Page 74 of The Luminaries
He is lonely and lost, and Winnie hates that she knows the feeling.
His gray eyes—glowing pure silver in the twinkling lights—scan quickly over the crowd. She’s not sure what he’s looking for, but whatever it is, he doesn’t seem to find it. A tiny frown cinches his brow. Then L.A. starts singing happy birthday, and he and Trevor join in with their instruments.
The whole party sings, even Winnie, though she’s more mouthing the words than really singing along.Happy birthday, witch traitor, happy birthday to you!She has come a long way in six days.
The song ends, and without a pause, the Forgotten kick into a song Winnie hadn’t heard on Saturday. It starts with L.A. snapping her fingers into the mic, and the twins lose it. Them and everyone else, really, and when Jay moves in with the bass line, Winnie gets why. Then as soon as Trevor starts playing too, popping in with a vocal harmony, Winnie finds she’s dancing.
Not the wild dancing up near the stage, but a rocking that thrums through her. Wind caresses her from the garden, icy and fanged. She scarcely notices. The Forgotten are good. Really good, and she almost wishes she’d stayed on Saturday to hear them play longer.
But you’re here now,her brain reminds.You can enjoy them now.She is about to push into the thick of it all and find the twins, find Fatima, when Jay looks up. It’s exactly like it was at Joe Squared, like he has sensed her movement and his eyes instinctively know where to land.
It takes him a beat to realize it’s her, though. She can see the confusion in his glinting eyes as he absorbs her makeup, her dress, her shoulders and neck so completely bared.
Then recognition sets in.
His lips part. He stops swaying to the music. Only his fingers still move, sliding up and down the frets as if attached to someone else entirely. She thinks, weirdly, he might approve of her current look. And she thinks, weirdly, that she’s pleased by it.
Then he smiles, and she knows he likes what he sees. It’s a tiny smile that only lifts one corner of his lips, but sets all his admirers into shrieking raptures. And it sets Winnie’s insides curling. Her toes too. And her fingers into the soft silk of Fatima’s dress.
For the first time in four years, Winnie forces herself to look squarely in the face of a truth she has stoutly ignored, denied, buried away since Jay ditched her: once upon a time, she liked him. A lot. More than a friend, more than a best friend. Which was why his sudden departure from her life, his cold rejection of her, had been so,sohard to bear.
He’d been her first crush. Heronlycrush and he hadn’t even wanted her as a friend anymore.
Now he looks at her like maybe he does want her—at least during this particular fraction of a song while his fingers play and his eyes linger—but rather than be flattered, Winnie only finds anger boiling up inside her.
He’s four years too late. Why is healwaysfour years too late?
It doesn’t help that Winnie’s traitorous mind imagines, for the second time in a week, what kissing him might be like, with lips crashing and tree bark against her back, with heat and teeth and hunger…
No.She doesn’t like Jay now; she doesn’t even want tothinkof him in that way; and she really wishes he would look at someone else now. That he would end this silly moment that ultimately means nothing for either of them.
She is the first to take the initiative. She turns toward the garden and gulps in the cold air sweeping off it. As she stares into the shadows and her rage shrinks back to something manageable—the same old pain she has lived with for four years past—she spots movement at the edge of the garden.
A person, dressed in magenta with a skirt that flounces on the breeze, is almost to the gate that leads off the estate.Emma.She pauses and glances behind her. It’s a furtive look, as if she wants to make sure no one sees… except that her eyes land on Winnie—just the barest flicker—and Winnie thinks she glimpses a flash of teeth.
Winnie is suddenly frozen down to her very bones. Gone is the normal spring bite. It’s like the forest cold has suddenly laid claim to the entire party.
She abandons the patio quickly, an urgency rising in her that says,Wrong, this is wrong.And with that feeling comes the Compendium.
Changelings: These daywalkers can perfectly mimic any human they see. Long claws give them away, and they cannot speak.
She doesn’t think that was a changeling. In fact, she’s almost certain it was Emma, the real Emma because how would a changeling have come into the party—and why would it disappear again when there is so much here to feast upon?
But something is off, something with Emma isn’t right.
Possession: Though rare, there are reports of forest spirits briefly possessing humans and using them to accomplish tasks that nightmares cannot complete, such as destroying sensory equipment or killing hunters. The hosts rarely survive the encounter.
Winnie’s feet grind over gravel paths. She is covered in gooseflesh from the cold; her toes are already going numb, her ankle aching anew. But those are cursory problems in someone else’s body. Right now, everything inside her has homed in on Emma.
Winnie reaches the garden gate. The latch is dangling, the iron not all the way shut.She wants me to follow,Winnie thinks, so she does, stepping through the brick wall and leaving the sound of music and revelry, the light of fairies and warmth behind. There are small torches to illuminate a stepping-stone path here. Right will connect it to the other path and then the parking lot. Left will loop around the estate. Straight will take her through trees, and eventually to the forest.
Winnie goes straight. Not merely because she thinks she spots a wink of magenta, but because she can feel, wrapped around her skeleton, a certainty that Emma is headed for danger.
How much did she drink?Winnie wonders as, still, the Compendium scrolls endlessly through the back of her mind.
Revenants: Corpses left in the forest or buried too close to the forest will reawaken, imbued by spiritual energy and hungry for blood.
Later, when all of this is done and the forest has finished what it set out to do, Winnie will think she should have gone back to the party for help. After all, she is weaponless, alone, and no one knows where she is. She doesn’t even have a jacket. It’s just her, a flimsy dress that droops over her chest, and leather flats that feel every pebble, every stick that lines the wooded floor.
