The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 44

CHAPTER 44

Winnie has been many things in her life: Wednesday, Luminary, outcast, bear, girlfriend, best friend, science nerd, Midnight Crown… What she has never been is a thief. Until today.

First, she stole the T-shirt. Then the sweatshirt, and now she’s jumping right up the corporate ladder to vehicular thief .

Number of boats stolen a month ago? Zero.

Number of boats stolen now? One.

Oh, and the fireworks—she can add those to her list as well, since there are three crates of them in the pontoon boat. Does Winnie have any idea how to detonate the fireworks? Nope. But surely the box of matches in her pocket that advertise the Très Jolie will do the trick.

Wind slaps over Winnie, cold and stinking of ancient soil. The swan’s neck, head, and wings act like a funnel, targeting all the frozen air into her face. It snatches away the whine of the Diana siren downtown, so all she hears is the wind.

She thinks she smells dead things.

And she definitely feels Jay’s song, summoning her like a different sort of siren.

Siren: These nightmares are known for luring their prey in with a song so seductive, no one can resist.

Ms. Morgan never did hear Jay’s voice, and she was adamantly opposed (her words) to Winnie’s plan. But Winnie didn’t care about her teacher’s approval back at the Floating Carnival, and she sure doesn’t care now, halfway across the Little Lake. Jay’s song is so seductive, Winnie can’t resist it.

Besides, it’s not Ms. Morgan’s boyfriend who is trapped inside the Pure Heart. It’s not her boyfriend who is the son of forest, son of pain. And it’s not her boyfriend who said, I love you. I’m sorry.

Winnie’s plan is a pretty simple one, in the end: while Ms. Morgan gets Jeremiah Tuesday aiming for downtown, Winnie will sail upstream toward the Big Lake. She actually wants the Tuesdays to follow her eventually—just not yet. Winnie needs a head start. Because no way in hell is this majestic Sunday swan going to outrun the scorpion speedboats.

Storm clouds have fully assembled in the north; the morning that should be peeking out in the east is being stamped down again. Never mind, sunshine. Go back to sleep. You’re not welcome here today.

Winnie’s hands—gloved in scorpion armor that belong to Mason—are frozen atop the pontoon steering wheel. The gear, although top-of-the-line, was definitely still wet when Winnie slugged it onto herself at the pier. It fits her taller frame no better than it fit Ms. Morgan’s, hanging loose on Winnie’s shoulders and thighs. The exo-scales should be form-fitting.

Still, some armor is better than no armor.

Her ankle thrums with a rhythm like Morse code. SOS. Bandage immediately and elevate. Winnie’s response to that would be, LOL. Not happening. As long as her fibula, tibia, and talus bones can still support her weight, then she’s going to keep using them.

Her left sleeve is rolled up to her mid forearm, allowing constant access to her watch’s digital screen. What it says right now is T minus one hour and seventeen minutes until the Crow makes good on her threats.

So yeah, no stopping for injuries. No stopping for potty breaks or hitchhikers either, since here’s the way Winnie sees it: there was a reason Martedì gave her an 8 A.M. deadline. That can’t just be an arbitrary time on an arbitrary day. So by Winnie’s logic, maybe the Pure Heart spell has until 8 A.M. to be cast.

Which also means it has until 8 A.M. to be canceled.

Winnie pushes at her glasses. The crack over her left eye seems to pinwheel. Pick your nightmare! Spin the wheel! Ignore how Jay’s song makes you feel! She is almost out of the Little Lake, and although she can’t see it from here, the Tuesday estate is beyond those dark fir trees and burgeoning maples.

And okay, there’s undeniably a white fog trickling downriver now—one that is not merely water vapor condensing as the morning temperature ascends. Awesome. If Winnie had any doubt the forest spirit was waking up, that mist just dispelled it.

She grabs a life vest from under the captain’s seat, and with the straps and foam, she locks the steering wheel in place. Then she scoots to the back of the boat.

To think, she stood here on this same platform only a few days ago and refused to toss out candy. Now she is about to aggressively launch pollutants into the lake.

Number of fish saved six years ago? Zero.

Number of fish saved today? Probably in the negative hundreds.

After all, Winnie caused a second Hummer to sink down to the lake’s substrate, where it can leak out toxic chemicals and gasoline for all of time. Well done, Little Environmentalist!

She finds her matches. The armor makes her clumsy; the cold even more so. She has to remove her gloves to get the flimsy box open. Then it takes her six tries and three ruined matches to get a flame going long enough for her to shove it into a crate of fireworks. Don’t try this at home, she thinks once she drops in the burning match, hefts up the open-top crate, and finally tosses it all overboard. It won’t float forever, but hopefully no fuses will catch inside the box before Winnie gets twenty… thirty… forty feet away…

The fuses catch fire.

And the display that follows is filled with so much Wednesday green—since it’s intended for after the Hunters’ Feast—it sears the color onto Winnie’s eyeballs permanently. Like, she’s pretty sure her irises are no longer brown but hazel. And while half the fireworks go rocketing into the sky, the other half definitely don’t make it out of the crate.

That should get some Tuesday attention.

Winnie scoots back to the steering wheel, where she detaches a walkie-talkie from her belt. It has dried out enough now from its dunk in the lake to switch on. Chatter and static topple out of the tiny speaker.

Fireworks. North of the Little Lake. All Lambda units move.

There are other messages spewing out too, now that Winnie is nearer to the forest. These voices are muffled and broken by a spirit that doesn’t want to let them leave. Help—forest—manticore—spread—salamander—lightning—mist—

Well, shit. Winnie sure hopes this next part of her plan goes accordingly. She’s no Thursday, so haphazard is a fair descriptor for the next few bullet points on her to-do list.

She hits the walkie-talkie’s transmit button. “Hey, Jeremiah!” she shouts. The wind tries to steal her voice. “Hey, J.T. J-Dog. Pickle-breath—you around for a chat?”

Winnie presses the speaker to her ear. Behind her, one final firework sparkles into the gray, clotted sky. A bursting circle of Wednesday green.

“Ms. Wednesday,” a voice answers momentarily. “I assume you just set off the fireworks?”

“Guilty as charged. Did you find Leona Morgan yet? Has she explained by now that we’ve got a spirit waking up in the forest?”

“She has, and it’s an interesting tale. About as interesting as all those Compendium facts you shared with me underground yesterday.”

Jesus, Winnie thinks. That was only yesterday?

“So I guess this means you don’t believe her?”

“Not particularly.”

Winnie groans directly into the mic. Jeremiah is excruciatingly predictable. Worthy of a Jeremian theorem: input x , and he will always think y is a lie!

“Well, if you want to catch me, J-Dog, you’re going to have to come this way. I’m headed north. Swan float. Hard to miss.”

Winnie gives an emphatic wave toward the lights of downtown.

“Also, I’m going to guess you’re not getting the messages out of the forest right now. Otherwise, you’d probably believe what I’m telling you. So I’ll just give you the basics: it’s bad. Really bad. It sounds like the hunters are facing a manticore and a salamander right now. So you’re going to want to get back to the Tuesday estate and load up on all that shiny gear from your Masquerade displays.”

“Ms. Wednesday, turn around the pontoon boat.”

“No, J.T. Can’t do that.” Winnie frowns at a shadow forming in the nearby mist. Then water splashes. Kelpie, she thinks. Great .

“Also, you’ve got mist and nightmares incoming. So… you know: get ready.”

Winnie turns off the radio. The mist is so thick, she’s not sure her final message went through. Plus, she’s officially out of the Little Lake now. The banks are closing in on either side; the current is picking up speed. And to complicate things, the mist is quickly erasing all shoreline. Only the vague shapes of trees keep Winnie aimed in the right direction.

There are other vague shapes lurking in there too. They hulk and prowl, moving like zoo animals finally freed from their habitats. They parade south, toward Hemlock Falls.

The wind, at least, is gentler. The only improvement, since the mist cloys at Winnie with carrion smells. It strokes against her legs with hungry heat. And Jay’s song—she still hears it, still feels it.

Elliott Monday hypothesized in 1974 that a siren’s song switches on key dopamine receptors in the brain, and it is in fact this hunger for dopamine that drives people to follow the song.

Winnie dips away from the steering wheel to light another match. This one catches on the first try, and she tosses another crate of fireworks overboard.

Once again, Wednesday green lights up the sky. Beacons for scorpions to follow. Lying lights to lead them into danger.

The more I forget you, the deeper you sink in

Fangs at the neck and red paint on a lost cabin

Ten dollars to kiss, a bet I can never win

Snow on your lips

It’s feast or it’s full famine

I miss you more now

Now that it’s been so long