Chapter One Shea #2
She’s so lost in thoughts of her father, she doesn’t notice Asher Thorley standing on the mat until she collides directly into him.
Her backpack—still clutched protectively before her—jams between them.
The stolen cans bite into her belly through the fabric.
From the look on his face, he’s felt it, too.
His brows lift in quiet amusement. His hand closes over the strap before she can wrench herself safely out of reach.
“Fourteen months away and nothing has changed. You’re still a little kleptomaniac.”
“Let go.”
He doesn’t. “What do you have in there, Parker?”
“It doesn’t matter, it’s mine.”
His smile is faint but familiar. “Somehow I doubt that.”
He’s dressed in a sherpa jacket, his hair buzzed short.
The last time she saw him, he was leaving for boot camp.
She and Camellia watched the scene unfold from across the street—crouched behind the curtains of Poppy Zahar’s bedroom window as he’d argued with his father, his duffel bag banding his chest.
He didn’t want to enlist , Camellia said, watching her brother through the steam of their breath on the glass, but we need the stipend. Dad’s been out of work for months.
The Asher standing before her is incongruous with the way she remembers him.
His face is more harshly defined, his shoulders broad.
Even the way he carries himself is unfamiliar—at attention, his shoulders thrown back instead of rounded against the mountain cold.
He looks unyielding as a wall, the playfulness drilled out of him.
Only his eyes are the same—a rich golden brown.
The color of Fletcher’s field in late summer.
In his free hand, he grips his sister’s poster. Shea’s heart plummets to her feet.
“I didn’t know you were home,” she says, eager to get the focus off her backpack.
“I’m on leave.”
“Oh.”
It’s not that she’s been counting the days since he left, it’s only that she knows he’s not due back for several more months, which means he’s been granted special permission.
Emergency permission. The happy, gap-toothed smile of Camellia Thorley is a bulwark between them.
This time, when she tugs at her backpack, he lets it go.
“I’m sorry,” she manages. “About Camellia.”
His face closes up like a fist. “Everyone’s sorry. Her teachers. Constable Foster. My parents. Sorry doesn’t bring her back.”
Shea thinks of how her mother retreated into herself after her father left. How she visibly recoiled each time someone offered up their empty condolences, their shallow sympathies. Sorry was a poison. It tainted everything it touched.
“I know.” She hopes her tone conveys just how deeply she means it. “I know it doesn’t.”
“ Sorry is what people say when someone dies.”
There’s a worrying determination in his eyes.
It’s the same conviction she saw etched into her mother’s face, in the days and then months after her father disappeared.
The same resolve that drew Ivy Parker to the forest’s edge night after night, barefoot and shivering, chasing the sound of Calhoun Parker’s voice on the wind—ignoring her daughter as she pled with her to come home: Mom, it’s the trees. It’s just the trees, it isn’t Dad.
“Ellie’s not dead,” says Asher. “She’s missing. And missing people can be found.”
Still on the floor, Shea’s heart forms a single, deep fissure. “She’s not missing,” she tells him as gently as she can. “She’s in the Gravewood.”
She shouldn’t have to say it. She shouldn’t need to remind him. It’s been beaten into them from the moment they were born: Don’t go into the forest. Don’t answer if it calls. Don’t bleed where the trees can taste it.
No one comes back from the Gravewood alive.
She ghosts a thumb over the bite at her wrist and thinks: Not without the devil’s permission.
“I thought you weren’t afraid of the trees.” His teasing falls flat, their rapport rubbed thin by his time away, by his missing sister, by the awful things she’s done in the months since he left. Her guilt is a wild, clawing thing.
She tugs the sleeves of her blazer lower just as he says, “You look different.”
“ You look different.” It’s a feeble comeback, and both of them know it. A band of worry runs through her. She wonders if he can tell. If he can see it on her—the pale skin, the glassy eyes, the tremor in her hands. If he knows, after months of training, how to recognize signs of a bite.
“Combat training will do that to you.” The look on his face invites no further inquiry. “Did you talk to my sister? Before she left? Did she say anything strange?”
The question is like being doused in ice water. Every answer she could possibly give feels like the exact wrong one. In the end, she settles on a partial truth.
“I’ve already told Constable Foster everything I know.”
“Well, he’s not asking,” says Asher. “I am.”
He says it like it ought to count for something, and maybe it should.
She thinks of six years past—when she’d been eleven years old and perpetually angry, every part of her itchy and ill-fitting.
Earlier that day, Mr. Belrose had pulled her aside and chastised her for disrupting the lesson—made her stand and write lines on the board while the rest of the class read silently from the textbook: I won’t talk back to my elders.
I won’t talk back to my elders. I won’t talk back to my elders.
When school was done, she’d raced home with tears in her eyes and wrath in her throat, furious at the terrible injustice of it all.
It wasn’t that she’d misbehaved on purpose, it was only that she hadn’t heard Mr. Foster call for order.
The harder she’d tried to explain it to him, the less he’d listened, until she’d finally accused him of being the one with non-working ears.
Still bristling from the encounter, she’d wedged herself into the top of an old dogwood tree at the forest’s edge. She sat and watched the trees undulate in the wind, wishing she could hear the promises swaying in their branches.
Camellia and Poppy found her there a short while later, her palms abraded and her stockings torn. When she refused to come down, they left to get help. Reinforcements arrived fifteen minutes later in the form of Asher Thorley—thirteen years old and fed up with her antics.
“I’m not afraid of the Gravewood,” she’d insisted as he coaxed her down. “There’s nothing to do in Little Hill but wait to die. Why not do it where the trees can see?”
She’d dropped to the ground to find Asher’s expression a careful blank. She’d known right away that he was thinking of her father—of the way Calhoun Parker left his family without a word. She’d braced herself for yet another empty platitude. Another meaningless scrap of sympathy.
Instead, he’d said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It isn’t stupid. It’s true. Which would you rather? A slow, horrible death, or a quick, painless one?”
“You’re not dying a slow, horrible death.”
“That’s what you think.”
Feeling mulish, she’d thrown out her arms and collapsed into a patch of auburn overdam, sending several woolly aphids skyward. Directly overhead was a marmalade sky and a dozen feathered seed heads and Asher Thorley’s lopsided frown.
“Get up,” he’d ordered. “Sun’s almost down.”
“So what? Are you afraid?”
His face tightened and she counted twelve whole heartbeats before he eased himself down beside her, muttering under his breath as he went.
They lay that way for a long time without speaking, watching a dragonfly drift from stalk to stalk.
Beneath the earthen musk of the meadow, she’d been able to smell the sharp turpentine of the trees.
Cold. Crisp. Inviting. It said nothing at all to her. It never did.
“See,” she’d said, “it’s not so bad.”
“That’s because you can’t hear it.”
She’d turned to face him, each of them mottled in shadows like bruises. “Can you?”
He’d nodded, quiet, his arms crooked behind his head. He’d looked riveted—uneasy—focused on something faraway. A strange sort of jealousy gripped her like a fever.
“What’s it saying?”
Asher didn’t answer. Not for a long time. Not until dusk fell, and a nearby bullfrog began to croak. Slowly, he rolled on his side to mirror her. They lay face-to-face, the shadow of the forest looming over them.
“I’m not going to die in Little Hill,” he said. “I refuse.”
The wind picked up, clicking the branches. He met her eyes across the swollen dark.
“I won’t let you die here, either.”
It wasn’t a promise from the forest, but it was a promise.
For years, she’d clung to it like a life raft.
“It’s almost curfew,” she says now. “I should get home.”
She doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear—she doesn’t say a word about his sister, or about the horrible way they fought the day before she disappeared.
She doesn’t mention how Camellia found her in the third-floor lavatory, changing her bloody dressings between classes, or how she’d gasped when she spotted the half-moon lesions scored into Shea’s wrist.
“Asher is risking his life to keep those things away,” Camellia had hissed, the color going out of her face, “and you’re letting one of them feed on you.”
“Quiet. Someone will hear.”
“Do you know what they’ll do to us? If you bring the Rot home to Little Hill?”
“Stop talking.”
“It won’t just be your life on the line, Shea. It’ll be everyone. Do you remember Highbush? What they did to all those people?”
The way Asher is watching her is too intense. Like he’s searching her. Like he knows everything already, without her even having to admit it. She wishes he’d never come home. She’s not the same girl she was when he left. She stopped waiting for him to save her a long time ago.
She’s grateful when the bell jingles and two more students slip inside the store. Silas barks something incomprehensible from somewhere out of sight. Two at a time , most likely.
“I’ll see you around,” says Shea.
Asher’s gaze turns unreadable. “Parker, wait—”
She doesn’t. She escapes out into the cold before the door can drift shut.
Before her guilt can consume her. Off in the distance, the vast goliath of Mercy Mountain rises out from above the shadowed tree line.
The town of Little Hill is gray and cold, but the mountain’s craggy face is awash in brilliant gold.
The gilded peak feels like a lit beacon, beckoning her back.
A reminder that she belongs to the Gravewood.
To the boy who lives at the heart of it.
It’s the deal she struck. It’s the reason Camellia is gone.
It’s the damage she did, the path she chose, and she can never tell Asher any of it.
She can never tell him that she had no choice, that she was out of options—that there’d been no more deliveries in months, and she badly needed hearing aid batteries to keep the quiet at bay.
In seven months, she’ll be done with high school.
Everyone in her graduating class at Hornbeam will go off and find their place.
They’ll further their studies. They’ll join the watch.
They’ll settle down. They’ll make something meaningful of themselves, keep the wheels of Little Hill slowly turning.
Not her. Shea Parker is a liability. A sunk cost. A burden .
Poor Ivy , she once overheard Marla Brer say to Silas. She’ll be stuck caring for that one all her life.
In the end, the trees didn’t need to offer up promises to lure Shea into the Gravewood—she’d gone in all on her own.
Asher won’t understand. Just like Camellia hadn’t understood. Their parents still live at home, unscathed by the Rot, their pantry full. Their people haven’t left. Their bodies haven’t betrayed them. They don’t need . They’re not desperate. Not like her.
She can feel Asher watching her all the way to the end of the road.
The weight of his stare is unbearable. She breaks into a run the moment she turns the corner out of sight, where the cluttered main street gives way to farmland, the roads to crumbling stone walls and flattened cattle paths.
The air is heavy and wet. The cows lift their heads to watch her pass.
Though nothing is chasing her, she doesn’t stop running until she reaches home.