—a swallow—followed by silence.

When Wrenna lifted the lid, the pastor was gone.

From the back room of the cabin, a baby wailed, and the sound brought Willow back to herself with a jolt.

She found herself crouched in Miriam’s yard, her palms damp from the cool grass and her cheeks damp from hot tears.

She was crying—really crying—from a place so deep she hadn’t known it had a voice.

Wrenna had done it. She’d survived. The pastor had thought he owned her, but Wrenna—Willow’s grandmother—had bested him in the end. She’d reclaimed her power and then some. Whatever Wrenna had, Willow wanted it.

The wind stirred. A branch groaned. A floorboard snapped on Miriam’s front porch, and Willow pushed herself to sitting and whipped her head in that direction. She heard something else, this time a drawn-out creeaaaak , and her heart jumped into her throat.

Miriam had said she’d be here. That she was always home. That her door was always open.

But when Willow had stood on Miriam’s front porch, the door had been shut. She’d rapped on it, hard, and it hadn’t budged. It had stayed firmly, undeniably shut.

Now it stood ajar, the dark behind it thick as velvet.