Page 19 of The Luminaries
Never run from a banshee.
She can’t remember the exact reason. Something about how they hunt—like maybe they follow exhalations. Or they move too fast to escape. But it doesn’t matter. The fact is,never run from a bansheeis definitely in that appendix and Winnie is going to obey.
Mom ran, and it didn’t work out for her.
The sniffling tears are getting louder now, and though Winnie wouldreally like more space in her brain for planning, she can’t seem to turn off the Compendium.
Their tears produce a lethal poison that burns to the touch. 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 has no plans to collect tears and no need for a false death. Her only choice right now is to lay this trap and hide.
Except there are no branches she can climb onto, no convenient logs to clamber under. There are only herself and the red button that looks gray in this leached light.Press it,she tells herself, and somehow, her thumb obeys. Prongs poke out, although in the darkness, she feels more than sees how metal spines eject like scarab legs.
She sets it down, then slings her backpack around to grab for the second poison-mist trap. The zipper gets stuck. The bag won’t open.
The crying is now overwhelming in its nearness and its power. Winnie’s chest twists in on itself, a sponge wringing out. There’s something so familiar in that sound, as if this creature has lost her own father and been cast out from all she ever knew. As if she too knows how big loneliness can feel. How it settles over everything, muddying edges the way tears muddy ink.
Winnie yanks at the zipper, again, again. Harder, harder, her fingers numb and pulse booming against her eardrums. The banshee will be here any moment. Winnie needs the second trap. She needs to set it down and move—
The underbrush shivers. The banshee appears.
She is close enough that there is no mistaking her for human. What might look like a green cape from afar is actually her skin, sagging off bones with a velvety sheen. Her hair, spun silver, hangs in long strands that shine as if lit from within. Her humanoid face is strangely smooth, strangely serene, as if this crying frees her. As if it will free Winnie too if Winnie will only give in to the pain.
Winnie drops her backpack and straightens. She knows not to run, but she has to movesomeif she doesn’t want her lone, pathetically tiny trap to release while she, Winnie, is still in the way.
It’s all she’s got. This one trap she almost didn’t have at all is her only chance.
The banshee, still crying, wipes her eyes. Her claws glint, and Winnie realizes that the creature has no knuckles. That each finger is like a fat syringe waiting to inject. As illogical as it is, she thinks,I need to update my drawing.
The banshee takes a single step forward. Winnie takes an achingly cautious step backward. Surely this is safe. She’s not running, after all. She takes a second step. A third—
The creature lightnings toward her, a streak of silver hair and a scream to shred hearts, and where Winnie has always believed time must slow in moments like these—isn’t that what the movies and stories say?—it doesn’t. The banshee is somehow before her. Somehow on top of her while her back crashes against the ground, and the poison-mist trap hasn’t fired.
She can’t see the creature’s face. The banshee is too close and there isn’t enough light. She can feel the weight of her nightmare body, though. She can smell a breath that is fetid and ancient like a sarcophagus opened for the first time.
Winnie wants to fight. Deep down, along with the footnote not to run, shewantsto fight this nightmare and get away. But she can’t, because she is so overcome by grief that now she is crying too. And not just the sniffling tears like the banshee had made, but a rough, heaving sob that scratches up her throat and ejects from her mouth.
She misses her dad. She wishes he hadn’t chosen the Dianas over his family. She wishes he hadn’t chosen the Dianas overher.
A teardrop hits Winnie’s cheek, but it doesn’t burn. It’s like the mist when it first enclosed her: warm, soothing. It melts down her cheek to her jaw, where it mingles with her own tears. And somehow, that feels even better.
She doesn’t smell death anymore, nor does she feel the banshee’s weight. Her sobs are quieting, her chest relaxing, as if the banshee tears are an antidote that have somehow smoothed away scar tissue Dad left behind.
Thank you, she wants to say, but her lips don’t move and her bodyhas gone completely limp. She would have thought herself asleep and dreaming if she didn’t still see the silver hair cascading around her, erasing the forest, encapsulating her, not like an iron maiden, but like a cocoon. She will awaken from this and be a different person.
The wolf howls. An odd sound that pierces Winnie’s awareness and punctures her cocoon. Another howl, nearer this time and almost frantic. Distantly—in a tucked-away spot still functioning—Winnie wonders if it’s the werewolf and if it now hunts the banshee. If she is about to have two nightmares to contend with.
The banshee’s head turns. Silver hair scrapes Winnie’s face, stealing away the warmth of her tears—and stealing away the cocoon and the safety and the certainty that everything will be all right.
Reality crashes into Winnie as hard as the banshee had only moments ago. She is trapped beneath the creature, and three needle claws are stabbed through her Kevlar vest. Pain scrapes the surface of her skin, and rotten, wasted death fills her nose.
She needs to get out of here.
Winnie arches her back upward, slinging up a single knee. She has practiced this move a thousand times, but never with a partner. She’s weak and clumsy.
The forest seems to favor her, though, for the banshee is distracted by the wolf howling. With Winnie’s kick, the monster slings sideways like a pile of shed clothes, skin sagging and body unresistant. Needle-claws snap—still stuck in the Kevlar—and fragile light slices into Winnie’s vision.
She scrabbles away. Then to her feet. She doesn’t flee but instead dives for the trap and her backpack. The werewolf is almost to her, and it could be coming from anywhere. Its howling bounces and flings around her, so loud she worries it isn’t alone. That others like it might follow.
