Page 23 of The Luminaries
It hadn’t. It doesn’t. Winnie’d choked last night, and the “hunt” she’d always assumed was in her blood… Yeah, it hadn’t been there.
Have you given any thought to that summer program at Heritage?
Winnie leaps from bed and lurches out of her room, aiming for the tiny bathroom everyone shares. But once she’s bent over the old porcelain toilet, the vomit doesn’t come. She just stares at a collection of blue-stained cracks in the bowl from the winter three years ago when money had been too tight to keep the heat on during the day, so Mom had dumped antifreeze into the toilet.
It’s not that Winnie’s family doesn’t get by. Mom makes an okay wage at the Revenant’s Daughter and some of the nicer Luminaries do pity-tip her a lot. Plus, she works at the grocery store once a week and picks up occasional shifts at the bakery—and then Darian chips in whatever he can too. So they have shelter, they have heat 98 percent of the time, and they never go hungry. But back when Mom had been Lead Hunter and Dad had contributed an income too, life had been a lot… well, easier.
Breakfast spins a bit faster in Winnie’s stomach. She clutches the toilet seat. The ankle she’d twisted on her escape from the forest throbs. She hadn’t even wanted the pancakes, since they were overcooked to the point of rubbery, but Mom had been so… well,Momish. “Birthday pancakes,” she kept calling them as she flipped more onto Winnie’s plate. “Next stop? Lead Hunter!”
Winnie has to pass the second trial. She doesn’t want to go to art school, she doesn’t want to leave Hemlock Falls. And if that means she has to spend the night in the forest alone on Sunday—if it means shehasto keep pretending that she killed the banshee—then so be it. That’s exactly what she’ll do.
It takes a few minutes, but the nausea subsides without any vomit to show for it. Winnie hauls herself out of the bathroom, shoves on her old glasses (the new pair got pretty bent up last night), and slumps downstairs for a ginger ale from the supply kept only for emergencies. The sparkly candy juice slides down Winnie’s throat, sharp and brisk and grounding. After a few big gulps, she heads to the family computer in the living area, an ancient PC that they got before Dad left.
It takes a while to boot up, and she gazes around the room, taking it in with lens-sharp eyes. The couch with the spring hanging out of the bottom. The TV with the remote that got smashed (and then trashed)after one of Winnie’s more spectacular attempts to dive and roll when no one was home. The framed sketch of the house Winnie had made when she’d briefly flirted with architectural drawings… then decided she hated composing anything that wasn’t alive.
Beside the house sketch are four faded patches where pictures of the family once hung. Where Mom keeps saying she’ll put up new ones; Winnie and Darian know she never will.
There used to be plants in here too that Dad and Darian lovingly talked to. A money tree, a ficus, and an African violet. They all died after he left, and no one has wanted to replace them.
Winnie hasn’t thought of those plants in years; she wishes she hadn’t remembered them now, but it’s like the banshee opened a door she has kept shut. The closet she has shoved all her memories into. The way thingsusedto be before Dad became the enemy.
He’d had a mini basketball hoop in the kitchen with a foam ball that always knocked over the salt by the stove. One time the ball even fell into a pot of boiling rice water, and because Dad hadn’t wanted to start a fresh pot (brown rice takes forever, you know?), he’d made Winnie help him pick out all the blue plastic flakes that had sloughed off between the grains.It’s just micronutrients,he said.They’re good for us! Also, don’t tell Mom.
They’d giggled through the whole meal that night, and to this day, Mom still doesn’t know why.
Winnie fingers her hair. She inherited the auburn shade from him, along with her nearsightedness.
She used to wonder sometimes if maybe Dadhadn’tdone it. If maybe Mom had been wrong when she’d found him. Except that guilty people don’t knock out their partners and run away, leaving their family in ruin.
The computer screen finally winks on, revealing its puppy desktop menu, and Winnie opens her email. As expected, there’s a message from Mario.
The Council is in agreement with you,it reads.Though I’m honestly still not sure a werewolf is what we’re dealing with. Nonetheless, I’ll let you win this one. Congrats! There’s a tab under your name at Joe Squared. Get as much coffee as you want.
Winnie drums her fingers against the desk. Her teeth start clicking too, and though she would ratherneverthink about last night again, she forces her mind back to the forest—to the banshee and how it had fled.
And how the werewolf had been running from something… somethingwhisperyshe couldn’t quite see. Could that… whatever it was, be what Mario is now talking about?
She should go find out. She doesn’t have to admit to him that she didn’t kill the banshee, butsomeoneneeds to know what she saw. And maybe he’ll recognize something about the description that she doesn’t. She might know the Compendium backward and forward, she might have sketched enough manticore hatchlings to make her fingers callused, but that obviously didn’t count for much when she was faced with a nightmare.
Her fingers and teeth pause their percussive beat. What she needs is someone to help her. Not Mario, but someone who knows what they’re doing in the forest and won’t ask too many questions. If experience is what she lacks, then experience is what she should find.
She glances at the clock in the screen corner. It is almost 4:00P.M., meaning if she gets dressed now and takes the family bicycle, she could probably reach Gunther’s before five.
And just like that, the final shreds of nausea crumble away. The living room comes into focus around her; her muscles come alive. Winnie is done dwelling on last night and on Dad and on pancakes with syrup out of date.
She has a new plan, and it’s time to put it into action.
CHAPTER15
Despite being one of only two gas stations in or near Hemlock Falls, Gunther’s Garage looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1960s. Because it hasn’t. Neither has Gunther. He is an odd breed of non who seems to know about the Luminaries and the forest but has never shown any desire to join the local society or flee the area for safer grounds. The Luminaries grudgingly allow him to remain, since his booze and gas are cheap.
That said, the Wednesdays do regularly check his background, and the Thursdays regularly check that he hasn’t shared what he knows.
He keeps his gas station on the lone road leading into Hemlock Falls, about two miles outside of the roundabout that marks the edge of town, and Winnie is both freezing and boiling by the time she gets there on her bicycle. The earlier rain has drooped into a halfhearted drizzle, leaving behind a bone-chilling humidity that has numbed her fingers and toes despite the cardio of a five-mile bike ride. Her hair is practically soaked through too, and she’s glad she traded in her leather jacket for an anorak.
Or shewasglad until she saw how full the gas station parking lot is. It’s literally every possible cool kid. There’s Xavier and Marisol beside the open garage door. There’s Peter, Imran, and Angélica on the benchout front while Dante and Casey act out something for them that might be a replay of last night’s trial or could just be a bad attempt at breakdancing. Winnie can’t be sure.
There are also a ton of other kids actuallyinsideGunther’s, combing the two aisles of candy and chips as if they might discover secret treasure by lifting every package and inspecting underneath.
