Wildwood Whispers Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Willa Reece

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover photographs by Mike Heath, Arcangel, Getty Images, and Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: August 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Reece, Willa, author.

  Title: Wildwood whispers / Willa Reece.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Redhook, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020047787 | ISBN 9780316591768 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316591782 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A69775 W55 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047787

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-59176-8 (hardcover), 978-0-316-59178-2 (ebook)

  E3-20210603-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  For Todd

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  Prologue

  April 2009

  I was prepared.

  I was always prepared.

  Before recess, I opened my locker and felt the bottom of the Wonder Woman book bag hanging on the hook. The lumps created by several tightly rolled T-shirts, shorts and pairs of underwear made me feel better. In another locker, one hall away from mine, Sarah’s book bag was also carefully packed.

  I wished I could check it too, even though I already had before we left our foster home that morning.

  Recess was never okay. And it was even worse now that I had a “sister” to protect. Bullies seemed to know when you didn’t have adult backup. No loving mom or dad who would swoop down and save you if things went south.

  I had been saving myself for a long time. Unlike Sarah, I’d been in the system for as long as I could remember. I pulled my hand back from the book bag and slammed the locker door harder than I should have. The bang sounded loud even in a hallway full of students rushing toward the one free half hour out of the day. I didn’t look up. I cringed inside and forced my fists to relax. I laid my palms flat on the cool, dented metal of the closed locker as if I could shush it now. Too late. I’d called attention to myself. It felt like a hundred sets of eyes were on my bowed back.

  So, I did what I had to do.

  I turned, straightened my spine, and squared my shoulders.

  I was already over five feet five inches tall. Bigger than most of the kids in my grade. And on my head was a wild cap of muddy brown curls that added a couple more inches to that. Tall or not, the whole world still considered me just a kid. I’m ancient only on the inside. I met the first set of staring eyes I came to and locked on with my best “What are you looking at?” face. The boy looked away. I did that several more times until the whole crowd moved on.

  Recess was a daily challenge I faced with the grim determination of a soldier marching onto the battlefield. Before Sarah, I could always find a quiet corner, and my size made me less likely to become a target. Sure, there were rumors about me. Bored people can make up some crazy shit. But teachers talk too and sometimes their voices carry between districts.

  I hadn’t always known to lay low.

  The system didn’t like fighters. It had taken me eleven years to learn that. I kept our book bags packed because flight was best. Bugging out instead of hitting back was always the plan. Caseworkers liked that. Runners got extra counseling. Different placements. Sympathy from overwhelmed men and women “just trying to do their jobs.” Sarah didn’t understand all the tricky stuff yet. She was a year older than me, but inexperienced in spite of what she’d been through.

  If you didn’t contribute to the blood and bruises, you were much better off.

  Sarah Ross had come into the foster care system in Richmond from far away. She spoke like every word was a song and she didn’t know anything about bullies or living in the city. She was small and so vulnerable my fists clenched again thinking about it.

  She was the first best friend I’d ever had. Only I knew her real last name. To everyone else she was a “Smith” like me.

  Three months ago I’d been Jane Smith. No name. No family. No hope that anyone would adopt a girl with a record of anger management issues. But Sarah didn’t care that I had been born a fighter into an unfair world that made me use my fists and punished me for using them at the same time. Maybe she even liked it a little. My hot anger was the opposite of Sarah’s icy grief. Our friendship had been instant. We’d pinky sworn our sisterhood at midnight by the glow of a superhero night-light.

  Sarah had given me the name Mel the very next day. And I had run with it, feeling more like a Mel than I ever had a Jane.

  “Sarah’s trapped at the top of the monkey bars and Jason is posting upskirt shots online,” a girl shouted at me as I exited the building and started to look around. Wendy Solomon sounded more pleased than upset. As if recess was much more fun with a little torture and sexual harassment going on.

  Most of the students had abandoned whatever they’d been doing to gather in a ring around the monkey bars, where the biggest kid in school, even bigger than me, had cornered Sarah.

  Sarah was quiet and peaceful and way too old for playground equipment, but she c
ould never lay low when the sun was high and the playground was open. Something about the outdoors drew her as if every scrubby blade of grass was a miracle. Sarah never seemed to notice the noise of traffic or the pollution haze across the sky. Or the bullies that stalked her because they liked her rounded shoulders and hollow eyes.

  I didn’t pause. I didn’t even consider walking to the other side of the playground where an empty bench might help me to stay out of it. I wouldn’t leave Sarah to the small huddle of teachers near the basketball court where a weed-clogged fence gave them cover to smoke. Not even when butting in would further wreck my file.

  But I didn’t run. I walked, as carefully as I could, across the playground. No one paid me much attention. Rumors were one thing. Personal experience another. I’d never scrapped at recess here. I’d avoided bullies and pretended to be chill.

  Only Sarah knew better. And right now, only Sarah watched me head in her direction.

  I could imagine how it had all gone down. The spring day was warm and clear. Butterflies flitted over the dandelions that poorly paid landscapers hadn’t even bothered to poison and kill. Sarah had eagerly run outside while I was dragging my feet. She’d scrambled up to the top of the monkey bars to get even closer to the white cottony clouds she loved to watch.

  And Jason Mews had been right behind her.

  I should have rushed outside. I should have been there to guard the ladder and protect my friend from pervs.

  I was close enough now to see Sarah’s red eyes and flushed cheeks. I could see her white-knuckled grip on the rusty metal bars and the sheen of tears on her face. And the hot, hard knot of anger that always wrapped around my insides, squeezing my lungs and holding me back, broke loose and set me free.

  I ran.

  I ran at Jason and slammed into him with the force and fury of ten thousand times when I’d wanted to but hadn’t. He was knocked off his feet and his cell phone flew from his fingers. It fell in the mulch beneath Sarah, and my foot came down on the screen, hard, once, then twice, while Jason caught his breath.

  “Mel,” Sarah said. Her voice trembled, but it sounded hopeful and relieved.

  I needed to warn her that this wasn’t going to end well. The system didn’t favor heroes. Victims were better, quieter, more easily managed. But, before I could put the complicated lesson into words, Jason swung out a long leg and kicked me off my feet. I went down with a thud into the mulch that was so thinly spread hard-packed earth showed in a bunch of places.

  My chin found one of the bare spots and pain exploded in bright flashes behind my eyes. I tasted blood and gasped its sickly metallic flavor down my throat. I hated that taste. I always hated it. The taste of blood was usually followed by worse things.

  “What? You the only one that can peek at the hillbilly’s pink lace, Ankle Bracelet?” Jason asked.

  I’d never had to wear a juvenile court monitor, but rumors had inspired the nickname and I hadn’t bothered to deny it. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I’d figured it would be true, sooner or later. Laying low was hard.

  I gagged and spit blood into the dirt. Kids were yelling now. Some encouraged Jason to kick me again. Their shouts somehow hurt me more than the fall had. Others warned the teachers were coming. I ignored them. I also ignored the pain. I grabbed two fistfuls of mulch and pushed myself up on my knees.

  “Stay down, Ankle Bracelet,” Jason warned, then he turned away from me to clown with his friends as if he was already sure I would listen.

  Sarah and I were only foster kids. And no one was going to save us.

  Staying down would have been the right thing to do. Oops. I fell. Just an accident. No reason for a teacher to get involved. So far, I’d only shoved a much bigger kid. Stomped his phone. Big deal. There was no blood on him. No bruises. Me being the bloody one might actually work in my favor. The problem was he deserved so much more. Especially when I glanced back at him and saw him still looking up Sarah’s dress.

  I ignored his warning. My jaw ached, but I struggled back to my feet. Handfuls of mulch made my fists bigger.

  The problem with lying low was that bullies like Jason deserved to bleed.

  “They’re pink, guys. And the elastic is torn and hanging out on one leg,” Jason said, then he laughed. Because poor kids were funny. Because if he didn’t mock and laugh and hurt someone else bad stuff might happen to him too. He was cruel because if he was kind he might feel our pain. Some of his friends in the crowd laughed and shouted nasty suggestions, but others got really quiet because they had seen me stand.

  The first teacher was pushing her way through the students who had ringed the scene when Jason turned back toward me, warned something was up by stares and gestures. I didn’t hesitate. This chance couldn’t be lost. He was bigger, but I was madder. I put all my weight behind the swing. Blood flew from Jason’s busted lip as my knuckles connected with his smirking face. His body spun halfway around before he fell, hard, knocked off his feet. Mulch scattered in a satisfying spray as he came to a rest. Stunned. The whole playground was stunned. Except for Sarah, who had seen the blow coming from a hundred yards away.

  The momentum of my swing carried me forward and into the teacher’s arms as she burst through the crowd to join us under the monkey bars. The look on Ms. Tatum’s face pretty much confirmed my philosophy about lying low, but I focused on Sarah instead. My best friend. My sister. Family. She looked down at me from her perch with the first huge grin I’d ever seen on her face. The smile made her seem less pale. Like okay could be possible if we held on to each other. Jason howled curses from the ground at my feet. Ms. Tatum’s hands closed cruelly around my upper arms. But our bug-out backpacks waited in our lockers and Sarah was smiling.

  I’d always been a fighter.

  But I hadn’t always known family was worth fighting for.

  April 2019

  Mel didn’t wear perfume. She didn’t have to. Even though her chestnut curls were always kept back with strong clips and a perky visor with the coffee chain’s logo on it, the scent of coffee permeated her hair and skin and clothes. No wonder. She worked, constantly, picking up extra shifts and volunteering for overtime and inventory because nursing school wasn’t cheap. Sarah had always wanted to be a nurse.

  Nearly always.

  She could remember a time when she’d dreamed a different sort of dream. Growing up in the western Virginia mountains with her herbalist mother, she’d always assumed she would be a healer. She shied away from thinking about why that goal had morphed into another, with Mel’s help.

  Sarah breathed deeply of Mel’s comforting coffee scent.

  She could never go home again. At least not while she was living. It wasn’t safe. One day, she would be buried there. With her mother. Until then, she would learn to heal in more modern ways.

  The fragrance of Mel’s job filled the apartment that morning as she drank the cup of herbal tea Sarah had made her. Beside her cup, nothing but crumbs were left of the toast Sarah had also made, but she knew better than to try to make her eat more. Mel’s budget consciousness begrudged every piece of her own toast consumption while usually urging Sarah to eat more than her share.

  Never had an actual sister worried over a sibling the way Mel worried over Sarah. At first, it had been a relief to accept Mel’s caretaking. When the loss of her mother had been sharp and fresh. When the new sights and sounds and expectations in the city were so different from the hushed world of the whispering woods where she’d grown up.

  Mel had pushed back, literally, against the bullies who would mock Sarah’s accent or her backwoods ways. Against the people who would have preyed on her because she didn’t know anything about surviving as an orphan and she’d been so slammed by loss she’d been too slow to learn. She’d come to the Richmond Children’s Home completely wrecked by the ruin of the only life she’d ever known.

  And Mel had caught her as she was falling, before she could hit the ground.

  Never mind that Mel, as an unplaceable foster
kid, had her own problems. She had taken Sarah under her wing and taken care of everything from that moment on. And Sarah had let her. Until now. After six months of nursing school, Sarah realized that Mel wasn’t going to sign up for classes too, like she’d promised. She wasn’t going to stop making do with less food, less clothing, less of everything, so that Sarah could have more.

  Not unless Sarah forced her to.

  A daunting thought. No one forced Mel to do anything she didn’t want to do. She was ever and always immovable. Like the sun… or maybe more like the moon. Definitely more night than day. Sarah brought the warmth to the tiny family they’d made. With tea and crotchet. With houseplants and silly texts to try to make Mel smile. Mel brought the predictable power of the tides. She propelled their lives, but always for Sarah, never for herself. Only Sarah knew that there was more to Mel, beneath the work and worry.

  “You need more time away from the coffee shop,” Sarah said. Mel’s eyelids drooped with exhaustion, but her mouth still managed to smirk at the very idea of rest.

  “I’ll sleep all afternoon. I promise,” Mel said. She’d tossed the hated visor on the table beside her plate and now she pulled the clips from her hair. They often caused her to have headaches. She pushed her hands into her hair to massage her scalp, probably dealing silently with one now rather than complain about it.

  But Sarah often knew things others didn’t know.

  For instance, she knew that Mel wasn’t meant to brew coffee for the rest of her days. She just didn’t know how to make her shift her focus from caretaker to taking care of herself.

  “They’ll call you in early. And you’ll go because I won’t be here to stop you,” Sarah said. Mel shrugged and sipped some more tea, not bothering to deny it.

  She wanted to tell Mel that trouble was brewing. Beyond Mel’s workaholic ways, there was something else nibbling at the edges of Sarah’s senses. A warning. She heard it in the call of the doves on the ledges outside their apartment windows. She heard it in the wind whistling through the trees on the street. There was still some nature in her life and Sarah couldn’t ignore what it was trying to say. But she wasn’t sure how to convey this knowing to Mel without adding to the already heavy burdens she was determined to carry on her strong shoulders.