Page 59 of The Hunting Moon
Winnie looks at her two lists. They are at least the same length now, and surely Winnie can shorten thatDo Not Knowlist with a bit of hard thinking.
Her glasses have slid down her nose. They perch just above her nostrils, the lenses warping her list and distorting her drawings until the granite hole almost looks as if the Whisperer hovers within.
Somehow that second spot on the map is where everything connects. Where theW’s and theS’s overlap.Sources, spells, sadhuzag. Whisperer, witches, werewolf.
She pushes her glasses back up. Her teeth click steadily, while the tea she made sits at the edge of her desk, untouched and oversteeped, growing cooler by the second like a body left in the forest for tomorrow’s corpse duty to retrieve.
Winnie draws a three-circle Venn diagram. In one circle, she writesSource.In another, she writesSadhuzag.In the final, she writesDad.Then, in the very middle of it all, where all three circles overlap, she writes her own name:Winnie.
Except no. That doesn’t work.
She strikes through it and starts anew. She trades outSpellforSource.TriesWitchesinstead ofDad.Then triesWhispererinstead ofSadhuzag…And oh, it looks much better now. The diamond is so close to forming from all this coal.
Winnie shifts her focus to the areas where circles overlap:SpellandWitchesoverlap to formSource. SpellandWhispereroverlap to formSadhuzag—although that’s a tenuous connection at best. Sure, they both appeared on Tuesday night and are both connected to the granite hole…
But correlation does not prove causation and all that. Plus, how do witches and Whisperer overlap? In the end, Winnie can’t find an answer, so she scribbles a question mark in that particular area. And then she shades in the very center of the diagram, where all three circles meet to form her own name.
She stares at her sketch, time bleeding past. Her hangover from the melusine blood still throbs, but it’s a dull pinprick now. She rubs at her forehead. Her teeth click in a slow, reliable drumbeat that matches her heart. Her fingers casually fill in circles from her discarded Venn diagrams. She adds stems. She adds leaves. She creates three-petaled trillium flowers like Dad would have loved long ago…
Then she removes her glasses and cleans them. When she puts them back on again, the answer sharpens along with her vision.
Just like that, Winnie sees where her latest Venn diagram went wrong.
She strikes throughWinniein the center of the circles, thenWhispereron the right circle. Because of course,sheisn’t the one that connects everything—sheisn’t the one that started this clusterfuck and keeps it churning and churning like water over the Big Lake’s falls. It’s the other way around. Winnie is just anotherW,another piece of the puzzle, another person who has to jump to stay alive…
But if she puts herself where the Whisperer was, thenah,she sees it now. In seconds, she draws a new, clean diagram and fills it in with her final conclusions.
It looks like nothing she would ever have guessed or ever seen without her pen to guide her. Because what if the Whisperer isn’t merely attracted to the same area as the sadhuzag because of residual power? What if it isn’t justconnectedto sources and witches…
What if, instead, the Whispererisa spell? What if it was something made by the Dianas to haunt Winnie every time she steps into the forest?
And what if the Whisperer is exactly what Dad wanted Winnie to find all along?
CHAPTER31
It makes so much sense Winnie can’t believe she didn’t think of this sooner. It’s like a missing semicolon in a line of failed code. She was missingone little detailthat would let the program finally run. Now she’s got it, and everything makes sense.
The Whisperer was never a nightmare.
It was… itisa Diana spell.
And that’s why Winnie and Mario could find no record of a creature like it in the Nightmare Compendium. That’s why the Whisperer doesn’t vanish with other nightmares after the dawn mist rises. Heck, it might even explain why the Whisperer goes through the forest each night hunting anything in its path…
There was a spell like that, wasn’t there?
Winnie finds her answer almost instantly.Understanding Sourcesis open right beside her elbow, the list of spells glaring up at her.Fames,she reads halfway down the page.These spells are self-feeding and sustain themselves in the forest.
Holy crap. It really is right there, staring up at her in stark black-and-white.
Pure Heart,she thinks.Trust the Pure Heart.Now she knows why she dreamed that phrase on Sunday night. Her subconscious already had the answer, even if she was too slow to pick it up. The heart of the Venn diagram,the pistil of the flower, the piece upon which everything else in Winnie’s chaotic life hinges…
Is the Whisperer.
It is a spell. It is afames.
Winnie needs to tell someone. Like, right away, no time to waste. This one piece of information—this one word, “fames”—could change all the calculations for Hemlock Falls. If the Whisperer really is a Diana spell, then while everyone is waiting around for the Mondays or Tuesdays to catch a werewolf, an actual self-feeding spell is out there killing Luminaries.
A spell cast by a witch who might have framed Winnie’s dad four years ago.
