Page 116 of The Whispering Night
“No!”Winnie screams.“Let go!”The fat scorching raindrops vanish as she is towed under branches. She thinks of Erica in mist vines from the Crow. She thinks of Jay eaten whole by the Whisperer. She wassoclose to the Big Lake. She wasso closeto the Pure Heart. “I’m on your side,” she tries to shout, but the branches are creaking around her head, shoving wet leaves and rough bark into her mouth. Her glasses get crushed against her face. She can’t even scream now, and there—oh god, there is amouthforming in the middle of the dryad’s trunk.
It has teeth, it has a tongue. Hot breath curls outward. The branches constrict Winnie tighter.
Then it stops.
It juststops,as if someone hit a pause button on the dryad. Rain still batters down. The wind still sucks over Winnie, frizzing with a song that sounds like Jay. And the waterfall still thunders and snarls downhill.
But as quickly as the dryad overpowered Winnie, it now releases her. She topples to the sandy earth, coughing. Smoke-flavored air courses over her. Rain, still hot and charged, lands on her face. Her glasses are bent and warped.
A shadow stretches over her. Then a pair of scaled legs. It is the melusine, and when Winnie tries to scoot away, it doesn’t stop her. It simply watches as she crab-legs backward. And though it has no eyes, Winnie can 100 percent feel the dryad watching her too.
“Oh shit,” she croaks, clutching at her throat. Her neck is bleeding. Her face as well, and the rain is washing blood down in burning stripes. But neither the melusine nor the dryad make a move to attack again. So Winnie doesn’t grab for her second knife, nor does she get up and start sprinting. She simply wipes the blood and rain from her eyes. Adjusts her glasses as best she can. Then pushes all the way to her feet, ankle bones juddering and howling.
Smoke billows upward, a gray curtain to haze out the southern sky.And there’s a rhythmic thump in the sand like a heartbeat. Gently tangible through the strange, tugging storm that wants to consume Winnie—and everything else—around the Big Lake.
“I’m… going now,” Winnie tells the melusine. She lifts her hands.No weapons, see?“I think that’s what you want me to do. Ithinkthat’s why you just helped me. And uh… well, if you can find any other helpers, that would be great. Because I’m not sure what’s happening at the shore, and I’m only one person against a really powerful Diana.”
The melusine coughs, a violent sound that draws up from its aquatic throat while its scales coruscate in a wave of colors. It lifts its arm; Winnie sees it’s holding her knife.
“For me?”
The melusine blinks. Its irises, Winnie notes, are glowing silvery gray like Jay’s.
“Okay. Thanks… I guess.” Winnie inches forward. Her exo-scales—modeled on this creature right here—look laughably clumsy next to the nightmare’s own scales.
Winnie grips the hilt. The melusine’s fingers briefly brush against hers.
And a ripple of strength courses through her. Up her arm, into her skull. It’s like coffee with a splash of starlight. Like kisses underneath a Lyrid sky.
Melusine scales provide all the euphoric feelings of melusine blood but with only limited active healing properties.That’s what the Compendium says, but now Winnie adds a note of her own:However, when the melusine chooses to share its healing powers, all it requires is a single touch to transfer the magic.
Winnie feels amazing.
Like,amazing.All the pain in her ankle is gone, as if there was never a Morse code machine pulsating through her blood vessels. The shredded skin on her face and neck stitches back together—she feels it happening, as if there are zippers on her flesh sliding shut. Within seconds, it’s as if Winnie never got hurt in the Saturday maze or by a sylphid at the falls. Like she was never in a Tuesday cell with too little food and even less sleep.
Yet unlike when she drank melusine blood, she feels no silly drunkenness. No giggly ecstasy. The touch of the melusine was healing, empowering, restoring—and nothing more.
“Thanks.” Winnie chokes out a laugh. A slightly deranged laugh as shefinishes accepting the knife. Steel glints in the green and orange light. Rain plops onto it and slides down.
The melusine doesn’t move, and as Winnie carefully backs away, it lets her. As does the dryad, so immobile now it looks more tree than nightmare. Only its branches move, clashing on the unnatural, Pure Heart wind. On that heartbeat rumbling into its roots.
Winnie turns. Winnie runs. And this time, when the melusine follows—and the dryad too—she lets them.
CHAPTER
46
In theory, Winnie knows what she will find at the Big Lake is notactuallygoing to be a single spirit eye opening while the wordsGone Fishinghover in mist nearby. But now that the thought is in Winnie’s head, it’s basically all she can imagine.
Pure Heart. Trust the Pure Heart.
I love you. I’m sorry.
What Winnie actually finds when she bursts through the tree line is the end of the world. Ms. Morgan wasn’t overblowing her panic; theIncantamentum Purum Correally is destroying everything. There’s a hurricane spinning over the Big Lake made of green clouds and lightning. The forest behind Winnie burns, flames spread by this wind—and not at all tamped down by the rain. And all along the shore, in droves beyond imagining, are nightmares.
There are Luminaries in there too, although they are vastly, pitifully outnumbered. Through her near-ruined glasses, Winnie spots familiar faces battling against more nightmares than she ever knew the forest could contain. It’s as if the Xeroxed Compendium at the bottom of her closet just started vomiting out every page.There’s Chad Wednesday against an arassas with a cat head and lizard body. There’s a hidebehind, long and thin and laughing as it attacks Isaac. There’s a hellion pack, a banshee, a kelpie.
And oh god—there’s Aunt Rachel against countless swarming manticore hatchlings.
