Page 34 of The Whispering Night
“Wait.” Winnie lays a hand on Erica’s, pausing Erica’s methodical side-to-side tracking. “Go back.”
Erica obeys, and the slight variation that had caught Winnie’s eyes reappears. “That.” She points at a line of silver. The first light of dawn glints on it, and there’s the unmistakable glare of glass.
It’s a pair of glasses, tucked into what was a pocket before most of the shirt burned.
“I… know those glasses,” Winnie says, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult to actually get those words out. And not because of the spell, but because of building nausea. Because of thickening horror. “I know who they belong to.”
Erica gapes at Winnie. In the blueish light off the screen, the russet toneof her irises is almost purple. “Well?Who is it?And how can you possibly recognize them?”
“Because I hated them and wished I could break those glasses every time I saw them.” Winnie leans forward to rest her head on her hands. Her eyes close again. “That bigger corpse right there is Professor Samuel from Luminary history. I killed Professor Samuel.”
Winnie doesn’t get home until midnight, and because she is the actual worst, she doesn’t even realize she has missed Jay’s regular Saturday-night show until she finds a note from Mom on the kitchen table.
Tried to stay up to see you, but guess Forgotten show running late. Love you, Winnebago!
Winnie immediately grabs the family phone. Jay doesn’t answer. She tries again three more times, determinednotto freak out. Because after all, his silence could mean all sorts of things that are not death-by-Crow or death-by-Tuesday or death-by-fellow-nightmare. Heck, maybe he’s simply mad at her. (Although admittedly, she hopes that’s not the case either.)
On the fourth try, she lets the phone click over to voicemail. Then she listens, teeth grinding, to Jay’s recorded voice: “Leave a message.”
“Hey, Jay, it’s me. Can you call me back, please? I’m so sorry I missed your show tonight. Like, I’m so,sosorry. Okay, yeah. Call me back. Oh, and this is Winnie.” She hangs up.
Then forces herselfnotto call a fifth time and instead carry herself upstairs. Once in her room, she sits at her desk, grabs paper and her favorite 0.5 pen, and with nothing but her lamp for illumination, she starts sketching. Not trilliums tonight; they will lead her nowhere.Tsk, tsk, we can’t help you.
No nightmare anatomy for the Compendium competition either. Instead, Winnie lets her right hand and the two hemispheres of her brain connect without any intermediary of consciousness. She lets the stress and intensity of all that happened today—the Midnight Crown, the Crow, the photographs of dead hounds, and the glasses tucked into a charred pocket…
It comes pouring down her arm, like she’s a little teapot shrieking to be tipped out.
Yet it’s not the images of her day that form on the page in sharp lines. It is Jay as a boy, all feet and gawky limbs draped across his living room couch after a night with just the two of them playing Mario Kart.
“Winnie?”he asked.
“Yes, Jay?”
“Do you think, when we’re grown up, we’ll still be friends? Me and you and E?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I dunno. Just seems to me lots of people don’t stay friends once they’re old.”
“My mom and Rachel are still best friends.”
“Yeah, but they’re related. They have to stay friends. But Aunt Lizzy and Erica’s mom—they used to be tight, remember? And now they don’t talk at all.”
“Right. I always forget about that. But… they’re not us, Jay. We won’t be like them.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Winnie stares at the boy before her. This was before he was summoned by the forest—by a wolf’s jawbone mysteriously tucked beneath his pillow. Which is a method of mutation Winnieneverheard of before Jay’s description of it, and neither had Mario. Nightmare mutations are spread by bite; not because the forest simplydecidesone day you’ll be a nightmare.
Except that’s exactly what seems to have happened to Jay.
Her right hand starts moving again. The pen scratches and scrapes across the paper.
“Winnie?”Jay asked her four days ago, as they sat together on his bed at the Friday estate.
“Yes, Jay?”
