The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 35

CHAPTER 35

Dampener: A metal tin filled with moss used to hide a Diana’s source from Luminary detection and to slow the drain of collected spirit power over time. Often a fish hook is added to the moss to act as a “vent,” since power sometimes drains in explosive spurts instead of steady drips.

There are some places that are so profoundly private, other people are never meant to find them. Secret corners where children play unwatched by adult eyes. Forgotten tombs meant only for spirits of the dead. The bathypelagic depths of the ocean.

And hidden rooms built for witchcraft.

Which is what greets Winnie after she wedges herself into a liminal space the original plumbers had no use for, so they blocked it off with three massive water heaters that radiate warmth like a dracon puffing fire.

“I never would have looked here,” Erica explains, “if not for one line in Jenna’s diary about my secret place behind the three. I didn’t know what that meant at all until I was down here, saw three tanks, and that line came back to me. I poked around, and…”

“And,” Winnie agrees because and is all there is to describe this spot, away from prying eyes. A place to do magic no one can sense. A place for an artist soul who needs to get away from it all.

It’s not that Winnie feels safe here—she doesn’t. The only things separating this random ten-foot-by-ten-foot area are three brutally hot water heaters, so while Erica is right that it’s almost impossible to get here without prior knowledge…

It’s still not an actual room with an actual door that they can lock against approaching scorpions. Plus, it wouldn’t surprise Winnie if Jeremiah does dig up blueprints once Winnie and Erica aren’t found on the Sunday grounds.

Still, despite that inherent weakness, there is a sense that this place is separate from the outside world. Like time has stopped and history is moving on without her. Only subterranean silence will ever exist here.

It even smells like Jenna, like the summer rain perfume she used to wear.

Much like the old cabin on the Thursday estate, there is a shelf and folding chair in one corner. A fan too, which is probably necessary if the heat off the water tanks gets too intense. A simple pink-and-white quilt has been laid over the floor like a rug, and there’s a second blanket that hangs behind the heaters in a crude semblance of a curtain.

Erica lowers that blanket now, making sure there are no gaps around the edges to let out light or sound. Then she moves to the shelf where a lamp awaits. She flips it on. A warm glow unfolds, rendering the phone’s sharp light unnecessary.

“Grayson came here,” Winnie says. “He must have come here.”

Erica blinks from her spot crouched beside the shelf and lamp. “Why do you say that?”

“Because Jay knew about the pump room,” Winnie explains. “And he learned about it from Grayson, who showed it to him a few years ago. That can’t just be coincidence.”

“Oh.” Erica frowns. Her cheeks are scarlet from the race to get here, and the slightly crazed glint that had filled her russet eyes now snuffs out beneath a grieving gust.

And Winnie understands that grief. She has been staring it in the face ever since the old museum. Ever since she watched Jay turn to face the Whisperer. I love you. I’m sorry.

“Jay,” she begins… but then nothing else comes.

“I know,” Erica replies. She carefully, thoughtfully eases her black duffel to the concrete floor. “I saw him transform. Other people did too. He… turned into a nightmare. And then the Whisperer was there.”

“Did you see what…” Winnie can’t finish that question. What happened next?

But Erica understands. “No. None of us did. We talked about it after—me, L.A., Trevor, Katie, and the twins. Everyone saw Jay turn into a wolf, but no one saw what came next.”

Winnie swallows. Shoves at her glasses, which have all sorts of red body paint smeared across them. “I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Okay.”

Winnie pretends she doesn’t hear the pity. “He’s not dead, Erica.”

“Okay,” Erica repeats, and this time, she turns away to crouch beside her bookcase. After pulling off binders with handwritten labels like Guitar Chords or Original Songs, she gets to a false back identical to the one on the bookcase in the old cabin. She pries it off…

To reveal a square, metal tin.

Winnie knows right away what it is. She knows because she has seen a dampener before. After all, it was the first item that Dad’s map led her to: Jenna’s dampener hidden in a stream in the forest. But that dampener had been underwater for many years. The cookie tin holding the moss was dented and dinged, and the moss itself immediately began to rot upon exposure to air.

The dampener that Erica holds is spotless and gleaming. It’s a simple silver tin—square, where Jenna’s had been round—and there’s no denting, no rusting, no damage.

Without thinking, Winnie reaches up and grips her locket. “That’s your source, isn’t it.”

“Yeah,” Erica replies, and there’s a familiar hardness glazing onto her posture. A lowering of the castle portcullis because—as Winnie is now starting to recognize—Erica is afraid of what Winnie might do next.

But Erica shouldn’t be afraid. If she thinks a source is going to scare Winnie off, then she really hasn’t been paying attention these past few days.

Winnie shuffles forward. Then sinks cross-legged onto the middle of the blanket. “So how does it work? Does it have magic inside?”

Erica thaws slightly. “Yeah, there’s magic. My source was charging up until the night… well, the night the Dianas went after Jay.”

Right. That night, almost two weeks ago. The same night Winnie finally realized what Jay really was—and what Erica really was. Anyone could be a Diana. A Diana could be anyone.

“So how long can you keep it here?” Winnie asks because she’d rather think about magic than about Jay and all the ways she has failed him. “How long before all the stored power drains away?”

“A few months. Even a few years, if it’s preserved in the right way.” She strides toward Winnie and drops down before her. It’s the same pose they shared in the cabin, when they had a sheet hung over them and Winnie thought the Crow was the greatest threat before them.

T minus “I don’t know if I care anymore.”

Erica opens her dampener. Static undulates outward, plucking at the hairs on Winnie’s arms, neck, face. They feel tugged by a thousand tweezers. Then the sensation passes, and Winnie is left staring at a Diana source.

It’s the first source she has ever seen, yet not the first time she has seen this particular sphere of obsidian that once lived beside the Thursday family piano.

Part of Winnie wants to laugh. You took Marcia’s crystal after all. Amazing. Another part wants to recoil. A source. This is dangerous, run away.

But try as she might, she can’t quite reach the appropriate feelings. There is simply too much happening. Inside of her, outside of her, in concentric shock waves around Hemlock Falls. So Winnie stares at Erica instead and lets her fumble to find her own emotions.

“I was so… angry when Jenna died.” Erica slides her hands beneath the obsidian. It rests atop a nest of moss, but unlike Jenna’s dampener, there is no fish hook nearby to vent power.

Which, Winnie supposes makes sense, given that Erica is not a strong Diana.

“Why was Jenna on her second trial?” Erica continues. “ Why did she go out there, into the forest, if all she wanted was to leave the Luminaries and leave Hemlock Falls?”

The source glisters, veins of gray sliding through it. Winnie thinks again of bioluminescence. She thinks again of secret places where adults can’t watch. And she thinks of those words from long ago that she and Erica uttered as girls in the cabin: Sumus ūnus in somnō et somniīs.

“The Saturdays were managing the trial that night.” Erica’s voice is a detached confessional, as if she is narrating one of her own letters. Yours sincerely, Erica Antonia Thursday . “So I never understood why it was the Tuesday clan who brought my family the news about Jenna’s death. Yes, Tuesdays eventually contain a kill site, but shouldn’t that come later? It was the Saturdays who must have found her first.

“It was only later, when I found Jenna’s spell… Well, someone else must have realized what she was. And Dianas are always the domain of the Lambda scorpions.” Here Erica pauses long enough to withdraw a torn piece of notebook paper from the dampener. Its blue and red lines have faded to teal and pink, as has the ink scrawled across it.

“Is this it?” Winnie asks. “The spell?”

Erica nods. She doesn’t offer it to Winnie. Instead, she holds the spell in one hand, her source in the other. Lady Justice with her scales in perfect balance.

“You told us you got rid of it.”

Erica winces. “I know. And I’m sorry I lied. I did mean to destroy it, four years ago. But I… I just couldn’t in the end. Jenna took the risk of leaving it in her diary—where anyone could find it. And I just… well, it felt like maybe that was the point. Like maybe she wanted me to uncover it.”

“And do what with it? What’s the spell for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t asked the other Dianas?”

Erica’s head shakes. Then she blinks, as if tears are stinging. “I haven’t asked them. I’m afraid to. Because I still don’t know how Jenna died, you know? My family never saw a body before Jenna was cremated. Was it really a vampira horde that killed her? Or did Tuesdays find out what she was and finish her off? Or…”

“Or did the Dianas kill her?” Winnie fills in, and she thinks back to what Signora Martedì told her—that a spell killed Jenna. And that the spell is still bound to her source. Maybe this is the spell. Maybe this is what created the Whisperer.

But Winnie can’t say this to Erica any more than she can suddenly say, The Crow is a powerful Tuesday!

Erica’s fingers tighten on the paper. “All I really know is that this spell, whatever it is, is an important one. We’re told never to write spells down. We learn them like songs instead, so that no one can ever take them from us.” She laughs here, an almost hateful sound. “Remember those blisters you saw on my fingers?” She makes jazz hands. “They were from a guitar because I was trying to memorize spells by giving them tunes.”

“And that one?” Winnie points at the spell. “Does it have a tune?”

Erica frowns. “If it does, I don’t know it.”

Winnie would bet she knows it. Because there’s only one song it can be, right? The song that haunted her beneath the waves of the waterfall—the one she thought saved her while hypothermia crushed in. She must have had it wrong; it wasn’t Jenna’s ghost protecting her underwater. It was the Whisperer, still hunting even as water and cold dragged Winnie down.

And it’s the same song that has now dragged Jay down too.

“I don’t know what the spell does,” Erica continues. “What few books there are in the library on Dianas sure don’t mention the Incantamentum Purum Cor . And until I have an answer—I’m afraid to even make up a melody of my own.”

Winnie swallows. Then folds forward, her ribs bowing down into her stomach. She wants to tell Erica everything. Never has she wanted it more. I know the song. I know how Jenna died. I don’t understand why, but Erica, I have at least a few answers for you.

But of course Winnie can’t grit any of those thoughts past her circling-words spell. As soon as she opens her mouth and tries, she feels the Compendium awakening instead.

Erica watches Winnie, her eyelids lowered to half-mast. Her nostrils flaring with something that is almost tipping toward rage. “I’m sorry I haven’t found a way to break that spell on you. You have no idea how sorry, Winnie.”

It’s fine, Winnie wants to respond. I’m sorry too. But the words won’t come—and now that she considers it, there’s a weird feeling tickling at the back of her neck. A shuddery sensation that makes her think of a CD of her dad’s that had overtone chanting. The recorded monks were able to manipulate their vocal tracts to create more than one pitch at a time.

Here is Erica’s apology, says one pitch. And now here is something else too.

Erica lowers her arms. After easing her source back onto its nest of moss, she tenderly rests the spell above it. The paper is clearly precious to her—and understandably so. That spell and a locket with a stain on it are all she has left of her sister.

Winnie blinks. Sits taller. All thoughts of overtone chanting have fled now. A locket with a stain on it . “Show me your locket,” she blurts, and with as little caution as Erica just used on her source, Winnie leans over the dampener.

Erica’s head chickens backward, her face scrunching with surprise. But she does let Winnie tug out the locket and tip it toward the light.

“Four stars,” Winnie murmurs. “For the yew tree, which symbolizes hunters or danger. Or…” Her eyes flick to Erica’s. “Maybe it symbolizes nothing at all.”

“Um, I have no idea what you’re talking about right now, Winnie. Is this the circling-words spell again?”

“No.” Winnie rocks back, laughing. A wheezy, pained thing fueled by too much terror, too little sleep, and days of nothing making sense in Hemlock Falls.

Witch, Whisperer, werewolf, Wednesday.

Mom, Dad, Grayson, Jenna.

Four stars. Yew trees. And a rolling ball fountain that my dad built.

“The maze,” Winnie breathes. “Erica, Jenna’s source is in the hedge maze on the Saturday estate.”