Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Winnie never joins the bacterial tag mass that thunders around the indoor track, but she still gets in plenty of movement for the next few hours. In fact, Rachel’s regimen for her hunters makes Jay’s tutoring sessions look like child’s play. Like an actual child playing.
Winnie punches bags, she grapples other Wednesdays, she jumps hurdles and climbs ropes, and she repeatedly wonders, Why did I want to do this? She goes for at least two hours until her new black leggings and tank top are soaked through with sweat, and until eventually, Rachel slows the whole show down with a hollered, “Forest loop!”
Winnie doesn’t know what that means, but she figures if she just follows everyone while they aim for the stairwell out of the Armory, she’ll get her answer soon enough. She slots onto the end, jogging at an easy pace. Rachel falls into step behind her. They are the caboose to a long train of hunters doing everything Rachel commands.
Soon Winnie is up the stairs, out of the estate, and stamping steadily over gravel garden paths. The final rays of sunset laser over the Wednesday rooftop. Night will fall soon, and with it the mist will rise.
Flowers in full bloom melt past Winnie. A Monet painting daubed with blues and greens and purples—and fractured by a bright orange construction crane as well as a smattering of half-assembled food booths, each one proclaiming a different sort of delicious cuisine for free tasting.
Winnie is still the caboose on the Wednesday train, and she’s okay with that. Her muscles are exhausted; her brain too; and not for the first time tonight, she dreams of her future dinner, which will probably be more PB the forest is just a forest, no nightmares to escape. No hunters on the prowl.
Hunters like Jay because today is Friday, and soon he will be out there in the trees, putting his life at risk to protect not only Hemlock Falls, but an entire world who has no idea he exists.
No . Winnie can’t think about this either. About Jay and how she almost lost him a week ago. Just focus on the ground. On your stride. Bilateral symmetry, bilateral symmetry.
Winnie doesn’t notice her feet slowing. Stopping. She’s just suddenly doubled over while the rest of the Wednesday hunters timpani-roll onward. Red stakes wink like wicked candles nearby, marking the edge of the sleeping spirit’s domain.
Rachel moves beside her, scooping a firm hand onto Winnie’s shoulder and hauling her upright. “Keep going,” she murmurs.
So Winnie keeps going. Although she doesn’t make it far before she says: “You should be dead.” She is panting. The words are strained.
“Yep,” is all Rachel replies. Then she thrusts a water bottle into Winnie’s grasp. She was clutching it in one hand while she jogged, and Winnie doesn’t miss that in Rachel’s other hand, she grips a small first aid kit—which she opens as soon as Winnie claims the bottle.
They are in the forest now. The nightmare forest, and although the last rays of pink try to knife their way in, here it is always shadow, always gray. Because this world belongs to the sleeping spirit. This world is infested with monsters.
Winnie sips from the bottle’s squeeze top. It makes her footsteps lose their steady rhythm, but the cold feels good sliding down her throat. So she sucks in more, more, until she has drained most of the bottle and the sweat across her skin turns icy.
Her pace is so disrupted now, it’s more walk than run. But since Rachel isn’t stopping, Winnie isn’t either. This is the way the mama bear goes, so the cub will follow.
“Eat this,” Rachel commands, and Winnie finds herself blinking down at a gel pouch that proclaims it is Hi EnerG! In an All-New Cherry Flavor! It looks about as appetizing as Chrysomya megacephala maggots on a dead body.
“You need the calories,” Rachel insists, and she rips off the top before Winnie can protest. The pouch presses against her lips and Rachel reclaims the water bottle. The gel turns out tasting as appetizing as the maggots probably would, but once Winnie gets it down, she does feel better.
The forest still looks like it wants to kill her, though.
Because it does.
“This… this shouldn’t be so hard,” Winnie pants out. “All the stuff in the forest—my trial, the Whisperer, the…” She can’t make herself say dead Dianas. “It bothered me at first, but I thought I’d moved on.” I thought I’d learned to eat the pizza.
Rachel snorts in a truly mama-bear fashion. “Yeah, that’s not how trauma works, kid. Which is why we do this run.” With no disruption to her stride, she straps the water bottle to a holster on her hip. Then the first aid kit too. “You’re not the only one with bad memories of the forest. But the only way we can exorcise our ghosts is if we keep on facing ’em. Until you go out on the hunt again, this will be your exorcism.”
“And if I can’t exorcise? If I can’t compartmentalize?”
“I never said compartmentalize.” Rachel’s arms settle into a steady, effortless swing. Like her hands are pendulums with no friction or gravity to act upon them. “That’s a good skill to have, sure, but only while you’re in the forest. Most of us—we can’t compartmentalize forever. All the ghosts have to go somewhere. And if you can’t find a way to exorcise them on your own, then we have trained professionals who can help you do so.”
Winnie, her own arms most definitely affected by friction and gravity, lets her brain gnaw at Rachel’s words. Nine nights ago, in the forest, Winnie decided the darkness that always drags at the light in Hemlock Falls must come from everyone eating their pizza, from everyone pretending pain, violence, and nightmares can never harm them. She decided, too, that Rachel must have a lockbox full of such ghosts.
And it’s true. Rachel is saying as much right now. But she’s also saying that she knows they’re in there—and that she knows when to ask for help setting them free.
Winnie side-eyes her aunt. In this dim light, Rachel might as well be a younger version of Mom. And Mom, Winnie knows, has plenty of ghosts too. Except she never asks for help; she never even acknowledges their existence.
“You should be dead,” Winnie repeats to Rachel.
And her aunt nods. “Many times over.” A pause. A glance ahead to ensure they’re still alone. Then, in a voice that is simultaneously harder and softer—like she’s really straining to be gentle here, but the Lead Hunter part of her demands aggression: “Who else knows about Jay?”
“Just me and you.” Pant, pant. “And Mario Monday.”
“Mario knows?” A thoughtful frown folds Rachel’s eyebrows. It’s a look Winnie’s mom makes with great regularity, particularly when watching reruns of Murder She Wrote . A look that says: Well, that’s a twist I didn’t see coming. “That explains why he was so ready to sign off on my Proof of Kill last week. I thought it was just because I was in the hospital and he didn’t want to wear me out.”
Winnie snorts. “Knowing Mario, that’s probably what he wanted everyone else to think too.”
“Have you talked to him about this?”
Winnie shakes her head. “Every time I try to find him, he’s either out of his office with Science Fair stuff or Councilor Monday is right there.”
Rachel winces at that because Theresa, as the councilor for the Mondays, is definitely not someone Winnie—or Rachel or Jay—wants noticing them.
“And what about…” Winnie hesitates. Wipes sticky hair off her sweating brow. “What about the Tuesdays?”
“Yeah.” This is all Rachel says at first, and it could mean a million different things, ranging from Yeah, they have come to talk to me to Yeah, I’m wondering why they haven’t shown up yet to Yeah, they are indeed a clan in the Luminaries, Winnie.
But then she finally elaborates: “Yeah, they talked to me, but it was weird.”
“How so?”
“It was, ah, spare, I guess. Jeremiah came to my hospital room, asked a handful of vague questions, and that was it. No one has followed up with me since.”
“Whoa.” That could not have been more opposite from Winnie’s experience four years ago, when she thought the interrogations would never end. Those ghosts still haunt her today; she knows she will never exorcise them.
“My thoughts exactly.” Rachel rubs her forehead with a sleeve. A lot less sweat drips off her than Winnie. “I don’t like it, Winnie. And I wish I hadn’t told Marcus that Dianas jumped me, because now he’s terrified to sleep.”
“Ah.” Winnie wants to feel bad about that. She and her younger cousin shared a brief moment after Rachel nearly died… But it was short-lived. Marcus is back to pure, unadulterated goblin these days. “Has he told anyone about the Dianas?”
“No. I asked him not to, so we could keep from frightening the city. And the kid has kept his word.”
“Well, maybe the Tuesdays are keeping it under wraps because of the Nightmare Masquerade? Like maybe, once the Masquerade passes, they’ll investigate more publicly?”
“Maybe. But there was an awful lot of uproar over that werewolf.”
Winnie almost trips at the word werewolf .
Rachel doesn’t notice. “We had forums, we had testing sites and daily broadcasts. But Dianas are so much worse than a daywalker. They’re why we have the siren downtown: to warn against our greatest enemy.” She glances at Winnie, as if expecting Winnie to contradict this somehow. As if Winnie might have some insight that says, Nah, Dianas aren’t so bad.
But Winnie’s got nothing. She has been taught the exact same history as Rachel: back in the earliest days of Hemlock Falls, when the spirit had only just been born in the US, the Dianas fought to gain a foothold in the forest. It was ugly; people died; and the siren downtown—built to warn of Diana attacks—howled almost weekly.
In the end, the Luminaries of Hemlock Falls were stronger than the Dianas. The witches went back into hiding around the globe. The old siren fell into stale disuse, and later, it was repurposed to warn of nightmares escaping the forest.
But just because the siren hasn’t howled doesn’t mean the Dianas are gone—as Rachel and Winnie know all too well.
The Dianas still want to wake up each of the world’s spirits.
They still want to overrun the world with nightmares and claim all the spirit magic for themselves.
So if Danger to Luminaries were plotted on a graph, with Nightmares on one side of the X axis and Dianas on the other, then all the data would definitely trend toward Dianas.
And this is why Jay doesn’t trust Erica.
“All right,” Rachel says with a heavy exhale. “I’m going to poke around a bit. Carefully, of course.”
“And me?” Winnie asks. “What should I do?”
“Same as you have been for the last eight days: avoid attention, stay out of trouble, and keep training. Be the model Luminary you’ve always wanted to be.”
Winnie has to fight to keep a grimace off her face. She’s pretty sure leaving secret messages with her ex–best friend who is a Diana does not qualify as staying out of trouble or being a model Luminary. Nor does dating a werewolf.
Ahead, footsteps rumble. Rachel’s lips pinch with part frustration, part disappointment. “We have to cut this short, Winnie. I see my hunters coming this way.”
“Right,” Winnie replies. She tries to swallow; her mouth tastes like cherry mixed with maggots.
“Don’t forget dawn training this week,” Rachel finishes. “And we’ll chat more soon. Hey, Tanaz! Look at you, leading the pack. Not bad. But let’s see if you can beat me.”