Page 43 of The Luminaries
Winnie is waiting for Mom behind the Revenant’s Daughter. She hadn’t seen any reason for Darian, who had kindly picked her up, to drive her back home when Mom will be off her shift any minute now.
Or she issupposedto be, but for some reason Archie keeps giving her the “just one more order, just one more order, and you can go” line, so now Winnie has been leaning against the brick wall in the alley outside for fifteen minutes’ worth of “one mores” and freezing her butt off despite the leather jacket. The open door to the Revenant’s Daughter spews a greasy vapor of fluorescent light, while across the alley, another doorway hangs open to welcome cool air into the overcrowded space—but that light is cozy and dim, carrying with it the smell of fresh coffee and the sounds of grinding beans and clinking cups.
Winnie really wants a cup of coffee. One of the fancy ones that has whipped cream on top and flavored syrups—and that Mom totally disapproves of. She keeps imagining going into the warmth, ordering a coffee on the tab from Mario, sitting in a corner, and savoring the vanilla or the chai orboth.But she doesn’t dare. Because there’s a guitar tuning in there. And a sound like tables being moved. Winnie even thinks she hears Jay’s voice a couple of times. Shedefinitelyhears all theLuminaries. That’s Xavier’s distinctive chuckle, and there is Marisol’s excited squeal. It’s a ton of people; one of them is likely Erica; no way is Winnie going inside.
Just as she is huddling more deeply into her hoodie and jacket, a head pokes out of the Joe Squared door. “Winnie?”
Winnie jolts upright. It’s one of the twins. “Oh, hey… Emma.” She can always tell the sisters apart when they’re together, but solo—and in shadows—it gets tricky. Fortunately, Emma has been wearing her long braids for a while now. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Emma giggles as if Winnie said something funny—and not in a mocking way, but in a genuinely delighted way. “Are you coming inside? The show’s gonna start any minute now.”
“No.” Winnie offers what she hopes is an apologetic smile. “I’m just waiting on my mom to get off work.”
“Ah, right.” Emma traipses out of the doorway toward Winnie, and Winnie has to fight the urge to cower into her hoodie. She definitely keeps her hands in the leather pockets. Her teeth start clicking, and she berates herself for being a coward. The twins deserve better than her flinches and frowns. They aren’t going to hurt her; none of the Luminaries are anymore.
Emma only makes it three steps before a cheer goes up in Joe Squared. It’s like watching the mist in the forest clear: Emma transforms before Winnie’s eyes, somehow becoming even more beautiful. Her eyes literally sparkle, her dimples pucker cutely, and her smile beams.
Winnie is moved by its infectiousness and she finds herself smiling in return.
“They’re starting,” Emma says breathily, clapping her hands to her chest. “Oh, I hope they start with ‘Backlit.’” She gives Winnie a fluttery wave and then half skips, half runs back into the coffee shop.
Winnie watches after her, a frown sewing across her lips. Though she knows that Jay and Trevor Tuesday and L.A. (Louisa Anne) Saturday are in there now, she can’t really imagine what it looks like. She can’t really imagine Jay playing bass guitar or performing on a stage.
“We’re the Forgotten,” L.A. says in a crooning voice. “Thanks for coming out tonight”—rapturous cheers!—“and this is a song about a siren.”
More rapturous cheers. Winnie thinks she hears the twins shrieking loudest of all. Not that she’s really listening to them. The music has started now, and it’s so completely different from what Winnie was imagining.
Once, four and a half years ago—shortly before Dad had gotten caught as a Diana—Winnie and Erica had come to Joe Squared to hear a different Luminary perform: Jenna, Erica’s half sister. She’d had a whispery voice that had sounded almost otherworldly atop her acoustic guitar. A lot like the siren L.A. is now singing about. Every tune had been soft, magical. Jenna had been really good, and she’d desperately wanted to leave Hemlock Falls. Go to music school, perform on a real stage like her non dad, whom she’d never really known.
But then she’d died during a hunter trial—a trial she hadn’t even wanted to take—and that had been the end of her dreams. The end of her music.
Even now, Winnie sometimes wakes up with a hole in her chest and Jenna’s voice whispering around her. The lyrics of her songs might be lost to time, but the ghost of the tunes never seems to fade.
Winnie wonders if Erica thinks of her every time she goes into Joe Squared. She wonders how Erica can stand to ever listen to music again.
The Forgotten sound nothing like Jenna and her lone guitar. They are heavy on beat, electric and pointed, the bass sustaining the bulk of the sound while L.A.’s voice flitters around it, tripping out a melody that’s part pop, part dance, part… Winnie doesn’t even know. It’s different. It’s alive. It’s throbbing in a way that she has only felt once before, when she was alone in the forest after the mist had faded. When it was just her and the vast expanse of nightmares.
They’re all hunters,Winnie realizes, and without quite knowing what she’s doing, she finds herself walking toward Joe Squared.
“Winnie.” Mom rushes breathlessly out of the Revenant’s Daughter, catching Winnie only a few steps away from the coffee shop door. “Hon, I’m so sorry it’s taking me forever. Come wait inside the kitchen, where it’s warm. I’ve still got this one table to wrap up, and then we can go.”
“It’s fine, Mom.” Winnie tugs her arm free. She doesn’t want to miss this song to conversation. It calls to her, just as an actual siren would. “I’ll… I’ll wait in there.” She pops her chin toward Joe Squared.
And Mom nods absently, already hurrying into the kitchen once more. “Meet you back here in fifteen!” She vanishes into the steam.
Winnie tugs her hood low, pulls as much of her hair around her face as she can, and finally ducks into the coffee shop. The song is just ending, everyone’s attention focused on the performers. People don’t notice her slinking into a shadow beside the coffee bar.
Strings of light drape over the high-ceilinged space. The tables normally at the front of the store have been replaced by a makeshift stage on which a single, crude spotlight gleams. People are clustered close to it, and only a few sit at the three remaining tables in the back. The owners, Jo and Joe, bustle about behind the counter. Jo is a former Tuesday hunter who had to have her leg amputated after a droll encounter. She moves easily about on a prosthetic, filling orders. She and Joe both pause to cheer along with everyone else when L.A. announces “Misty Nights,” Trevor kicks off the beat with a drum machine at his foot, and Jay starts plucking away at his bass.
Winnie can’t see Jay from her spot. There’s a column draped in fairy lights that blocks him. She sees Trevor just fine, though, his foot hitting pedals to repeat different guitar parts while his fingers slide over the chords with ease. He’s tall, taller even than Jay, with tawny brown skin that reflects to almost gold in this ethereal light and long dreads that bounce as his head bobs to the beat. Meanwhile L.A., whose dad moved here from the South Korean Luminaries, wears a rainbow baby dress and monster platform sneakers, and she has even added star stickers to the apples of both her high cheekbones.
Jay, Winnie thinks, is definitely the boring one of the three. Even if she can’t see him, she can imagine him in his standard uniform, his skin like old fireplace ash. His music, however, is anything but boring. Every piece of the song seems to center around his bass line—around that thrum in your veins that only comes inside the forest. Thatisthe very forest.
Winnie circles around the counter, sliding between two dancing girls she vaguely recognizes from school and who she thinks are a couple. Actually, a lot of people are dancing—which again, is not what Winnie had expected for a band called the Forgotten. Or for a band Jay might be in.
She spots Emma and Bretta, dancing with Imran and Xavier. ThenWinnie has cleared the counter’s edge, and she can see behind the fairy light column too.
Jay wears a black flannel button-up and looks as he always does… yet completely different. His eyes are fastened on the stage floor, as if that’s where the inspiration to play comes from, and his head moves to the beat. But where Trevor and L.A. are bouncing, dancing, Jay moves with a bare sway that seems to tremble up from the bass guitar. It is hypnotic to watch him.
