The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

“We have to get help.” Ms. Morgan is wheezing. This might be caused by panic or might be from the fact that she and Winnie are now running. “We’ll go to Teddy—she can help us. And… and your grandmother. We’ll send her a message.”

“My grandmother,” Winnie replies, her own breaths shallowing out, “isn’t here. Plus, Harriet didn’t exactly help my family when Dad vanished, even though she knew he was the good guy. So why would she help us now?”

“Because the world is ending?”

Winnie’s jog slows. Her ankle isn’t happy about this pace as she aims herself and Ms. Morgan for the striped tent. There’s a phone in there Ms. Morgan wants to use. “But we just dumped the Whisperer in the lake. Surely that bought us time?”

“When I thought the Whisperer was a run-of-the-mill famēs spell, sure. I would have said we bought time. But”— pant, pant —“I have no idea anymore, Winnie. All bets are off. We have to assume the worst.”

“And the worst is the world is ending?”

“No one knows.” Ms. Morgan flips up her hands. “That’s kind of the whole point.” Pant, pant . “Dianas think waking the spirit will be good for the world; Luminaries… think… it will be bad.”

“And you?”

“I think we have a… good balance here, so why mess with it?”

Winnie thinks again of the words from Understanding Sources —written by none other than Professor Funday. Both carnivores and herbivores are essential for healthy ecosystems, it reads, and this author posits that so too are our disparate organizations.

“What if the Dianas are right, though? What if waking the spirit is a good thing?”

“I mean, it’s possible.” Wheeze . “Dianas believe… Luminaries hoard and control the sleeping spirit’s power. And they’re not totally wrong. You have life-saving technology here, like… melusine blood—and you don’t share it with… the wider world.”

“Okay, but sharing all the magic will also share all the nightmares.” Winnie’s glasses are bouncing on her nose. It makes the stripes on the tent ahead look like an EKG.

“Again, we don’t know… Jesus, Winnie. Can we slow down?” Ms. Morgan’s footsteps drop to a trot. Then a shamble. She’s really breathing heavily. “I’m not… a hunter. I do not run sprints. Like, ever.”

“You’re the one who said the world was ending!”

“Well, it won’t help if I go into cardiac arrest. Do you know how to stop the Pure Heart?”

“I thought you didn’t know either.”

“No, but Teddy might, and I’m the one who has her phone number.”

Winnie groans. Her adrenaline is kicked up to eleven, and her blinders have been so firmly slotted on, she can’t see anything but the path ahead—which goes right into the carnival tent. The flaps are lowered. Winnie thrusts them aside.

Where she almost gasps because all the lights are on. It’s like stepping into a snow globe. A crystal ball. A fairy land of gold. Winnie thinks of bioluminescence and photons. She thinks of the guiding lights of downtown. They’re all here, sparkling inside this tent.

“Look. There’s the phone I was talking about.” Ms. Morgan points to a nearby booth. It’s a first aid station, only a few steps away. And sure enough, there’s a corded phone on the outside wall, glittering like it’s made of gold.

“I’ll call Teddy now.” Ms. Morgan is still half gasping. “And you can… send a message to your grandmother with the locket.”

“I don’t want to send a message to my grandmother.”

Ms. Morgan frowns. Her cheeks are shining. “Winnie, now is not the time to be upset she missed Christmas dinners—”

“That is not my reasoning.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ms. Morgan’s lips purse, but she says no more before retrieving the phone and hammering in a number.

Winnie doesn’t join her teacher. Instead, she stares into the glittering lights of the tent—a booth selling handcrafted jewelry, a stand for tarot card readings, a food truck offering frozen treats. Her eyes sink out of focus, like she’s turning the knob on Professor Samuel’s telescope to blur out the night sky. She pretends there are no Tuesday boats zooming across the water or Hummers revving down the streets. No Crow with a stolen source or Erica held prisoner.

And above all, no Jay trapped inside a Whisperer that isn’t a famēs spell.

Guess I have all the evidence Mario needs now , Winnie thinks, fighting off a bitter laugh. She might not understand how a werewolf seventeen years ago became Jay’s father—or how a wolf’s jawbone appeared under Jay’s pillow—but she can’t deny what’s right in front of her. It doesn’t take a genius to draw the connecting line.

The Incantamentum Purum Cor requires someone with a “nightmare father, gone and slain” and a “lantern mother, spirit’s bane.” Jay’s father was a werewolf; his mother was a Luminary. That makes Jay the “son of forest, the son of pain.”

Pure Heart. There you are.

“Teddy?” Ms. Morgan pants into the phone. “It’s me. Sorry to wake you, but we’re in big trouble. Like, big trouble.”

Winnie slips off her glasses. Another telescope knob turns. The lights become bulbous, as if they are bubbles under the water. All Winnie has to do is press a hand over her mouth and she can follow them.

Follow them where, though?

“No, not with the Tuesdays,” Ms. Morgan is saying from twenty thousand leagues away. “With the Dianas. It’s the Incantamentum Purum Cor .”

A plastic trash bin hovers to the left beside a stall selling homemade soap. It’s blue like poppies. Blue like Erica’s gloves.

“Yeah,” Ms. Morgan continues nearby, “Winnie doesn’t want to contact Harriet, but I agree: we have no other choice. You can send the message, if she won’t.”

Winnie won’t. She absolutely won’t. For four years, Grandma Harriet didn’t help her family. Neither did Ms. Morgan or Professor Funday. Or Aunt Rachel. The only person who helped was Dad, albeit in the most convoluted way possible.

Although Winnie understands why he had to use codes and maps and drawings. He must have been trying to hide the source from Martedì so the Crow couldn’t finish the Incantamentum Purum Cor. And he did a really good job of it. No one ever found anything until Winnie started poking around a month ago. And the only reason she ever poked around was because Darian gave her a locket by accident on her sixteenth birthday.

But there’s one big question Winnie still hasn’t answered: Why leave the clues at all? Why not let Jenna’s source stay hidden forever?

There’s something important there. Something Winnie is still missing. The why at the heart of her Venn diagram.

“Yeah, Teddy, I’m almost positive Winnie is under a verba circumvolēns spell. Still, I’ve managed to piece together the important parts—and that we’re probably dealing with a lēgātum. ”

Winnie stares again at the blue trash can. Her ghosts are far away; she is an emotionless robot; her fingers don’t itch to draw. She just needs to keep thinking, keep following the bubbles.

Right now, Ms. Morgan has drawn the conclusion: This whole town is in danger. The sleeping spirit is about to wake up.

The Tuesdays, meanwhile, have decided: This whole town is in danger because Winnie Wednesday is a Diana who is casting spells and killing people.

The Luminaries Council has decided: There is no danger worth disrupting the Nightmare Masquerade for.

And Winnie, meanwhile—well, what has she decided? Where is her data leading her? Or for that matter, what conclusions is Signora Martedì making right now? The Crow has a witch and a source, she has the son of forest, the son of pain…

The more I forget you, the deeper you sink in

Fangs at the neck and red paint on a lost cabin

Winnie startles. She just heard those words as if they were right beside her, sung directly into her ears by Jay’s rasping throat. She looks around. But of course, the tent is empty save for her and Ms. Morgan.

Ten dollars to kiss, a bet I can never win

Snow on your lips

It’s feast or it’s full famine

Winnie doesn’t actually notice when her feet begin moving. She just knows she is suddenly pivoting toward the tent flaps, marching once more toward the pier.

“Winnie?” Ms. Morgan calls after her. “Where are you going?”

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That song. Jay. He’s this way.”

“Winnie, there is no song.”

No, there is definitely a song. It is Jay, singing the song he wrote about Winnie. Just like she heard him in the maze. Just like she heard him at Joe Squared two weeks ago. And it’s coming from outside the tent.

She pushes back into the early morning. Wind, cruel and venomous, bites at her face. It’s so at odds with the grayscale twilight rippling over white-tipped waves. Tuesday boats still chug; lights still beam off the dam; her ankle still throbs.

I miss you more now

Now that it’s been so long

Ms. Morgan barges out of the tent to join Winnie. “What are you doing, Winnie? What do you hear?”

“I already told you. Jay’s song. ‘Backlit.’” Winnie reels about, feeling like a compass drawn by the earth’s magnetic field. And just like a compass, her finger abruptly points north. “It’s coming from that direction.”

“Winnie, I don’t hear anything.”

“I told you: the Whisperer ate Jay. I told you I heard him in the maze. And I… I hear him again now. He’s not dead, Ms. Morgan. He’s not gone.”

“I never said he was, but—wait.” Ms. Morgan grabs at Winnie’s shoulder because Winnie is yet again moving. “You can’t just walk all the way up to the forest. Assuming Jay is there, what will you do once you find him? We need a better plan.”

Yes, Winnie thinks . We do. A plan like Dad would make .

Her feet stop again. Her eyes stare at nothing. Her mind clicks and whirs as new punch cards get fed through her processor. Agent Wednesday. What would Agent Wednesday do? She can see her drawing of Jay before the Whisperer ate him. She can see her drawing of Erica channeling Lady Justice.

And she can see all the pieces of the last week—of the carnival, of the Masquerade, and of Hemlock Falls connecting like constellations through her telescope. Here is Lyra. Here is Hercules. And here are the Lyrids, shooting across the sky.

“I… have an idea,” Winnie says, and now her compass swivels south. Toward the dam, toward all those Tuesdays hunting for her. “We’ll have to split up—”

“No.”

“—because I’m going to need you to make a distraction.”

“Winnie, no . We can’t split up. It’s too dangerous.”

To kiss across shadows into a bright fever

The dawn mist rises inside me like a wildfire

Winnie’s compass fastens onto Ms. Morgan. She takes in how tired, how drenched, how cold and broken the teacher is right now. This is not the woman who called her homeroom students childish assholes and begged them to boycott the Nightmare Court. This is not the woman who invited Winnie to apply to an art program at Heritage or snuck her an early pamphlet on a Compendium contest.

This is a defected Diana who just translated the Pure Heart spell and now thinks the world is going to end. Ms. Morgan really is just trying to keep Winnie safe.

But Winnie has her own people to look after.

With heat on your skin I spin

Until I can’t see us

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

“Please, Ms. Morgan. If you’re always on my side like you keep saying, then please help me do this. I need to get into the forest.” I need to get to Jay and Erica. “And I need you to make a distraction that will let me get there.”

Ms. Morgan’s nose twitches. Her parted lips tremble. Several more tired gasps escape her chest. Then she nods. “Fine, Winnie. God, I hope I don’t regret this, but… tell me what you want me to do.”