Page 32

IT WAS THE size of a coffin, the gleaming wood carved with exquisite images.

A pomegranate tree grew tall and proud, its fruit heavy, its roots tangled deep.

Animals lurked among the branches—rabbits poised mid-leap, birds frozen in silent flight.

Coiled along the trunk was a serpent, its body winding upward, its tongue flicking out, its black eyes knowing.

Willow recognized it, but how? From a dream? A vision? Not from Amira’s scrying bowl, but... had she seen the Box in Hemridge when she’d touched the trunk of the Stillwood Tree? She couldn’t remember. She just couldn’t remember.

It was beautiful. It was terrible. The closer Willow looked, the more the carvings seemed to move.

Old Nail’s colleagues set the Box down with a heavy thud. Willow swallowed.

“Who will guard the Box in the girl’s absence?” Old Nail asked, turning his heavy-lidded eyes to Cole. “Will it be you?”

“Yes,” Cole said without hesitation.

“Then listen well. Once the girl is gone, take the Box away from this place. Take it to your home. Guard it with your life. For if the girl returns, the Box must be somewhere safe to receive her.”

Willow’s stomach flipped.

“ If? ” Cole asked, leaning forward as if Old Nail himself was threatening Willow’s safety.

Old Nail was unmoved. “If you care for the girl, then you must care for the Box.”

Cole clenched his jaw. “I do. I will.”

Old Nail nodded. Then he turned and gestured to his attendants, and the tattooed man and the root-haired woman lifted the Box and carried it through a narrow passage swallowed in shadow.

“Wait,” Willow said weakly. “Why are they taking it away?”

“There is a grove beyond the eastern hills where the trees remember the first rain and the stones have known little blood,” Old Nail said. “On that sacred ground, the Box will await you. Go to it at midnight when the moon hangs full.”

“At midnight!” Willow cried.

“Your companion can accompany you that far but no farther,” Old Nail told Willow. “From there, you must go alone, Daughter of Wrenna.”

Old Nail rose. Willow and Cole stood as well.

“We are done here,” Old Nail pronounced in his raspy old man’s voice, and with that, he turned away, vanishing into the darkness after the others.

Willow felt hollow and more than a little unstable.

Cole found her hand, interlocking his fingers with hers. With a reassuring squeeze, he led her toward the stone steps that curved upward in a spiral.

“Ladies first,” he said when the passageway grew too narrow for the two of them to remain side by side.

Willow smirked. “How gallant.”

“I’m your guard,” he replied seriously. “‘Gallant’ is only the beginning.”

Willow wanted to thank him, the rough and sometimes rude man with such gentle eyes. He hadn’t asked to be the guarder of the Box. The guarder of her . But when the question had been issued, Cole had risen to the challenge like a true Arthurian knight.

Willow’s throat thickened. She couldn’t speak, not now. She placed her hand on his cheek and gave him a soft smile. Then, wearily, she turned and began the long climb back up into the light.

“What now?” Willow asked when they broke into daylight. The sun’s glare struck her in a thousand white-hot fists, searing her vision until it danced with afterimages. She raised a hand to shield her face.

Cole stood beside her, his silhouette crisp against the bleached sky. He swept his gaze over the desolate landscape of World’s End and said, “Now? Now we enjoy the day.”

She squinted at the crooked buildings, the tangled mess of tin and wood and smoke. Goats wandered freely between the houses, gnawing on laundry lines and knocking over rusted buckets. A few chickens scratched in the dirt beneath a sign that read “NO SOLICITORS. NOT EVEN YOU, JESUS.”

On a gatepost, someone had mounted a sun-bleached goat skull. It reminded Willow of the goat girl back in Lost Souls, the one with the flat, unblinking stare.

“How do you suggest we go about that?” she asked, her voice low.

“We start by finding something to eat.”

They made their way downhill, feet skidding on loose gravel. Cole led her through a maze of leaning porches, past oil drums and cracked windows stuffed with quilts. A kid sat on a stoop cleaning a rifle. He nodded as they passed.

Willow’s stomach grumbled, which was a good sign. She was still hungry. Still herself. She was a better version of herself than she’d been in a long time, actually.

Sure, she was wandering with a bunch of goats through a town called World’s End—but she was living . Not sulking in Atlanta. Not fixating on the unfairness of life or berating herself for believing Mr. Chapman’s pretty lies. Not scrubbing herself raw or cataloging every mistake she’d made.

Maybe she’d been a fool—but Mr. Chapman had been a predator. Predators preyed. But Willow, she wasn’t prey anymore, not his nor anyone else’s. She didn’t have to keep punishing herself for having been young and naive.

She also didn’t have to turn herself to stone to make sure she never got hurt again. Call it foolishness, call it faith, but even now, she clung to her belief in magic, in goodness, in the sharp, bright ache of hope. Not because Mr. Chapman had hurt her. Not as a means of escaping reality.

No, Willow clung to those beliefs despite what Mr. Chapman had done to her. Her faith in Serrin—and her steadfast belief that she would succeed in journeying to Eryth and finding him—was a universe-sized “fuck you” to Mr. Chapman. And now it was time to let that asshole go.

Fuck you and goodbye. Willow was on to better things.

They came to a shadowed alley between two trailers. A faded Budweiser sign swung overhead, half the letters burned out. At the end of the alley was a bar of some sort. From within came the low thrum of banjos and country music.

Cole grinned and lifted his eyebrows. She shook her head in disbelief, and then she grinned back. Why not?

Mismatched tables crowded the dark room, some made of plywood laid over sawhorses. In the center of each table, a glass Coke bottle held wildflowers—daisies, goldenrod, a sprig of mint.

They seated themselves, and a woman approached their table—barefoot, with long brown braids. Her eyes flicked between them with interest.

“Y’all want the board?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Cole said. “And two Cheerwines, if you’ve got them.”

The woman looked insulted. “Sweetheart. Do you even have to ask?”

“What’s ‘the board’?” Willow asked. “And what’s Cheerwine?”

“‘Ordering the board’ means getting a little bit of everything,” Cole said. “And Cheerwine? You haven’t heard of Cheerwine?”

Willow did her best imitation of their waitress’s indignant expression. “Sweetheart. Do you even have to ask?”

He laughed. “Cherry Coke but better. You’ll see.”

Soon, their food came out, plate after chipped plate. There were crowder peas, golden cornbread, and fried trout laced with needle-thin bones. Cold watermelon, which Cole told Willow to sprinkle with salt.

“What?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Do you trust me?”

She looked at him. She smiled. Then she sprinkled her watermelon with salt, and dang, if it didn’t make the sweetness even sweeter.

The room hummed with low voices, clinking glass, and the occasional thunk of a chair leg on the warped wooden floor. A little girl in cutoffs and a tank top stuck a quarter into the jukebox, and it kicked out a warbly version of “You Are My Sunshine.”

Willow lifted her bottle of Cheerwine in a toast. “This is nice.”

“Told you,” Cole said.

Willow laughed. The Cheerwine was excellent; she was on her third bottle. “This,” she said, gesturing around them, “the food, the music—everything.”

Cole leaned back, the metal chair creaking beneath him. “Even the company?”

“Wow. Look at you, begging for compliments.”

He grinned. “Is that a yes?”

She searched for an appropriate retort, then changed her mind. “Sure,” she said, more playful than sardonic. “Even the company.”

Over a shared piece of lemon icebox pie, Cole asked Willow about her life before . Before Hemridge and all the rest.

“Tell me about the Braselton sisters,” he said. “What was it like growing up in that grand house of yours?”

The question should have felt dangerous.

He already called her “princess,” for heaven’s sake.

But the Cheerwine had loosened something in her chest. The waitress had gotten friendlier as day turned to dusk and dusk swept into evening, and the most recent round she’d brought them tasted tangier and made her throat burn.

“Sour mash,” the waitress had said with a wink.

It was more than the alcohol, though. Willow liked Cole, and she knew that the window of time in which she could get to know him—and let him know her—was rapidly closing.

“Three little girls in a house too big for them,” she said finally. “My sisters and I... I don’t know. We love each other. But we’re not close the way sisters are supposed to be, I think.”

“Supposed-to-be’s have a habit of misbehaving,” Cole observed.

“Yeah. Maybe. Juniper is amazing. Sweet, funny, loves stories almost as much as I do. But she’s eight years younger than me. That’s a pretty big gap.”

She sipped her drink. “Ash is sixteen and very competitive. Not that she needs to be. She’s always been the clever one. I, on the other hand...”

“Let me guess. You were the wild one,” Cole said.

“The troubled one,” she corrected. She stared at the table. “The one who saw things that weren’t there.”

A breeze blew through the little restaurant and made the screen door bang.

Cole glanced toward it, then back at her. He swiveled his lower body and stretched his legs out long. “I used to think it was a curse,” he said. “Feeling too much. Sensing patterns that other people didn’t. Knowing there was more to the world than what most people see.”

There was a sadness behind his words. Willow guessed he was thinking of Micah, his little brother who’d disappeared, and the duskwyrm that had taken his place.

“Maybe . . . in Eryth . . .” she said tentatively.

“You’ll find the Lost Souls who slipped through the cracks?” Cole asked wryly.

He didn’t have to say it like that. Willow pressed her lips together and wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

“Sorry,” Cole said, shaking his head. “But that’s not why you’re going anyway. You’re not looking for those who are lost. You’re looking for Serrin.” To his credit, he kept both malice and mockery out of his tone. “Would you tell me more about him? I’d like to understand.”

She shot him a look.

“I’m not saying I can,” he admitted. “But I’d like to try.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tapped her bottle of Cheerwine and searched for how to explain. “He comes to me in my dreams—or he did. Lately not so much. And the thought of him—it’s like a toothache. A constant pull I can’t ignore.”

“And this is what you want? A toothache you can’t ignore?”

Willow chose her next words with particular care. “I care about you, Cole. And—I think you care about me.”

Cole’s eyes darkened. “You know I do. God knows I didn’t want to, but I do.”

Willow smiled weakly. “But Serrin...” A confusing resistance gathered in her chest. “Serrin needs me.”

“What if I need you, too?”

“You don’t.”

“And you get to decide that? You know what longings live in my soul?”

All at once, Willow felt teary and raw, as if some winged thing were fluttering just beneath her skin. She didn’t know anything, not for sure.

“This is my path,” she whispered. “I made a vow.”

Cole was silent for a moment. Then he gave a single quiet nod.

“I wish you’d chosen me,” he said. “But—here we are.”

Willow nodded, then reached across the table and laid her fingers over his.

~

The hour was near midnight when they left the little restaurant, walking in silence beneath a bruised sky. The moon rode high, casting long silver shadows on the path ahead. Willow didn’t speak. Neither did Cole.

They moved past the cabins and the houses and reached a lonelier land. No owls called from the trees, no cicadas sang their mournful song. Even the night birds held their tongues.

The path took on an upward slope, rising over low, soft hills. Willow’s heart beat a strange rhythm, drawn forward not only by her feet but by the night itself.

Cole’s hand brushed hers once, lightly, as if by accident. But he didn’t link his fingers with hers.

They crested the final hill just as the moon reached its highest point. Below them, the forest spread out like a tapestry—twisting limbs, silvered leaves, the ground beneath dappled in light and shadow.

In front of them? The Box.

The wood shimmered, dark and rich, etched with those savage carvings that once again seemed to shift as Willow approached—crouching rabbits, birds with broken wings, an overripe plum cleaved in two and dripping juice.

Willow brushed her fingertips along the ridged spine of a serpent winding up the trunk of the pomegranate tree. A hum filled the grove. The sound vibrated in Willow’s bones.

The Box knew she was here. It was waiting. It was eager.

She placed her second hand on the Box, and something opened within her, a wave of longing that bound her to the Box. She felt drunk with it, flooded by a pull she had no desire to resist.

“Are you sure?” Cole asked.

“I’m sure,” she said breathlessly. “You know I am.”

“Because of Serrin,” Cole said flatly. He flung out a hand toward the Box. “And you’re sure that climbing inside is the only way?”

“What other way is there? It’s my birthright. It wants me.”

“Sure, like a lion wants a wounded gazelle,” Cole snapped. “It’s hunger, Willow. Not love.”

The Box throbbed. Willow knew she could only resist a moment longer.

“Cole, you’ve done so much for me,” she said, though her eyes stayed glued to the Box. “You brought me here. You protected me. I’ll never forget that, never in a—”

“Don’t,” he said quietly.

She felt his hand on her shoulder, and somehow, his touch unlocked her. Made it possible for her to release the Box, just for a moment, and face him.

“Won’t you stay here with me?” he asked.

The question, stripped of charm and bravado, nearly wrecked her. He wasn’t trying to win her or best her or persuade her. He was just asking her to choose him, as plainly as he possibly could.

“Cole . . .” she whispered.

She glanced over her shoulder at the Box.

Its energy coiled around her, savage and alive.

Then Cole’s hand was on her waist, spinning her back and pulling her close.

His mouth met hers. His fingers dug into her back.

He left no distance between them, pressing his body to hers as if to mark her forever.

She felt the heat of him, the rhythm of his heart in time with hers. For one aching second, she wondered, And if ... ?

But the hum. Low. Bone-deep. It shook through like a summons.

She tore her mouth from his, wrenched free of his grip, and ran to the Box. Its lid creaked open, a beautiful mouth.

“Wait—” Cole’s voice cracked behind her.

She climbed inside, and the lid slammed shut.