The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

The hot room sounds so much nicer than it actually is. You might imagine a sauna or steam room—and that’s a start. But now ratchet up the heat and steam to Level Relentless, and instead of a spa with cucumbers for your eyes, imagine an underground maze where everyone wants to destroy you.

Filled with columns, walls, ditches, mounds, and a long pool of varying depths, the hot room is meant to mimic the forest when the nightly mist rises. It is, in other words, meant to mimic hell.

Winnie hasn’t entered the maze in over four years, and back then, she and her fellow sixth graders only ever did the most basic of maneuvers to acclimate themselves to the steam.

There’s almost no light beyond five white bulbs spaced throughout, and the obstacles are changed weekly so no one can memorize the layout. Sometimes the classes split into teams, sometimes it’s every hunter for themself. Last Hunter Standing, it’s called, and the goal is to eliminate all other students by ripping off their flags.

That’s the game today, and Winnie is going to win. She couldn’t pound in the signora’s teeth, but she can probably get in a few swings at L.A. Come at me, she thinks as she navigates the outdoor obstacle course into the woods behind the Sunday estate. Back me into a corner, L.A. I dare you. The same goes for the rest of the class too. They don’t get to watch Winnie get bullied like it’s Shakespeare in the Locker Room.

Steam drifts out of the mausoleum-like entrance to the hot room. Trees cast shadows. Winnie forces herself to drop low and take each step into the darkness slowly. Because she’s last to arrive, there will inevitably be an ambush at the bottom of these stairs—and those seniors will inevitably be expecting Winnie’s head high. So if she’s really quiet and really low, she should be able to slip right under.

If she’s unlucky… well, some grappling might be in her near future. But that still won’t compare to getting stuck in the middle of a vampira horde during the real forest mist, and Winnie doesn’t care how many Saturdays go full alpha-hole on her. Divas are easier to take down than a sadhuzag.

The intensity of the steam rolls over Winnie, thick and hot. It steals her sight and forces her to rely on senses she didn’t know she had until that night on her first trial a month ago. She does have those senses, though, and if the run from the carnival was a cardiac warm-up, then the obstacle course toggled all her reflexes to On.

A kiss of cold hits her skin. She hears a scrape like shifting fabric. The steam thickens against her lips.

Winnie scoots off the final step and drops to the concrete floor—right as two arms sling out where her torso was. A red flag is hanging at eye level; Winnie rips off the flag and sidles left, searching for a wall she can use both as cover and guidance. She never even sees a face.

The sounds of remaining ambushers pinball from behind. Grunts. A Hey, no fingernails! And a What the hell, bro? It’s distracting—both for Winnie and the girl she almost runs into: Clarissa Thursday, a second cousin to Erica, who is now materializing in the steam.

“Sorry,” Clarissa says, and she charges Winnie with the grace of a ballerina and speed of a banshee.

But Winnie really, really has something to prove, and for all Clarissa’s undeniable skills, she’s not an actual banshee. Winnie’s muscles move without command. She punches upward with both hands, knocking Clarissa’s outstretched arms. Then she whirls in close, snatches off Clarissa’s orange flag, and keeps on moving.

Clarissa squeals, a sound both frustrated and delighted. It makes Winnie smile. Number of flags grabbed a month ago? Zero. Number of flags grabbed now? Two and counting.

Winnie passes three more Luminaries, but they never realize she’s there before she has their flags. And with each new ribbon to shove into her pocket, the more Winnie is convinced she’s going to win this. She’s going to be the last hunter standing, and L.A. Saturday can savor the taste of defeat.

Boohoo, I got your Midnight Crown and your flag, Louisa Anne.

Winnie moves around a column, under a low archway, and over two “streams” made of rustling plastic—the second of which Winnie doesn’t quite avoid. Two Luminaries leap at her. One wears a yellow flag, the other a green, and Winnie ducks behind the yellow right as the green lunges.

They take each other down, which Winnie derives great pleasure from, even if it isn’t sportsmanlike. And she especially enjoys plucking off both their flags while they’re tussling. She slinks back into the steam before they can stop her. Obscenities chase behind.

Winnie’s grin expands, steam pushing into her mouth and between her teeth. Eventually she’ll have to meet L.A., and she can’t wait for that moment to come. Don’t fuck with Wolf Girl, indeed.

Winnie reaches the central pool. It is the one element of the hot room that never changes, its waters supposedly kept the same temperature as the shallows of the Big Lake. The air breathes differently here, slightly cooler, slightly thinner, and she senses no movement in the steam that beads on her skin. She circles the pool, moving cautiously. No one is here, leaving her to wonder if maybe she’s already the last hunter standing—if maybe she got L.A.’s flag without realizing it.

She hopes not. She really wants to see L.A.’s face when she clobbers her.

At the pool’s end, a column blocks Winnie’s way. She can continue left, skirting dangerously close to the pool’s edge, or she can go right—the safer option, so long as no one else is around.

She decides to risk left. Cold air tickles her scarred arm. She forgot to roll down the sleeve. Her toes inch along a narrow lip beside the water. Scoot. Slide. Scoot. Slide.

She realizes half a second too late that someone else has had the same idea. Their feet touch. Then their hands. Then they’re both grappling for each other’s flags. Winnie can’t even see what color it is; she doesn’t care. She’s not going down.

Except that right as she does manage to find the flag—gray, it’s gray—her feet slip. She loses her balance. She falls backward into the pool. Her body crashes under the cold, lungs expelling every drop of air.

And Winnie knows right away that she’s in trouble.

It’s an atavistic terror that electrifies her muscles, her brain. Not again, it seems to say. Not these ghosts again. She is back beneath the falls, sinking and numb. She trusted the forest, and it only froze her in return. Her life is plucking away from her.

She thrashes, trying to swim, but the green dress is tangled around her like kelp that will never release.

No. Not the green dress. You’re in the hot room.

Her body doesn’t care. It’s trapped under the falls, while water roars. She is so cold. She is so numb. Why did she trust the forest? The Whisperer is coming. The Pure Heart can’t save her. She didn’t find the source, and now everyone in Hemlock Falls will die like Grayson did—

“Winnie,” someone shouts at her. “Winnie, you’re okay. Winnie, Winnie.” They are shaking her, and she is no longer submerged. She’s not even in the water, but draped on the inclined exit at the pool’s other side. Someone has hauled her all the way here. They drip water onto her, their face backlit by a foggy light bulb. “Winnie, you’re okay. You’re okay. Hey, it’s me, Win. It’s just me.”

Bergamot and lime. It’s Jay. Always Jay.

“You’re here,” she chokes out, trying to sit up. But Jay is tugging her too tightly against him.

“I’m sorry I pushed you in,” he says into her wet hair. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“You’re here,” she repeats. And this time, she digs her forehead into his shoulder. He is so warm. “Is there… anyone else left?”

“I doubt it. You’re the first person I’ve run into in a while. And again,” he insists, “I didn’t know it was you.”

“I believe you.” She is shivering. “D-do you know what time it is?”

He shifts, as if to study his dad’s watch in the darkness. At this angle, he is a black-and-white sketch with shadow eyes and wet-dark hair. “It’s half past.”

Winnie groans. That means there’s still thirty minutes left in class. “I can’t do it, Jay. I can’t go back out there and deal with everyone.”

A zipper hisses. Then Jay’s hoodie—wet, but warm—drapes over her, followed by his arms again. Safe, certain. One part of the forest she can always trust.

“And you don’t have to go back out there. We can leave, Winnie. Just walk out of here. There’s a door nearby. It leads to a pump room we can use to sneak out.”

“Spoken like someone who has used this tactic before.”

He doesn’t deny it. Just explains: “Grayson showed it to me a while ago. Probably because he… knew what I was. What I am.”

Winnie sighs. A sharp, cold thing. Grayson Friday continues to prove a mystery. He was a hard person to describe, Darian once said about him. And at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone really knew him.

As much as Winnie would like to use Grayson’s private escape right now, she knows she can’t abandon the blue schedule; she knows she can’t skip all the tasks she has been set as the Midnight Crown. For all the secrets Mom might be hiding, she is still the most important person in Winnie’s life.

“I’ll just run out the clock in here,” she murmurs. “And you can explain to me why you missed your own show last night. You were at the Tuesday estate? Is that right?”

“Ah.” Jay hugs her more tightly against him—like he’s the one who’s afraid the forest will claim him. His nose presses into her wet hair. “It was a long night, Win. And as usual, I can’t remember a thing.”

Another cold, sharp sigh levers up from Winnie’s abdomen. “It’s happening more often, isn’t it, Jay?”

“Yeah.” A nod. Another squeeze. “Yeah, it is. And for longer times too. I barely made it out of the Tuesday estate before the mutation took hold. What happens if I change while other people are around me, Win? Then what? What do I do ?”

You die, she thinks. But she doesn’t say this out loud because Jay already knows this is the answer. Witches, werewolves, Wednesdays. Three petals, four petals, messages in honey ink, and nothing that Winnie can find to connect them all.

She shivers again. Then kisses Jay’s neck. Just a gentle pressure below his ear to remind herself that he is real, he is here, and that the shadows of the forest haven’t claimed either of them quite yet.