The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 47

CHAPTER 47

While Winnie’s new plan, crafted from a truly desperate assemblage of bullet points, won’t impress the Thursdays anytime soon, it does give Winnie precisely the mathematical outcome she desires.

The fireworks detonate, spraying out green sparkles that pop-crack-boom! around the rowan tree or across the half-moon stretch of shore. One hound gets it in the abdomen, another in the leg. And the lynx, meanwhile—well, they get a faceful of Winnie because as soon as the fireworks start going, she starts running. Bilaterally symmetric, her knives swing like she is a vampira with blade arms.

She aims one knife at the lynx’s face. Swipe. She slices off a pointed ear. Then her other knife she punches across the lynx’s abdomen. These aren’t killing blows so much as flourishes meant to stop the silva spell channeled from the rowan tree.

It works. Winnie knows it works because she sees the mist evaporate like a line of falling dominoes. Then a bellow fills the morning, so loud, it rattles into Winnie’s bones—a familiar sound that was directed at Winnie only fifteen days ago…

And that is now beautifully, viciously directed at the Dianas.

The sadhuzag charges this way.

Now Winnie does laugh with a full-throated cackle. She is a hunter. She is on the move. And although the Dianas are trying to launch attacks at her, only one actually connects with Winnie before the sadhuzag—and all its fellow nightmares—come pouring out of the forest.

The spell that hits Winnie is a bad one, though. The worst: a golden arrow that shafts right into her chest. Pain, heat, screams. They suffuse her body, all the way from her anterior fontanelle down to her distal phalanges. She becomes the sagitta aurea, her vision turning gold as molten sunlight.

Her locket burns like fresh magma. Fully red. Fully smoking. But, inexplicably, Winnie doesn’t die. The gold and the pain clear, and other than a melted depression on her armor, there is no wound.

So she runs onward. Her knives drip blood. Her focus, even with green fireworks to burst in her periphery, stays lasered on the Crow. Martedì has seen what is happening, so is tearing Erica out of the water again. This time, there is no struggle in the girl.

“Do it!” Martedì shouts in a voice made of thunderclaps. As if her mask magnifies her words, turning her into an all-powerful godling. “Do it now, Erica, or I will make sure everyone you love is destroyed.”

Winnie throws her knife, but it’s useless. The blade simply bounces off the Crow, deflected as if hitting a force field.

“DO IT, ERICA. NOW.” Martedì whips Erica higher, and a cry rips from Erica’s throat. Partly pained, mostly defeated.

Then come the words Winnie doesn’t want to hear. The words that mean, We are one in sleep and dreams. We are one in waking.

The explosion that ripples out is devastating. It flings Winnie back—along with everyone else on the shore. Nightmare, Luminary, Diana. Everyone topples like wheat beneath a scythe. All except Martedì, who leans into the wave as if she knew this was coming. As if she loves it, and by the power of the forest, give her more .

Worse—so much worse—a tunnel begins opening into the water. It pulls at Erica, sucking her into the lake as if she really is nothing more than protons and dirt dug into the carpet.

Winnie rises. She runs. The earth no longer pulses with a heartbeat. Now, there is only the chaos of the resuming supercell storm.

She drops her second knife because it’s no use against the Crow or the waking spirit. All Winnie needs are her smarts, all she needs are her instincts. “Stop!” she screeches at Martedì, who stalks toward the watery tunnel carving into the waves. “Stop!”

Martedì doesn’t stop. She probably can’t hear Winnie over the universe collapsing. So Winnie pushes herself harder. She’s close to the Crow now. Close to this uncanny hole spiraling into the Big Lake.

That is when two things happen. First, a bird drops out of the sky and starts squawking. It flaps and claws into Martedì’s face, forcing the woman to stop right at the tunnel’s edge. Which gives Winnie enough time to catch up. To rush onto the first stretch of exposed silt and rocks and weeds.

Then the second thing happens: the melusine returns. It propels itself from the water like a wave come to life. Its tail morphs into legs. Webbed feet, Winnie notices for the first time. And very sharp claws. It attacks the Crow—and this time, Martedì has no choice but to stop and fight back.

Winnie stampedes past them. The melusine doesn’t notice her, nor does Martedì. But the crow—the avian one… It screams a throaty caw at Winnie before flapping away. And sure, why not? A sentient crow on top of everything else makes total sense here.

Winnie looks back only once, to check the battle that has laid claim to the beach and forest. Golden arrows fly against nightmares, against Luminaries—and a lone signora still fights against a melusine with scales that shine like a sunrise.

Winnie enters the Big Lake.

Possession: Though rare, there are reports of forest spirits briefly possessing humans and using them to accomplish tasks that nightmares cannot complete, such as destroying sensory equipment or killing hunters. The hosts rarely survive the encounter.

The ground is silty and sopping as it slopes downward. Already Erica is fifty feet ahead. She doesn’t look conscious. She doesn’t even look alive. But if Winnie won’t give up on Jay, then she sure won’t give up on Erica either.

She pushes the muscles of her quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes faster. She channels every ounce of speed into legs that haven’t felt relief in hours. That haven’t had calories in even longer. But that is what the melusine’s caress was for. Keep going. Keep going.

T minus this is the end.

I miss you more now. Now that it’s been so long.

Water fuses into a liquid wall behind Winnie, and though light still pours down from above, the deeper she runs, the less light reaches her. It reminds her of an aquarium she went to once, when she was eleven. There was a tunnel that went right through the shark tank. Now, instead of Chondrichthyes to swim around Winnie, there are sirens, kelpies, river sylphids. They whip and flash, keeping pace with Winnie in a way she really hopes isn’t predatory.

Each time the shadows move, green bioluminescence ignites. It doesn’t make her think of fireworks now. Instead, she thinks of fish food. She thinks of Grayson’s funeral and his ashes tossed into the Big Lake. May Grayson find peace in his long sleep at the heart of the forest. That was how the eulogy ended because that is how they always end.

Winnie’s boots slomp in the silt and trip through plants drooped across the substrate. Erica, Erica. She just has to reach Erica. She just has to stay ahead of the water stalking behind.

Her breathing turns pained. The air is humid like a spa. Like the hot room. And all the gurgling from the encroaching lake—they’re just pumps and pipes and furnaces to keep Winnie hidden away from Tuesdays.

God, if only she could go back to that moment in Jenna’s secret corner. If only Winnie could listen to the harmonic overtones in Erica’s words and push her friend for more answers. For more truth.

There’s something important in that thought. Something that is digging at Winnie’s frontal lobe like it’s another scratch-off lottery ticket. But she has no time to scrape in search of matching numbers. She is still running down into a lake that wants to crush her.

The descent flattens, and Erica slides like a sea slug, her body carving a groove through silt. Each rock she bumps into makes her eyelids open.

If she’s alive, there is no sign of it.

A droplet plops onto Winnie’s head. It’s so hot, so startling that she looks up. Oh shit. The lake has sealed over her. And any light still letting her see, move, run—it isn’t coming from overhead. It’s coming from the center of the lake, from a silvery glow that…

Oh yes, is pulsing.

Pure Heart. Trust the Pure Heart.

This, Winnie decides, must be the sleeping spirit. Not an eye nor even a heart, but a silver glow like the full-moon Ferris wheel surrounded by lapping waves and dry ice.

A mist floats here too. An ethereal fog that lacks the talons of usual mist. It’s not hot, nor even warm. It’s simply vapor that Winnie scrambles through.

More hot water rains onto her head.

The light brightens. There’s a greenish tint that swirls through like two paints being mixed upon a palette. Forest green, reads one tube. Full moon silver, reads the other . And all Winnie has to do is dab her brush in, then smear, swipe, create whatever nightmare her mind’s eye can imagine.

Brighter, brighter. Winnie has to screw her eyes to almost shut. Erica is losing definition, becoming a silhouette. Backlit, like Jay’s song—a title Winnie still doesn’t understand, even though she asked him about it nine days ago. I miss you more now. Now that it’s been so long.

She does miss him. And if Jay isn’t here, if Winnie can’t save him or Erica now that she’s literally at the bottom of the Big Lake, then what was the point of everything? Of Dad’s clues or a stolen swan boat or a ruined maze and a derailed Hummer?

Erica stops moving. It’s sudden. One moment, she’s prostrate. The next, she’s rising, pivoting, as if invisible hands have scooped her up. There, there, little witch. Let’s get you back on your feet.

The water still prods at Winnie from behind, shepherding her forward. She is a fish in a net, pushed along toward doom. Until she too reaches the greenish, throbbing light, where a second silhouette awaits. A figure she has drawn and redrawn more times than she can remember. He fills her sketchbooks, he saturates her thoughts. And his song—it continues to sing, controlling her just like a possession as described by the Compendium.

“Jay?” she asked him nine days ago as they lay on Winnie’s bed, her body tucked against his. Her fingers reveling in the shape of this boy she’d lost for so many years.

“Yes, Winnie?”

“Why’s your song called ‘Backlit’? You never say that word in the lyrics.”

“Not all song titles have to be in the lyrics, Win. I’m an artiste like that.”

“You mean, you’re a dork.”

“A cute one?”

“A very cute one.”

“Do cute dorks get kisses?”

“Not until they answer my question. Why ‘Backlit’—what does it mean?”

“It means…”

“Stop squirming. Answer the question.”

“Fine. It means ‘I don’t know.’ I just… heard the tune, and for whatever reason, that title was there. ‘Backlit.’ It felt important. Like I needed to write it down. I didn’t have lyrics yet—just the tune and the title.”

“But then why make the song about me?”

“Because…”

“You don’t need to blush like that, Jay. I promise I won’t laugh.”

“I’m not worried you’ll laugh. It just doesn’t make sense, is all. When I heard that tune, I saw you. There was all this light radiating off you, like you’d stepped out of a star. And… yeah, yeah. I know how weird that sounds. But once I saw you like that… well, there wasn’t anyone else I could possibly write the song for.

“There, are you happy now, Win? Does that satisfy your ladyship?”

“Stepped out of a star?”

“I knew you’d laugh.”

“I’m not laughing, Jay. I promise. It’s just… hard to imagine myself like that.”

“Not for me it isn’t. Now can this dork have his kisses?”

Well, Winnie can imagine the light of a star now. Holy hellions and banshees, can she imagine it. Jay wasn’t just having some weird dream about her; he was seeing what would come. He was seeing this moment, right here.

Just like how you keep dreaming of the Pure Heart.

There goes the scratching at the lottery ticket again. Winnie can see the first numbers. Important numbers that add up to something bigger, like a jackpot for her friends, her family, for all of Hemlock Falls…

Water sloshes behind her. Impatient. Filled with galaxies and fish food and nightmares. Go on, little hunter. Make your move or we will make it for you.

Wednesday, witch, werewolf.

Bear, bell, sparrow.

Three circles on a Venn diagram; three petals on Dad’s favorite nodding wakerobin.

Luminaries. Dianas. Nightmares.

Oh. Oh. There goes the last of the scratch-off silver. Because oh, this must be why Dad left Winnie all those clues. Why he didn’t simply hide Jenna’s source away forever, but left a complex scavenger hunt for his daughter to follow. A secret exit from a twisty maze.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Yet neither are they my enemy. Because in a system, there are no enemies. There are no friends. There are predators, there are prey, and there is survival—all kept in a careful, cautious balance. To remove one piece of the system means the whole thing will collapse.

The spirit was awoken because the balance was broken by a Diana who fed it a half nightmare made from pure, Friday heart. Now if Winnie wants to reassemble the balance again…

She sucks in a sweltering breath. The green lights dart around her, blasting photons that no one will ever see. They aren’t swamp fires, but rather fairies who will guide Winnie where she needs to be.

You either trust the forest or you don’t, little hunter. You have to make up your mind.

Winnie steps into the light.