The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 39

CHAPTER 39

Winnie’s glasses are broken. Her face is bruised and throbbing. And her earlier stages of grief are back, stronger than ever. Because this cannot be happening right now. The Whisperer cannot be Jay and now hunting Winnie as if nothing will ever fill him up.

With heat on your skin I spin until I can’t see us

I find no relief, inside I’m still a hopeless curse

None of this can be possible. None of this can be real. The crack on Winnie’s left lens, the pain on her torn-up palms, the shots of heat near her ankle—none of that can be real. Jay lost, Erica taken. Here one moment, gone the next. And somehow, this whole clusterfuck still isn’t over.

Because the source was only the first thing that Diana Crow wanted from Winnie, wasn’t it? Clearly Caterina Martedì also wanted Jay, also wanted Erica. Her threats to take them both from Winnie were promises all along.

But why? Why does she need Jay inside the Whisperer? Why does she need Erica shackled in mist vines? What are you still not seeing, Winnie Wednesday?

The Whisperer chomps through yew leaves and branches like they are blades of grass. It will reach Winnie faster than she can escape these infernal bends and turns that Dad etched onto a page all those years ago. Unless she can find something to distract this monster chasing from behind.

Such as Tuesdays. She sees their shapes ahead. A regimented line to guard an intersection in the maze.

“Don’t shoot!” Winnie screams, which is a pointless endeavor because the Whisperer is a vortex too loud for any sound to bypass.

And now guns are pointed at Winnie. Guns. It’s so ridiculous she actually marvels at it—in a weird, slow-motion sort of way. The Tuesdays still think she, Winnie Wednesday, is the problem? They still think shooting her is going to stop the god-awful acid trip that this night has become?

Muzzles flash, sparking like violent versions of the lanterns from the Saturday trail. Yet no pain bursts inside of Winnie. None of her limbs stop their forward drive. Instead, it really is like the Saturday trail, with lights to guide her on. Because the guns aren’t pointed at me, she realizes. In fact, the Tuesdays don’t still think she is the problem at all; they have instead finally realized the true threat is the devastation chasing behind.

The stench of gunpowder sears over burning plastic. Scorpion masks glitter in the strobing light of their weapons. Winnie doesn’t know who these Luminaries are, but she is suddenly struck by the weight of their lives. They were the enemy half an hour ago; now, they are on the same side against an enemy no guns can ever defeat.

“Run,” she screams into the mask of one soldier. She grabs their shoulders, forcing them to stop their gunfire. “RUN.”

There is nothing else she can do. Nothing else she can say. Denial is ham-fisting its way to the top of her brain: They aren’t so stupid as to let this consume them. No way they will let the Whisperer just come. They will run any second now.

They don’t, though. None of them run, and Winnie will never know if that one scorpion heard her shouts or not. She will only ever know that she kept running, and no… no. The Tuesdays did not.

The Tuesdays held the line.

And it is their strength that lets Winnie roll left into Dad’s secret exit through the same hidden slice of hedges she used a few days ago. A crooked slingshot tucked between the hard lines of Dryden’s maze. It will spit her out beside the front entrance to the mansion. Fifty steps from the awning where she was deposited last Saturday for a breakfast she didn’t want to attend.

The breakfast where she also let herself fall into the clutches of a Diana Crow. Unlike you, I’m an excellent liar.

Here comes the fury now. It’s a golden locket stamped with a moon and stars. So heavy it scratches at the lottery ticket of grief, straight through denial and into rage. Rage at the Crow in her stupid mask. Rage at Erica for lying. And above all, rage at herself. Winnie should have listened to Jay; she should have prodded more at those harmonic overtones in Erica’s voice. Erica might have changed her mind at the eleventh hour, but the eleventh hour could have been avoided altogether if Winnie had only looked past her relentless loyalty.

Winnie runs on. This route is narrow. Her shoulders scrape on branches that have been tended, if crudely, to prevent the path from growing in—and whatever devoted gardener maintained Dad’s secret trail, Winnie owes them a thousand thank-yous that she isn’t sure she will survive long enough to ever relay.

Gunfire still erupts from behind.

Winnie bursts out of the darkness onto a driveway crawling with scorpions, backlit by headlights. A line of Hummers is parked against the curb, although there is one Hummer—only one—that doesn’t face the same direction. Its lights are aimed away, and its back door hangs open as if someone just climbed out of it.

That is when Winnie sees a small scorpion rushing toward her. The person’s arms sling out with expert precision to intercept Winnie.

Winnie tries to duck, but the arms leash around her. Yet, rather than try to stop her, arrest her, control her, detain her, the arms propel her right into that open Hummer door and a familiar voice bellows: “GET IN!” Then Winnie is pushed inside with all the force of a bulldozer.

And her captor?—savior?—climbs into the driver’s seat. Tires squeal, a sound that barely cuts through the Whisperer. The famēs spell has eaten its way out of the maze now, and though Winnie can’t see it, she smells it. She feels it.

The more I forget you, the deeper you sink in

Fangs at the neck and red paint on a lost cabin

The scorpion speeds the Hummer down the driveway. Wind jet-streams into the open back door, until the force is too strong. The door crashes shut, prompting Winnie to finally claw her way into sitting. To try to see who the hell is driving her away from the Whisperer.

“Buckle up!” the person shouts. “Winnie, BUCKLE UP.”

Winnie buckles up. And just in time. They skid so hard onto the main street, aiming north, that only the seat belt keeps Winnie from slamming full power against the window.

And now her savior—and they are a savior—finally removes their helmet, revealing a face so out of context , Winnie almost doesn’t recognize her. “Ms. Morgan?” Her voice is a mere squeak over the Hummer’s V-8 engine. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving you, obviously. And it’s about to really suck, Winnie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you had it right when you jumped off the waterfall on your third trial. This spell ain’t stopping unless you drown it.”

Winnie gawps at the sweating, shadowed face of her homeroom teacher as the Hummer vibrates like an earthquake around them, as Ms. Morgan goes hell for leather through one intersection after another—the same intersections Winnie and Erica burned through hours ago, going the other direction…

Erica, who is now in the clutches of the Crow. Enough of this, Martedì said, we are out of time, Erica, and I don’t want to lose the night.

There’s no chance for Winnie to mull over those words. Or to mull over the Whisperer—did she really hear Jay singing in that pixelated, magicked maelstrom? Or was that just her desperation, her denial, her delusion? The reality is that the Whisperer hunts right now. It wants to kill Winnie. It wants to obliterate this Hummer.

The dam bridge appears ahead like a dark blade to guillotine the night. And that’s when Winnie’s mind rockets to a different time, a different memory. Because oh god, it’s all so obvious now—what happened four years ago, on the night Jenna died.

“Grayson was on his second trial,” she says to herself, exactly as she said while she gripped her green sweater and stared at the same waters ahead. “When he stole a Tuesday Hummer and drove it off the dam.”

Ms. Morgan doesn’t answer. Presumably because she can’t hear, and anyway, what is she going to say?

Jenna Thursday created the Whisperer, and it killed her. Grayson was either with her on the trial or else nearby, and the Whisperer tried to kill him too. So he ran. He ran and took whatever vehicle he found first: a Tuesday Hummer just like this one.

No, Winnie doesn’t have all the gaps filled in yet, such as why Jenna cast such a monstrous spell, why she did so on the night of her second trial, or what the Crow has to do with any of it, but Winnie knows, deep in the beating ventricles of her heart, that this is why Grayson drove a Hummer off the bridge.

And that she is about to follow the exact same path.

A speed bump launches the Hummer skyward. They are almost to the dam. “You’re a Diana, aren’t you?” Winnie has to shriek to be heard.

And Ms. Morgan’s eyes find Winnie’s in the rearview. “Defected!” she answers. “Winnie, do you trust me?”

Yes, Winnie thinks, and she nods to prove it. Because even if her brain can’t arrange all these puzzle pieces, she can’t deny that Ms. Morgan really has always been on her side.

“Good.” Ms. Morgan’s eyes latch onto the road again—onto the dam bridge straight ahead. “Because I meant what I said before: this is about to suck .” She cudgels her heel to the gas. They reach the dam. They career fifteen feet onto the bridge.

And Ms. Morgan wrenches the steering wheel left.

Time slows like an action sequence in a movie, except every sensory organ is engaged—organs Winnie never knew she had because they’re not on human anatomical diagrams. Like the ability to sense inertia, tugging her backward while gravity and gasoline rip her forward. Or the sense that space and time really are connected, meaning Winnie is not a three-dimensional being so much as a four-dimensional one wound tightly inside the confines of gravity.

Her eyes, despite the crack in her glasses, are suddenly aware of all sorts of details she has never registered before on the dam: how the railing on either side is rusted iron with rivets as large as her fist. How the concrete curb is painted yellow, or how signs every ten feet proclaim: Warning, Dam Outflow. Water level change when alarm sounds.

Winnie has never actually heard that alarm, has she?

The Hummer hits the railing. It is a sound louder than any alarm. And although the iron tries to hold back this charging bull, it is no match for five thousand pounds of SUV. It crunches through the iron as easily as the Whisperer did through the maze.

The Little Lake shines, beautiful with the round-the-clock lights from the Floating Carnival to dance and scatter on the waves.

RIP, fishes, Winnie thinks as the four dimensions of the universe tip her downward. As the lights and waves vanish and all Winnie sees is the darkness of water ready to feast.