Page 52 of The Luminaries
It’s not wide, but she’s able to hang her backpack on a separate branch and then wedge herself up against the trunk, one boot on this branch, one boot on a lower one for stability. She shouldn’t fall asleep like this, but she also won’t topple to her doom if she accidentally nods off.
Of course, the thought of sleep feels impossible right now. She, Winnie Wednesday, just impaled a vampira—after hamstringing another. Then she outran the rest of them. An entire freaking horde. She wishessomeone could have been there to see it. Mom or Aunt Rachel or ever doubting Ms. Morgan.
Winnie faced down vampira and she didn’t pull the alarm for backup. The rest of the night is going to be absolutely peaceful compared to that.
Still, just in case, she keeps that shrapnel trap on her lap and her right hand on the hunting knife. So far, Jay’s rule about the running water seems to be holding true, but there are stronger things out there than vampira.
There are banshees. There is a werewolf.
There is the Whisperer.
Winnie does doze off. A few times, actually. The ankle she’d thought was healed now aches. It’s boring in the tree, and she wishes she’d brought night-vision goggles or even binoculars. She hears creatures go by, sometimes with footfalls heavy enough to rattle branches. Sometimes with a softer, slithery sound. And sometimes the faint clacking sound that she thinks is the vampira searching for her.
She sees hunters go by too, and one girl she thinks might be Fatima, since she remembers a spiderweb pattern on her hijab. She hears a wolf howl far, far away. She strangely hopes no hunter finds it tonight, because what if it’snota werewolf at all, but just a lost animal caught in an unrelenting forest like she is caught in this tree?
Winnie is about to nod off a third time when a light trickles into her eyes. Instantly, she is wide awake. Instantly, she cranes her neck toward the pallid glow. It comes from across the stream, hazy at first, like the mist rising. She squints…
And then gasps.
It is a ghost-deer—a ghost-doeactually, with two ghost-fawns beside her.
Ghost-deer, ghost-squirrel, ghost-raccoon, etc.: These ghostly apparitions pose no threat to humans, and will typically flee when hunters or nightmares appear. Much dispute remains around their origins: Are they creations of the dreaming spirits? Or are they phantoms of animals that inhabited the woods prior to the spirits’ arrival? In the forests surroundingthe Earth’s oldest spirits, there are apparitions of primitive creatures long since lost to time.
Though they leave tracks, no known hunter has managed to capture a ghost-creature. Weapons do not pierce them.
Winnie is captivated by the doe and her fawns. They are young, as if born just this season, and tottering on legs that don’t quite work. And they look to be grazing on undergrowth just as real deer would do.
Winnie doesn’t move as she watches them, even though her left leg is going numb from being elevated too long and her neck is getting a crick from craning. Shedaresnot move, for no matter how cautious she is to make no sound, the ghost-deer will hear. The ghost-deer will know, and they will flee.
She doesn’t want them to ever leave. If she thought the vampira brought her to life, sharpening the lines of the world and connecting her mind to her muscles in a harmony she’d never known before, then the ghost-deer do the opposite. They smooth down her roughness, stretching her mind outward, weaving her into the world in a way that’s wholly new.
Except with the banshee,she thinks, watching the doe nose at the smaller of the two fawns. When Winnie had felt those banshee tears, she’d felt the same sense of beautiful calm she feels now—the same tragic certainty that life can’t last forever.
You either trust the forest or you don’t, Winnie.
For the first time since her failed trial, since her failed encounter with the forest and its nightmares, Winnie’s fingers itch to draw again—even if she knows she can never,evercapture these deer. They are more alive than Jay in the forest, and far less tangible. A pen’s line would only define something that shouldn’t be.
Yet she wants to try all the same. How else can she make this moment last forever?
Eventually, the ghost-deer move on, the fawns frolicking off toward the lake in a way that only fawns can do. Mama trails behind.
Winnie’s heart sinks. Her eyelids too.
She falls asleep.
CHAPTER28
Winnie jolts awake to the sound of clattering mandibles.Vampira,her brain provides, heart ramping into overdrive. She readies the trap, fingers moving without her mind to guide them—and later, she will think that she isn’t sure where that muscle memory came from. But right now, in the moment, she squints through glasses that have slid down her nose.
The vampira are definitely here. Though cloud cover still blurs the forest shapes into undefined brushstrokes, she senses a weight straight ahead that didn’t used to be there. It’s where the ghost-deer were; now it’s where the vampira wait.
They know I’m in the tree,she thinks at the same time the Compendium unrolls in her mind.Though it is not their typical method of hunting, there are records of vampira climbing.
Winnie’s teeth want to start clicking, but she shoves her tongue between them. Jay’s stream is really going to be tested now. How badly do the vampira want her? What will they do to cross?
Why running water deters land nightmares is something that has been debated for as long as the Luminaries have existed. Back when the Dianas were still a part of the society. Back when there were only three spirits instead of fourteen. Some speculate it has nothing to do with theactual movement of the water (after all, some nightmares live in slow-moving oxbows) but rather the purity of it. Others speculate it’s the direction of the flow (east-moving water does seem more effective). And then some say running water does nothing; it’s just that the terrestrial nightmares don’t like to get wet.
Until tonight, Winnie has always leaned toward the purity theory. Now that she’s seen a ghost-deer with her own eyes, though, she’s not so sure. Those nightmares were more pure than she knew a creature could be—so much so that even the word “nightmare” seems all wrong for them.
