“I know it’s you,” I call pleasantly, because she’s a child, and a jumpy one, and I half expect her to run away. I think I’ve lost her when she takes one step in the direction she’d been headed, toward the Outfitters, but suddenly she stops. “Stop hiding,” I say. “Come on out.”

She doesn’t move. I wait a minute, but nothing changes. Either the leaves are shuddering in the breeze, or she is.

I step forward, hands out. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

When I’ve moved closer, I can see her eyes, wide and brown as the mud crusting her lips. There’s always fear there, but now it’s magnified. She’s shaking. I peer through the branches and see something lying on the ground beside her. A familiar powder blue. And blood, now crusted and dark, almost the color of the mud around it. And blond hair, now greasy and tangled and matted with pine needles and leaves. My body.

I gasp. “Vi. What are you doing with that?” But it’s obvious what she is doing. She’s moving it toward the Outfitters, not away from it, not where it can be buried in these vast woods and safely disappear forever. She’s bringing it to where the heart of the search party will be, where it will likely be buzzing with people.

She wants them to find my body.

Maybe she always wanted me dead, too, because one thing is clear. She wants me to stay that way.

Chapter Twenty-One

“What are you doing?” I shout at her, but she doesn’t listen. She grabs handfuls of greasy green hair and begins to drag my lifeless body through the mud. She’s so tiny, but when I reach for her, her elbow jabs between my ribs. It doesn’t hurt, but the little girl’s force shocks me. Her eyes narrow to slits. She opens her mouth only a sliver, and black filth drizzles out. I know that if she could, she’d be hissing at me to get away. I put my hand on hers, trying to pry her fingers up, but the hair is wound tightly through them. All I can manage to do is pull up a few strawlike strands that break apart in my hands. I grab the hair closer to the scalp and yank in the other direction. A whole lock of hair at the crown of the head rips free in a series of sickening pops, like a seam splitting, leaving a pinkish-gray bald spot there. That’s me, I think, wincing at the bloody clump of hair in my hands, and am so shocked for the moment that I’m not prepared for what comes next. She lunges at me, throwing me on my back and knocking all the air out of my lungs. When I recover from the shock, she’s straddling my waist and holding a finger up to her muddy lips. Quiet.

I struggle to move, but it’s useless. I’m pinned to the ground. This little girl, not four feet tall, has pinned me to the ground. She looks over her shoulder and before I can form another plan of escape, I hear the swish of feet along the grass. Someone is coming. I strain to see over the little girl’s shoulder, but can only make out a faint glow. Jack. I swallow when I hear his voice. “I’m going to wring that little brat’s neck.” He stops, points his head to the sky, and shouts, so loud it nearly shakes the trees, “Do you hear that? I’m going to wring your neck!” And then he continues on. Once he’s moved on, I exhale. She moves off of me and bends over the body again.

“Wait,” I say, finally understanding. “You want my body to be found so that my mother can’t bring me back to life. You don’t want Jack to become ruler, either, do you?”

She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head.

I lean over and press my eyes into my knees. “All right. I’m totally confused.”

There’s another sound, nothing more than the crack of a branch in the distance, but Vi startles like a doe, stilling, her eyes filling once more with fear. She looks around and grabs a branch, then begins to scrawl something in the soft dirt. I watch each letter as it’s produced, eager to find some answer to the mystery, but what she writes makes no sense, even when it’s right in front of me, etched in mud.

Not Jack.

“What?” I shrug. “Then who?”

She stands and moves close to me, and for a moment I’m afraid, and the next moment I’m embarrassed for feeling that way in front of an eight-year-old. But I can still feel her inexplicably enormous weight on my waist pushing my back into the ground. When she grabs my hand, not at all gently, I don’t know what to expect. Suddenly the world dims and I’m floating through a blur. When the world comes into focus, after a moment, things look strangely muted again, like they did when I was alive. My body is gone. Vi is gone, although, oddly, I can feel the intense pressure of her hand on mine. I swivel my head around and at once it’s obvious I’m not in the same place I’d been in a second ago. The pines are gone, and now I’m surrounded mostly by leafy trees. The ground is no longer covered in pine needles; instead, I’m up to my ankles in muddy water. There is a smell in the air, like burning coal from a grill. Each way I turn, I see nothing but trees.

Before I can panic, a voice greets my ears. Out of nowhere. I see the girl, Vi, coming down the path, skipping. This time, she’s different. Her pink dress is clean and unwrinkled, her shoes are unscuffed. She is singing a nursery rhyme about a man who lived in the moon, and I know right away that I have slipped into one of my visions. But what a vision! Unlike before, it is so real, I feel I can almost reach out and touch her. She even smiles at me, like she can see me there. But suddenly there is another voice. Angry. “You took them from me!”

Another person comes into view. Lannie, wearing the familiar white dress, but what is unfamiliar is the way her lip curls in hate as she storms after Vi. Vi turns, her eyes wide with fear. “I’ll give them to you,” she says in a voice I don’t recognize. I realize I don’t recognize it because I’ve never heard it, but it’s sweet, soft, and so full of fear I want to grab her and hug her to me. Protect her. She bends over and begins to roll her sock down as Lannie says, “They’re silk stockings, you know. For women. They’re not kneesocks, like babies like you wear.”

I stare at Lannie. I remember how she taunted me before, when we played, but it was always good-natured. It was always just fun, wasn’t it? She’d never done anything horrible to me. Not at all. Then I turn in time to see Vi lift her foot out of her white shoe. She loses her balance and her foot touches the dirty forest floor.

“Look what you’re doing! You’re getting them all muddy! And I just bought them!”

After some more struggling, Vi manages to take both stockings off. She slips her bare feet into her knee-highs and shoes and holds the white stockings out to her sister. Lannie takes a step forward, and for a glimmer of a second before she reaches out, I see the fear in Vi’s face morph into defiance. Vi throws the stockings to the ground and grinds them into the mud with the sole of her shoe. She smiles triumphantly, but it only lasts for a single instant before Lannie begins shrieking loudly enough to pierce eardrums. She lunges at Vi, screaming, “You brat! You’re always in my things!” and it doesn’t help when she reaches for the stockings and slips in the mud. Vi makes the mistake of laughing. I know it is a mistake and yet there is nothing I can do to stop it. I know the outcome.

They struggle in the mud. The little girl is small and bony, not strong and nearly fully grown like Lannie. It’s not long before Lannie has handfuls of her little sister’s long brown hair. They both fall to the ground in a heap of mud and grunts and once-crisp Sunday clothing. Vi presses her muddy palm against her sister’s face, flattening her nose, trying to push her away, but it’s no use. Lannie grabs her by the back of the neck and pushes her down against the forest floor. Harder, harder …