Page 20 of The Hunting Moon
She scrolls down until she reaches the map from Friday night—a map Jay must have turned in even as his heart was breaking.
She swallows at the thought of that. And she wishes, silly as it is, that she had been there to help him. His name is right there, second on the list after Grayson Friday, which now saysdeceasedin parentheses.
Winnie’s gaze drifts toward the landline phone on the desk’s edge. She could call Jay. He gave her his number two weeks ago; she hasn’t used it yet because she hasn’t had any reason to.
And she definitely has no reason now that he is Lead Hunter. There’s no way he has time to keep training her. Plus, last night on the roof—whatever the hell that was—might as well have never happened. Winnie is 100 percent certain she is sitting here thinking of Jay while he isnotthinking of her.
She forces her attention back to the screen, dragging the mouse over every point indicated. A blue dot for hellions in the northwest, a green triangle for a banshee beside the southwestern shore. Red squares for manticore hatchlings, still reappearing every night beside the lake. When she clicks on each symbol, a window pops up detailing the kill site: what nightmare died, how many, and who did the slaying.
Jay’s name pops up often. Grayson’s too.
Winnie’s teeth click slowly, her jaw slightly askew so her top right canine connects directly onto the bottom one.Click, click, click.The sound taps out in near-perfect unison with her clicks upon the mouse.
As she gets closer and closer to the top right of the map, she wonders if maybe they wouldn’t have included Grayson’s deadly encounter. Like out of respect for his family or something. But then her cursor reaches the open meadow known as Stone Hollow, where a black X awaits.
Winnie blinks at it. Why does she know this area? Why does she feel like she has seen this X before?
Then it hits: this is where the X on Dad’s map is too. The secret map he hid for her at the Monday library.
Winnie’s fingers freeze atop the mouse. Her heart seems to freeze too, and her glasses slide slowly down her nose.It could be just coincidence,her brain provides even as her heart booms out:But what exactly are the odds?
Good, she decides. The odds have to be good. There are so many hunters out each night, so many nightmares to kill…
Winnie clicks on the black X.Werewolf,the window reads.4:33A.M.Still at large.
There’s nothing else there. No other description, no hint that this is the spot where Grayson Friday went from vibrant and living, his green eyes taking in a world he wasn’t afraid of, to ripped apart in a thousand little pieces.
No way it was the werewolf.That is the first thought Winnie has because it is the same thought she has had for almost two days now. The neural pathways are primed as a bobsled chute, and that particular idea is ready to glide, glide, glide.No way it was the werewolf who killed Grayson.
The second thought Winnie has, though, is about her dad. It takes a minute to assemble, its bobsled runners off to a slower start. But once itgets going, it’s abeast.Like the giant rocket in Mario Kart, it just incinerates every other neural impulse in its path.
Bright, insistent, terrifying.
This is where Grayson died and this is where Dad’s map leads. That means Mondays and Tuesdays will have found what Dad’s map leads to.When a hunter dies, his body isn’t left for corpse duty to find. There is a limit to how much death is part of life for the under-sixteen crowd in Hemlock Falls, and cleaning up one of your own parents most assuredly qualifies astoo far.So when a hunter dies, Mondays come in to retrieve the body…
Or body parts, in this case.
Then Tuesdays come in to secure the kill site and get statements from any hunters who were there. Sometimes, if the nightmare is a nasty one, they’ll rope off the spot for days—and set up extra Alpha patrols at night, just in case the spirit’s mist creates the same monstrous creature in that area again.
In other words, if Dad’s map leads to a physical item that Winnie is supposed to find, if it will take her to another clue in this scavenger hunt she abandoned, then that physical item is going to be discovered soon.
If it hasn’t been already.
There might even be Tuesdays on the way to Winnie’s house right now to arrest her. The Lambdas this time, who are in charge of tracking and disposing of Dianas.
Strangely, Winnie feels a cool sort of detachment grip her. Perhaps because there is nothing she can do at thisexactmoment. It’s almost night; the mist will rise soon, and if Tuesdays or Mondays found something at the kill site, wouldn’t they have come for her by now? It has been a day and a half since Grayson died.
Winnie leans across the desk and snags the phone. When the dial tone hums out, her fingers do not dial Jay’s number. Instead she scrolls the mouse back to the top of the page to where seven phone numbers glow in white pixels. Winnie chooses the one farthest to the right; gentle beeps fill the living room; her glasses slide down her nose again.
Then the phone is ringing and she’s holding the receiver to her ear.
“Sunday clan,” a voice chimes. “How may I direct your call?”
“Corpse duty,” Winnie says, her voice a bit crackly, a bit rough. Sheclears her throat. “I need to talk to the person running tomorrow’s corpse duty.”
Nine days ago when Winnie first found Dad’s secret messages in the birthday cards, she was angry. But more than that, she was scared. What if someone were to find the clues Dad left behind? What if her family was blamedagainfor colluding with a witch they hadn’t known about?
Thus she decided she must clean up Dad’s trail before anyone could discover it.
