Page 77 of The Luminaries
She is about to set off that way when she hears it: a hissing like a broken time machine. A whispering like a deflating hot-air balloon.
She whips her head backward, toward where she thinks the soundmight be coming from. She squints and squints, but there’s nothing there. No warping, no bending, no nightmares of any kind. Only moonlight over stone.
Then a herd of ghost-deer break from the trees. They gallop into the clearing, moving with the speed of prey whose death is imminent. Winnie thinks she sees the doe and two fawns, vaguely glowing shapes that melt into one without her glasses.
One of the fawns stops moving. It makes a sound Winnie didn’t know a deer could make, much less a ghost-deer.
It disappears. The sound of a broken blender rips out. And Winnie realizes the Whisperer isright there.Without her glasses on, she simply cannot see it.
Winnie leaps for the trees. Her arms pump, her knees kick, and like the ghost-deer, she moves as fast as prey being hunted. It is almost helpful to lack glasses; there is no awareness of her surroundings to slow her.
Glowing white streaks pass her, blurring at the edges of her vision.No,Winnie wants to scream.Go another way.They are leading the Whisperer right to her.
Except that when they reach a small brook, the deer spear left to avoid running water, aiming their stampede north. And Winnie just tramples right through, ice-cold water cutting into her ankles and soaking her flimsy flats.
She sprints onward. The other-dimensional whispers fade. She is safe for now, and the forest is empty—nightmares scared away by the Whisperer. And still, somehow, no hunters have come.
Winnie can’t stop now, though. If she does, the cold and the venom and the terror of what she’s doing, where she is, what she’s running from will lock into place. She won’t be able to escape it; she’ll die here, petrified like her glasses.
She has to figure out where Emma went. She has to figure out what the hell is going on.
CHAPTER38
Winnie is on the verge of giving up—of finding a tree and trying to survive the night without freezing to death—when she hears a hollow howl.
No.Her stomach bottoms out. She can’t face the werewolf with only this stake. Shehasto find a tree and find it now. Except that as she approaches a pitifully small maple—the only tree her hazy vision can find with low enough branches—Emma screams.
It’s visceral and pained and near.
The wolf has her. Winnie knows this right away, despite all the gaps in her knowledge: Why is Emma here? Where are the hunters?
Emma screams again, a sound of terror. A screech of suffering. And Winnie charges straight that way. She holds the stake high, running over tree roots she can’t see and stones that want nothing more than to trip her.This is our forest,they say.Go back. You don’t belong here.
Another scream, and with it comes a splash of magenta through the trees. Winnie wants to shout at Emma,Wait, I’m coming!But she only runs faster instead.
There is blood on the forest floor. Spatters of it over pine needles.
She gets closer to the magenta and finds the vague outline of a body.Emma is limping like a revenant fresh from the grave, and she is whimpering. Staggering from tree to tree.
Then the wolf is there. It careens into Emma, toppling her to the ground. Pinning her easily, teeth bared. It’s larger than any natural wolf, with shoulders shaggy beneath thick white fur. Emma screams again.
Winnie throws her stake like a javelin.
She doesn’t know what else to do. The wolf is going to rip out Emma’s jugular if she doesn’t act, and her arm moves of its own volition. Some long-dormant muscle memory waking up just for this. The stake, red as Emma’s blood, whistles through the air and embeds in the wolf’s back.
The beast yelps, a piercing cry that strikes a minor chord atop Emma’s screams. Then it jumps off Emma and heads straight for Winnie. The red stake pokes from its back, reminding Winnie of a picture she’d once seen of a bull charging a matador. She is weaponless, defenseless, frozen in place.
The wolf barrels for her. One bounding step, two. It leaps. Its front paws hit Winnie with all the force of a freight train. And like Emma only moments before, she goes down.
Her back hits the ground, punching the air from her lungs, and for a confusing half second, she thinks she’s back in the clearing with Jay. That it’s just him dumping her to the ground as she, yet again, fails to aim true.
But this isn’t Jay, and now its teeth are zooming for her face. Foam drips off fangs. Its eyes glow silver as the moon, eerily sentient. And, like the basilisk’s, empty and sad.
Winnie struggles. She kicks, she writhes, she claws at fur soft as the shredded silk of her gown. But the beast has survived a stake directly in the back; what good will her human muscles do? She can’t believe she ever thought this might be just a natural wolf; she can’t believe she ever feltsympathyfor it.
Were-creatures, when in their animal form, are almost unkillable. However, like the non legends, they are hurt by silver—and, in some rare cases, by gold.
Winnie grabs her locket, snaps it off her neck, and shoves it in the wolf’s face. She misses. Her fist and the locket hit a neck thick with fur.
