Page 117 of The Whispering Night
With Bretta and Fatima beside her.
Winnie wants to plow right to them, knives slashing through carapace and antennae. She even bursts out of the trees, ready to rampage over… until wind freight-trains into her, cackling like a combine harvester eating an eclipse. It hurls the full force of the acid rain onto Winnie’s face; her nose hairs singe on a stench like a chemistry lab that’s gone up in flames.
It is the Whisperer unleashed.
And it is Jay, still singing:I miss you more now. Now that it’s been so long.
T minus nineteen minutes.
Nearby, the melusine emerges from the trees. It stays tucked in the same shadows as Winnie—a shadow that stretches longer once the dryad joins them.
Which,wow,is weird enough to jolt Winnie fully back to the task at hand: to the Crow, to Erica, to Jay.The enemy of my enemy is my friend,she thinks as she searches foranysign of where Martedì might be.
Except… as soon as those words flicker across Winnie’s brain, they get punted back out again. Rejected like faulty code. Because there’s something that doesn’t feel quite right about them. Something she can’t pinpoint at thisexactmoment while the apocalypse rages before her… But something.
“Focus,” she hisses to herself. Hot rain sears her lips. “If you were a Diana casting a spell, where would you go?”
Okay, that answer is easy: She would go somewhere all these fighting nightmares and Luminaries couldn’t reach… But also somewhere near enough to the lake that the Pure Heart spell in Jenna’s source could finish casting. Because as the final lines of the spell read:
Dawn will rise, casting light
No more Lyrids falling bright
Where waters fed will wake the night
And mist inside the Pure Heart
Winnie wishes she had binoculars. She wishes she had harpy-sharp vision. She wishes her left lens wasn’t shattered and her right lens all crooked, turning this epic collapse into an epically collapsing kaleidoscope.
And shewishesthat she hadn’t seen two corners of her Wednesday square—and her aunt too—fighting only a tenth of a mile away. Near enough for her to help, near enough for her to save.
She searches for them once more… but rather than spot Wednesday forms fighting off hatchlings, she instead spots the sadhuzag bucking down the beach. Its seventy-four prongs stab anything in its path. Its razor hooves slice up shoreline.
Though not flesh eaters, they will kill any who enter their territory, including other nightmares. Addendum: Some evidence suggests the sadhuzag is drawn to residual magic, such as areas where Diana spells have been cast.
“Oh,” Winnie says on a sigh, watching as the stag-like beast thunders this way. When Jenna cast the first portion of theIncantamentumfour years ago, that residual magic attracted the sadhuzag to a bloodied pit in the forest.
Now the spell is finishing, so maybe the sadhuzag will be drawn to all that magic again.
“I have to follow the sadhuzag,” Winnie tells the melusine, who is five feet to her right and curled in on itself, as if it craves the end of this cataclysm and the return of a comforting night. “Will you come with me?”
Somehow, talking to the melusine is even weirder than simply standing with it. But the melusine does oblige—and the dryad too, lumbering onto the shore while sand digs beneath its root legs. Its branches corkscrew outward. Wood groans, loud enough to puncture the storm’s subatomic thunder.
Then branches stretch around Winnie, around the melusine.
And the sadhuzag scuds right past them, massive and majestic. It doesn’t see them. It just careers ahead, while the sand beneath its razor hooves gets punched up… then sucked into the vortex of the waking spirit.
“Follow it!”Winnie hollers, and the dryad’s limbs creak apart to let Winnie and the melusine hurry onto a path Winnie has taken before. On her third trial, she came this way, trying to cross the lake where water flowed shallowest toward the waterfall.Tryingto outrun the Whisperer as it chased her.
This time, she is the one doing the chasing.
The sadhuzag leaps into the lake, clattering onto the same submergedrock that Winnie used a month ago. Its hooves seethe up water, and Winnie is shocked to see sparks of green winking with each splash. It’s like the Wednesday fireworks exploding in every wave.Bioluminescence,she thinks.
She lurches into the water after the sadhuzag. Her feet also froth up microscopic lights. And oh goodness, how the scientist part of her wishes she could take a sample. Wishes she could stop and observe this never-before-seen galactic light forming in every splash her boots disturb.
The melusine does not run beside Winnie. It dives into darker, choppier depths and vanishes. The dryad, meanwhile, follows much more slowly. Its root legs can’t gain purchase on the slick, underwater rock. The winds want to tug its branches the wrong way.
So Winnie leaves it behind. The sadhuzag is already to the other shore, and if she loses sight of it, she’ll lose her only chance at finding the Crow and Erica.
