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CLUTCHING THE BABY blanket to her chest, Willow pushed the door open, hoping it wouldn’t announce her presence. It did, with a long, complaining squeak. Willow’s heart drummed.

“Miriam?” she called.

Nothing.

The lock on the door hadn’t been forced. Willow could see that now. Within the house, the lights remained off. She heard no bumps or bangs, so whatever was going on here, it probably wasn’t a break-in.

Willow bit her lip, then stepped over the threshold, leaving the door open behind her.

The front hall led to a sparsely furnished living room.

There was a worn sofa draped in a crocheted throw, a bookshelf sagging with oversized folklore tomes, and a small lamp with a base shaped like a crow.

On the side table beside the sofa sat a mug of what looked to be chamomile tea, based on the tag dangling from the tea bag steeping within.

No steam rose from the tea, but the mug was warm when Willow touched the side.

She moved down the hallway, calling Miriam’s name again.

No answer. But in the kitchen, a chair had been pushed half back from the table, like someone had stood up mid-thought.

A notebook sat open beside an uncapped pen.

The pages were dense with looping script and arrows that connected terms: veil thin in Hemridge , Orrin not erased , trace lines back to Bratton bloodline .

Beneath, in smaller writing, a scribbled line: Wrenna= spark. Willow= kindling?

Willow stared at her name and felt pressure behind her eyes. She remembered Orrin and the axe and baby Lark left alone in the back room of a cabin while her mother did God knew what.

She shook the images from her head and kept going. At the far end of the house, a three-season porch looked out over an overgrown backyard. She looked outside but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just trees and the hush of sleeping suburbia.

Still, something wasn’t right. Willow knew it from the spiders that ran up and down her spine and from the unpleasant smell that rushed to clog her nostrils. When she’d stepped into the house, the air had smelled musty, but nothing worse than that. Now, it smelled of...

Willow concentrated. She knew this scent—she did.

Sour milk. That was it. Milk so far gone that clumps splattered into the sink when you went to pour it down the drain.

Willow backed out of the kitchen and returned to the living room.

Her eye caught on a small framed photo on the bookshelf—Miriam, younger, standing in front of a church with someone who looked like a country woman.

A farm woman. This farm woman wore overalls and held up what looked like a rattlesnake skin.

A shadow crossed the window, and Willow spun around. There was no one there.

“Miriam?” she called one last time.

No one answered, and Willow’s racing pulse was starting to make her feel queasy. She slipped out the front door and pulled it shut behind her. This time, it swung on its hinges noiselessly.

Willow walked to the end of the driveway and stood on the curb, the night brushing cool over her skin.

She remembered the Greyhound station the cabbie had driven her past—that squat building with the bench out front.

She bundled the baby blanket into a square and added it to her backpack. She resettled the pack on her shoulders and started walking.

~

The bus—the first Willow had ever been on—stank of cigarette smoke, body odor, and urine.

Mountain Crest had smelled like this. You could scrub until your fingers bled, but it stayed with you, working its way beneath your skin.

A few rows ahead of her, a man in an army surplus jacket snored loudly with his mouth open. The man’s seatmate coughed. The bus was maybe a third full, but the slumped passengers in their sagging seats radiated a hopelessness that made Willow’s skin crawl.

Mountain Crest had radiated a hopelessness that had made Willow’s skin crawl.

Stop it . Willow had chosen to be here. She’d purchased a one-way ticket to Hemridge and climbed aboard the bus as if she’d done so dozens of times before.

No orderlies. No sobbing. No papers signed under fluorescent lights while the teenagers who’d already been committed stared at her and whispered, “Newbie.”

She shifted in her seat. She held her backpack in her lap, then shifted it to the side, hiking it to the window’s height and attempting to use it as a pillow.

She looped her arms through its straps and held the fabric tightly.

No one was taking this from her, even in the unlikely event that she did fall asleep.

The bus jounced. The engine rumbled.

Willow pressed her cheek to the canvas of her backpack. It smelled like school supplies and the lavender scent Juniper had spritzed into her closet during one of her holistic moods. The smell grounded her. Almost.

Dang, she was tired. She let her eyes close, just for a second.

The hum of the tires on the highway lulled her, then lost her, then caught her again.

Sleep didn’t take her so much as smear her across the night.

Behind her eyelids, she saw the baby. Not Lark as a real infant, but something her mind had half-invented: swaddled in moss, eyes wide and silent.

She saw Wrenna flickering: young, then old, then young again.

She jerked awake, and the woman in the seat ahead of her turned around. Willow forced a smile and mouthed, Sorry. The woman frowned and turned back.

God. What even was that vision she’d had? Wrenna, the pastor, the beautiful, terrible box—what kind of story ended with a man swallowed whole and a baby crying in the next room?

A faerie tale, that’s what. A real one, with teeth and shadows and the stain of blood.

Why had the tale come to Willow, though? She hadn’t asked it to. The air had rippled in Miriam’s yard, and Willow had heard that low silver chime that always preceded her visions.

Willow squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to breathe. A bloodline with too much magic and no place to put it, so it came out where it could. That was the best explanation Willow could come up with.

She opened her eyes and stared at her reflection in the window of the bus.

Her face was blotchy. Her eyes were wide.

But there was something feral in them. Something newly awakened.

Maybe the why didn’t matter. Maybe the why just was , and what really mattered was that the vision tonight and all the ones that came before it—they’d come to her . They’d chosen her .

She thought of the notebook on Miriam’s kitchen table. Veil thin in Hemridge. Orrin not erased. Wrenna = spark. Willow = kindling.

Kindling. Something that burned. Or maybe something that lit the way?

Miriam had said there were other worlds than this one. That Blue had crossed over to one. That magic, if it lingered anywhere in this all-too-ordinary world, lingered in Hemridge.

Miriam had also said that, despite what Willow had been told, her grandmother—Wrenna—hadn’t hanged herself. What, then? Had Wrenna punished her abuser and then found a way to follow Blue, to escape to a better, purer world?

Mr. Chapman hadn’t been as brazen as the pastor.

He’d started small. Compliments. Lots of eye contact.

He was the drama teacher, and Willow had almost always been cast as one of the leads in whatever given play the students had put on.

It made sense that he’d touched her, helped her hit her marks. That was his job, wasn’t it?

She remembered standing on the taped X center stage while he’d adjusted her shoulders, tilted her chin. “Willow, you are light on a dim stage. Let them see you.”

He spoke to all the students like that. Like they mattered, like he saw them.

I know you because I’m one of you was the energy he gave off.

Stodgy Dr. Filbert with his love for the Oxford comma?

Sad, sallow Mrs. Wright, whose posters of the Eiffel Tower are fading with age?

They’re doing their best, guys. I mean it.

Are they me? No, but then, no one is. Only me.

Just me. Just me and you... and you.

.. and you, with his eyes lingering on each student just long enough for every one of them to feel the electric charge of his charisma.

There was a reason he’d won “Best Teacher” year after year.

In the spring of her sophomore year, they’d put on The Crucible . Willow was Abigail. He’d said she had the perfect edge for it—fury, beauty, vulnerability.

“You’re electric,” he’d whispered during rehearsal one night, standing just behind her, their reflections staring back from the darkened mirror of the drama-room windows. “I don’t think you realize how rare that is, to carry that kind of fire.”

Junior year, the play had been Pygmalion , and Willow had played Eliza Doolittle—a girl turned into a man’s perfect woman, scrubbed clean of her rough edges until she could pass in polite society.

At the time, Willow had thought it was romantic—the way Eliza blossomed beneath the professor’s attention. Mr. Chapman had said she brought “an aching fragility” to the role. He said she understood what it meant to be seen.

He’d started asking her to stay late after the others had gone. “Extra rehearsal time” was how he’d put it. She’d been thrilled. When he’d offered her rides home afterward, she hadn’t thought twice.

It had made sense. He’d been the teacher. He’d believed in her. And she was good. She was better than good—he’d told her so often, sometimes placing a warm hand on her arm.

Senior year, he’d asked if Willow might like to go to church with him. Church.

“Is that all right, Mom?” Willow had asked. “Can I?”

Her mother had cocked her head. “It’s a little strange, Willow,” she’d said, but in the end, she’d relented. It was church, after all.

He’d started talking about Willow’s future in a way that included him. “I’m not so much older than you, you know,” he’d teased. “You don’t see me as an old man, I hope.”