Page 1 of The Hunting Moon
THE NIGHTMARE
The boy awakens beside a hemlock tree in the forest. He doesn’t know how he got there or how long he has been lying there. He still wears his pajamas—the ones with Wolverine on them—and his feet are filthy and frozen.
His heart drops to his bowels. He yanks in his legs to stand, but terror stiffens his joints, his low back, his skull.
The forest, the forest,whyis he in the forest? And what if someone finds him here?
His bare feet knock something as he grapples upward. It is a wolf’s jawbone.Thewolf’s jawbone that first appeared in his bedroom four days ago and told him the forest would be coming for him.
The boy knows now exactly what it must mean, exactlyhowit came for him. He doesn’t understand why, he doesn’t understand the mechanics, and he can’t remember anything of what came the night before. Yet he feels the truth of what he has become dwelling deep inside of him.
He is no longer a sparrow, he is a wolf.
He is no longer a boy, he is a nightmare.
He snatches up the jaw. It is slick with something that might be blood or might just be mist mixed with the red clay beneath his toes. Then, with the curved bone clutched tight in his grasp, he runs east toward the rising sun.
He prays this is the right way home.
CHAPTER1
This story begins with a funeral in a town where the locals don’t bury their dead. After all, the forest nearby has such a nasty habit of waking the bodies back up again.
This particular corpse is a stranger to Winnie Wednesday. She knewofGrayson Friday, of course. He was the person who first busted into the old museum on the south side of town and turned it into The Place to Party. He also used to sneak into the clans to steal banner sigils just to show that hecould.And then there was that one time when, according to local legend, he stole a Tuesday Hummer and drove it right off the dam—while he was still inside.
Yet for all that Winnie knowsofGrayson, she never, not once in her life, actually talked to the guy, with his peat-brown hair and his bright green eyes.
Now, she never will.
“You okay?” Mom asks, squinting at Winnie’s face. She and Winnie are in the forest, walking toward the Big Lake’s western shore.
“Yep,” Winnie lies. “I’m fine.” It’s not a good lie, and Mom definitely doesn’t believe it.
“You don’t have to come.”
“I do.” Winnie avoids her gaze. For Jay, she needs to come. She is his friend again, so she should be here. Grayson Friday washisLead Hunter, after all.
“You can go home,” Mom presses, “and I’ll get a ride with Rachel—”
“No.” Winnie snaps this harder than she intends. People are coming up the path from behind; she doesn’t want to deal with them. She’s as close to a local celebrity as Hemlock Falls gets these days thanks to Johnny Saturday calling her “the Girl Who Jumped” on a news segment five nights ago. Everyone wants some of her shine.
Because ten nights ago, Winnie completed her third trial; saved Emma Wednesday’s life with a banshee claw; jumped off the Big Lake’s waterfall; and got bitten by a werewolf while somehow not absorbing the werewolf’s nightmare mutation and turning into one too.
It’s exciting stuff, worthy of a penny dreadful (or a repeated slot on the nightly news)…
Except half the story is missing.
Emma wouldn’t have been in the forest if she knew how bad Winnie really was at hunting. Winnie only jumped off the waterfall because the Whisperer—a nightmareno onebelieves in—chased her there. And as for the werewolf bite… Well, Winnie can’t remember that part. Almost everything from after she’d plunged into the water is forgotten, erased, missing.
Which just makes this whole celebrity thing even worse. It’s aconstantreminder of the gaping hole inside her brain.
“Take these,” Mom says, cutting into the spiral that consumes Winnie’s thoughts almost hourly these days. She slides the Volvo’s key from her pocket. “If it gets to be too much, just leave, okay?”
“It won’t be too much,” Winnie counters, although she does take the keys and push them into her own pocket. If for no other reason than to end this conversation.
Like Mom, Winnie wears all black underneath her jacket, although her black jeans have faded more to heather gray at this point. Her feet, bound in the combat boots she wore on her second trial, stomp out a steady and graceless rhythm down the path. Mom’s tread lands more lightly behind her.
Eventually, she and Mom clear the trees and the entirety of the Big Lake opens before them. The waters are dark at this morning hour, the surface rippling and writhing like basilisk scales—all moving south, toward the waterfall. Spindrift rises off the precipice like flies off a dead body.
