Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
While Winnie and Erica buy an entire wardrobe of clothes, actual progress regarding what happened at the breakfast or getting this spell off of Winnie’s words—that goes absolutely nowhere. Winnie tries writing words on paper, spelling them out in sign language with her limited knowledge of the ASL alphabet, and even singing them.
Nothing works. Nightmare Compendium factoids reign supreme.
At least, though, throughout each experiment, Winnie’s furious spite cranks back into place. Then cranks even higher because dammit, she will not let the Crow win. She will not be a weak target for the Crow to crap on. And it is that spite that delivers Winnie and Erica to the cabin after sunset.
Together. At the same time . No hiding. No sneaking. No secret spy messages to trade off.
And over the course of an hour, they form a plan. One that Winnie actually feels good about, because Erica is not only a Thursday, but also one of the smartest people Winnie knows. Plus, they now have the photos from Isaac’s phone—which is the first real clue they’ve acquired in over a week.
Mostly, Winnie feels good because this plan is a real middle finger aimed at that Diana. You want to threaten me in the maze my dad built? You want to keep me from talking about you and turn me into an audiobook narrator for the Nightmare Compendium? Well, then I’m going to find every Diana in this town and reveal them. Every single one.
“Okay,” Erica murmurs. “So it’s hard to see on my laptop screen, but…” They are in the dark with a sheet draped over their heads like they used to do as kids. If anyone walks in, hopefully they just assume Winnie and Erica are making out or something. Not studying images of witches.
The scent of cut grass is especially sharp thanks to a mowed lawn that afternoon. It feels like childhood. It feels like safety.
“Still, it’s better than the phone.” Winnie crooks her neck toward the screen. Her heart is lodged somewhere in her throat. Her glasses creep down her nose. For the last hour, she has mostly been able to talk unimpeded by the spell. No wasps in her ears. As long as they stick to Jenna or Dad topics, she is a fully functioning Winnie Winona Wednesday.
The first of Isaac’s photos loads. There are seven in total, and this one shows a blurred and blackened streak of earth. Probably an accident as he tried to surreptitiously get the phone high enough for a secret shot.
The next photo is a foot. The rubber on the shoe melted, and Winnie hears Erica swallow at the sight. She swallows too. Her throat hurts with her heart stuck there. Her stomach is wound up tight. Her teeth start clicking.
The third photo is the whole corpse, and Winnie can’t help but gasp. A wheezing sound because she killed this person, and it’s impossible to pretend otherwise when faced with the vivid, full-color evidence. When she left the burned scene, the mist had not yet risen—which meant the sun hadn’t either. There wasn’t much to see, and her body was pumped so full of adrenaline… Well, she hardly stuck around to explore the scene.
Only now is she realizing how much of a blessing that really was.
“It was self-defense,” Erica murmurs, her eyes fixing on Winnie for several seconds. Then she clicks her trackpad, and the next photo pops up.
It’s both bodies at once, charred and smoking. The masks that were once shaped like hounds are melted into near nothing. Only plastic ears remain on the left body, only part of a snout on the right.
“You did what you had to do.” Erica rests a hand on Winnie’s shoulder. Then a second hand on Winnie’s arm. It is meant to be comforting. Winnie wants to flinch it away.
She closes her eyes instead.
“Do you see anything recognizable?”
“No.” Erica withdraws. Her voice softens as she angles back to the screen. “But that’s not surprising. We’re taught to never give anything away. Our faces, our voices, and even our bodies—they’re all hidden or modulated. And like I told you, this was one of the only nights where I actually met anyone. Usually everything I learned came in messages from the…”
“The locket.” Winnie forces her eyes open. In all the chaos of the last twelve hours, she has forgotten until right now that she put a message inside her own.
Not that it did anything. When she quickly pops it open, the words Is anyone there? stare up at her. She snaps it shut again and returns her attention to the screen. The bodies look the same as they did before; they’re just bodies. Inanimate as the nightmares she collects on corpse duty. As the nons she has seen mutilated and ruined countless times.
Death is a part of life. Death is a part of life.
“Can you zoom in?”
“Yeah.” Erica clicks a few times and the details expand, expand. It’s not a high-quality photo—there wasn’t enough light—but at least zoomed in, it’s easier to emotionally detach. Winnie is a scientist seeking answers. She is a detective looking for clues.
For several minutes, Erica scrolls over the photo, moving side by side in organized rows. She begins at the melted shoes. Up, up they go. There is nothing specific. Nothing to stand out. So much is burned and shapeless. Whoever these Dianas were, they are nothing more than overcooked meat in this photograph.
Death is a part of life. Death is a part of life.
The air under the sheet feels heavy. The grass smell is sickening.
“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 tone of 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, determined not to 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, so sorry. Okay, yeah. Call me back. Oh, and this is Winnie.” She hangs up.
Then forces herself not to 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 Winnie never heard of before Jay’s description of it, and neither had Mario. Nightmare mutations are spread by bite; not because the forest simply decides one 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?”
“I want to kiss you.”
“Now?”
“No, in three years and sixty-seven days. Preferably in the afternoon, if you can make it work—ouch. Punching someone on the arm isn’t nice, Win.”
“If you qualify that as a punch, then you aren’t worthy of your Lead Hunter title.”
“I mean… I’m not worthy of it.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I’ll forgive you if we can go back to the subject of kissing. I do want to kiss you three years from now. But also right now too. Basically, I want to kiss you always. It’s like… it’s like homeostasis, and it’s just this constant, steady state inside my system. ‘Kiss Winnie,’ it says. ‘Kiss Winnie.’ Wait—why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because I’d like for you to say ‘homeostasis’ again, please.”
“Homeostasis.”
“Ah, Jay.”
“Wow, that’s so much nicer to hear than ‘Ugh, Jay.’ I guess this means I should talk nerdy to you more often. Homeostasis.”
“Ah, Jay. Do it again. Say something else.”
“No, no. This time you have to pay the toll—ouch! Okay, okay. You’ve really got to stop hitting me. You’re stronger than you look.”
“Or maybe you’re weaker, Jay Friday.”
“I am when you kiss me.”
“Like this?”
“Just like that. Can I have another?”
“No, now you have to pay the toll.”
“Wait, so you won’t pay it but I have to?”
“I paid, Jay! Here, I’ll kiss you again. And again. And here, on your neck. Your jaw. Your ear…”
“Ah, Winnie.”
“Now it’s your turn. I expect payment.”
“Homeostasis. Biome. Mitochondria. Uh… binary fission? Okay, if you keep doing that, Win, I’m not going to be able to think of any more science words.”
“Don’t worry. I have more than enough for the two of us.”
A black-and-white wolf lies upon the page. It is Jay in the forest ten nights ago, when Dianas and Luminaries hunted him. His eyes are closed; he is curled into himself and dying. Blood smears his fur.
Winnie abruptly shuts the sketchbook. She doesn’t want to relive that night. She doesn’t know why her teapot mind wanted to draw it. That is the night you became a murderer. That is the night you killed.
Winnie kicks away from her desk. Her swivel chair squeaks and spins as she shoots to her feet. As she drags her skeleton to bed and hides beneath her blanket. The sunflowers on it are so much brighter than any that will ever grow in Hemlock Falls.
The last thing Winnie does before she closes her eyes is check her locket. Still no message inside, so she rips out the paper she wrote on. She crumples it. Drops it to her floor. Then Winnie falls asleep—and far more easily than she expects to. Her mind drifts; her teapot is drained; and there is just enough space now for Jay’s song “Backlit” to creep in. To tickle at her amygdala like a prophecy.
With heat on your skin I spin until I can’t see us
I find no relief, inside I’m still a hopeless curse
I miss you more now
Now that it’s been so long