Page 77 of The Whispering Night
What if I hadn’t followed the messages? What if I hadn’t asked Jay to meet me? What if I hadn’t lost him in the crowd? Would he still be here?
But denial is the coin that’s doing the scratching, so that still fills her skull too.Maybe he’s not gone. Maybe you didn’t feel the Whisperer consuming him. Maybe he’s just fine and on the run from the Tuesday scorpions.
Clearly Jeremiah knows that Jay is a werewolf. Presumably because someone at the old museum saw Jay change and told the Tuesdays.
Repeat track. Start the scene over again.
Winnie can’t hear anything in her cell. It’s so well insulated, she mightas well be at the earth’s core. Or in outer space. Or locked inside the Whisperer.
She stands. She paces. Three times, they bring her water and crackers. Once, she pees in the ridiculous toilet.
Repeat track. Start the scene over again.
After at least three hours—maybe a hundred—she forces her brain to stop. ToSTOP.Unfortunately, the shield she flings up is more like a ramp. It doesn’t block so much as deflect. Her thoughts leave the old museum, sure, but then they slide right over to her family.
Because what does it mean for Mom and Darian if Winnie is here inside a cell? If she’s accused of the witchcraft her dad was framed for four years ago? Obviously Mom’s chance at rejoining the hunt must now be burned to cinders. And Darian—he’ll have no shot of ever becoming a councilor if he is believed, yet again, to be related to a witch.
Winnie can still remember how it felt when she was released from the interrogation room four years ago. Mom was being drilled in a room nearby; twelve-year-old Winnie was totally,terrifyinglyalone while a scorpion in full armor marched her up, up into the dawn.
The dregs of night still clung to the sky, and it was always at those twilight moments when Winnie’s eyesight was—and still is—at its worst. When the cones and rods in her eyeballs play tug-of-war and neither side can seem to win. She had also been crying that night, which meant her skull hurt. Her tear ducts ached.
And then there was Darian before her. He’d just finished with his interrogation too, and now he stood in the gravel parking lot of the Tuesday estate, cast in matutine grayscale. He held the Volvo keys in one hand. An opened bottle of water in the other.
He looked more shocked and lost than Winnie felt, dressed in his flannel pajamas. His eyes were latched onto a space ten feet in front of him—but his actual focus was galaxies away. Until he looked up. Until he saw his sister, and he changed. The same folding-chair-of-a-skeleton pulled itself into shape before Winnie, joint by joint.
He opened his arms.
Winnie ran into them.
And that hug—that ferocious, almost brutal compression that his musclesbranded onto her bones… It wasthe thingWinnie needed in that moment. It wasthe reminderthat they were a family, that they were bears, and that whatever came next, they were doing it together.
“Mom can’t leave yet,” he told her, still hugging. The water bottle’s cheap plastic crackled against Winnie’s back. “So I’ll take us home.”
“How long will she be here?” Winnie asked.
“I don’t know.” Darian pulled away, and god, he looked so much like Dad. Especially when he forced a smile and asked, “Was it just me, or did Jeremiah’s breath smell like pickles?”
Winnie laughed. A broken, freeing sound. “It smelledsomuch like pickles!”
“Right? I mean, like, I enjoy a dill for snacking, but it’s the middle of the night, my dude. Brush your teeth!”
Winnie doesn’t mean to start crying here, four years later in this cell. But it’s the only logical conclusion. Scratch too long at the lottery strip, and eventually you’ll hit paper. Then flesh. Then blood vessels and muscle and bone.
She drops back onto the cot. Her head falls again between her knees.
People always act as if the stages of grief happen in clear, orderly steps. Like you really do just scratch off until you get to the next layer. But instead, it kind of happens all at once. A jumbled mass of feelings to get dumped on you. This one over here is shaped like denial. This one over here looks like rage. This one over here is bargaining and depression mashed into a single lottery ticket. And over here, we’re back to rage.
For ten hot, vicious seconds, Winnie lets her tears fall. Unfettered. She will cry—for herself, for her family, for Jay—and then she will pull it together, just like Darian did four years ago.
Darian, you should have seen Jeremiah’s mustache. He totally had creamer stuck on one side. I spent the whole interrogation wanting to wipe it off.
Winnie’s tears stop. She lifts her head. Her glasses are on the cot beside her, dropped there as soon as she came into the room. She grabs them now. The cinderblocks sharpen. Jenna’s song is elbowing back in, carrying the old museum and its ghosts along with it.I love you. I’m sorry.Except now, Winnie’s brain is snagging on one moment: when the Whisperer seemed to say,Pure Heart. There you are.
Her teeth start clicking a methodical beat. A replacement for the pacing to power up her brain.Pure Heart. There you are. She hadn’t really considered what those words might mean in each of her replays, but now she processes them like they’re holes on a punch card being fed into an old computer.
Who was the Whisperer referring to?Whowas the Pure Heart? There were only two people in that conservatory: her and Jay. And the Whisperer didn’t wake up until Jay arrived.
Winnie’s neurons start firing in all new directions now, a conspiracy wall forming inside her mind, complete with red circles and lines made of yarn.The night the Whisperer chased you off the waterfall, Jay was there too. And the night Grayson died because of the Whisperer, Jay was there.
