Page 21 of The Luminaries
She draws back her shoulders and waits for the inevitable slowdown. The inevitable window-roll and questions.
Her teeth click. The car takes clearer and clearer shape beneath each streetlamp. It’s a black SUV like all hunters drive, and soon Winnie spots the Thursdays’ silver bell sigil on the front plate.Please don’t have Aunt Rachel inside,she begs.Please don’t have Aunt Rachel inside.
Aunt Rachel isn’t inside—but Emma and Bretta are. They’re with others that Winnie can’t see as the SUV grinds to a stop and the back door slings open.
“Oh mygod,Winnie!” Emma shrieks, clutching her dimpled cheeks as she leaps out.
“You killed a banshee!” cries Bretta. Then they both launch toward Winnie, hands clapping and steps bouncing.
“Winnie killed a banshee!” Bretta screams as she runs, and Emma joins her: “Winnie killed a banshee!”
CHAPTER13
It all happens so fast Winnie can’t seem to stop it. Like the banshee’s attack in the forest, there is no slowing of time. No pause for assessment. No life flashing before her eyes. There is simply beat after confusing beat to slam into her while she is trapped by the weight of a banshee with silver hair.
First: The twins assume Winnie killed the banshee and they scream this at everyone in the SUV. Repeatedly.
Second: Everyone in the SUV—two Thursday hunters and Fatima—scrambles out and rushes toward Winnie. Everyone is talking at once, inundating Winnie in words and sound and, to her utter confusion, claps of congratulations or smiles with open respect. There is no space for her to reply. She can barely keep up with what anyone is saying.
Winnie vaguely notices how filthy everyone is, coated in nightmare blood of varying shades as well as dirt and sweat and pine needles and leaves. Winnie realizes that the same thing coats her, except there is no blood.
Just the three banshee needle-claws, still poking out of her Kevlar.
Third: She is herded toward the SUV, where one of the hunters (Ernesto, a distant relation of Erica’s) takes the banshee head and dumps it in the trunk while the other hunter (Lucia Giovedì, not related) pushesWinnie into the back seat and offers her a swig of celebratory whiskey from a silver flask at her hip. The twins and Fatima cram in with Winnie, all of them asking her some variation ofHow did you kill it? Where did you find it?Or alternately squealing,Holy crap, you killed a banshee! Wow, wow, wow, you’re gonna be a legend!
They also mention they’d seen a werewolf—Bretta, Fatima, and Ernesto too all saw a werewolf, and oh my gosh, Winnie, a realwerewolf! Ernesto is the only one who seems worried by this development instead of exhilarated.
Fourth: When at last Winnie does manage to speak, her throat and chest still burning from the whiskey, she croaks out exactly what had happened—with the wolf howling and the banshee arriving and the trap she’d placed on the forest floor. But like some horrifying game of telephone, the twins take over the story before she’s done and finish it for her. They assume the trap fired; they assume Winnie then used a standard hunting knife (that no one seems to notice she doesn’t have) to saw off the monster’s head.
Emma even points to the needle-claws as evidence of Winnie’s epic skills and hair-raising escape.
Fifth: Winnie doesn’t contradict Emma. She knows she should. She watches the scene in detached alarm, like some omniscient narrator removed from her body that can assess and disapprove in real time. But she can’t seem to get backintoher body to tell Emma and the others they’re wrong.
Because as she sits there squashed into the middle seat, basting in the stench of nightmare viscera and hunter sweat, no one in the SUV is laughing at her. No one is calling her names. No one is looking at her like they just wiped her off the bottom of their shoe.
Instead, they’re all impressed. Even awestruck, and they are welcoming her into their ranks with not only open arms, but smiles and laughs and whiskey flasks. Emma killed a will-o’-wisp; Bretta slew a manticore hatchling; and Fatima gutted a sylphid. And of course,theyall did it with hunters nearby in case anything went sideways.
Winnie did it solo. Winnie is a queen.
But when Winnie asks them all about a weird whispery creature that makes the forest look like it was smashed through a meat grinder, noone knows what she’s describing. Fatima even regards Winnie with a worried frown and offers a power bar “in case your blood sugar is low.”
Winnie doesn’t take it, but she does wonder—again—if she might have missed something in the Compendium. For all her memorizing and sketching, no brain is perfect. Surely that creature she saw has a name.Surelysomeone in Hemlock Falls will know it.
Sixth: The SUV pulls up to the Thursday estate. The clock on the dash says 12:42. The Thursday-night hunters will still be at large until dawn, but most hunter applicants seem to have already returned. Casey Tuesday wears his arm in a sling and Astrid dances off her adrenaline to music that only she seems to hear. A third SUV is shifting into park as Winnie and the rest of her crew pour out.
Seventh: The twins and Fatima relay Winnie’s story to everyone, complete with hand motions to mimic what she’d done. They make it sound a lot more badass, and the second half of the story remains completely untrue.
Winnie still doesn’t contradict them.Later,she tells herself.I’ll tell the truth later.When not everyone is nearby to impale her with stares and frowns and words thickened by hate.
Eighth: The fourth and final SUV arrives right as Ernesto pulls the banshee head from the trunk and as everyone starts cheering and patting Winnie on the back. The banshee claws glint on her vest, which Casey keeps gaping at and saying,That’s so cool, that’s so cool.
Ninth: Aunt Rachel disembarks from the SUV and assesses the situation with her usual blank expression, listening while the twins, yet again, relay a story that is only 50 percent true. And while Winnie, yet again, finds her throat closed off and her words far, far away.
Rachel studies the banshee head, then leans in to study the claws on Winnie’s vest. Winnie’s heart thunders almost as hard as it had in the forest. She prays Rachel doesn’t notice that she has no banshee blood on her. That her leather jacket is only streaked in red clay. Shewilltell the truth, just not yet. Not here.
Then it happens. The tenth and final beat of the night: Aunt Rachel’s expression transforms. From acute angles to obtuse, her entire face opens up. The lines on her forehead relax, and she even cracks the barest glimmer of a crooked smile. Her dark eyes meet Winnie’s—the samehemlock-bark brown as her sister’s, as Darian’s, and as Winnie’s too—and she says, “Well, shit, Winnie. I guess I need to apologize.”
She thrusts out a hand, and Winnie is almost too stunned to take it. She is definitely too stunned to speak as Rachel pumps it and says, “Good job, kid. You passed the first trial.”
