The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

“Mom! I’m home!” Winnie bangs at the kitchen back door. It is locked, which isn’t a bad thing. Winnie was the one to lock it, after all. But this is a new behavior for her since discovering Erica stole all her stuff, so Winnie is now out here without a key.

Worse, the rain finally broke. No warning, of course, and with all the clouds seemingly gone until halfway on Winnie’s bike ride home. Kapow! Here you go, the forest seemed to say, its thunder a maniacal laugh, and by the time Winnie reached the house, she was soaked through—as was the enormous bear flag still hanging off the front porch.

Winnie imagines she looks as limp and defeated as it does.

“Mom!” Winnie bangs harder. “Let me in! I locked the door and forgot a key!” Winnie knows Mom is home. The Volvo is parked on the front curb, and the light is on in her room.

A crow caws—loudly. Winnie jolts sideways, practically tripping over herself. But it’s just the usual crow that lives on the roof, now perched on the recycling bin. Why it is out in this rain, Winnie can’t say. But she shoos at it.

The crow caws again. Then nips at her, wings flapping.

“Eep!” Winnie shrieks at the same moment the back door finally swings wide. Winnie topples inside. “Did you see that?”

“I did.” Mom slams the door shut before the crow can hop in—because it is literally trying to hop in. “It did that to me earlier! Do you think we should call Animal Control?”

Animal Control is really just Mom’s second cousin Lauren and the five people Lauren gets to help her out with wildlife control. Vermin are vermin everywhere, even if sometimes the rats and raccoons become ghost-rats and ghost-raccoons in Hemlock Falls.

“No, leave Lauren alone.” Winnie peels off her wet training gear. “The crow is probably just hungry.”

“Oh.” Mom blinks. “That’s possible. Now that I’m working fewer hours at the Daughter, I’m not giving him as many hamburgers.” She bites her lip and hurries to a notepad beside the swear jar (currently full after Mom got spectacularly angry over a pot pie that exploded last week). “Crow… food,” she murmurs, pen scratching. “Hey, wait.” Her head snaps up. Winnie is now down to her sports bra and underwear. There’s a small puddle forming around her. “Why was the back door locked? I’ve noticed you’ve been doing that lately—and I’ve almost been locked out twice now too. You know we have a key hidden under the azalea, right?”

“I did not know.” Winnie hastily grabs her wet garments—and then hastily stomps to the laundry room. She can’t exactly say, Well, Mom, I met Dianas in the forest a week ago, and they might try to break in and steal my stuff like Erica did—who, surprise! Is a Diana! As such, I feel that locking our doors would be a smart tactic moving forward. On top of that, since Winnie is the worst liar in the history of bad liars, she is better off trying to deflect right now than respond.

“Did Jay call?”

“No.” Mom appears at the laundry room door. She waggles her eyebrows. “But the night is young.”

“Not for a Lead Hunter.”

“Right.” Mom’s cheeks bunch up. “Tonight’s Friday.”

“Tonight’s Friday.” Winnie sighs, trying not to consider that these flies buzzing in her lungs must have flown in Dad’s lungs too, every Wednesday night when Mom went out on the hunt. She slings open the washer door and dumps in her wet clothes. “Oh hey, how’s the new job? Is being a Wednesday networker like you remember? Also did you get assigned an office? I would have come by to see, but I went to hunter training. And holy whoa, Rachel is so tough.”

“She is,” Mom concurs. Her eyebrows slope in unmasked longing. “How was it? What drills did she do? And did you get a locker?”

As relieved as Winnie is that Mom has completely and totally forgotten about the locked door, she also feels crappy over her choice of subject change. Because Mom’s hunger for her old life isn’t just evident in the acute angles of her brow; it’s audible in her voice, slightly breathy. Falsely nonchalant.

Winnie dumps detergent into the washer. “Have you heard anything from the Council about when you can hunt again? Or is it still vague nothings?”

“Okay, that is way too much powder, my child.” Mom scoots over and tugs the detergent from Winnie’s grasp. “And this should be a delicate wash if you want those leggings to last.” She hip-bumps Winnie aside. “As for the Council, it’s still vague nothings. Soon, Frannie. Don’t get ahead of yourself! You’re four years out of practice, after all .”

Me too, Winnie thinks, recalling how winded she was at training while Rachel’s sweat glands barely switched on.

“Oh, hey,” Mom says, clanging shut the washer door. “Did you go shopping today? I saw a Falls’ Finest bag on the couch.”

“I did.” Winnie grins slyly. “Apparently Leila wants me to look presentable for all these Luminaries coming to town, so I got to buy stuff on the Wednesday credit line.”

“Dang, girl.”

“I know . Want a fashion show?”

“Of course.”

Winnie’s smile stretches wider, and in under a minute, the living room has become a runway. And of course, Mom ooh s and ah s at all the right moments. The rain might be falling, Winnie’s muscles might be hurting, and she might have two pieces of paper covered in invisible ink that still need reading… but right now, Winnie is really, really happy to have this pocket of goodness.

All that’s missing is Dad. He would perch on a couch arm, making his own fashion-related observations while wryly commenting that Mom and Winnie are kind of terrible at this. In conclusion, he would say, take me and Darian with you next time you go shopping. I didn’t win Best Dressed in high school for nothing.

Then Winnie would laugh and say, I do not want to shop with my dad and brother, thanks .

Dad would shake his head in mock seriousness and say, Your loss, Win- Ben. Your loss. And it would be her loss because it has been her loss for four endless years.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

It is almost midnight before Winnie can sneak downstairs and finally decode Erica’s message. She had to wait for Mom to go to bed, then wait another hour to ensure Mom was fully asleep. Winnie herself is half asleep and in her pj’s (sweatpants and an ancient Charmander T-shirt) by the time she reaches the kitchen and lights the gas stove. Just one eye, one flame.

She pulls Erica’s message from her pocket and waves it high, high over the fire. Not too high or there won’t be enough heat. Not too low or the paper will burn…

There it is. The honey caramelizes. Words appear.

Still no news on who the Diana hounds were, and really no news anywhere. There was only that one message in the locket from Friday when I asked for help—and they said “no communication, stay hidden”—and nothing has come since. My guess is the Masquerade is forcing the Dianas to stay away. (Or forcing the Diana Crow if she’s the only one remaining.) So many Luminaries visiting means more chances to get caught!

I do have other news, though. Katie Tuesday had too much hard cider last night, and she let it slip that her cousin Isaac saw Dianas in the forest. “Dead ones,” she said. “And he claims he has pictures.” Fortunately, she thinks he’s just making it up. She also seemed to realize she should not have told me what she did. Isaac could get in huge trouble. Like outcast-level trouble for taking photos.

Katie made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone. Guess I’m already breaking that swear!

I’m going to try to find Isaac. Maybe those pictures will give us clues. Rumor is he eats lunch every day at the Daughter, so I’ll try that tomorrow.

Thank you for going back over your dad’s clues, but you’re right that there doesn’t seem to be anything missing. YARGH. I am getting so frustrated. I hope that book about secret messages arrives soon from Italy. Although at this rate, it’ll just be another dead end. Because of course that’s my

I’ll be busy with all the Luminaries visiting, so I’ll have to write less, I suspect. But I’ll keep checking to see if you’ve left any updates.

Winnie reads Erica’s letter twice. Writing in honey water means the words are big and sloppy, with only a few paragraphs fitting to each page. But despite the mess of their “invisible ink,” it’s still Erica’s handwriting. Familiar after four years.

It used to be that Erica would write Winnie notes all the time. They’d trade letters in class, finding fun ways to fold the pages and secret moments to slide them to each other. No one else could write in cursive, but Erica always used it—like she was some nineteenth-century heiress. She would even end every note with Yours sincerely, Erica Antonia Thursday.

She has not ended this particular letter that way.

Winnie homes in on the part that Erica scratched through. She can just make out the words Because of course that’s my . And although that’s all Winnie can decipher, she can fill in the blank: Because of course that’s my luck.

Erica’s old letters used to be part confessional, part diary. As if only by writing her feelings down could she extract their meaning. Her half sister Jenna wrote songs. Erica wrote letters. And Winnie… well, she drew. Her responses to Erica’s letters would always be just a line or two of text, then she would draw. Cartoons of their teachers. A portrait of Erica’s latest crush (which, gross, was briefly Peter Sunday). A crude diagram of a particularly juicy event in third period. All of it got sketched onto the page—and not only because Winnie enjoyed doing it but because her doodles always made her best friend laugh.

Winnie used to save all of Erica’s notes. She had a giant, family-sized canister that smelled of its first life as an Earl Grey can ( Address me as “my lord.” ). By the time Winnie was twelve, that thing was crammed completely with folded notes. Always, they were addressed to Winona, because Erica loved calling her that.

Dear Winona, guess what Peter said to me today in algebra!

But then Winnie’s world collapsed, Erica walked away, and Winnie threw every single one of Erica’s cursive confessionals into the trash.

Which is where she throws this latest one too. She is a human paper shredder, tearing the pages into smaller and smaller strips as she aims for the back door. Her mind whirls and spins. Isaac Tuesday took a picture, which is both super surprising and absolutely not surprising at all. It’s human nature to want to cling to things—to stuff them into a canister for perusal at a later date. But Erica was also right: that sort of infraction could get him expelled from the Luminaries, a fate which Winnie would rate one out of five stars, thank you.

After a careful pause at the back door to ensure there are no stirrings from upstairs, Winnie eases up the lock. Then eases the doorknob sideways. The hinges creak, the wood resists, but she has done this enough times in the past week to recognize the door’s rhythms. Here, if she lifts just a little on the knob, it’ll squeal less. Here, if she goes a bit slower—

CAW.

Winnie jumps, flinging her shredded letter like confetti at the crow. It still waits atop the garbage, blinking as if to say, Where the hell have you been?

“Shoo,” Winnie hisses at it. “Shoo, shoo. Dammit, shoo! ” The crow does not shoo. It just watches Winnie gather up fallen pieces of paper and then toss them in the blue recycling bin. Then it continues its vigil as she returns to the back door.

“Do not caw at me again.” Winnie waggles her fingers. “If you wake my mom, I will make sure she never gives you another hamburger, do you understand?”

Its eyes glitter—the only part of it that doesn’t absorb light from the kitchen—and Winnie can’t help but think of the cornīx in the forest, with her crow-shaped mask and anatomically incorrect golden beak. Winnie’s fingers close around the doorknob. It’s cold from the night and still wet from the earlier rain.

“I’m going to find him, you know.” Winnie isn’t sure why she feels the need to say this out loud. Only that speaking to this crow sort of feels like speaking to the witch from the forest. “If I have to go over every one of Dad’s clues a hundred times or stalk Isaac Tuesday or… or track down every Diana who ever lived, I am going to find my dad. Just you wait. Soon enough, he’ll be the one standing here giving you hamburgers.”

The crow doesn’t respond to this. It just continues to stare with such unblinking creepiness, it looks more nightmare than natural. Winnie’s hand suddenly aches to draw it, from the gray feathers around its orbital sockets to the tip of its black beak.

Address me as “my lord.”

Winnie pushes back into her house. The crow doesn’t caw again.