The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 32

CHAPTER 32

If Jeremiah Tuesday thinks he is torturing Winnie, then he has no idea how good she is at torturing herself. He leaves her alone in the interrogation room with nothing but water and silence to keep her company, and she gets a great head start on self-inflicted wounds. For hours, she has nothing else to do but go over what happened at the old museum.

A thousand times. A thousand thousand. What happened at the old museum? Where did it all go wrong?

There was Jay, as a human. I love you. I’m sorry.

Then there was Jay as a wolf while the Whisperer frothed with hunger.

Then there were her friends, who, logically, Winnie knows were only trying to protect her. Were only trying to get her away from a monstrous, unstoppable whirlwind that they finally understood was very real.

But Winnie hates them. All of them. L.A., Trevor, Katie, and yes, even Bretta. Even Emma. Even Erica. They took her away from Jay, and now Jay is gone because of it.

Maybe he isn’t gone, her brain spurts every five seconds, a caricature of the first stage of grief: denial. Maybe he isn’t gone, and the Whisperer didn’t destroy him.

“Except I felt it,” she tells the interrogation table. “I felt it.”

You don’t know what you felt. It might have been adrenaline.

Winnie wants it to have been adrenaline. She wants it to have been an awful dream she will wake up from, with the words Trust the Pure Heart echoing across her brain. But this isn’t a dream. The Pure Heart echoes are real because the Whisperer briefly had a voice that spoke to Winnie.

It made music too. Somehow, impossibly, it made music. And now the song that once belonged to Jenna is the soundtrack to a scene Winnie can’t stop playing in her head. Every time she finishes imagining each moment, each beat at the old museum, from Casey Tuesday in his Dracula costume to the kiss against the column with Jay, to the Diana hound in the bathroom with cards from Winnie’s dad…

To the voice at the gallery’s end that must have been the Crow… Then all the way through to that moment when Winnie felt Jay’s life vanish.

Every time Winnie reaches The End, her brain circles back to start the track anew while Jenna’s haunting song plays on.

Eventually, Winnie is escorted several hallways over to a cell with cinderblocks for walls, a squeaky cot with no blanket, and a toilet with a bare-minimum privacy screen. It’s so prison cliché, Winnie would find it funny.

Except nothing is funny right now. She simply drops to the cot, rests her head on her knees, and drapes her hands over her neck like she’s in a tornado drill. And that’s definitely what this feels like: a tornado. All that’s missing are the sirens.

It’s like these nightmares only show up when you’re around, Winnie. Mario said that to Winnie half a month ago at the dockside werewolf testing site. Or like you’ve got some special power that only lets you see them.

Well, this power sucks then, she answered. And it does. Even now when other people have seen the werewolf and the Whisperer…

This power sucks. Winnie wants it gone from her body, from her brain.

She has no idea how long she is in the cell like this. Only that it is enough time for her to start rubbing at another stage of grief like the scratch-off strip on a lottery ticket. Bargaining, the ticket reads.

What if I hadn’t followed the messages? What if I hadn’t asked Jay to meet me? What if I hadn’t lost him in the crowd? Would he still be here?

But denial is the coin that’s doing the scratching, so that still fills her skull too. Maybe he’s not gone. Maybe you didn’t feel the Whisperer consuming him. Maybe he’s just fine and on the run from the Tuesday scorpions.

Clearly Jeremiah knows that Jay is a werewolf. Presumably because someone at the old museum saw Jay change and told the Tuesdays.

Repeat track. Start the scene over again .

Winnie can’t hear anything in her cell. It’s so well insulated, she might as well be at the earth’s core. Or in outer space. Or locked inside the Whisperer.

She stands. She paces. Three times, they bring her water and crackers. Once, she pees in the ridiculous toilet.

Repeat track. Start the scene over again .

After at least three hours—maybe a hundred—she forces her brain to stop. To STOP. Unfortunately, the shield she flings up is more like a ramp. It doesn’t block so much as deflect. Her thoughts leave the old museum, sure, but then they slide right over to her family.

Because what does it mean for Mom and Darian if Winnie is here inside a cell? If she’s accused of the witchcraft her dad was framed for four years ago? Obviously Mom’s chance at rejoining the hunt must now be burned to cinders. And Darian—he’ll have no shot of ever becoming a councilor if he is believed, yet again, to be related to a witch.

Winnie can still remember how it felt when she was released from the interrogation room four years ago. Mom was being drilled in a room nearby; twelve-year-old Winnie was totally, terrifyingly alone while a scorpion in full armor marched her up, up into the dawn.

The dregs of night still clung to the sky, and it was always at those twilight moments when Winnie’s eyesight was—and still is—at its worst. When the cones and rods in her eyeballs play tug-of-war and neither side can seem to win. She had also been crying that night, which meant her skull hurt. Her tear ducts ached.

And then there was Darian before her. He’d just finished with his interrogation too, and now he stood in the gravel parking lot of the Tuesday estate, cast in matutine grayscale. He held the Volvo keys in one hand. An opened bottle of water in the other.

He looked more shocked and lost than Winnie felt, dressed in his flannel pajamas. His eyes were latched onto a space ten feet in front of him—but his actual focus was galaxies away. Until he looked up. Until he saw his sister, and he changed. The same folding-chair-of-a-skeleton pulled itself into shape before Winnie, joint by joint.

He opened his arms.

Winnie ran into them.

And that hug—that ferocious, almost brutal compression that his muscles branded onto her bones… It was the thing Winnie needed in that moment. It was the reminder that they were a family, that they were bears, and that whatever came next, they were doing it together.

“Mom can’t leave yet,” he told her, still hugging. The water bottle’s cheap plastic crackled against Winnie’s back. “So I’ll take us home.”

“How long will she be here?” Winnie asked.

“I don’t know.” Darian pulled away, and god, he looked so much like Dad. Especially when he forced a smile and asked, “Was it just me, or did Jeremiah’s breath smell like pickles?”

Winnie laughed. A broken, freeing sound. “It smelled so much like pickles!”

“Right? I mean, like, I enjoy a dill for snacking, but it’s the middle of the night, my dude. Brush your teeth!”

Winnie doesn’t mean to start crying here, four years later in this cell. But it’s the only logical conclusion. Scratch too long at the lottery strip, and eventually you’ll hit paper. Then flesh. Then blood vessels and muscle and bone.

She drops back onto the cot. Her head falls again between her knees.

People always act as if the stages of grief happen in clear, orderly steps. Like you really do just scratch off until you get to the next layer. But instead, it kind of happens all at once. A jumbled mass of feelings to get dumped on you. This one over here is shaped like denial. This one over here looks like rage. This one over here is bargaining and depression mashed into a single lottery ticket. And over here, we’re back to rage.

For ten hot, vicious seconds, Winnie lets her tears fall. Unfettered. She will cry—for herself, for her family, for Jay—and then she will pull it together, just like Darian did four years ago.

Darian, you should have seen Jeremiah’s mustache. He totally had creamer stuck on one side. I spent the whole interrogation wanting to wipe it off.

Winnie’s tears stop. She lifts her head. Her glasses are on the cot beside her, dropped there as soon as she came into the room. She grabs them now. The cinderblocks sharpen. Jenna’s song is elbowing back in, carrying the old museum and its ghosts along with it. I love you. I’m sorry. Except now, Winnie’s brain is snagging on one moment: when the Whisperer seemed to say, Pure Heart. There you are.

Her teeth start clicking a methodical beat. A replacement for the pacing to power up her brain. Pure Heart. There you are . She hadn’t really considered what those words might mean in each of her replays, but now she processes them like they’re holes on a punch card being fed into an old computer.

Who was the Whisperer referring to? Who was the Pure Heart? There were only two people in that conservatory: her and Jay. And the Whisperer didn’t wake up until Jay arrived.

Winnie’s neurons start firing in all new directions now, a conspiracy wall forming inside her mind, complete with red circles and lines made of yarn. The night the Whisperer chased you off the waterfall, Jay was there too. And the night Grayson died because of the Whisperer, Jay was there.

And when Winnie and Jay went in the forest and found that granite hole, Winnie felt the Whisperer wake up nearby… And oh no, if she goes back—way, way back—to the first time she sensed the Whisperer, it was that night on her first trial. And Jay was there .

The only night she can’t line up is the night the Whisperer killed all those vampira in the forest. But what if Jay was there then too? What would it mean if he was always nearby when the Whisperer was hunting?

Winnie’s teeth stop clicking. For the first time since she got locked in here, since L.A. and Trevor, Bretta and Erica, and everyone else dragged her from the museum, she has hope. It makes no sense because nothing on her conspiracy wall would suggest Jay is still alive. Or that her family will come out of this mess unscarred. Or that Winnie has any future filled with photons ahead of her.

But for some reason, she feels a feathery spark brightening in her chest because maybe, just maybe…

“Okay,” she murmurs to the door, a cold, metal thing across the room. In four strides, she reaches it. “I’ll talk now!” she shouts, her voice rebounding off the metal into her face. Her breath ain’t great, but at least it ain’t pickles. “I’ll talk now, but only to Isaac Tuesday!”

It is very clear that Isaac was expecting Winnie to summon him. Or if not expecting it, he certainly imagined this scenario, and so now he is taking steps to mitigate harm to himself. His steps look like:

· Shutting himself alone in the interrogation room with Winnie.

· Leaning so far over the table that when she leans as well, they are basically touching heads.

· Whispering so no one outside can hear them.

· Turning off the usual recording device so truly, no one can hear them.

“What do you want from me?” he asks. His eyes skate frantically around, and Winnie’s face is so close to his she can see where he missed a spot shaving.

“You know what I want, Isaac. I need to get out of here.”

He gulps. “I can’t do that. As bad as those photos I took might be for my future, if I help you out of here…” He gulps again, and this time his eyes close as if he might pass out.

Winnie places a hand on his. “Hey now, Isaac. Let’s stay in the present moment. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to describe the layout of this underground nest to me. Then you’ll escort me back to my cell”—she waves to the door, metal and cold just like her own—“and tell whoever is in charge right now that we’re finished.”

“The Lead Hunter. Mason Tuesday. He’s the one in charge.”

“Great,” Winnie says. “Tell him, then.” Part of her wants to add, And please tell his partner Ms. Morgan that I’m here because she said she’s always on my side. Except Winnie is 99 percent sure Ms. Morgan didn’t have Prison Bust on her list of Ways to Help Winnie.

“Once you reach the cell, Isaac, you’ll push me in, but then you won’t lock the door behind you.”

His eyes are still closed. He swallows loudly once more, and Winnie takes pity on him. “Hey,” she murmurs. “Look at me, Isaac.”

He opens his eyes.

“Am I correct in thinking most Tuesdays are up at the Olympics right now? That there’s a skeleton crew down here because Jeremiah probably doesn’t want anyone to notice the drama happening underground?”

Isaac nods. He’s sweating now.

“So just tell me how to get out of here, what spots to avoid, and I’ll do the rest. All you need to do is escort me, tell Mason I had nothing to say, and forget to lock the door. Super easy.”

“Then… then we’re even?”

Winnie lifts one hand. “I swear. On my mom, on my dad, on my brother: I swear, we’ll be even then.”

“And your friend, the one with the photos—she’ll delete them?”

“Absolutely. Although… speaking of Erica, do you know what she told Jeremiah? Or what anyone else from the party said to him about what they saw?”

“No—I don’t have access to that kind of information. Like I’ve said before: I’m at the bottom of the food chain in here.”

“So you’re a cockroach.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what scorpions eat.”

Isaac looks sick all over again, and Winnie quickly adds: “But no one will eat you, okay?”

“Are you sure? Because right now, they’re all wondering why you asked to see me .”

“Tell them I’m friends with Katie, so I trust you.”

“No one’s gonna believe that.”

“I promise they will, Isaac.” Winnie lays her hand on his again. “Katie was at the party last night, so it’ll make enough sense at casual glance. Plus, you’re going to act totally clueless if anyone asks for more details. You’ll shrug and say, She just said Katie told her about me. And they’re going to believe it.”

“But when they realize you’ve escaped—”

“I’ll wait, okay? I’ll wait until you’ve been gone a while, and then I’ll make my move. Then it won’t look like we coordinated anything. Now hurry, Isaac: we’re losing time. Tell me how to get out of here.”