Page 76 of The Luminaries
Second, what if it’s currently hunting Emma? Weaponless, maybe-possessed Emma.
The tail arrives. It flicks past from a different spot ten paces away, slipping and sliding and slithering while feathery hairs float on the night breeze. They are far more angelic, almost like a peacock’s plumage, than she had realized. She thinks, quite uselessly, that her sketch in the Compendium needs updating.
A scream splits the forest. Winnie’s body goes cold. That was Emma screaming, and that is Emma now lifting her voice to shriek, “Help!”
Winnie lunges for the basilisk’s tail. Up go her arms, stake gripped in both hands. She stabs downward, through the scales and spine and muscle and earth.
But oh god, she wasn’t prepared for how fast the basilisk can move. Sketches don’t move. Compendium descriptionsdon’t move.Somehow, before she can even leap properly away, she sees the head—a crowned queen—flying toward her. It is head-height, moving on an erect body like a cobra. A nightmarish, impossibly tall cobra.
Winnie leaps back, arms windmilling, but she’s clumsy on her unhappy ankle. She loses her balance and slings straight down.
Fortunately, the training lives inside her, recently refreshed after hours with Jay on hard ground. She tucks her chin, splays out her arm, and catches herself before transferring into a sideways roll.
The basilisk’s fangs slam against the forest floor, exactly where Winnie had just been. She tries to scrabble up, her hands groping for purchase, but all she finds is the stake.
She stumbles against it. Knocks the stake out of the earth and therefore out of the basilisk. Blood spews forth, hissing and gray. It splatters Winnie’s hand, and she vaguely thinks that itreally freaking hurts.But she can’t do anything about it, because the basilisk is rising again to strike.
Winnie grabs the stake, bits of it eating away beneath acid blood, and twists her body to face the nightmare.
It lunges, fangs bared.
And Winnie looks right into its eyes.
Not on purpose, because sheknowswhat will happen if she meets this creature’s gaze, but by accident, because for all her years of solo training, for all her knowledge of the Compendium, her body still lacks experience. The basilisk’s eyes are silver with vertical pupils, and in the split second before it hits her, Winnie feels…
Sad. Only sad.
Then her glasses turn to stone, and her arms shove the stake forward—a reaction of total panic and no grace.
Scales. Ribs. Heart. The stake pierces the monster.
And, hidden behind lenses of pure stone, the basilisk dies.
Winnie has to ditch her glasses. They are unsalvageable. She also has more basilisk blood on her, and now that the nightmare is dead, adrenaline is receding in the face of pain.
One time, in chemistry class (which Winnie had to take along with six other students who didn’t go to the Sunday estate), Winnie spilled a droplet of hydrochloric acid on her wrist. This feels like that times one thousand. She has to forcibly bite her lip to keep from groaning.
It takes her a moment, as she lies there with her skin boiling and her vision a nearsighted blur, to remember why she is here—why she’d stabbed that basilisk in the first place.
Emma.
Winnie pulls the stake from the basilisk’s heart. More blood sprays, but she’s able to avoid it and she wipes the wooden tip on the ground. Her movements are sharp, perfunctory, and already the horror of the basilisk is fading. Only the pain in her hands remains, but she can ignore that. Shehasto ignore it, along with the cold that has permanently woven through her like that basilisk through the trees.
With the stake clutched tightly, Winnie sets off toward where she thinks she heard Emma scream. And as she moves, over uneven, shadowy terrain thick with pine needles, she wonders where the hell the Wednesday hunters are. Surely Emma’s scream would have summoned someone. Instead, Winnie hears no one. Sees no one—and it’s not just because her vision is blurred. It’s because there’s nothing here to see.
She reaches a wide clearing, almost a field really, where boulders thrust up from the soil. Stone Hollow, it’s called, and it’s a favorite hunting ground for harpies. Wan moonlight slides over the granite megaliths. Winnie squints, trying to force her eyes to see better, to spot where danger or Emma might be.
She glimpses a streak on one stone she thinks might be blood.
After a quick glance at the sky for harpies, Winnie hurries to the weather-carved megalith. Thereisblood on it: three lines, very distinctly spaced like fingers. And on the ground nearby is a shoe.
It’s one of Emma’s heels, and as Winnie quickly scoops it up in search of something that might indicate what had attacked her—guano from a cockatrice, webbing from a manticore—she realizes the glossy leather is completely clean. No clues, no mud, no nothing.
She drops it and scans the soil instead. Maybe the grass is a bit flattened. Andmaybethat stone twenty steps away has more blood on it.
Winnie resumes her forward progress, and with each step, the voice in her head gets louder.Where are the hunters?It is louder than the Compendium forever chattering. It is louder than Jay’s voice forever playing as the bass line.Where are the hunters? Where is Aunt Rachel?
When Winnie reaches the next megalith, she does find more blood and a trail through the grass that leads into the trees.
