Page 74 of The Hunting Moon
Later, Winnie will be impressed she manages to follow Lizzy into the lab without collapsing. A heavy, compressive sensation has fallen over her, like one of those weighted vests they make you wear during X-rays.
The Wednesday hunters have finally hit the werewolf.
Lizzy leads Winnie to her wall of computers. The lights beam down overly bright, garish even, at this hour. The lab used to be a living room, the aging sofas and tables replaced by tables and mismatched shelves, all littered with books and papers and beakers and Bunsen burners.
Winnie fixes her glasses with fingers that don’t feel like her own. Her joints are locking up, while beside her, Lizzy swipes open a touchscreen computer. A grid of four squares reveals sites throughout the forest.
Under normal circumstances, Winnie would be thrilled to watch these screens slide by: the forest isaliveright now, the nightmares awake andprowling—even if the quality is grainy at best. Each square glitches and winks every few seconds, the cameras doing their best to fulfill their duty. There is only so long they can resist the supernatural energy of the forest.
“My tech won’t last the night,” Lizzy says, as if following Winnie’s line of thinking. She flicks aside grid after grid of video, like a bored singleton on a dating app. She knows what she’s looking for, but it’s all Winnie can do to keep up with the various nightmares flying by.
Manticore hatchlings, white and scuttling. A hellion, half-eaten, sprawled beside a stagnant pond. Winnie misses the bottom two squares before they’re gone.
Next comes an empty slice of Stone Hollow; then a shoreline of the Big Lake; a shot of the overlook beside the falls; a view of the granite ridges in the north.
Throughout all of this, Lizzy chatters away—about how she might swap out night vision for heat detection in two of the cameras. About how the cameras by the Big Lake are always the first to go. About how everyone told her to take her cameras and piss offuntilthis werewolf came along, and now they can’t get enough of her inventions, unreliable or not.
Not once does Lizzy ask why Winnie is at the estate—or why Winnie was looking for Jay. She is too caught up in the thrill of being part of tonight’s hunt.
A hunt that is for the werewolf.
As Lizzy continues her descriptions of camera advances against the spirit’s energetic fields, Winnie nods and nods. She is one of those figurines that bobble on a car’s front dash, and a weird buzzing grips her brain, right in the back where that gas and the dust have been accumulating for days.
Now, they’re spinning really fast—like collapse-into-a-star fast. Collapse intolotsof stars fast, so that soon, all she will see is a bright, obvious constellation she should have detected weeks ago.
Then Lizzy finds the screen she wants. “Bingo,” she says, aiming finger guns toward the ceiling. “Here it is.”
Hereheis,Winnie silently corrects, and sure enough, the werewolf slumps across the screen.Northeastern stream 11:41PM.He’s in bad shape, moving with aching slowness. His head hangs low, and streaks stain his white fur. In seconds, he is out of frame.
Lizzy reaches for a radio receiver at the edge of her desk.
And Winnie’s hand moves of its own accord.
It is an extraordinary sensation to watch her body move without any conscious impulse from her brain. As if the constellation has finally formed, but there’s too much chaos in there, it can’t cut through all the noise.
She thinks again of the cosmic microwave background. How it makes everything buzz and buzz and buzz.
Right now, the big bang is drowning out everything. In spite of it, Winnie’s arm muscles still manage to act. Her hand still manages to clamp on to Lizzy’s wrist.
“Huh?” Lizzy snaps her attention to Winnie, and for the first time since discovering Winnie in Jay’s room, she seems to realize it isreally bizarreto have a sixteen-year-old in her lab at this hour.
The buzzing in Winnie’s brain is louder. Yet like her arm, her diaphragm seems to have developed a mind of its own. Her vocal cords and mouth too, forming a word that she has yet to fully understand. “Wait.”
Lizzy squares toward Winnie. “Huh?” She pushes to her feet. “Hey, Winnie—hey, Winnie, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
No. Winnie is definitely not okay. Because something about seeing the werewolf on the screen, white and hurt and with blood gushing out of him—it is acting like a trigger to her memories.
Thememory that Winnie has been trying to reach for days.
CHAPTER38
She is trapped underwater.
She is going to die.
Hypothermia or drowning—she doesn’t know which will come for her first, only that she is too tired to fight it.
She can hear Jenna singing, and blearily, she wonders if this is how Jenna died. She wonders if this is where it happened.
