The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 29

CHAPTER 29

Hotspot: These extensions of the sleeping spirit’s domain can appear anywhere within several miles outside the spirits’ typical boundaries. Like mushrooms that have fungal connections extending and branching below the earth’s surface, the spirits also grow and reach and spread.

Mist rolls toward Winnie like the ash from a volcanic eruption. It comes from the gallery’s end—from the window where the golden arrow appeared. Hot and magicked and unstoppable. It engulfs the room so fast, she can do nothing but let it come for her.

The heat shears her skin. Her eyesight vanishes. And deep, deep inside her, a hysterical version of Winnie laughs like a hidebehind. Because the Sundays think their hot room is like this ? How adorable, how precious. They clearly know nothing about what the forest can really do.

Hidebehind, Winnie’s inner Compendium spurts. These thin daywalkers are native only to the northernmost spirit forest of the Americas. They stalk prey by hiding behind trees, and the only warning of an attack is the high-pitched laughter emitted when they pounce.

“Winnie!” she hears Jay roar from behind. “I’m coming!”

Then there he is, an inhuman blur morphing into a hunter beside her. His hand claps onto Winnie’s arm. “Move,” he commands. “We have to keep moving.”

Yes. This is the one lesson Winnie really should know by now after how many times in the mist? After how many nightmares have formed around her?

Later, she will marvel that she had the physical capacity to not only hold on to the red envelopes when the mist thundered across her, but to shove them into her hoodie pocket. Her phone might be long gone, but these cards are prizes she refuses to give up.

With fingers latched like pliers, Jay hauls Winnie back toward the antechamber—or at least, she thinks that’s where they’re going. She can’t see; she no longer smells smoke from a burning wall; and she can hardly hear. Yet of course Jay makes it all seem so easy. This might not be the forest, but nightmares and mist are his natural habitat. And Winnie, Winnie, Winnie—oh, what do you think you’re doing here? What do any of these silly little Luminaries in their silly little costumes think they’re doing here in this domain that the forest has suddenly claimed?

Those same silly little Luminaries scream. Winnie sees shadows forming in the mist. And uselessly, her brain emits: The only warning sign of a hotspot’s formation is the flight of local fauna.

Someone grunts and rolls. A nightmare snarls. “Winnie!” Jay’s voice twists around her in horrifying ways. “Hellion on your left!”

Yes. There it is, lunging at her with fangs bared. She has seen hellions so many times, but always dead, always damaged by hunter bolts or shrapnel grenades. She has just enough time to think, My what big teeth you have! before its front paws land against her.

She falls to the wooden floor, her chin barely tucking inward to avoid concussive contact. Heat sears against her, mist and snarling saliva and a breath that reeks of carrion.

Fangs lurch close, along with eyes as fiery as the pits of hell the beast is named for. This is what killed Grandma Winona. This is how she died.

Jay slams into the hellion’s side, and it flings off Winnie—although not without claws shredding over her leather jacket.

A gust of wind punches in from the nearby roof-access window, clearing mist and revealing Jay and the hellion locked in a match of strength that Jay is not going to win. Winnie scrabbles to her feet, half crawling across the room to the easel. “Sorry,” she says to the future dead, yanking the wood to her. One kick at the right leg, then another for the left.

“Jay,” she barks. “Catch!” She flings one of her two newly made stakes his way.

And for a fraction of a second, she remembers doing this before: throwing a stake at Jay. Except he was a wolf then, and she was trying to kill him instead of save.

The memory is gone before it can fully form. Jay catches the stake as the hellion’s teeth lock onto his forearm. Punch . The stake stabs into the hellion’s neck. Punch. He stabs this one into the skull.

The hellion releases, and Jay shoves the nightmare off him. He’s bleeding, but when Winnie crouches to help him, he waves her off. “More nightmares.” He points with his bloodied arm toward the rotunda—where yes, the screams and shouting and a building roar are impossible to miss.

As are the people sprinting into this antechamber, one of whom is L.A., dressed as a zombified nurse. She catches sight of Winnie and Jay aiming her way and shouts, “Droll! There’s a fucking droll !”

Droll: A humanoid nightmare that can range in size from four hundred pounds to almost four thousand. They are best avoided or, if conflict is necessary, then dealt with by many hunters at once. Firearms recommended.

Winnie and Jay do not have firearms. No one in this museum has firearms.

When Winnie and Jay—and now L.A. with them—push through the crowds into the rotunda, the mist has fully cleared, and the droll stands exactly where the old skeleton used to hang.

It’s a big one. Definitely in the thousands of pounds range.

Jay sprints ahead of Winnie, taking stock of the situation faster than Winnie can possibly absorb it. Her brain is still trapped in the gallery where a Diana canis gave her birthday cards and saved her from a golden arrow. Except, why was a golden arrow coming for me? Why would the Crow want to hurt me?

“L.A.! Trevor!” Jay shouts, flying for the stairs. “Aim for the knees!”

Jay jumps. Right off the staircase and leaping the balustrade like it’s nothing. He lands on the droll’s shoulder, and the nightmare twists its ugly head toward this obnoxious human—who is somehow still shouting orders.

It’s incredible. If there weren’t actual lives on the line and actual nightmares in the middle of the old museum, Winnie would just stand here at the top of the stairs and marvel at her boyfriend. Youngest Lead Hunter in Hemlock Falls.

No wonder he is though.

Jay drops off the droll’s shoulder, landing behind the monster in time for his bandmates to charge in with makeshift weapons. L.A. has a chair leg and Trevor just has the whole chair.

They slam against the droll’s knees. Its bellows writhe all the way into Winnie’s bone marrow, propelling her into action while Jay’s voice somehow pierces the chaos. “Imran, the ribs! Marisol, the face—get it in the fucking eyes!”

Winnie bolts for the stairs; they’re shallow, and she flies down two at a time. Meanwhile, Jay dives and rolls around the droll. His arm sprays blood.

Winnie is halfway down the stairs when the droll turns toward her. Its eyes, huge ogling things, lock onto her and she would swear it laughs. That its grotesque mouth stretches wide, and chuckles bounce out.

It reaches for her on the stairs, hands as large as her torso and arms longer than she is tall. It’s just like the arm she retrieved on corpse duty weeks ago. And its wrist is just like the wrist she always draws during class. (So soothing, all those carpal bones.)

A meaty hand grabs her, and Winnie doesn’t have to think. Lunate bone, capitate bone, hamate bone. The spike goes in. The droll screams, high-pitched and pained. Then Winnie reclaims the stake, satisfaction surging through her like a champagne bottle uncorked. Her hunter senses are toggled to max. She wants more .

She gets her wish a heartbeat later when Jay appears. He snags the stake from her as he passes, then, just as he’d done before, he clears the balustrade to land on the droll’s shoulder.

This time, though, it’s not a distraction. One stab—that’s all it takes. Right into the ear.

And Winnie finds she is grinning. Jay may never go to school, but hell if he doesn’t know his nightmares. Droll ears are particularly sensitive, their cochlear and vestibular nerves sitting closer to the surface than humans’.

The droll’s ogling eyes start rolling. It’s really screaming now, yet Jay is still barking orders. “Winnie!” he shouts from the ground floor, pointing with his bloodied arm toward a nearby room called the nightmare gallery. In there, he’s saying. Help in there.

Like every other hunter here, Winnie obeys without question. She clears the rest of the steps in four leaps. She no longer has a weapon, but she’ll figure that out once she sees what she’s up against.

Which happens moments later: the nightmare gallery is almost completely cleared of people, save for three bodies wrapped in sticky white web…

While six spidrin scuttle and spin across the room.

“Spidrin!” Winnie shouts to anyone who might hear in the rotunda: “SPIDRIN WITH PREY!” That’s all she has time for before the nearest spidrin darts her way and launches a web.

Winnie drops sideways, barely getting low enough before sticky silk flies where her body just was.

Spidrin: A catchall term for any nightmares resembling spiders. They will always possess eight legs and produce webs; some feature human body parts as well.

These ones definitely have the human body parts. Their thoraxes are shaped like a human’s—some female, some male, one that is even a child’s. Then they all have eight hairy brown legs, and heads with eight eyes and mandibles clacking.

These truly are the stuff of nightmares, and Winnie can’t help but think, This should be my entry for the Compendium contest. Then her thoughts are silenced by more web pitching her way.

Winnie levers herself at the nearest spidrin, one with a well-muscled thorax and chest hair. Actual chest hair. She sees each curl as she dives closer. In close quarters, the spidrin will resort to physical combat instead of web deployment. Beware of possible venom.

Mandibles zoom in, but Winnie bypasses the creature and aims for a table filled with booze. Up she springs. Smash goes the nearest bottle. Then she rounds and stabs the bottle into the spidrin’s back.

It is entirely too human.

And Winnie hates herself for thinking of Professor Samuel in that moment. This is not a place for ghosts to rise.

“Duck!” a voice calls, and Winnie obeys, rolling under the booze table. Then she watches as a flaming bottle arcs through the air, lighting up the dark gallery that used to display illustrated nightmares instead of real ones.

The bottle smashes onto a spidrin. The monster hisses and writhes and burns alive, while legs spasm inward, just like a real spider.

Winnie thinks again of Samuel.

Until Trevor gallops by and barks, “Help the victims, Winnie! Get them free!”

Right. Priorities. Winnie grabs for another bottle. Smash . This time, she turns her blade onto the web-bound prey. Just like a real spider, these nightmares save their food for later. She stabs the broken glass into thick silk.

But at that moment, a charged, feral sensation swipes over her spine. It’s like a live wire dragging down a chalkboard. No, she thinks. It can’t be. Not here, not now.

She finishes carving the web; Casey stares up at her with vacant eyes. He’s alive, he’s breathing… but he’s definitely not moving.

Winnie wracks her internal Compendium for an antidote. Isn’t there something in the addendum about dissolving the web in water that—

“I’ve got this!” a new voice shouts. Winnie glances up, startled.

“Bretta?”

“I got this,” she repeats, pushing Winnie aside and grabbing at the webbing around Casey.

“Is Emma here too? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine.” Bretta spares Winnie a brief glance. Her eyes are huge in the dark room; her skin shines with sweat. “She’s outside and calling the Tuesdays for help right now.”

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you ? And with Erica, I saw.” There’s a harshness to Bretta’s voice that Winnie has never heard before—at least not directed at herself. And she can’t help but acknowledge, This is fair. After all, she said she wasn’t coming tonight. She said she and Erica weren’t friends. Now here she is, unable to explain anything.

Wind sucks against Winnie like a miniature wormhole; like a nuclear warhead detonating. She knows exactly what it is. She just prays it isn’t inside the museum.

“I’m sorry,” Winnie tells Bretta. That’s all she can offer, all she has time for. The Whisperer is coming, the Whisperer is here, and only Winnie knows about it. No, she can’t stop it, but maybe if she can find it, she can distract it. Keep it away from the rest of the museum.

Away from Bretta, Emma, and everyone else she cares about.

Winnie lobs to her feet and aims for the exit. The live wire on the chalkboard writhes hotter with each step. She reaches the gallery’s end and veers into a room filled with couches ripped to shreds like they were nothing more than teddy bears caught in a lawnmower.

Winnie crosses the room in seconds, knowing on a visceral level where the Whisperer will be. She can’t say why, but it just makes sense. Everything keeps going back to her dad, doesn’t it? So now, where the Whisperer must await will be in Dad’s favorite room.

Winnie reaches the conservatory and steps inside.