Page 82 of The Hunting Moon
She can’t risk that.
Winnie does, however, at least pause long enough to don her glasses—filthy and warped again—and bind up her changeling wound. The anticoagulant from the bite means her bleeding won’t stanch quickly and the wound won’t scab easily. Plus, the line of spidrin venom on her skin is developing blisters.
Much as sharks can sense blood in the water from miles away or vultures can smell carrion, most nightmares are drawn to open wounds.
Winnie stops at a granite ridge to remove her socks and wrap them around the bloodied fang marks. Then she cuts off a strip of bandage from her meager first aid kit and winds that around the socks. It’s not great, but the blood really is so slippery, so profuse, that she needs as much cotton as she can to compress the bite and absorb the flow.
Lastly, Winnie covers the standard bandage in a thicker, plastic bandage made just for Luminaries that will contain the smell of blood.
It looks like she is wearing an inner tube around her leg, and it takes her a few awkward steps to get used to the weight, the shape, and the continued numbness in her calf muscle. But the human brain is truly a masterpiece of evolutionary engineering, and within two steps, new neural pathways are forming. Within ten steps, her brain has fully adapted to this new arrangement. And within twenty, she is moving forward with exactly the same quiet purpose as before.
She must be getting close to Jay. Surely, surely he is somewhere nearby.
His tracks become easier to follow the farther she hikes. Partly because there is more of his blood to mark the earth. But mostly because his prints leave deeper indentations with every step, his claws dragging lines across the dirt as if he can scarcely lift his legs anymore.
Winnie is too afraid to even consider what that might mean—or what she might find when she finally catches up to him.
Eventually, she reaches a trickle of water slurping by. More rill than proper stream, it is even weaker, even more pathetic than the rainwater stream that surrounded the hemlock Winnie hid in for her second trial. A place Jay showed her…
A place that looks a lot likethisalmost island, where a red cedar stands shadowy and towering against the night.
Heat bowls over Winnie—shamed heat, furious heat. Because in all her fixation on surviving that second trial, Winnie never wondered why Jay evenknewabout that island east of the lake. Not once did she question why a skilled hunter like Jay might need a safe haven surrounded by running water where nightmares do not tread…
A trained Luminary has no need to hide, but a boy hoping to survive the night?
I had my own stuff going on.
Understatement of the century. While Winnie fumed and hurt, Jay was just trying to make it through each night alive, trying to fight off a curse that grew and festered inside him.
Her glasses fog slightly, her body an inferno from the fighting, the creeping, theshameat everything she never bothered to see in her best friend. All Winnie has focused on for four years has been how her dad got caught as a Diana, how her family became outcasts, and how she wasgoing to make it okay again with the hunter trials. That wasallshe existed for—a single-minded fixation that she ate, slept, and dreamed of for four eternal years.
She blamed Jay for ditching her, she blamed Erica for abandoning her, but not once did Winnie turn around and flip that mirror onto herself.So stop being such a hypocrite,Lizzy said back in Jay’s bedroom,and try looking at your own choices for once.
Winnie thinks of Jay’s drawer of contraband now crammed inside her backpack. She thinks of the photograph with Jenna completely in love. Two ex–best friends with their own stuff going on.I find no relief, inside I’m still a hopeless curse.
Winnie shoots forward. Five paces. Ten. Sixteen. Then she is to the trunk’s base and her neck is flexing backward so she can squint into the cedar’s branches. But if there’s anyone up there, she can’t see them.
A rasping breath slides through the night. Gurgling and weak and coming from the ground nearby. Winnie lurches around the tree… and there he is. The wolf. The boy she has always loved.
He is fully nightmare now, his enormous lupine body curled into a ball against the darkened tree. He glows like a full moon, the blood smears on his abdomen like clouds wisping by.
Winnie kneels beside him. He does not move.
Three arrow bolts protrude from his belly. There might be more, but Winnie can’t see them with his body clenched up like this. And all she can think is he should be dead right now, and hewillbe dead soon if she doesn’t do something. They both will be dead because it’s only a matter of time before those witches circle back or Aunt Rachel finally catches up to him or nightmares scent his blood.
Winnie tugs off her helmet and drops it to the earth. One of the wolf’s eyes opens; the iris is silvery gray, the pupil dilated and lost. If there is recognition in his gaze, Winnie doesn’t see it. If there is anyhumanin his gaze, she doesn’t see it. No more than she could the night of her third trial when he tumbled her to the ground and she staked him in the neck.
All she finds is resignation.You have caught me. Kill me quickly please.
For several seconds Winnie’s resolve falters. Maybe she has this wrong. Maybe this is a nightmare drawing twisted sideways on her sketchpad.Maybe Jayisn’tthe werewolf and this is nobody she knows, so now she will heal someone that will ultimately kill her in the end—
No.
Winnie snaps her head to the side. Because even if all of that is true, if there is one thing she has learned in this forest, it’s that not every nightmare is evil. Not every nightmare deserves to die.
Nightmares like the will-o’-wisp. Nightmares like the ghost-deer. And nightmares like this wolf who may or may not be the boy Winnie grew up with—they all deserve a chance to keep on living. And just as this werewolf saved her beneath those crashing, frozen waves, she will save him before the night can steal him away.
“Hey,” she whispers, dipping her face toward his long white snout. “It’s me. It’s Winnie, and I’m here to help you.”
