Page 78 of The Luminaries
It works. Somehow, the forest has decidedthiswolf responds togold, and the locket works. The monster yips again with new, nightmare pain and rears away from Winnie’s face.
She pushes the locket harder against it, and now it’s howling. A sound that will draw more nightmares—or worse, the Whisperer—but Winnie can’t stop. This is all she has.
The wolf finally breaks free and bolts. A smear of white, it abandons Winnie and disappears into the forest, taking her locket with it.
Winnie wants to catch her breath. She wants to spend a moment making sure nothing is broken, that no bite wounds mar her skin, but Emma needs her. So she drags herself on wobbling arms and legs—a half crawl, half walk—until she reaches the other girl.
And it’s bad. So much worse than Winnie had feared when she’d been tracking Emma’s blood across the clearing. Emma’s entire left leg is sodden with red, and a bone pokes through thigh.
“You won’t turn,” Winnie says, panicked words that don’t matter, but even now, she can’t switch off the Compendium. “The local variety of werewolf can’t turn you from a bite.”
Emma doesn’t say anything. Her breaths are ragged. Her eyes are shut.
Winnie grabs her cheeks; they’re freezing. “Wake up, Emma. Wake up. God, wake up.”
Emma’s eyes flutter open and briefly latch on to Winnie’s. “You… found me.” A smile whispers over her lips. “Rachel will be… happy.”
“What?” Winnie asks. She doesn’t actually care about the answer. She just wants Emma to keep talking—though she’s not sure what good that will do either. She can’t tend this injury, and she’s got no way to contact the hunters.
Andwhere the hellare they?
“Loyalty,” Emma says. She is smiling a bit more now, and there’s a glassiness to her eyes that Winnie doesn’t think can be good. “My trial… to lure you. Yours… to follow. Although.” She gives a weak giggle, and blood burbles from her thigh. “I’m not sure I’ll… pass with a wound like this. Harpy… got me good.”
“You mean wolf,” Winnie counters, even as she assesses what Emma just said.
Emma lured her out here to prove her loyalty to the clan.
And Winnie unknowingly followed to prove hers.
“No,” Emma says, “harpy… By the stones. Came out of nowhere.”
Winnie vaguely hears this and vaguely nods, but the bulk of her focus is now on the heat building in her blood. It’s not a heat she recognizes. It is incandescent. It is violent. It makes the world look clear even as her vision is still a grayscale blur. And it finally, finally shuts up the never-ending chyron of the Compendium.
She is on her third trial—and Emma is too. This is why there are no hunters near. This is why Emma “lost” her shoe—and why it was so clean. She’s wearing combat boots, Winnie now sees. She has a knife sheath at her waist too, though the knife itself is on the leaf-littered earth nearby.
“I really… thought I’d do better.” Emma offers another laugh. “But you took longer… than I thought… to find me.”
Yes,Winnie thinks,because this is not where I belong.She lied about the banshee, and like a cave filled with dynamite, she has set off a gunpowder line to bring the whole thing down. Instead of coming clean and admitting she was out of her depth, she spent the night in a tree—and even then, she still almost died. Now here she is, with Emma’s leg gouged apart and red blood seeping into forest gray. A grotesque paint-by-numbers adding color to all the wrong places.
Winnie isn’t just a liar like her dad—she’s worse than that. Emma will die and it will be entirely Winnie’s fault.
She forces herself to look at Emma’s sweat-shining face. At the blood trailing down Emma’s jaw like she’s a vampira just finishing its kill. Aunt Rachel and the rest of the clan thought Winnie could handle this. They trusted her. Emma trusted her. Now Emma is going to die, and there’s nothing Winnie can do to fix it.
“It was a good party, don’t you think?” Emma lifts one hand from her leg. It shines with wet blood, and she laughs. “I didn’t even drink the champagne. Just pretended. Because…” Her eyes, now sagging, flit to Winnie’s. “Because… I knew… of course.”
She coughs. Blood spews. A fleck hits Winnie’s face.
And there it is. The violence, the silence, the blazing light inside Winnie.
This isn’t over yet. Emma isn’t dead. And even if Wednesdays won’t come to help her, Winnie knows someone who will.
“Emma,” she says, pushing to her feet. “I’m going to take this back… just for a minute.” She grabs for the vial around Emma’s neck. Emma doesn’t resist. She just watches with an odd, almost languid smile, as if this is a semi-amusing TV show. Winnie uncorks the glass and shakes the barbed banshee claw onto her palm.
It glistens, and Winnie prays she’s doing the right thing. “Can you count to three?” she asks, leaning toward Emma’s neck. “Do it with me. One.”
“Two,” Emma says.
“Three.” Winnie pokes the claw into Emma’s neck. In her mind, she counts again:One. Two. Three.She pulls the claw back out. Emma doesn’t react. She still wears a smile. Her chest still moves…
