The Gravewood

Chapter One Shea

Camellia Thorley’s missing poster doesn’t stand out.

It’s one of a dozen overlapping sheets, each one pinned to the wall outside the grocer’s. It’s misting today, the whole of Little Hill swallowed up in a cloud. The paper is wet—nearly translucent. It curls in on itself every time the wind blows.

The girl in the photograph is small and willowy, her smile gapped with missing teeth and her golden hair pulled back in bows.

The photo is outdated. At least six years old.

The last time anyone at Hornbeam saw Camellia Thorley—two weeks ago, to be exact—she was half a foot taller and in possession of all her teeth. She hadn’t worn bows in years.

No one will find Camellia Thorley.

Just like no one ever found the others.

When the Gravewood swallows someone, it doesn’t spit them back out.

The bell rattles over the door when Shea slips out of the November chill and into Brer’s Corner Mart.

The sound is muffled—nearly nonexistent—the way it always is on days when she’s forgone her hearing aids.

The air inside the shop is warm and thick.

It condenses in a cloud along the wide glass windows.

She scuffs her boots against the mat, letting the heat chase the cold from her bones.

She tries not to think about Camellia at all.

“Two students at a time,” shouts Silas Brer. The rest of his gripe is incomprehensible. Something about mud, she’s sure. He hates mopping the floors.

Shea’s come in alone, but Silas wouldn’t know that.

The elderly grocer is perched precariously atop his stepladder, thoroughly preoccupied by stacking boiled fruits along the topmost shelf.

She’s always thought his shop looked less like a grocer’s and more like a root cellar, canning jars arranged haphazardly in every direction.

It’s the only way to eat anything grown from the ground—pickled or fermented, boiled and canned, the Rot cooked out of them.

She’s sick to the teeth of cured vegetables and freeze-dried fruits, but food is food, and the pantry back home has been almost empty for weeks.

She plucks several jars of canned peaches from the shelf as she heads for the candy counter, weighing them in her palm before easing them into the battered shell of her knapsack.

Silas doesn’t notice. He never does. It isn’t that he’s inattentive, it’s only that Shea Parker is a creature of silence.

It’s a benefit of being born in it—she knows how to come and go without making a sound.

It’s why she leaves her hearing aids in her pockets whenever she’s sneaking.

It hones the world to a point, lets her slink along the tip of it, quiet as a mouse.

The candy counter is picked over, as usual.

Scant, the way everything in Little Hill is scant.

She can’t remember a time when life wasn’t this way.

When she was small, she’d fall asleep with her mother’s secondhand memories looping like a film reel through her head—Christmases in Manhattan, the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue glittering with lights.

Summers on the Cape, catamaran sails puffed up with wind.

Octobers in Salem, the stores packed with witchy trinkets and cheap souvenirs.

The Rot sprang up overnight, but the end of the world came in increments.

Gradual—slow—so that no one noticed it happening until it was over.

Once it was done, they carried on as best they could.

Even as the stores shuttered. Even as the phone lines went down.

Even when Washington went dark. Adaptive as rats , her father used to say—a comparison her mother detested.

Unlike Shea’s well-traveled mother, her father never left home until the Rot arrived.

The first time he set foot on a train, it was as a soldier of the newly established wood watch.

Ready to fight and die to preserve the final echoes of a life he’d never tasted.

These days, there are no tinsel-clad holidays, no jaunts to the city, and no summertime excursions.

Food is carefully rationed. Medicine, more so.

The only way to get anything extra this far north is through the Mercy Boys, and fraternization with the Gravewood Devil isn’t just prohibited, it’s a death sentence.

If something doesn’t snatch you off the path on the way to Mercy Ridge, the watch will gun you down on the return journey home.

No one comes back from the Gravewood.

Not when a single sip of spring-fed water is enough to Rot the blood.

Everyone in Little Hill knows what happened in the neighboring town of Highbush—how the Rot swept through overnight.

It’s a ghost town now, bordered in barbed-wire fencing.

A cautionary tale, used to frighten children away from the trees.

They don’t take chances anymore.

If you step outside the bounds, you don’t come back.

Fishing through an assortment of old penny candy, Shea pockets a lollipop, cherry red and flat as a coin.

It’s hardly substantial, as far as snacks go, but the sugar will stave off the pounding in her head, at least. It’s always like this the day after a feed—her throat dry, her skin aching, a percussive beat at her temples—but today it’s particularly bad.

She was barely able to focus in school. She’s positive she failed Mrs. Appledorn’s latest pop quiz—she left the last three pages blank.

At the rate she’s going, she won’t be surprised if she’s forced to repeat her senior year.

Not that it matters.

Rounding the shelves, she finds Silas stepping off the bottom rung of his ladder.

“Oh.” He draws up short. “It’s you .”

She watches his mouth shape the words, wariness tightening the corners. It’s the unfortunate side effect of being Calhoun Parker’s daughter. She drags her dead father’s reputation behind her like a ball and chain. She rattles his memory like a Dickensian ghost.

“I brought you something,” she says, before Silas can ask her to turn out her pockets. She twists her backpack forward to better rifle through its side pouch, careful not to shift the stolen contents as she tugs loose several shoots of white cohosh. Silas’s eyes thin in immediate suspicion.

“Baneberry like that grows out by the Gravewood.”

“ By the Gravewood,” agrees Shea. “Not in it.”

Silas doesn’t budge. “At the rate the Mercy Boys have been picking off your classmates, I’d think you’d be a bit smarter than that.”

She thinks of Lys. She can’t help it. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. His dark, inhuman eyes. That sharp, inhuman smile. The scrape of his voice against the shell of her ear: That’s a boring rumor. I don’t take anyone who doesn’t beg to be taken.

“There was a patch of it growing out by Fletcher’s,” she says quickly, shoving all thoughts of the Mercy Boy in the dark where they belong. “I passed it on my walk to school this morning.”

“It doesn’t matter if you dug it up right in your backyard. You know I can’t sell that here.”

“You can if you boil it,” says Shea. “My mom likes to make it into tea.”

Liked . She liked to make tea.

The correction is a knife. It lodges in her chest.

“It’s not half bad with honey,” she adds, though her voice comes out pinched. “And it’s good for a cough.”

“ Cough medicine is good for a cough,” says Silas, but both of them know there’s no cough medicine left. Still wary, he takes the wilting cohosh from Shea’s outstretched hand. The mention of her mother has softened his suspicion, just a little.

Ivy Parker—formerly Everly, and the only surviving member of Little Hill’s founding family—is Little Hill’s fallen angel.

Pretty, popular Ivy, who disappointed everyone when she married a poor boy from Highbush and moved to the outskirts of town.

Pitiable, innocent Ivy, who had a baby four short months later.

A sickly little thing, too still, too small, too silent.

Lovely, golden-haired Ivy, who went gray in the weeks after Calhoun Parker left home in the dead of night and didn’t return.

“Is she all right?” Silas asks. “Your mother? Haven’t seen her around.”

“She’s fine,” says Shea, and this is a lie. Her very worst one. “She sends her best.”

Silas looks unconvinced. “Maybe I should have Marla stop over one of these days. She can bring her famous casserole. Check in on things.”

“No.” Her voice is too sharp to be mistaken for anything but panic. She tries again, softer this time. “Thank you, it’s just that she’s not up for visitors.”

“Right, of course.”

There’s no denying how thin the excuse has worn. It’s been seven years since Shea’s father disappeared. Eleven whole months since anyone has seen her mother outside the house. Shea can’t keep up the ruse forever.

Thankfully, Silas doesn’t pry any further. His head kicks up, angling toward the door. The bell has rung again, too far off for Shea to hear it. She feels, in the soles of her feet, the subtle creak of floorboards, the telltale shift of another customer arriving.

“You’d better get on home.” Silas reaches for his pushcart, his eyes on the sky. “Sun’s due to set within the hour. If Constable Foster catches you out of the house after curfew, that stolen candy in your pocket will be the least of your troubles.”

“It’s not stolen,” she argues. “I bartered for it. Don’t forget to add honey to the tea.”

“I’m throwing that poison right in the garbage,” Silas calls after her, but she knows he won’t. He’s far too frugal. The last shipment was late in the summer. No trucks have come through since then.

It’s those Mercy Boys , say the rumors. They’re smoking us out.

But Shea’s not so sure she believes it. The Mercy Boys weren’t around when her father got sick, and there wasn’t medicine then, either. It’s why he left—to take the burden of watching him wither and die off her mother’s shoulders. No debt. No doubt. No slow, painful demise.

Only the forest and its teeth, the lesser of two evils.