K E L LY A N D R E W

SCHOLASTIC PRESS/NEW YORK

 Copyright © 2024 by Kelly Andrew
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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data available
ISBN 978‑1‑­338-​­88507‑1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1  24 25 26 27 28
Printed in Italy 183
First edition, April 2024
Book design by Maeve Norton
FOR ANYONE WHO HAS EVER LEF T A PART
OF THEMSELVES BEHIND.
PART ONE
THE HOMECOMING

I had liefer to die with honour than to

live with shame;
and if it were possible for me to die a
hundred times,
I had liefer to die so oft than yield me to thee.
Le Morte d’Arthur, Thomas Malory
 1
W YAT T

S he meant to burn it down. The house, with its pitched gables

and chipped paint, leaded windows glazed in yellow glass. The
roof was leaved in curling gray shingles, the undersides fringed in
moss, and there was something undeniably morose about ­it—​­the way
it sagged, the way the wrought iron parapets of the widow’s watch
had gone red with rust.
She stood at the edge of the flagstone walk, hemmed in by a
meadow of fat purple coneflowers, and gripped a red jerrican in her
left hand. In her right, she clutched a thin paperboard matchbook.
She thought about dousing the porch in gasoline. She thought about
enjoying one last sit on the weathered swing.
And then she thought about setting it aflame.
About the way it would feel to watch her ghosts go up in smoke.
Memory was a fickle thing. She’d remembered her father’s house
as white. Instead, she’d been surprised to find the wraparound porch
done in a splintering evergreen trim, the ­broad-​­paneled siding a
dull i­nfection-​­colored yellow. The last time she’d seen it, it had been
through the rearview window of her mother’s rusted Ford. Her back-
pack sat on the seat beside her, stuffed full of books. Her Maine coon
cat, Slightly, was clutched in her arms and she’d been openly weeping.
On the porch, her father grew smaller and smaller.

3
 “She’ll find her way back,” he’d bellowed.
And she had.
Her father’s death had come as a surprise. It wasn’t that they’d been
­close—​­they hadn’t. He sent her letters on Christmas, which she duti-
fully ignored. He sent her gifts on her birthday, which she passed off
to her cousin. She didn’t write back. She didn’t return his calls. It still
felt like a rug had been pulled out from underneath her the day she
received the news of his passing.
“He didn’t want you to know he was ill,” Joseph Campbell said,
framed in the open door of her aunt’s apartment, his coat wet from
the April rain. The last time she’d seen her father’s r­ ight-​­hand man,
he’d been restraining his son James, his hands tacky with blood and
his face contorted into rage. Now those same hands spun and spun a
flat herringbone cap. He looked startlingly contrite. “He wanted you
to remember him the way he was.”
“Estranged?” Wyatt’s grip on the door had begun to hurt.
“Robust,” Joseph corrected, his mouth twitching into a frown.
“Strong. Dedicated. A proper steward of Willow Heath.”
A steward. It was a funny word to describe Wyatt’s father. She’d
had plenty of words to define him, back when she still lived at the
farm. A steward wasn’t one of them. He’d been a botanist, locked
in his greenhouse with his eclectic collection of plant ­life—​­a naturalist,
his attic full of taxidermized quadrupeds and antler sheds, a curio
cabinet he kept locked tight as a drum.
A ghost, too swallowed up in his passions to take notice of the child
floundering in his care. His letters and his gifts had come too late.
Postmarked with regrets she didn’t care to receive. Sealed with apolo-
gies she didn’t have the space to break open.

4
 “As you know,” Joseph told her, oblivious to the way her thoughts
spun out like a top, “your father was my oldest and dearest friend. He
appointed me executor of his estate just after receiving his diagnosis. It was
his dying wish that the Westlock family farm should go to you. The last
living Westlock.”

Standing on the front walk, Wyatt could just see the mist rising off
the meadows in curls of gray. Beyond that, the first shingled rooftop
of a clapboard cottage poked its dormered head over the rise. If she
closed her eyes, she could still picture the fields b­ eyond—​­the half­­
dozen outbuildings baked into the creases of Willow Heath’s ­sixty-​­five
considerable acres. Once livestock shelters and poultry coops, the
buildings had long since been remodeled into modest lodgings for her
father’s revolving door of summertime callers.
And now they were hers.
She wondered if they’d burn, too. Hot and bright, like kindling.
“They come for the summit,” her mother told her, when she’d grown
old enough to dig into her father’s mysterious circle of guests. “Try and
stay out of their way, if you can help it. They’ll be gone by summer’s end.”
At seven years old, Wyatt had no idea what made up a summit. She
only knew what it meant to her. It meant roomfuls of strangers who
went quiet whenever she entered. It meant the stink of incense cling-
ing to everything she owned. It meant lanterns in the field after dark,
the Gregorian cadence of chanting in the dawn.
But more than anything, it meant Peter and James.
For nearly as long as Wyatt could remember, her summers at
Willow Heath had included the two of them. Each autumn she was
shipped off to boarding school, kicking and screaming in her plaid

5
skirts and her Mary Janes. Each spring she returned and found James
and Peter there waiting, bored out of their skulls and stalking cotton­
tails behind the rusted silo. Where to Wyatt, Willow Heath was home,
to James and Peter, it was a sort of bucolic ­prison—​­an ­eight-​­week sen-
tence they were forced to carry out while their guardians convened in
secret alongside Wyatt’s father.
Gangling and barefoot and a little bit feral, Peter had been the sort
of boy who always looked hungry. He’d had a stare like ice, a shock of
white hair that stuck up every which way. Where Wyatt was an open
­book—​­eager to spill her innermost thoughts to whoever or whatever
was willing to ­listen—​­Peter had been infuriatingly ­tight-​­lipped. As
such, Wyatt had never quite managed to puzzle out who he belonged
to. Their first few summers together, she’d peppered him with an
endless barrage of ­questions—​­Are you here with your dad? An uncle?
Where do you go to school? Did you take the train? Which cottage are
you staying in?—​­until he became so fed up with her interrogation, he
began avoiding her altogether. After that, she’d stopped asking. She
let him remain a mystery, so long as he was her mystery to keep.
James Campbell, older than the two of them by a year, had been
every bit Peter’s opposite. Cunning, where Peter was guileless. Chatty,
where Peter was withdrawn. Charming, where Peter was wild. He
wore his dark hair cropped short, preferring to dress according to the
stringent codes of his stuffy English boarding school, even when no
one required it of him.
A budding renegade and a reckless thief, James arrived each sum-
mer with yet another expulsion under his belt, his suitcase stuffed full
of stolen ­things—​­an old Polaroid camera, a silver butane lighter, an
exported pack of cigars he’d pilfered from his headmaster’s office. The

6
three of them would tuck away their treasure in the barn’s t­ermite-​
­eaten loft and cuff the legs of their pants, spending the rest of their
day catching frogs in the reeded shallows of the millpond.
They hadn’t been friends. Not in the usual sense of the word, and
certainly not at the start. Wyatt had often thought that if the three of
them had gone to the same school, they likely would have gone out
of their way to avoid crossing paths. She’d have her circle, and they’d
have theirs, and that would be that.
But at Willow Heath, all they’d had was one another.
That wasn’t to say they’d gotten along. Far from it. Their days back
then were filled with petty squabbles and ceaseless bickering, their
elaborate war games often coming to very real blows. J­ames—​­the
schemer of the g­ roup—​­had kept the trio plenty busy, doling out daily
expeditions with all the confidence of a prince. Eager to avoid the
droves of adults, they’d stuff their pockets full of breakfast biscuits and
hike out to the farthest reaches of the farm, spending their mornings
climbing into trees to look for birds’ nests, their afternoons collect-
ing snakeskin sheds from the stony northern ridge. They’d dreamed
together. They’d fought together. And e­ventually—​­
reluctantly—​
­they’d grown together.

The rattle caw of a crow dragged Wyatt back into the present and the
task at hand. Match. Accelerant. Flame. Her childhood in smoke.
She didn’t want to think about Peter and James. Not standing in the
shadow of her father’s house with a drumful of gasoline and a ven-
detta. Not with the memory of her final night at the farm burned into
her brain like a brand.
All these years later, and she could still picture it so clearly: Peter

7
on his knees, his eyes shining red and unrepentant in the e­ clipse-​­dark.
James, spitting blood, the collar of his shirt clutched in his father’s fist.
She couldn’t help but wonder what she’d find, if she were to hike out
to the old wooden chapel where she’d seen them last. Would there be
remnants of their final, brutal moments together? Or had it all been
scrubbed away?
Once, the chilly chantry had been their hideaway. Their sanctuary
and their home base. It sat out on the northernmost acreage, tucked
away in a grove of dying pine. Its western face was bordered in a grave-
yard of crumbling headstones, its steeple crusted blue with lichen, and
they’d loved it because it was t­ heirs—​­a sole pocket of s­ olace in their
fathers’ busy, secret world. Oftentimes, when the days wore on and the
heat became insufferable, they’d stow away in the shadowed ambula-
tory and hold court. Wyatt would climb onto the empty altar and
claim it as her throne, spending the endless afternoons doling out cru-
sades to her dutiful knights.
And there they were again, persistent as h
­ornets—​­
Peter and
James, the memory of them sharp as a sting. She hadn’t spoken to
either of them in five long years. Not since her father dragged her
from the chapel, the echo of his disdain pinging off the trees: “This
has gone quite far enough.”
As hard as she’d worked to forget that night, she still remembered
the way James had bellowed after them, railing against his father’s
restraints. She remembered Peter’s silence, the feel of his stare prick-
ling the back of her neck. And beneath i­t—​­buried deeper s­ till—​­she
remembered the funny pulsing in her veins. The sliding and slipping
of something dark and formidable in her belly.
Her mother had packed Wyatt’s bags the very next morning. She’d

8
been loaded into the car like luggage and shipped to her aunt’s apart-
ment in Salem. Neither Peter nor James had come to say goodbye.
For months, she’d waited. For a call. For a text. For an encoded
letter.
But all she’d gotten was silence.
All Willow Heath had ever brought her was a bellyful of g­ rief—​­a
headful of questions without answers. The sooner she could burn this
place to the ground, the better.
And yet, when she crossed over the threshold and into the house,
it wasn’t with a lit match. Instead, she was drawn toward the white
doorframe where her mother had tracked her yearly growth in neat
pencil notations. Peter’s were knifed in like an afterthought, towering
over her more and more as the summers trickled past. Every now and
again, there was James, his Catholic name penned in a ­private-​­school
longhand.
The feel in her chest was that of stitches ripped clean. There,
beneath her bones, was a wound she thought she’d healed. Raw and
weeping as the day she’d received it. She breathed in deep. It put a
prickle in the back of her throat. When she blinked, her lashes came
away wet.
She’d learned, in the past year, that no good could come of tears.
And so, she didn’t let them fall. Readjusting the canister, she contin-
ued on. This wasn’t a walk down memory l­ane—​­it was a mission. A
final crusade. She moved through the house room by room, kicking
up dust as she went.
By the time she reached her old bedroom, there was a saltwater
sting in her throat that wouldn’t abate. She stood in the silence and
breathed in the mothball camphor of her childhood room. Flooded

9
with lace and taffeta and frumpy, faded florals, the entire space was a
colorful, cluttered mess. The window seat was stuffed with animals,
the bedspread h
­ and-​­quilted from scraps of her baby clothes, and it
would have looked exactly as she’d remembered it if it hadn’t been
good and thoroughly ransacked.
It took her a beat to understand what she was seeing. Someone had
shattered the mirror on her vanity, and broken glass glimmered like
diamonds on the rug. The dresser drawers sat askew, and her jewelry
box had been upended, hinges split and wind‑up ballerina contorted
on her spring. Several bits of old costume jewelry sat strewn about the
room in a wild scattering of beads.
She might have felt violated, had she left anything of value behind.
But she hadn’t. She’d scraped up every last piece of herself and gone.
Whatever the intruder had been looking for, they were welcome to it.
Stepping inside, she plucked the jewelry box off the floor and set it atop
the pillaged dresser. The ballerina listed hopelessly to the left.
An eddy of wind swirled through the room, and Wyatt glanced up
to find the window ajar, the old willow outside her bedroom dripping
with yellow springtime catkins. The sight of it brought forth another
unwanted ­memory—​­deep summer, an ­eleven-​­year-​­old James scaling
the branches under cover of dark.
“My father’s downstairs with the rest of them,” he’d said, climbing
into bed beside her. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“Sacrificing a lamb, probably,” Wyatt returned. “Eating small
children.”
They’d loved to w
­ onder—​­to theorize about what their fathers did,
cloaked and secretive and chanting in the meadows.
“I think it has to do with Peter,” James said, rolling on his side to face

10
her. His eyes had been the color of deep midnight, starlit and secre-
tive, and he always talked like he knew more than he was letting on.
“I heard them whispering about him yesterday.”
“That’s stupid,” Wyatt said. “Nobody is interested in Peter but us.”
The boy in question had appeared not long after, crawling in
through the window as a pale dawn bled into the horizon. Wyatt
lifted her quilt, h
­ alf-​­asleep and shivering as a cool crest of nighttime
air slipped beneath the covers.
“You would tell me, right?” she’d asked as they lay nose to nose in
the dark. “If someone was hurting you?”
But Peter hadn’t answered. He’d already drifted asleep.
When she pulled her bedroom door shut, the click of it reverber-
ated through the empty house like a gunshot. Her stomach sat in
a tight coil, her nerves knotting along her veins. She hadn’t invited
­it—​­this unearthing of things she’d meant to leave buried. She hadn’t
come back to visit with her ghosts—she’d come to set them alight.
As she made her way back downstairs, she paused.
She’d heard it. She was sure of it. One moment the house had been
silent as a tomb, and the next she’d heard her name, drifting up from
the cellar. Across the hall, the door to the stairs sat open. She moved
toward it with caution, gas canister in hand, her heart skipping every
other beat.
“Hello,” she called. “Is someone there?”
When no one answered, she went down. The cellar was long and
low, the poured concrete spiderwebbed in cracks. A chill clung to the
air, and the feel of it pebbled her skin.
The very first thing she noticed were the roots. It looked as though
the white willow outside her bedroom had launched an assault of its

11
own, wooded extremities wending through wide cracks in the foun-
dation. Smaller feeders crept along the wall in a thinning network of
veins. They looked as though they’d been pruned into shape the way
an arborist trained ivy through a pergola. Only, instead of wooden
lattice, the ropy tubers had been carefully braided through a pair of
fat iron chains someone had bolted to the ceiling.
And there, suspended in the shackles, was the second thing she
noticed:
Peter. Not a boy anymore, the way she remembered him, but
grown.
He hung slack in the chains, his arms bracketed overhead, his lean
frame pale as marble. The white mess of his hair curtained his brow,
and he was bare save for a pair of trousers and a round pendant strung
on a thick leather cord.
A sharp spate of horror twisted up and through her. Her vendetta
momentarily forgotten, the canister slammed to the ground at her
feet. Peter’s chin drew up at the sound, and she was met with a stare
the color of liquid silver. A stare she’d done everything she could to
leave behind.
He didn’t look afraid to be there, gaunt and starving and h
­ alf-​
­swallowed in roots. He didn’t look relieved to see her. Instead, his
dark brows tented. The corners of his bloodless mouth turned down
in an imperious frown.
“You finally came home,” he said, and he sounded impatient. “It’s
about time.”

12
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