Page 12 of The Hunting Moon
The scales are also hard as steel yet light as air, so Winnie has always wanted to examine one under a microscope.
No such luck tonight, though. Instead, she follows her friends inside, where body heat and a booming beat cascade against her. It’s as overpowering as jumping off the waterfall, but also far more welcoming than her sledgehammer crash into the river below.
Voices echo in the welcome rotunda, where a staircase curves upward to the museum’s second floor. A life-size skeleton of a droll used to hang here, and though the bones are long gone, the wires that held it still dangle. Disco balls spin from each one, and Winnie wonders if Grayson installed those. She wonders if all the spray-paint streaks on the walls and steps and banister were his handywork too.
She knows so little about him.
People shout at Winnie as she passes—sometimes her name, but more frequently,Hey, Girl Who Jumped!She recognizes a few, but most are just faces steeped in disco light, passed and gone before she can match a voice to a face.
She finds herself looking at each person anyway, searching for familiar ashen skin marked by two gray eyes.
Bretta finally navigates them into a long room that once served as a gallery for nightmare illustrations. It used to be Winnie’s favorite room, and Dad would patiently sit at a bench in the room’s center while she scoured and sketched and studied.
The walls are bare now, and the bench long gone. Winnie frowns at where it used to be—at where folding tables now sag beneath liquor bottles and punch bowls. It is more alcohol than Winnie has ever seen in her life. Literally. Even Gunther’s just outside town doesn’t have this much booze.
“The punch is really good,” shouts a new voice, pushing into step besideEmma. It’s Katie Tuesday, her red hair in pigtails and her black miniskirt caroming around her thighs. “Xavier made it this time, so it’s not too strong.” As if to demonstrate this, she offers her Solo cup to Emma.
But Emma shakes her head. “No drinking for me tonight. I’m still on meds for the leg.”
“Ah, too bad. Bretta?”
“I’m driving.” Bretta grins. Then grabs at Winnie’s elbow. “But Winnie here might want something.”
Winnie’s eyes widen. “No.” Then a slightly less emphatic (because she is cool! she is hip!): “I’m good. Thanks.” She wants to summon some obvious reason for abstaining, but she can’t find one—I have school tomorrowis a bit too dorky. AndI don’t drink because my family acts like circus clowns after consuming alcoholdoesn’t sound great either.
Fortunately, Katie doesn’t seem to care, and after verifying Fatima is also abstaining, she bounces off. “To the conservatory!” she exclaims. “If you can’t take your trials yet, at least you can dance! Come on!” She beckons dramatically for all to follow, and since Bretta, Emma, and Fatima obey, Winnie does too.
They aim for a door in the room’s corner. The music gets louder with each step, though it’s not the conservatory they find on the door’s other side. Just a hall filled with couches and a lot of vape smoke that smells like weed. After that room, though, they finally reach the glass double doors into the old conservatory.
This was always Dad’s favorite space in the museum, with all the plants dripping and dangling, frilly and frondy.It feels like stepping into a nineteenth-century estate,he would say, and Winnie hates that she has now thought of him twice in the span of five minutes. She’s not here to think of secret messages in birthday cards or locked mental compartments crammed with the past. She’s here to burn so bright she stuns the world around her.
Itdoesgive her a slight jolt of satisfaction, at least, to know how much Dad would hate the way the glass-walled conservatory looks now, its elaborate tiles barren of pots and plants. This was a room built for stillness and green; now it is packed with bodies who dance and dance and dance to scare the nightmares away.
CHAPTER6
Winnie is boiling before she and her friends are to the fringes of the dance floor, so she slips off her jacket. Then glares when Dante Lunedì looks at her as if he likes what he sees. And although dancing has never really been her thing, Winnie will do it by golly, and burn this whole place to the ground if she has to.
Or that is the plan until Peter Sunday shows up and starts howling at her.
Literally, howling as if he were a wolf under the moon.
Winnie’s dancing pauses. Her face scrunches up. “Because you got bitten!” Emma shouts over the music.
Oh, of course.Except Winnie doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like it at all, and when other people start howling too—when even her friends start howling and someone she can’t see shouts, “Show us your scar!”—Winnie discovers spiders are hatching inside her skin.
This is worse than the funeral. Worse than being on the nightly news or having Marcus tell her he liked her more before. It’s like being stuck on the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the Masquerade’s Floating Carnival. Nothing feels right side up. Everything is warped and wobbly. And suddenly Winnie’s plan to burn bright feels so naive, sostupid.Because oh my god, what is she even doing here? Dancing and laughing and pretending that everything is fine? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since Grayson died, but she’s acting like she already forgot him.
Everyoneis acting like they forgot him, even though this is supposed to be his memorial party.
Aroo! Aroo!People howl around Winnie, faces streaming into a Whisperer-warped smear of teeth and eyes and body heat. Except the Whisperer might not be real, and Winnie might have made the whole thing up.
“Show us your scar!” Casey shouts in a pause between howls. A few people are looking at her, but most don’t even seem to know why they’re howling. “Show us where it bit you,arooo!”
No, Winnie cannot stay here. She is going to be sick.
“I need… air,” she pants at Emma, fanning her face as if her sudden overheating is from the dance floor. “I’ll be… back.”
“Want company?”
