Page 75 of The Luminaries
In this moment, though, all Winnie thinks is that she needs tohurry,needs tocatch up.Then she can grab Emma—who really must be drunk—and guide her right back to her birthday party.
She hears the strains of a Forgotten tune, hungry and haunted. Then it is just the bass line she hears. Then it is nothing at all.
But magenta still flashes ahead, so Winnie shoves at her glasses and moves faster. Her ears ache, the veins in her skull warming and expanding too fast against the spring’s cold. Her breaths are already shallow, her toes totally numb.
“Emma!” she shouts at the next flicker of magenta. “Emma!”
The other girl seems to momentarily slow… then somehow fly even faster. Like she knows she’s being chased; like that is the whole point of it.
Changelings. Possession. Revenants.Yes, something is wrong, and now Winnie is practically sprinting to try to catch the other girl. Her glasses keep sliding down her nose. Annoyingly, Jay’s voice murmurs in her mind,Contacts would be a lot easier, a maddening bass line to the endless tune of the Compendium.
Changelings. Possession. Revenants.
Emma reaches the forest, the brightness of her skirt suddenly flouncing into muted shadow. Winnie loses sight of it; horror bursts into her chest. The mist has already risen tonight, and Emma—and Winnie—are both completely unarmed, unarmored, unprepared.
Winnie dares not shout again for the other girl.
At the line that marks the forest’s edge, where color bleeds away and the air shifts from crisp to charged, Winnie finds a red stake. She pauses her pursuit of Emma just long enough to yank it from the ground, a primitive weapon against creatures that exist only to kill. Then she finds one of the perimeter sensors and kicks it over. “Find us,” she hisses to whatever hunters might respond to a damaged sensor. “Please, find us.”
CHAPTER37
Winnie has lost all feeling in her hands and feet. She wiggles her fingers constantly around the red stake, but the cold is too determined in the forest. One girl cannot stop this wintry gray that refuses to let go.
At least tonight there is moonlight, even if only a half-moon. It illuminates the forest in an eerie glow, and remnants of mist linger in low pockets of earth. Winnie strides through them, brief bursts of searing hot that cut into her frozen limbs.
Emma always stays ahead—too far for Winnie to catch up to, no matter how much she sprints. But never so far that Winnie can’t see her, can’t quickly find her again when she loses sight.
So far, they have encountered no nightmares—a blessing Winnie isn’t going to argue with. But it’s only a matter of time. Winnie prays they meet hunters first instead. She’s seen signs of them. Boot prints. An errant bolt stuck in an oak. But never the hunters themselves.
And never Emma either—only the shape of her, the muted colors sapped of life.
Possession.Winnie is leaning more and more toward that.Though rare, there are reports of forest spirits briefly possessing humans and usingthem to accomplish tasks that nightmares cannot complete.It’s the only thing that might make sense, even if the how of it isn’t clear.
Winnie should have gone for help. Why didn’t she go for help?
She doesn’t know how long she jogs, frozen yet sweating, through a forest that doesn’t trust her while the moon wavers down. She only knows that nothing looks familiar. She might know the forest well after three years of corpse duty, but daylight renders it a different world. Now she is a foreigner, an intruder, an invader the forest does not want here.
Something slithers through the trees ahead. It rustles against multiple trees at once, as if enormously long, and Winnie can just detect a faint scent like rotten fruit.
The forest is dangerous for a Luminary untrained.The lesson prickles over Winnie, and she stops dead in her tracks. Despite the thundering of her heart and aching in her eardrums, she finds her senses rocketing to life. Hunter senses she has tried to develop but that only the forest can truly awaken.
Basilisks: Though seemingly small, no wider than a cobra, the basilisk can, in fact, stretch up to forty feet long. Fine, hairlike tendrils alert it to nearby movement of prey, and the head can move with uncanny speed once prey is detected.
The crown-shaped stripes across its brow are venomous to the touch, as are its fangs and its breath, if inhaled. The greatest danger, however, is its eyes. To make eye contact with a basilisk is to have your own eyes turn to stone. Though animals can survive the encounter (but are permanently blinded), the basilisk usually strikes before they can evade.
Winnie slowly shrinks down to the forest floor. She is never going to spot a black serpent in this moon-leached light. The creature has killed several nons lately and keeps evading hunters. But maybe if Winnie can just listen and stay still, she can wait out the creature’s passage. It sounds like it’s moving away from her.
It’s probably following Emma,her mind kindly suggests, and Winnie swears inwardly. She can’t shout; she can’t run ahead. She’s just going to have to hope that Emma is as aware of her surroundings as Winnie is.
Winnie waits, her lips clamped shut. The slithering continues, traveling through the underbrush in the same direction Emma went.
Basilisks possess hollow fangs that inject venom much like naturalsnakes. Their venom kills within seconds, disabling a victim’s nerves in what is believed to be a painless, sudden death.
The basilisk is still sliding away when Winnie finally discerns part of it. Just a segment sliding near a log. It’s picking up speed, clearly on the hunt, and the sensory tendrils—almost hairlike, almost feathery—are briefly visible as they catch the moonlight. No wider than Winnie’s forearm, this portion of the monster is far enough away that Winnie can’t touch it… but near enough that she’s pretty sure any movement she makes will reach those tendrils.
She has stopped breathing altogether. Eventually the basilisk will leave the area. She will see the tail slide past, and she’ll know she can start running again.
But there are two problems with her plan. First, when she does burst into motion, the basilisk will sense her presence and likely double back.
