Page 25 of The Luminaries
“Okay. Deal.” He digs harder at her fingers. She grips more tightly.
“You don’t want to know what the favor is?”
“You can tell me while you give me the bicycle.”
Winnie frowns. This isn’t going how she’d imagined. For one, he has agreed much too easily. For two, there are people nearby and she doesn’t want to be overheard. She flings a cautious glance behind her, but no one has snuck around the garage. Still, she finds her voice sinking to a whisper as she says, “I need you to tutor me.”
“In what?” He’s still trying to grab the bike. Winnie is still resisting.
“Hunting.”
“I see.” Now his hands pause, resting atop hers. They’re warm despite the cold around them.
Doyou see?she wants to ask, suddenly afraid that he does. Thatsomehow he knows she didn’t kill the banshee and that everything about last night was a lie.
His fingers start moving again. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll tutor you in hunting. Now, can you please get into Mathilda?”
Winnie’s lips part. Then pinch shut again because thisreallyhas been too easy, and were he a member of any other clan but Friday, she’d worry he was tricking her. That he was about to drive her a mile away from Gunther’s only to dump her on the side of the road and declare all bets off again.
But Jayisa Friday, and though they might be the smallest, least powerful family in the Luminaries, they still live by their motto like everyone else. Their culture still runs thicker than their blood.Integrity in all. Honesty to the end.If he says he’ll tutor her, he means it.
“Jay?” comes an alto croon that sounds like Angélica. “Are you still here?”
His eyes widen like a cornered ghost-deer’s, and Winnie almost laughs at that. He is projected to be the next Friday Lead Hunter before he’s even eighteen, yet he’s terrified of the Luminaries. Namely, female ones. It almost defies believability.
“We start tutoring right now,” Winnie says. Her ankle has mostly stopped hurting, and there’s no time to waste.
He nods, gaze fixed over her left shoulder. “Yep.”
“Excellent.” She grins, releasing the bike handles, and with superhuman speed, Jay yanks the bicycle from her and flings it into the trunk. “Hey,” she barks. “Be gentle with that.”
He says nothing. Just slams the trunk shut and lurches for the passenger door, where he shoves Winnie inside. He then propels himself to the driver’s seat, and before Winnie is even buckled in, he is twisting Mathilda’s key.
The Wagoneer quakes to life. A smell like old exhaust hits Winnie’s nose, a familiar smell that makes her chest hurt—which in turn reminds her of the banshee. How it could stir up feelings she’d thought she had scrubbed away so many years ago.
While Jay backs them up with almost reckless speed, Winnie shoves at her glasses and pulls on her own seat belt. The twins are waving at her in the side mirror by the time Jay peels away. She waves back. Jay doesn’t.
CHAPTER16
“You could be nicer to them,” Winnie says. She has to yell to be heard over Mathilda’s nightmarish howl and the squeak of windshield wipers. The rain is picking up again.
“Be nicer to who?” Jay yells back. It’s weird to see him driving.
“Literally everyone,” she replies, although it’s only the twins’ feelings she personally cares about.
Jay glances at Winnie, gaze vacant while woods stream by outside. It’sreallyweird to see him driving.Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.
“All the people at Gunther’s just now?” Winnie elaborates. “Emma? Katie? Bretta?”
“Oh, right.” His attention locks back on the road. “I didn’t realize I was mean to them.”
“You just ran like vampira from garlic.”
He has the decency to flush. “I’m sure they’re all very nice. I just…”
“You just?” Winnie presses.
“Don’t have time.”
