Page 55 of The Luminaries
“I don’t need an emergency blanket.” Winnie tries to pull free. But Rachel is strong, and neither she nor Rosa is listening.
“Also radio in for the four-wheeler. She looks okay”—Rachel gives Winnie a hard once-over—“but I don’t think she should be moving too much. Look, kid, you passed the trial, okay? You made it the whole night, and now we’re going to get you to civilization.”
“Why aren’t you listening to me?” Winnie asks. Rosa is now muttering into a small wrist radio, and Rachel is just talking right over her. “I know what I saw, Aunt Rachel. It’s like… like a supernova made of shotguns, and we need to get the Tuesdays in here right away. And the Council! They need to know.”
Rachel tugs Winnie toward the stream; Rosa urges her on from the other side. And for what feels like an eternity of Winniebeggingthem to listen, they just haul her onward until three four-wheelers arrive. Until Winnie is shoved onto one with some Sunday hunter she doesn’t recognize, and there’s nothing she can do but hold on until they reach the dirt road again.
This is worse than having Mario laugh at her theories and call theminspired.This is worse than having the Luminary Council dismiss her like a child with an overactive imagination. Because unlike those times, there isreally a nightmare out therethat shesaw with her own eyesand now absolutelyno one will believe her.She tries to tell the Sunday on the four-wheeler; nothing. In the forest parking area she tries to tell Bretta, who is limping, and Fatima, who has a bandaged wrist. Nothing. She tries to tell Rachel again on their ride back to the Sunday estate.Nothing.
So she finally shuts up. If they won’t believe her, then she’s out of options right now.
“I know you pulled the alarm,” Rachel is saying as they drive into theSunday parking lot, where Mom’s Volvo puffs exhaust into the morning. “But since we didn’t reach you until after the mist, you still qualify as passing. Great job, Winnie. We’re really proud of you.I’mreally proud of you. You killed two vampira and survived the night.”
Winnie doesn’t answer. She just waits until Rachel has parked, pushes out of the SUV, and rushes straight for Mom—who is practically leaping from the car, excitement brightening her sleepless face like the sunrise behind her.
“How did it go? How did it go?”
Winnie doesn’t answer her either. Instead, she strides to the passenger door and climbs inside. She pulls on her seat belt, staring straight ahead, and waits for Mom to finish talking to Aunt Rachel. Waits for her to get back in the car and put it into drive. Only when they are out of the parking lot does Winnie finally move: she curls over and silently cries.
CHAPTER29
Mom is clearly worried about Winnie but also seems to intuitively understand (in that way only moms can) that Winnie needs space. She offers her a pat on the shoulder when they get to the house and says, “I went through the same thing.” Then she lets Winnie climb the stairs and burrow into her room.
Winnie can’t sleep once she’s there, though. She knows she needs to, but as long as the Whisperer is still out there and no one believes her, she can’t relax or lie down or shut her eyes.
She can’t even be happy that she passed the second trial and is now that much closer to becoming a full-fledged hunter. That her family might be that much closer to shedding their outcast punishment for good.
The fact is that she’d fallen asleep in the tree. She’d let the ghost-deer lull her into thinking the forest could be beautiful and pure. She’d evensympathizedwith a werewolf. Then vampira had snuck up on her, and a nightmare to kill all nightmares had come.
So much for trusting the forest. It only wants death, and it only knows how to betray.
Winnie sits at her desk, and without thinking—as if she’s trapped ina siren’s hypnotizing song—she starts to draw. Just big, sweeping lines with a pencil, even though sheneveruses pencil.
She doesn’t know what she’s drawing, either, or why. The lines and curves just appear beneath the silver graphite as it scrapes across sixty-pound sketching paper.
Voices rumble in the living room. Hushed tones so as not to disturb her. Mom, who has taken the morning off to be with Winnie, talks to Darian and Aunt Rachel. They’re likely speculating about whether or not Winnie’s mind has cracked.
Maybe it has,she thinks as she stares at a vampira’s gray face, stretched long in horror and mandibles wide with a scream. Its eyes are shaded with panic, fear, a desperation to live that is more real, more true than anything Winnie has ever drawn before.
She rips out the page and crushes it in her fist. It hits the carpet a half second later. Then she tears the hellion off the wall.Crunch. Drop.And finally the kelpie too. Three balls of paper she never wants to look at again.
Winnie needs to find someone who will listen to her—not sit here and draw. She needs to find Mario.
Which is why, a mere five minutes later, she climbs as quietly as she can out of Darian’s window, onto the roof, onto the woodpile, and finally into the yard. She’s wearing old leggings and an even older zip-up hoodie over a long-sleeved T-shirt. Three very different shades of black, and she’s freezing. But her leather jacket is in the downstairs closet and her clean laundry is… nonexistent.
It takes her twenty minutes to cross Hemlock Falls on the family bike. The grime she’d scrubbed off in a boiling shower two hours ago is now replaced with sweat and rain-damp wind.
A storm is coming.
She doesn’t bother chaining up the bike in front of the Monday estate’s main building when she gets there. Really, an unlikely bike theft by some asshat Luminary is the least of Winnie’s concerns right now. She takes the stairs two at a time, surprised her body has any juice left to give. She knows she’s coasting on adrenaline, but she needs to go a little bit farther still.
She bursts through Mario’s open office door, only to find he isn’tthere. She asks people in the hall where he is, but apparently no one has seen him today. When she steps inside to leave a note on his desk, though, she discovers something resting atop the Compendium.
It’s a vial of what looks like blood.
She goes toward it, not really thinking so much as drawn by the scientific part of her brain that wants to analyze and study. The blood looks like normal human blood, but there’s no label on it. No slip of printed lab paper. It’s just a vial of blood atop the open Compendium, which is open to the page on…
Werewolves.
