Page 119 of The Whispering Night
No, like flies on sticky paper.
Now that Winnie really squints, she can make out a faint mist curling and coiling around each nightmare.Vines,Winnie thinks.Like the ones that held Erica.And the nightmares are leaping right into that trap, getting glued into place one by one.
Well, no one ever said nightmares were smart.To judge a nightmare with human emotion,the Compendium states,or to anthropomorphize them in any way is to fundamentally misunderstand their inner motivations and decision-making. They do not operate according to Maslow’s pyramid of needs, but rather to an arrangement of needs that is entirely their own.
Winnie hastens forward. She at least knows there is a trap there, and that means she can avoid it. She cuts left, circling deeper into the trees, away from the lake. The wind and rain have all but stopped now.
And oh yes, now she feels her locket. It’s buzzing like a wasp inside a bottle, and it’sdefinitelygetting hot.
T minus seven minutes.
Nightmares continue to get snared by the fly trap. Tens of them pinioned between trees or under hedges or on top of branches. Each immobile while mist swerves around them. But actually, the farther Winnie treks, the more grateful she is that the nightmares are there. Because thanks to their arrangement, she can see exactly where the trap’s boundaries are—and avoid the boundaries in turn.
“I take it back,” she murmurs to the caught hidebehind as she shimmies around a red cedar. “You nightmares arereallystinking smart. Please forgive me and every other Luminary who ever thought otherwise.”
Winnie gets all the way to the overly cheerful stream that will lead down to the shore, its waters burbling a bit higher now thanks to the rain. The nightmares don’t cross, of course, but neither, Winnie notes, does the mist.
This is a crack in the witch’s trap.Thisis how Winnie is going to get close to the Crow.
She fights the urge to check the Timex as she stalks forward. She doesn’t need a second-by-second countdown anymore. The time is basically panic o’clock. The heat cast from her locket tells her that. As does the total stillness that has draped the forest. No rain, no wind, no movement or noise or distant chaos. Just…
Quiet.
It’s like the silencing spell the Crow cast in the maze. Everything has suddenly become muffled. Even her boots splashing in the stream stop creating enough sound.
Mist continues to writhe over the shore, holding nightmares in its clutches like an entomologist with new bugs. Winnie’s Compendium can’t stop cataloguing them.Basilisk, changeling larvae, urus, vampira, ghost-deer, velue, earth sylphid, manticore hatchling.She even thinks she sees the fiery wings of a phoenix.
Then suddenly, Winnie is back at the shore. At that half-moon stretch of beach where the safari went. Where Grayson’s funeral was and Jay was forced to hear congratulations and condolences at the same time.Youngest Lead Hunter! You must be so proud!
To think, that was the least of the problems rolling down the pipeline toward Jay.
The Big Lake is visible again—and there’s no winking eye. Nor any hurricane. Nor anywaves. The whole thing is placid as glass, except for a rhythmic ripple each time the ground quivers with the spirit’s geologic heartbeat.
Ba-doom.
Ripple.
Ba-doom.
The Crow stands at the water’s edge, her hands on her hips and her attention on the lake. She is dressed as she was in the maze with armor and mask—but she isn’t the only Diana now. Winnie hastily counts twelve other figures: four hounds, two more crows (although their masks have black beaks instead of gold), and then figures like she has never seen before.
Striges,she thinks, remembering back toUnderstanding Sources. These Dianas are ranked just below cornices and wear owl masks. Since spells are not created so much as interpreted from the forest’s own magic, these witches specialize in translating magic into spoken words.
Apres: These Dianas wear boar masks and are colloquially referred to as “sniffers.” They are tasked with finding new types of magic in the forest that owls can then translate into spells. Hierarchically, they are one level below striges.
Lynces: These Dianas wear lynx masks and frequently command hosts of hounds. Like a Diana version of a Tuesday scorpion, they are meant to guard witch society from Luminaries.
Well, so much for Winnie’s attempts to uncover all the Dianas in Hemlock Falls. She hasno ideawho any of these people are. They could be friends, they could be relatives, they could be strangers from a thousand miles away. She has no idea, and dressed as they all are in this nondescript armor, there’s nothing at all for Winnie to latch onto for recognition.
Other than the chattering stream and throbbing lake, the one lynx and four hounds are the only movement on the beach. Mist oozes from their left hands to serpentine into the trees. And now that Winnie squints, she can see second ropes of mist connect each witch with the rowan tree. Silva, Winnie recalls.A spell that can only be cast within the forest, relying on immediately absorbed spirit power.
If Winnie can stop those witches from drawing that power, then she can probably stop the fly-trap spell that’s imprisoning all the nightmares. Andthenshe could give all these Dianas something else to fixate on.
Winnie’s front teeth tap together silently as she tries to make the math of two knives against five targets work. Presumably the lynx is in charge, so maybe she can take them down first—
A splash shatters the stillness. Erica bursts from the water, towed onto the shore by mist vines. She gasps and chokes, as if she was just anchored underwater to the point of drowning. Her body reaches the shore. The vines tow her to the Crow’s feet, sand shoveling out from beneath her. A scar to mark the otherwise untouched beach.
“Let’s try this again,” Martedì declares, her voice unmodified by her mask. “Finish it, Erica. Finish what Jenna startednow,or join her at the bottom of the lake. We had an agreement, remember? And you should know by now that there is no escaping a Diana bargain.
