The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

After a day of confrontations, Winnie does not expect that the hardest one will be her mom. After all, it’s Mom. Literally her favorite person in the whole world. Literally her hero. Not a Diana pretending to be a Tuesday, not a Saturday wanting to bully her in the locker room, and not ghosts from the forest wanting to drown her.

Yet here Winnie sits, at the kitchen table, her heart all stutter and no flow. She’s dressed in the green sweater and jeans from the morning, because after counting down the clock with Jay, she took a blessedly hot shower in the locker room and once more became the Face of Hemlock Falls.

Jay, who was still recovering from his lost night in the forest, left at Winnie’s insistence to visit Mario. Because if his transformation is happening more often, maybe the Monday scientist can help.

Please let Mario help.

Classes blurred by, and Winnie felt like a child being carted along at the zoo, forced to eyeball exhibits she didn’t care about while all the critters she did want to see were behind crowds of people taller than her. By the time she reached Sunday dinner, she had vowed seventy-three times she would insist that L.A. should have the Midnight Crown instead. But every time her chance came with Dryden or Marcia, Winnie wussed out.

Now here she is, on her only free two hours, between dinner and the fireworks. She wasted thirty minutes of that time navigating from the Sunday estate to her house—which would have taken even longer if Headmaster Gina hadn’t offered her a ride. Now she has wasted another fifteen minutes waiting on Mom, who had no shift today at the Daughter and so should be home by now.

Winnie debates cracking open a can of ginger ale. Then decides, no. Those are for special occasions only. Then she decides actually, never mind, she does want one because her pesto pasta dinner is threatening to reroute via her esophagus…

And that’s when the engine of the Volvo gurgles outside. A wyrm with indigestion to match Winnie’s. Seconds later, Mom is shoving in through the front door.

Winnie lurches to her feet. Her mouth is dry. Her teeth are like clattering typewriter keys. She kind of wants to run away. But instead, she makes herself sweep up the eight red envelopes on the kitchen table and hold them out like a fortune-teller with tarot cards.

Mom doesn’t notice when she first strides in. She still wears her driving glasses. “Hey, kiddo. How was the dinner at the Sunday… oh.”

Now she’s noticing.

Her face goes pale. Revenant pale. She drops the Volvo keys, and they thwack on the ground by her feet.

“Mom,” Winnie says, enunciating carefully, “what are these?”

“Oh dear.” Mom lets her purse slide off her shoulder to join the keys. “You’ve opened them.”

For half a heartbeat, Winnie feels bad about that. Then she shakes the guilt free. It’s not justified; Mom hid these for four years. “They have my name on them.”

“And… Darian’s cards? He knows too?”

Okay, now Winnie does feel crappy—but again, the emotion grips her for a mere split second before logic barrels in. “Darian doesn’t know these exist, Mom. And I had to open the envelopes because…” Here Winnie wavers. Not because she’s worried about the silencing spell or the factoids that will projectile out, but because in the four years since Dad vanished, Mom and Winnie have never talked about what happened.

Literally, never .

Mom and Darian have talked about it. Darian and Winnie have talked about it. But Mom and Winnie? No way, no how. They haven’t merely snuck around the subject, so much as hammered in stakes, draped tarps, and then unspooled some barbed wire.

Winnie’s teeth click twice. She watches as Mom rubs at her thigh—where an old banshee scar still gleams. She used to scratch at that thing all the time.

“Was Dad framed?” The question is a catapult, taking down barbed wire and a stretch of tarp in one blow.

Some stakes must still be standing, though, because Mom doesn’t answer. Instead, she asks: “What do the cards say?”

This is not what Winnie is expecting. She frowns. “Uh… they wish us happy birthday. Me and Darian.”

“Right.” A nod. Then, with visible yearning widening her pupils, Mom adds: “And nothing else? No other messages?” Unspoken: No messages for me?

Lots of other messages, Winnie thinks. The secret kind, and not for you.

“He drew pictures for Darian. Of the family.”

“Ah.” A protracted sigh slides out. Mom plods to the kitchen table, finally towing off her driving glasses. She sits. Winnie sits. And when Mom holds out a hand, Winnie slides one of Darian’s cards into it.

Paper crinkles as Mom tugs the card from its envelope. It is the most recent of Darian’s birthday cards, so the hand-drawn Winnie is all grown up in it.

“Oh,” Mom says, and her eyes redden as she takes in the sketch of the family. “It’s like the old photo that used to hang in our living room. Except… Bryant aged us up, didn’t he?” The question is rhetorical; Mom’s voice is distant, her gaze lost in an alternate timeline where Dad never disappeared.

Winnie answers anyway: “He talks about that photo in the cards to me.” She taps an envelope, but doesn’t withdraw the card. “But you took the picture down years ago.”

“I did.” Mom’s lips compress. She sets the card onto the table. “It’s in my office now. At the Wednesday estate. Because…” A pause here. A careful chewing that carves crow’s-feet into the skin around her eyes. “Because it’s not… I mean, there isn’t…” Another pause while Mom’s mouth bobs open. Bobs shut.

Winnie can see words want to come, but it’s as if Mom’s lungs are black holes and no air can get past the event horizon.

Except that’s when it happens: enough speed for Mom’s words to break free from gravity. And so many, that once they start coming, they absolutely cannot stop. “Many aquatic nightmares will drag prey to depths where little light penetrates.”

“Huh?”

“When hunters get dragged into the Big Lake by such nightmares, they are often disoriented and lose track of where the surface is.”

“Huh?” Winnie says again—because these words are almost like the entry in the Nightmare Compendium on aquatic nightmares. But not quite. They’re changed enough to scrape at her brain. To push and rub like a jigsaw piece being shoved into the wrong slot.

Winnie’s face scrunches up. For the first time since leaving the Sunday estate, her heart finds a rhythm—and it matches the theme music to Jeopardy! . Doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo!

“To determine which way to swim,” Mom continues, her face cinching up just like Winnie’s—“exhale into your hand and feel which way the bubbles move. Air will always rise. Follow the bubbles, and you can find the surface again.”

Mom leans back. She is finished. She has reached the end of what she wanted to say, and she sets the card on the table like it’s the ace in a winning hand. Except she stares at Winnie with an apologetic smile that says, Don’t worry: I know you won’t understand what I’m saying.

Winnie does understand, though. Sure, it takes her a moment of gawping blankly. Of running Mom’s words through her brain like some internal search engine. Not the Compendium, so what else is there? Then a result appears. Match = 100 percent.

Mom isn’t quoting the Nightmare Compendium. She’s quoting the abridged version that all hunters carry into the forest. Because if there is any tome crammed into Mom’s brain the way the Compendium is crammed into Winnie’s…

Well, the Abridged Hunters’ Compendium would be it.

Little Franny has even more secrets than you do, the Crow said at the carnival, ones Jeremiah could never pry loose.

Yeah, Winnie can see why. Mom is clearly stuck under the same spell Winnie is. It’s incomprehensible. Unexpected. A plot twist even Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote could never have seen coming. But what other explanation is there?

However, there’s one problem: the Crow didn’t seem to know about this. Sure, the Crow could have lied. Pretended she didn’t know Mom was bewitched. But Martedì wants what Winnie wants, and it doesn’t help her to block Winnie from getting there.

Yet if the Crow didn’t put this spell on Mom, then who did? And how the heck is Winnie going to discover anything if she and Mom can’t have a real conversation?

“I understand,” Winnie says. “You… can’t talk about this with me.”

Mom blinks. And Winnie can practically see fresh words trying to escape the event horizon. “How?” Mom manages to croak out. Then: “How do you know?”

Winnie sucks in a shallow breath. She can’t shake her head—although she definitely tries. But it just makes her ears buzz, buzz, hum.

“Who… did this to you?” Winnie grinds out instead.

Now Mom is as stiff and silent as Winnie was, implying she also wants to speak, but the rules of the spell won’t let her.

Until suddenly Mom is moving. Until suddenly she is outright laughing, a high-pitched, almost painful cackle while she waves the card before her. “Four years,” she says between strained giggles. “Four years .” She pushes off her seat and yanks Winnie close for a hug. A weird, uncharacteristic, slightly suffocating bear hug.

“Winnebago,” she says into Winnie’s hair, still laughing—though more quietly now. “I don’t know what to do. I have no idea what to do. It’s been four years, and I am just as lost now as I was then. But hunters injured in the forest must first be checked for signs of blood.” She withdraws, gripping Winnie hard by the biceps. Boring into her with a stare. “And if blood is found, then it must be stanched. Immediately. Otherwise, nightmares will scent it and hunt you down.

“And that’s why we have to be careful, Winnebago: hunters are never, ever safe in Hemlock Falls.”

That night, as Winnie watches fireworks sparkle above the Little Lake, as she smiles and pretends she just loves wearing the heavy Midnight Crown, a crow watches the same fireworks from atop a black-shingled roof. He is cold. He is hungry. He isn’t sure why he has made his home here when there are plenty more comfortable places around town.

But then the woman with sad eyes comes outside and offers him a grilled cheese, and he feels briefly happy. Briefly warm. He really likes melted cheddar on toasted bread.

Meanwhile, miles north in the forest that never sleeps, a spell stirs. It is hungry too, and this is not the sort of hunger that cheddar will ever satisfy. Pure Heart. Trust the Pure Heart .

The Whisperer goes hunting.