Page 57 of The Hunting Moon
Winnie doesn’t answer. Just chuckles to herself and sets off with an arm-swinging march across the living room, upstairs, and finally into her bedroom. Time for a shower! Time for school! Today is going to be so awesome! Nothing at all can bring her down!
CHAPTER30
Winnie feels like a piece of crap. Not just any piece of crap either, but the old kind you find on the side of the road, left by a dog and its irresponsible owner.
There’s no pain in her leg—that is totally gone, since the melusine blood really did heal her up entirely—but the comedown. Thecomedown.Why didn’t Jay warn her it would be this bad? And why would anyone everwantto illegally drop this stuff if this is the eventual aftermath?
Never again. Winnie doesn’t care if she’s legit dying next time. Never again.
Thank goodness she didn’t have corpse duty this morning—though she’s not entirely sure how she’ll ever get enough sleep tonight to survive it tomorrow. At least the twins have their mom’s van today and give Winnie a ride from school to the Sunday estate, so she doesn’t have to pedal herself all the way over there. Or home again at the end of the day.
Unfortunately, they also give rides home to Fatima, Katie, and Xavier. All Winnie can manage is to slump in the back seat and massage her temples until at last she’s able to topple from the confined minivan filled with laughter and teasing and excitement over the Masquerade.
They also joke three separate times about Winnie and Jay K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Winnie’s face heats up at what is definitelynother first imagery of K-I-S-S-I-N-G Jay. God, she actedso absolutely stupidlywith him this morning.The booping! The tussling! The jokes about them dating! He must think her a fool.
Or worse, he must think she’s in love with him.
“See you at clan dinner!” Bretta calls after Winnie drags her revenant body out of the van, and then her bike from the trunk. Bretta leans out the open window. “Do you want us to bring you an outfit?”
Winnie makes herself look back and roll her eyes. “I do have clothes, Bretta Wednesday, thank you very much. And I promise they’re not all bad.”
“Are you sure—” Bretta begins, but Emma silences her with a hiss. Then a shouted “Great! We’ll see you soon!”
Too soon, as far as Winnie is concerned. Not because she doesn’t want to see Emma or Bretta or Fatima, but because she just wants sleep. And painkillers. And more sleep. The thought of navigating clan dinner in her current state sounds like a cruel combination of both physical and emotional torture, as well as some psychological and spiritual torture thrown in too. And hell, there’s some probably existential torture in the mix as well. That’s a thing, right?
The enormous black bear on the front porch flaps at Winnie as she leans the bike against the porch.Tonight is the big night,he seems to say.Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty—you ready for it?
No. Not really, if Winnie is being honest. If not for the fact that her family will probably be welcomed back into the Luminaries officially and that Mom has talked about nothing else for days, Winnie would totally skip…
After downing two Tylenol, Winnie makes herself a cup of Earl Grey. As much as she would prefer sleep, time is short. She needs to think. A lot happened last night, and she hasn’t had a single chance to sit with everything she did—and didn’t—discover at that granite pit in the forest.
When the tea is finally ready, the scent of bergamot fills her kitchen. Not quite like Jay, but close enough to make her think of him, to remember how he stood here only two weeks ago when everything had been so different between them… and yet, exactly the same.
Winnie trudges upstairs. Mom isn’t home, but Winnie still locks her bedroom door before settling at her desk and gathering her supplies: a piece of sketch paper, a pen. Then she starts to write. Writeanddraw, because sometimes it’s the only way to make sense of things.
Clusterfuck,she slopes out at the top of the page, imitating the seriffont of the Compendium. Then beside it, and with the meticulous care needed to add each little serif stroke, she adds,An occurrence not confined to the forest in which everything goes very badly all at once. See also: Winnie Wednesday, Were-creatures, Whisperer, and Witches.At the end of the definition, Winnie adds a little crescent moon and three stars, like the one on her locket.
Which reminds her: she needs to go to the library and see when that book on secret messages that Professor Funday requested will arrive. She still has no idea how Dad might have known about old Luminary tricks with moons and stars, and it seems even less likely that Grandma Harriet (the original owner of the locket) would have known either…
But still, Winnie should pursue every avenue of investigation, no matter how implausible it might be. Plus, it’s not like she has to deal with the secret message ideanow,since there’s no way the book will have arrived from Italy yet. Best of all, if she waits a few days before checking in at the Monday history library, maybe her embarrassment over how she acted withJay Freaking Friday(K-I-S-S-I-N-G!) will have subsided and she can bring him along too.
Below Winnie’s new written definition for “clusterfuck,” she scribbles down a list that she first began mentally two days ago.
What I know:
1) I know someone put a dampener in the stream.
2) I know there used to be a source in the dampener. Probably.
3) I know Dad wanted me to find it. Probably.
4) I know it somehow connects to the possibility Dad was framed.
5) I know there was a second X on the map that led me to a weird hole in the forest with blood on granite walls.
Here, Winnie’s pen pauses. Because a tiny light bulb has just switched on above her head. A mere Christmas light, really, like the ones that drape and circle downtown, but still—a memory that didn’t exist a moment ago.
