Page 1 of The Whispering Night
THE NIGHTMARE
The boy awakens beside a hemlock tree at sunrise. He has been here before, more times than he can count. More times than he can remember. The forest erases his human mind on the nights when it summons him. But this morning is different: a figure crouches over him. Trees drift and wave behind the man’s head, releasing gray dawn light with each gust of forest breeze. A smell like bubble gum pierces the boy’s nostrils.
“Hey,” the man says. He has a low, growly voice, but kind. “I thought I might find you here.”
The boy frowns, still groggy from the night he can’t remember. He is in one of the three places he always ends up after the forest claims him, dressed in the same clothes he went to bed in: jeans and a thick flannel button-up. He has learned in the last two years that pajamas only lead to trouble. It’s better to be fully dressed. This way, he will not freeze quite so quickly if he is unconscious for hours against a hemlock tree.
And this way, if anyone finds him, he looks less like a daywalker wandering from his bed and more like a kid who had too much to drink the night before. He has even started carrying a beat-up pack of cigarettes in his back pocket, just to complete the effect.
“How are you here?” the boy asks, his voice as rough as the broken soil digging beneath his boots.
“I’ve been watching you,” the man replies, and he has the decency to look embarrassed as he says this. His teeth smack twice at bubble gum.“I had a feeling something wasn’t right, and… well…” He waves to the forest around them.
The boy nods. A strange feeling wefts through him that can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it fear this man will turn him over to the Tuesdays? Or is it relief because now, finally, this misery will end?
He is so tired all the time.
He wonders if it will hurt when they kill him. It must have hurt that werewolf fifteen years ago. He thinks about that daywalker often, whoever they were.
The man blows a bubble, bright pink in a world of frosted gray. It pops. The boy flinches. Then the man offers him a hand. “Let’s get you out of here before corpse duty finds us.”
The boy stares at the man’s hand, with its dried, seamed skin from constant sanitizer and latex gloves. Right now, the hand is simply pale, bare, and waiting for the boy to clasp it.
“Hurry.” The man’s fingers flex. He blows another bubble. It crackles with a triplepop-pop-pop!at the end.
“You… won’t turn me in?”
The man shakes his head.
“But I’m a daywalker.”
“No.” The man glances to his left, into a stand of oak trees. “As far as I can tell, you’re just a kid who got unlucky.”
Oh.The boy doesn’t know what to say to this. The relief his curse might finally end is replaced by relief that someone might be able to help him, to cure him, to give him back everything he had to give up two years ago. The bear and the bell he misses every single day. The aunt he can’t confess to. Thelifehe used to have.
He swallows, his throat dry from a night on the prowl that he will never remember. Then he nods and takes the man’s hand. The grasp is strong, steady, true.
“Come, Jay Friday,” the man says as he helps the boy rise. “Let’s get you somewhere warm.”
THE WITCH
The girl goes to the edge of the forest at twilight. She has avoided the call of the Dianas for three years, but she can avoid it no longer. She has failed, failed,failedto cast the spell from her sister. So if she wants to finish what her sister began—and finally learn why her sister died—she will need training.
Thus, when another summons comes, a small note that materializes inside her sister’s old locket with coordinates in red ink, the girl decides to answer. The witches have been sending her these messages for the last three years, oddly unwilling to give up on her.
She is glad they’ve kept trying. After she failed for the thousandth time to do even the most basic of spells—amundanusthat creates a flickering flame—she has accepted she cannot do this on her own.
The inked coordinates lead her far from her clan’s estate, and though the mist has not yet risen for the night, and she is outside the red-staked boundaries of nightmare danger, she still constantly checks her surroundings. She has crafted a plan, of course, in case a Luminary finds her here. A story about hunting mistcap mushrooms, and she has even brought a small sack with her for the filling.
But she encounters no one, and soon, she reaches the secret meeting place. Six minutes early because she isalwayssix minutes early. She squints into the shadows. To her left, golden-leaf maples have turned to gray shadows in the darkness. To her right, underbrush and saplings are surrounded by fallen leaves.
Before her, the final grains of daylight vanish into gloaming. And behind her, a crow’s face zooms in.
The girl jumps, a yelp escaping her as she lurches away from the head. It is not a true crow, but a person in a charcoal-colored mask marked with feathers and a metal beak, glittery and gold. The person wears black, almost scalelike armor. Then the person laughs, a wheezing sound that isn’t quite human. And when she speaks, it is with an older woman’s voice. “So you are ready to join us, are you? Why now?”
The girl swallows. Her heart is trapped somewhere beside her tonsils. She was expecting a question like this, of course—why now?—and she rehearsed several answers while wiping off eyeliner in her bathroom. But suddenly her various stories and excuses sound exactly like that: stories and excuses. And although she can see nothing beyond a glittering darkness where the Crow’s eyes should be, she senses those eyes will see through any lies.
“Because,” the girl finally replies, “I want to know what my sister was. What she did. What… what all ofthismeant to her.”
