Page 77 of The Hunting Moon
Erica, when she used to smile, was all goofy gleam and mischief. She was filled to bursting with jokes and games and wagers.Ten bucks to kiss Jay.Jenna meanwhile wore innocence in her dark eyes and sweetness in her smile. She might have sung songs that could break you, but the songs always put you back together by the end.
The third thing Winnie thinks is:Holy crap, Jenna and Grayson used to date.Grayson didn’t just find Jenna’s dead body on the night of her second trial—and he didn’t just throw a party for her after she died. They were together. And like,happilytogether.
These are the faces of two sixteen-year-olds who are very much in love.
The last thing Winnie notices is the locket hanging around Grayson’s neck. Not Jenna’s neck, butGrayson’sneck. It is gold with a moon and two stars…
And a fleck of something staining it. Identical to the locket Erica wore on Monday.
It’s as if the light in the office has snapped on all over again. Winnie knows exactly who was in her bedroom and in her attic. They are someone who would know her family’s doors were always unlocked and they would certainly know their way around the house. They would also know that Winnie wasn’t currently home because they had just seen her at Joe Squared.
But that circle on the Venn diagram will have to be dealt with later, because right now there is different ex–best friend who needs her.
Winnie shuts the drawer. It clangs loud as a gong in the hollowed-out basement of the Friday estate. Then she seizes her backpack and abandons the office filled with secrets.
She flips off the light on her way out.
CHAPTER40
It is just after midnight by the time Winnie leaves the Friday estate. She wears black body armor that protects her chest and abdomen. On her head, she has a simple helmet. Not because it will protect her—though itwill—but because it will hide her identity when she traipses through the forest on a Wednesday night. She needs any hunters who spy her to assume she’s one of them, and above all, she can’t have Aunt Rachel spotting her auburn hair and thinking,Hmmm, that sure looks like my niece!
Unfortunately, the face shield won’t slide over Winnie’s glasses, so her face is exposed. Still, at a distance, she doesn’t think anyone will recognize her.
Also unfortunately, she couldn’t find a neoprene cord for her glasses, so she just has to pray the helmet will hold them in place.
In her backpack now strapped tightly to her back, Winnie has her nightmare contraband and a tiny first aid kit. Strapped to each of her thighs is a serrated hunting knife—the only weapons she could access. Everything else was locked up, and Winnie didn’t want to waste time searching for a key.
No, she might not have much protection against the forest, but she still has way more than she had on any of her trials.
She follows the route Jay always leads her on into the forest. At the boundary between spirit domain and outside—a line sharp as theyesthat hung between Jay and Winnie two hours ago—the temperature dropsten degrees. A scent like old leaves and mist coils into Winnie’s nose. The moon, a bright slash in the sky, turns hazy. It’s as if a bloom filter has dropped over everything.
It has been six days since the last time Winnie and Jay trained together—and though they only ever trained during daylight hours, she manages to navigate the trails solo. Maybe because the mist has already come and gone or maybe because she knows exactly why she is here and what she has to do… Either way, she feels ready. She feels competent.
Her hearing sharpens, her weak eyesight improves, and her muscles fire with a focused control she only ever feels inside these trees.
This is the forest. This is the spirit’s domain… but it is also the Luminaries’ domain. And though Winnie’s route to becoming a hunter might not have been straight or entirely truthful, she was still deemed ready enough to face the nightmares. She is still technically a Wednesday hunter, and tonight, she actually feels like one.
By the time Winnie reaches the training spot with the fallen sugar maple and red pine, the urge to run aches in her legs. But speed means noise and noise means death, so she keeps her pace creeping. Forward, forward, always listening, always scanning the horizon, the branches, the grayscale darkness of the forest.
She travels at least a mile in this fashion without encountering a single nightmare, a single hunter. Yet as she approaches Stone Hollow, a sound like ancient bicycle brakes hits her ears. It’s unnatural and somehow laced with laughter. Winnie holds her breath and slows to a stop. More shrieks layer in.
Harpy: While these nightmares look vaguely human, the lower halves of their bodies are fully avian with claws instead of feet. Vulture-like wings extend from their shoulder blades.
Winnie scoots forward. The fastest route to the northeastern stream, where Lizzy’s camera captured the werewolf, would be straight through Stone Hollow. It is also the most exposed, and walking into harpy territory is a guaranteed death sentence. One harpy, okay. Maybe Winnie could handle that. But a whole group of them?
Harpies have powerful eyesight, although they cannot swivel their eyeballs within the sockets. They must rotate their heads to see peripherally.
Winnie reaches the open meadow’s edge. Stone pillars rise up, darksentries observing the harpies as they swoop and dive. Six harpies in all—ahugenumber that even a host of hunters would likely leave be.
It’s going to cost Winnie a few minutes, but she will definitely need to circle around. She unstraps the hunting knife from her left thigh, just in case, and sets off west. Toward the stream where Grayson died. Toward the X on the map and the home of a dampener that set off a cascade of clusterfuckery in a mere three days.
Except, of course, Winnie knows now she can’t blame her dad for everything. She can’t even blame the Diana who framed him. Not when so very many of Winnie’s troubles have ultimately been caused by her own unwillingness to open her eyes and see what wasreallygoing on around her.
Winnie reaches the stream where Grayson died. The orange tape is no longer strung across the birch trees; the blood, though, is still there, streaked and smeared upon white bark. The trees are glowing pylons at this hour. The blood looks tarry and black.
Winnie resheathes the hunting knife to her thigh before continuing onward. She does not step into the stream, but instead tracks northward alongside its gentle flow. And although theoretically the running water should help keep land-bound nightmares away, it occurs to Winnie as she stalks along the shoreline that running water hasn’t stopped Jay. He went directly into the river while in his wolf form to save Winnie.
Although,she realizes,it’s possible he also paid for that.Maybe it caused him unbearable pain; maybe it is one more thing she owes him for, one more sacrifice he made to keep her alive.
