Page 90 of The Hunting Moon
Also, showed enough sentience to help a human.
The sun is rising by the time Winnie stumbles out of the trees and finds herself just south of the Tuesday estate, where uniformed soldiers scuttleand crawl at breakneck speed between the different bunker-like buildings. Without her glasses, the whole place looks like an ant mound riled up by a rainstorm.
Winnie supposes it’s only a matter of time before some of those Tuesdays end up at her house. She has no idea what she’s going to say when they do, but like the will-o’-wisps’ movement patterns, it isn’t something to worry about right now.
Winnie turns away from the Tuesday estate and aims south. As she plods onward, so tired she can barely keep her head up, she peels off the armor she took from the Friday estate. By the time she reaches the Monday grounds, where for the first time this year no morning frost whitens the grass, Winnie is stripped down to the same outfit she wore to Joe Squared all those hours ago.
A verydirtyversion of that outfit, anyway.
With a silent apology to Lizzy’s budget, she tosses all the armor into the first trash can she sees. And when she squints at her reflection in the hospital’s main glass sliding doors, she is relieved to see she doesn’t actually look as broken or breathless as she feels. Sure, the bandaging around her calf looks wonky, but it’s not terribly obvious.
The door slides open. Yet where Winnie thinks she is the one to have triggered the opening, she almost instantly sees she is not. Someone is coming out.
Someone she so desperately wanted to see.
Like her, Jay wears what he wore at Joe Squared last night—and like her, he looks worn and shattered. His skin is deathly pale, and his posture is as fragile as Winnie’s. All it will take is one sharp gust from the morning breeze, and they will both collapse onto the pavement.
Jay draws up short at the sight of Winnie. His gray eyes flash with golden sunrise. The hospital doors hiss shut behind him.
Then he stares at Winnie while Winnie stares at him.
It is like their moment outside Joe Squared all over again, except theyesbetween them has multiplied from a single word of confirmation into four years’ worth of secrets. A thousand swamp fires. A thousand lies all set free into the spring morning.
And the clockwork gears that synchronized them as children, that stillbind them as young adults—rather than order them to turn away from each other, this time compel them to draw near.
Closer, closer, until they are only two feet apart and studying each other like they’ve never met before.
Winnie supposes they haven’t. Not really. Notfully.
Why didn’t you tell me?she thinks at him. A breeze slides over her. It rattles through pruned, flowerless hydrangeas nearby.Why didn’t you tell me?She isn’t sure when the words leave her brain by way of her mouth, but they emerge like a forest dawn, cold and ethereal: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jay responds like a nightmare within: “I was afraid I would hurt you.”
Winnie almost laughs at that. No, shedoeslaugh—a weird, shrill huff. “That’s impossible.” She shakes her head. “You have never hurt me, Jay Friday. At least not when you were a wolf.” She doesn’t add that he hurt her as a human, because he knows that. And of course, she knows he wasn’t entirely to blame.
“What do you remember?” she asks. Then she adds, “From last night,” because she’s almost certain he can’t remember his other nights in the forest—a fact Mario probably knows more about.
“Not much,” Jay admits. “Just the… end. When the mist came. But I know you were there, Winnie. I know you came for me. And I…” He pauses. Swallows. “I know I wouldn’t be standing right now, if not for you.”
That is all they need to say. The onlyyesthat still needed to fall between them before they could move in synchrony again. Winnie moves to Jay, Jay moves to Winnie, and then they are squeezing each other so tightly that they briefly morph into one.
It is no longer where the hazy hemlocks and pines end that Jay seems to begin, nor is it where the hazy hemlocks and pines end that Winnie begins. It is simply with each other, two best friends who don’t really fit with the rest of Hemlock Falls. Whose culture doesn’t run thicker than blood, but whose friendship and history do.
Winnie has no idea how long they hold each other like that. She just knows it is too short. That even though she is so tired she could fall asleep right now, her muscles have found fresh energy to hold and hold and hold.
She wants to ask Jay how his wounds have healed—if it was the mist in the vial and how such a thing is possible. She wants to ask how he got outof the forest when hunters and Tuesdays prowled. But then a voice calls out, cracking with prepubescence, “Winnie? Are you here for my mom?”
And the moment is over. Marcus has arrived.
Winnie and Jay draw apart, and in a distant part of Winnie’s brain where actual thought is still happening, she considers how much her cousin looks like Darian did on the night Dad disappeared. Marcus even has similar plaid pajamas—green and red flannel with wooden buttons.
There’s also a similar terror in his eyes, as if he can’t believe he’s at the hospital before he even woke up for corpse duty, and surely he will wake up from this bad dream momentarily?
Marcus looks at Jay. “I heard you brought her in.”
“Yeah,” Jay replies. A sigh settles over him, as if he is shedding the young man from a few moments ago and slipping into his Lead Hunter’s coat. The nascent sunrise warms his cheeks to pink. “She’s going to be all right, Marcus.”
Marcus starts crying at those words. Without realizing what she does, Winnie moves to him and pulls him in for a hug. A fierce,Hey, the nightmares can’t get you nowhug. Because in the end, Marcus is just a kid. One who vomits at the sight of dead things, who is tryingreally hardto accept that death is a part of life in Hemlock Falls, and who right now just wants his mom to be okay.
