Page 79 of The Luminaries
Then slowly her eyelids lower. Her breathing slows. When her head lolls sideways against the tree, Winnie feels for her pulse, and though Emma’s skin is dangerously,dangerouslycold, and though her pulse moves sluggish as winter in the forest, the girl still lives.
If collected from a banshee corpse, the venom can be used to induce temporary comas and even a mimicry of death, slowing the recipient’s heartbeat to near stillness.
Winnie pushes once at glasses that are no longer on her nose. Then she rises into the night and runs.
Winnie can’t be sure where she is, but she can be sure that if she runs southwest, she will reach the Big Lake. And if she can reach the Big Lake, she will find one of Lizzy’s cameras.
That is the extent of her plan. The full breadth and width of it: Reach the Big Lake. Do not die. Pray Mario and Lizzy are watching the cameras and will hear her scream for help.
Emma’s hunting knife is tight in her grasp, a mirror to flash her face every time she pumps her arms. It offers a reflection she doesn’t like. Makeup smeared. Dirt and blood, no glasses. As if the entirety of herbeing has been distilled down to these elements. As if this is all she is and all she ever can be.
She is no Wednesday. There is no cause inside her, through and through. There is only a shredded dress and a lie hanging by a banshee’s severed spine.
Winnie doesn’t know what time it is—it’s got to be nearing midnight by now, if she’s properly gauging the moon that peeks and sneaks between the arrow-tipped trees of the forest. All she has are her feet to keep her moving and this flashing knife to keep showing her a truth she doesn’t want to see.
Happy birthday, witch traitor.
The ground starts to slope down. A gentle roll that heralds the lake. The moon is bright right now. So white it almost hurts the eyes. The trees are thinning out as sandy substrate takes over. Winnie can’t avoid the moon’s purifying glare.
She is cold. She is hot. She can’t feel her feet, and her breaths are loud enough to summon every nightmare in the forest.
Which is exactly what they do, and it’s only as she comes upon a rise in the ground that she remembers—too late—what Johnny Saturday had said.Manticore hatchlings keep reappearing on the eastern shore.
She has stepped on the mound that marks their nest. She has alerted the hatchlings inside.
They spew forth from a dark hole, hundreds of them, white to the point of transparent—and one after the next, each the size of a small pit bull. They look just like all the corpses she has delivered to Mario, and just like all her sketches too.
Except these hatchlings are on the move.
Manticore: A catchall term for any nightmares with scorpion characteristics, though most often seen with a humanoid head on a six-legged body with a traditional scorpion thorax and stinger.
In the American forest, the manticores lack the human head and are more akin to enormous whip scorpions. While they do possess stingers that lead to painful pustules—and sometimes death—it is their whiplike anterior appendages that do the most damage.
Winnie slings down her knife, ducking to reach the first manticore as it strikes.
Also like their natural cousin the scorpion, a juvenile manticore’s venom is more likely to be deadly. Avoid the stinger.
Her knife cuts through chitinous carapace. A stinger flies sideways before her knife pendulums back to cut through anything she can hit. She lurches on unsteady feet, hacking and hacking andhacking.But this isn’t a knife for brute force, and there are too many manticores to stop. They’re still scrabbling out, long mandibles clacking while their whips slash and reach.
Winnie cuts them away, whip after whip, stinger after stinger, but she’s not actually killing any of them, and they’re still coming. Worse, she can feel a rumble in the earth below that can mean only one thing: Mom is on the way.
Her back hits a pine’s rough bark. She hacks twice more—severing a stinger, a whip, a clicking claw—before sidling around the trunk and sprinting again. She can’t face those babies; she definitely can’t face the mom.
She also can’t outrun them. They are six-legged and scuttle easily over this forest terrain spun in moonlight. The only advantage Winnie has is that she is taller, her legs are longer. She gains ground.
But that ground is still shaking. The mother knows she is here.
Winnie angles toward the lake. It’s a long shot. It’s the longest of long shots, and it relies on even more what-ifs than before. Trees and stone rattle around her. A slash-slash-slash rips through the forest in time to thrashing whips. The mother is moving fast, slowed only by her size.
Winnie looks back once. A sea of writhing white arachnids have engulfed the forest like a tidal wave. Without her glasses, she sees only a frothing, churning mass. And at the back of it all is the wave’s crest, her whips swinging left and right like some Weedwacker gone wrong.
Winnie doesn’t look back again. She is almost to the shore. Twenty thunderous steps. Ten.
Kelpies: Shaggy water creatures, kelpies are horselike in shape, but close examination reveals algal hair and a bulbous body best suited to high-pressure depths. They hunt at midnight, briefly abandoning their deepwater home for the shoreline. Though legends declare they become human, forest kelpies in fact transition to a towering bipedal shape that is less human and more skeletal. In place of arms, they possess boneless tentacles.
Kelpies are extremely territorial when hunting, and though they do not actively hunt other nightmares, they are known to kill other nightmares that infringe upon their shore.
But there are no kelpies here. Winnie seesnothingon the shore save for silt and rock and still, sentient waters.
