Page 23 of The Hunting Moon
Culture runs thicker than blood.That’s what Dad always used to say about the Luminaries. About the clans and how everyone conforms to their respective virtues even if it’s not really who they are.
“They?” Winnie whispers to herself. “Shouldn’t it bewe?” She pushes into a jog. The rubber soles of her sneakers pound over pine needles and moss. Soft earth that feels as if it still clings to winter’s last snow.
Silver maple. Black walnut. Balsam fir. Winnie rounds the trees, following a map imprinted on her brain. Clouds clot in overhead. Johnny Saturdayhadmentioned more rain on the way. Winnie hopes it doesn’t hit while she’s out here.
Soon, icy morning wind bites against Winnie as the space between trees widens. Stone Hollow waits ahead. She sees no one amid the natural monoliths, but it’s so exposed, she lingers within the trees, half crouched atop the shadowy pine needle floor.
It’s strange to see the wide meadow and stones. Clouds might darken the sky, suspended above like guards on a prison wall, and the spirit’s magic might leach away most color, but it is still a thousand times brighter than the last time she was here, during her third trial. No ghost-deer sprint across the field. No slithering whispers fill the air. Winnie wonders if Emma’s blood still smears the rock from twelve days ago.
She’s glad she isn’t near enough to find out.
Staying within the trees, Winnie circles the field. The X on her dad’s map could lead to any spot within this field or the stream beside it, but it makes the most sense for her to start searching at the crescent-shaped stream. That is Grayson’s kill site, so that is where someone else is most likely to stumble on Dad’s next clue.
Winnie reaches the western side of the field. Orange tape drapes across the forest here like a toxic spidrin web, looped and stretched around white birch trees rising up from the cold earth.
Winnie stops moving. This is where Grayson died. This is where Jay found the body parts of his Lead Hunter. She drops to a squat beside the orange tape, letting her muscles relax and her breathing steady. If there is anyone here, they are quiet as a basilisk.
She adjusts her glasses several times, squinting over the terrain. There is little to see from this distance beyond the stream’s silty, rocky shore, curving around like a crescent. That running water helped protect her during her third trial by sending ghost-deer leaping another way and drawing the Whisperer after them…
Winnie swallows. She navigates through the tape like a thief throughsecurity beams. Duck, bend, shimmy, crouch until she is through. Andnowshe can clearly see what happened. Boot prints are stamped everywhere in the silty shore—likely from the Mondays and Tuesdays who cleared the scene. Maybe even from Jay.Maybeeven from Grayson.
It’s what Winnie glimpses when she peers backward, though, that makes her stomach revolt.
Blood. So much blood.
She’s never seen anything like it. She has to clap a hand to her mouth to keep from crying out. The birch trees’ white bark is streaked in line after line after smear after spray. Like someone came out here with a can of brownish-red paint and started flinging. A royally screwed-up version of Blue Man Group.
Distantly, Winnie supposes it might not be blood but just actual paint. Viscerally, though, she knows that is impossible.Thisis what remains of Grayson Friday. Not ashes in the lake, but blood on white trees.
Winnie’s fingers turn to claws, digging into the skin around her mouth. She is having trouble breathing.
This could have been you,her brain reminds her.Thisshouldhave been you.Then, fast on the heels of that thought comes another:How the hell can anyone think a werewolf did this?That thought is a bright buoy in a gush of horror saturating her brain.
The werewolf could not have caused this scene. Winnie doesn’t have to be a Monday or a Tuesday trained in nightmare forensics to recognize that. The wide spray of blood wasn’t from a body getting slashed to bits rightnextto the trees. Grayson was ripped apart in multiple places; his death happened all over this site. Limb by limb, organ by organ.
It’s horrific. It’s monstrous. And it makes no sense at all. Why, why,whywould a nightmare do this to a person?
To judge a nightmare with human emotion,the Compendium states,or to anthropomorphize them in any way is to fundamentally misunderstand their inner motivations and decision-making. They do not operate according to Maslow’s pyramid of needs, but rather to an arrangement of needs that is entirely their own.
Winnie swivels back toward the stream. The river and last night’s rain have washed away any blood that might have marked the stones beside the shore. But the birch trees with their skeletal white can hide nothing.
Nor can the half-submerged log in the middle of the stream. Even at this distance, Winnie can see something happened to it. Or something happenedonit.
She tromps in—no concern for the freezing water.Splash, splash, splash.The water quickly deepens. It kicks up to her knees by the time she reaches the log, where three bolts poke from the wood like a pincushion. Loosed by Jay or by Grayson, Winnie can’t say. And it doesn’t really matter. They were aiminghere.Into the stream. Not across the stream. Not at the stream’s edge. But right here at the heart of the running water.
No one may know why most land-based nightmares avoid running water, but the fact of the matter is that they do.
Not the Whisperer, though. Of course not the Whisperer.
A hurried scan and a hurried splash around the log reveal nothing more to be found. The water rises to Winnie’s thighs. Cold, cold, cold and soaking up her jeans toward her abdomen.
There is no sign of anything left from Dad. There are no clearly tampered-with stones in the water, and no visibly dug-up holes upon either shore. Short of bringing a metal detector out here and roving over the area like a morbid treasure hunter, Winnie has no way of knowing if Dad’s next clue was ever hiding in this stream—assuming it’s even a thing she is meant tofind.For all she really knows, he wrote a message in the silt four years ago and it’s long gone.
She hopes that’s the case. She wants to be done with this and his clues and all the memories that ever tied her to him.
Winnie is about to slosh back to shore so she can methodically search Stone Hollow next, when sunlight glints on a stretch of rapids nearby.Except the sun isn’t out.Winnie eyes snap to the clouded sky; the low clouds are practically reaching for her now, ready to erupt.
Winnie charges to where a small pool gathers between two stones. Unnaturally placed stones, she realizes as she studies them—and as the water continues to flash and beam around the stones.
