Page 86 of The Hunting Moon
Distantly, she notices a heat gathering at the base of her collarbone. It is a bee buzzing in a hurricane as she fishes out the vial of ground phoenix feather. The hounds are only fifteen feet away.
Winnie jerks the cork off the phoenix feather, then chucks the vial at the hounds. She doesn’t hear it land, doesn’t hear it shatter. There are only the hounds rasping and hissing—and the crow rasping and hissing too.
Winnie does, however, see one of the hounds flinch as if the vial has hit them.
Both hounds pause, their arms still lifted but their posture now tense with surprise. With their masks, they look like two dogs who have just heard their master calling. And for a fraction of a moment, their whispers quiet. The pain on Winnie’s sternum recedes.
She opens the harpy gastroliths, a weak movement with thumbs that don’t seem to work properly. Then she slings the vial right at the largest hound, who is well over six feet tall.
It hits them. The glass doesn’t shatter either, but it doesn’t need to.
The smaller hound emits a buzzing laugh, as if to say,Is that all you have for us, little girl?
And Winnie laughs right back, a choke of sound as guttural and raw as the changeling when it tackled her. “Enjoy,” she croaks at them before she lurches around to her aunt’s body and flings herself down.
Harpy gastroliths: These small black stones from a harpy’s gizzard produce sparks on impact with a hard surface. When exposed to air, they will gradually heat up before exploding.
Light and noise overtake the island as the gastroliths detonate inside their glass. The phoenix dust ignites. A conflagration erupts, and the world burns. Around the hounds, on the hounds, and anywhere the powdered feather landed.
Winnie hugs her aunt tight; Rachel’s body is as cold and unfeeling as the forest. Heat beats against Winnie’s back—as do full-throated screams that not even the masks can distort. After several moments, Winnie risks a glance behind her. Her glasses protect her eyes from the heat as she watches the hounds run and twirl like a juggler’s flaming batons. Too graceful to be dying. Too brilliant and fiery to be anything but beautiful.
Thatis going to draw some nightmares. And Winnie is glad for it. Let the crow fight the forest. Let them die by the same pain they inflicted on Winnie’s aunt.
As if in answer to that thought, Rachel stirs beneath Winnie.
It is such a slight movement and so brief that Winnie thinks it might just be a tremor of the earth. A trick played on her by a forest that laughs as the hounds did. She peels herself upward and gapes down.
The orange light from the flames casts Rachel in a warm, almost healthy glow. As if she has only just met Winnie in the front hall of the Wednesday estate and said,Oh hey, don’t forget about corpse duty tomorrow.
Winnie gropes for Rachel’s neck. Maybe there’s a pulse, maybe she can still save her—
A burning punches against the top of Winnie’s chest. So hot, so violent, she thinks she has been shot. That a bullet now tunnels into her and shetoo will die, alongside Jay, alongside Rachel, alongside the hounds lost in flame.
But then come the whispers. Inside her skull, as if they have commandeered her brain, and inside her arteries, as if they’ve hijacked each ventricle in her heart. Even her muscles feel swallowed up by the whispering.
Meanwhile the pain in her collarbone is so intense, yet so local. It is a hot poker plucked from this wildfire and stabbed into her chest, and the bee from the hurricane has now become a full-blown nest of murder hornets.
Winnie tries to turn around to face the crow she knows must prowl this way. She cannot. She tries to dip forward and protect Rachel from the attack that must be coming. She cannot. And when at last the crow strides through the fire as if there are no flames, as if this witch feels no heat and breathes no smoke…
Winnie cannot even lift her gaze to face the crow. Her whole body is locked in place by magic. And all she can see is the way light flashes and sprays on armored legs. Then come spoken words, pitched high enough to trip over the flames still raging, the whispers still throbbing, the pain still so intense at the top of her sternum: “You, Winnie Wednesday, are just like your father. And right now, that means you’re in my way.”
It is an older woman’s voice. Mature and commanding.Just like my father?Winnie wants to demand.What do you mean? What did youdoto him?
The whispers increase, and with them the heat on Winnie’s chest becomes all-consuming. As if she is the one doused in phoenix feather and burning alive by the spark of a gastrolith. This time, though, Winnie has just enough logical space in her brain to think,Oh, that isn’t a bullet at all. It’s just my locket.
And then she thinks, with a detached sort of horror,Is it trying to kill me too?
The whispers feast and claw inside Winnie’s skull. The locket scalds; her eyes stream with tears because they cannot blink and this island burns like an inferno. The melting-plastic smell sears her nose, and there’s a charge on her skin that scuttles over her as if the Whisperer is on its way. But it isn’t the Whisperer, is it? Not this time. It’s just a Diana with a lot of power who wants, for some inexplicable reason, to find a werewolf.
Winnie watches as the crow steps past her to reach Jay. The woman squats, offering Winnie her first up-close view of the whorls and linesthat stamp the crow mask like real feathers. The gold beak glows orange—although now that Winnie considers it, in a fuzzy connection of ideas at the back of her brain, shouldn’t the crow have a black beak? Does the golden shade perhaps mean something?
The crow slides her hands under Jay’s lupine shoulders, and with shocking strength given her tiny frame, she drags Jay away bit by bit. One foot. Two, three…
All the while, the whispers of a holding spell still course through Winnie’s body.
The crow’s movements soon become labored and clumsy. A thick strand of silvery hair slides free, dangling out behind the mask like a long gray feather.
I’m sorry,Winnie thinks at Jay, sliding inch by inch away. At Aunt Rachel. At the forest.I’m sorry.She should never have followed Dad’s map. She should never have dragged Jay into her mess. And most of all, she should have seen whatJay’smess was all those years ago.
