Thirteen-year-old Nina starts at a new school and finds that the old oak in the yard is hiding something far stranger than rumours suggest.
Nina stopped dead at the edge of the schoolyard.
The oak tree rose above Primary School 17 like it had grown there to keep the building in its grip. Its branches spread so wide they swallowed half the yard in shade, even though the morning was bright. The bark was split and knotted, scarred with pale grooves that looked disturbingly like claw marks. Nina had seen old trees before. Nothing about this one felt ordinary.
Around her, other new students crowded close to the trunk, half of them trying to film the tree for their feeds. One boy dared another to touch it. A girl laughed too loudly, as if that would make the place less unsettling. Nina kept her distance and slipped her hand into her pocket, closing her fingers around the small notebook she always carried. Lately, whenever she wrote down something strange, the strangeness seemed to come closer.
"It gives me the creeps," said Ala, dropping onto the bench beside her like they had known each other longer than five minutes. She nodded at the oak, trying for casual and missing by a mile. "People say someone disappeared under it once. On the summer solstice. Total nonsense, probably."
"Probably," Nina said, though the word tasted wrong.
The first bell rang.
Not for history, or maths, or any of the normal things Nina had prepared herself for. On the schedule pinned outside Room 207, the lesson was listed as Practical Magic. She stared at it long enough to wonder if the school was playing some kind of joke on the new students. Then the classroom door opened, and the man waiting inside looked serious enough to make the joke die on her tongue.
Mr Ruczaj was tall and narrow, with dark eyes that seemed to notice everything at once. He smiled as the class settled into their seats, but it did not soften his face.
"Welcome to the Shadows," he said. "Today, you will learn how to recognise what is hidden. And if you are unlucky, what is hidden will recognise you."
A sharp sting ran through Nina's fingers. She looked down. A line had appeared in her notebook, written in a hand that was not hers:
Watch out for the shadow under the oak tree.
Nina's breath caught. The room had gone strangely quiet. Even the old speakers crackled softer now, hissing with something like distant wind through leaves. Then the sunlight at the back of the classroom faltered. The shadow cast by the oak tree outside stretched across the window, slipping over the floorboards as if it had a mind of its own.
It moved past the desks.
It climbed the wall.
And then, before Nina could even stand, it lifted itself into the shape of a hand and reached straight toward her.