The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Winnie learned her lesson after Erica broke into her house: never keep your musings in physical form. Handwritten thoughts can be stolen; sketched-out ideas can be used against you. So last week, after their meeting in the cabin, Winnie acquired a small marker board and as fine-tipped a dry-erase pen as she could find. Now, she sits at her desk in her bedroom, a lamp her only illumination against the night’s shadows outside, and she draws out what she knows. Literally, she draws it as if she were writing back to Erica.

Her eyelids hang heavy. Her desk wobbles, a sign she needs to shove a new napkin under the left leg. And she desperately misses the feel of ink or graphite against paper; a marker is just too slippery against this laminate coating.

Still: safety first.

Winnie sketches out a scorpion. It might represent Isaac Tuesday or might represent Jeremiah. She hasn’t decided yet.

Next, she draws nodding wakerobins, Trillium flexipes, fashioning each petal into the circle of a Venn diagram. Starting with the outer circles, she adds words: Witches, Winnie, Spell . Then she moves to the overlap sections: Source, Sadhuzag, Dad . Finally, she lands on the heart of it. The pistil.

WHISPERER.

This diagram, which she first made nine days ago, hasn’t changed at all. But now, she knows who one of the witches is (Erica) and she knows there’s at least one more witch in Hemlock Falls, hiding behind a crow mask. She also knows Dad was wrapped up with that Crow… but not guilty. He was simply in the Crow’s way, so she took him out.

Winnie doesn’t mean to fall asleep this way. She is just going to lay her head on her arms for a few minutes and rest her eyes. Then she’ll get back to drawing. She needs to find more clues.

She startles when a knock sounds at the window. She has no idea what time it is or how long she has been draped here. Her muscles groan; her mouth tastes like dry-erase particles.

Another knock. Winnie snaps toward the curtain, but no shapes are visible. No hints of light to tell her the time outside. She flips off her desk lamp. Darkness falls—a pallid, blue darkness that sings of clouded dawn. One heartbeat passes. Two.

She knows who she wants to find at the window… and she knows who she fears might actually be there.

Another knock. Winnie’s lens-less eyes are slowly adjusting to the shadows; a figure waits. And it’s Jay—it has to be Jay. That athletic slant, that limber crouch.

Her breath whooshes out. She dives for the window, and in under a second, her curtain is drawn back…

And there he is, rain misting over him as he huddles beside the glass. Winnie hauls open the window and reels Jay inside. If he is surprised by the ferocity of her movements, he doesn’t show it. He simply climbs in, as quietly and gracefully as a sparrow. He wears his usual buffalo flannel and jeans. Motorcycle boots too, with his hair wet from rain. And perhaps from a shower as well, since bergamot and lime radiate off him.

“The hunt,” Winnie begins.

Jay shakes his head. “No.” He doesn’t want to talk about it.

So she replies: “Okay.” Jay might keep all his secrets tucked away, he might live inside his head, quiet as the forest at midnight, but now she understands why. Now she sees the broken heart of him.

So Winnie slides her arms around Jay’s waist instead of speaking. Here are the planes of his back, the muscled shape of his shoulder blades—his latissimus, his trapezius. Her fingers want to confirm he is intact. No injuries, no pain points, no scars. He survived the hunt. He survived the hunt.

As she touches him, his eyes rove over her face. His pupils swallow up the lambent gray. “Winnie,” he murmurs. “May I—”

“Yes,” she answers before he can finish.

His lips press to hers. Or maybe her lips press to his. Either way, all thoughts of the hunt fling out the window. Jay tastes like toothpaste and rain. Like spring and early mornings. His flannel is wet from the storm. His damp jeans rub against her sweatpants. His fingers twine in her hair.

He survived the hunt. He survived the hunt.

They kiss harder, an urgency taking hold. Jay’s adrenaline from a night in the forest—it has to go somewhere, and Winnie is more than happy to receive it. She digs her fingers into his back and feels as he pushes, pushes until she has reached her desk. Until he has lifted her up so she can sit on the edge and wrap her legs around him.

Vaguely Winnie wonders if she’s smearing all her marker sketches with her butt… Then she decides she doesn’t really care. Venn diagrams are so deeply unimportant compared to this boy with his teeth and his lips and his need.

Until abruptly Jay pulls away. “Jesus, Winnie.” His chest is heaving, as if he just emerged from a dive beneath the falls. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, also panting. Her heart hammers at double speed. Her vision spins, and dawn shadows swirl through her room like mist. Her legs release Jay, though not her fingers. She keeps her hands on his hips, her grip curled into his flannel.

He glances down and notices the marker board under her butt. “Oh crap. I messed up your drawings.”

“It’s fine.” She lifts upward and slides out the marker board. “There’s nothing new on here.” She flips it forward so Jay can see, and he takes it in with eyes that now match the morning.

An uncanny stillness settles over him, murmuring of something not quite human. His lips are swollen. His face is flushed. Then he taps at the half-smeared word Witches . “Anything new from Erica?”

“Is that your casual way of asking if I still trust her?”

A faint wince. “Am I that obvious?”

“No, you’re smart. One of us needs to not let Wednesday glasses turn their vision loyalty green.”

Now Jay smiles, and he pulls Winnie to him so he can rest his chin on her head. “For the record, Winnie, I like your loyalty. And everything else about you too.”

“But?” she asks.

“No buts.” He laughs. “At least not with regards to you. But Erica… You’re right I’m still worried about her.”

“Still worried or more worried?”

He sighs. Then kisses the top of Winnie’s head before pulling away. His fingers lace through hers. He draws her to the bed. The springs squeak. And here, with the pale light of a rising sun to creep through the curtains, Jay looks less nightmare and more boy.

“I’ve been digging through Grayson’s stuff,” he tells her. “Anything he left behind in his office… which is now my office.” Jay shakes his head. “There’s not much useful. I found all the clan banners he stole—three of which are Saturday banners because I guess he just thought it was hilarious to piss off Dryden.”

“I mean, it is hilarious,” Winnie says.

And Jay huffs one of his quiet laughs. “True. But I also found this.” He shifts on the bed, creasing the blanket’s sunflowers into yellow smears while he withdraws several folded papers from his back pocket. “These are just the first pages, but look. They’re all from Monday research papers on werewolves.”

“Oh.” Winnie takes the pages and frowns at diagrams and tiny print, at theories and descriptions of werewolves from around the world. “You think… he knew what you are?”

Jay shrugs—but it’s a falsely casual movement. “Maybe. Remember all that nightmare contraband you found in the office? The vampira blood and the mist we didn’t understand? Well, I didn’t collect most of that stuff. Grayson did.”

“So maybe he was watching out for you? Protecting you, even?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“He was a really good friend, Jay.”

Jay wets his lips. He doesn’t look at Winnie.

“It’s all right to grieve him.”

“It’s not that. I mean, that’s not the only thing bothering me. I just wish I could remember what happens in the forest when I turn, you know? Then I’d know if Grayson was helping me or not. I’d know what really happened that night when the Whisperer killed him.”

Winnie sets the Xeroxed pages on her lap. Then she takes Jay’s hands back into hers. They’re cold. “When I jumped off the waterfall, I couldn’t remember what happened for almost two weeks. And that hole—that missing time… It was awful.” She shudders. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to have hundreds of those holes you can’t fill.”

Jay doesn’t answer.

“I’m here for you—”

“Yep.” He pulls away. Springs squeak. Then his face pinches up and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Win. I know we said no more hiding things from each other. I’m just… I’m not ready to think about this stuff. Or Grayson.”

“Okay.”

“But I’ll keep looking in the office. See if there’s anything else…” A yawn takes over now. “… that might be useful.” He yawns again, a full-bodied unfurling that sends his arms up and his back arching.

It’s a pose that makes Winnie want to kiss his rib cage, his abdomen, his chest.

She very pointedly does not. And once Jay has folded back over, she says: “Thank you for looking, Jay.”

“You don’t need to thank me. It’s not like I’ve found anything useful.”

“But you’re helping me. Even though you don’t trust Erica—and that means a lot.”

He shifts toward her, and Winnie thinks how very unsparing this light is. He’s so clearly exhausted, so clearly hunted. She wishes she could make it better; she wishes she could cure the nightmare curse that suddenly struck him four years ago; and she wishes she could bring his friend back from the Whisperer who should never have claimed him.

Instead, Winnie kisses Jay. You are safe here, she wants her lips to say. Her hands too as they rise to cup his face. I won’t let the nightmares have you.

Jay returns the kiss. Gentle, almost ghostly. Gone is the urgency from before. His touch is softer, matching the storm outside as it fades to spindrift. Until eventually they lie down. Until eventually, Winnie swivels so her back presses against Jay’s chest. His arms wrap around her, and they fall asleep.

A lost nightmare from the forest.

And the hunter who found him.