More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Corpse duty might be a job no one else likes—cleaning up the nightmare bodies left behind in the forest each morning, as well as any human bodies—but Winnie has always enjoyed it. Her brother calls her morbid; she calls him boring.
Death is a part of life in Hemlock Falls. It’s a part of life beside the forest. You lose your family, you lose your friends, you lose yourself. The sooner “the children” learn what the forest can do to them, the safer and happier they’ll be. Winnie learned that the hard way.
He draws up short at the sight of her. For once, he doesn’t look stoned so much as tired, like he was out all night with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. His broad shoulders hunch inside buffalo flannel, his hands are stuffed into faded jean pockets, and his black motorcycle boots are streaked with red soil. He is a burst of color in this forest made of gray, and Winnie suddenly wishes she still had on her leather jacket. Something about Jay requires armor.
They were an inseparable trio. A triad. A triangle. Anything with “tri” in it, they had declared themselves to be at some point or another over their seven years of friendship. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. A perfect arrangement of clans that made the initials WTF, which never failed to make them laugh.
But that’s the thing about the forest: it can break just about anything. And it did.
Winnie smiles, and Mom flushes all the way to the edge of her graying roots. Winnie hates how desperate it makes her look. Mom wants to believe Winnie, and Winnie wants Mom to believe too. Like, never in her life has she more fiercely wished she were good at this whole lying business.
Not that Mom is broken. Anything but. She is Winnie’s hero and always will be. But before Dad betrayed them, Mom never had any doubts. She was Lead Hunter for the Wednesday clan, and she lived by the Wednesday motto. She hammered loyalty into her kids; she hammered loyalty into Winnie. Then Mom caught Dad in the middle of a spying spell that would have fed Luminary secrets directly to the Dianas. She’d tried to turn him in. He’d knocked her out. And the rest is shitty history.
The smell of bergamot and lime drifts into Winnie’s nostrils. Then a familiar voice asks, “You okay?” Winnie pries her face off the metal and finds Jay beside her. He leans against the next locker, no books in hand or backpack in sight. There is, however, a crease on his forehead that suggests he might have just awoken from a nap. His gray eyes reach Winnie’s then quickly skate away.
He hasn’t lived at home in almost two years, but like everything he touches or has ever touched, the tiny room is a spreadsheet. Even the colors feel vaguely Excel—green and gray with black lines to separate it all.
The rule is that anyone in the Luminaries—except nons who join from outside—can try to become a hunter during the month of their sixteenth birthday. If they fail, though, that’s it. No do-overs. No mulligans. The stakes are too high to risk anyone in the forest who isn’t a peak performer.
Winnie is not a violent person, even by a long stretch, but she suddenly feels like punching something. It’s a delicious feeling. It makes her spine stretch long and her blood pump hot. She’s invincible. Dangerous, and she imagines this must be what it feels like to drink melusine blood. No wonder the rare substance is classified as addictive; she could get used to this feeling.
Mom has a long, jagged scar the entire length of her leg from that encounter, and Winnie always thought it was the coolest feature Francesca Wednesday bore. A stretch of puckered skin to wear proudly. But that’s because Winnie has never considered how much it might have hurt to receive. She has never considered that her mother almost died from it, and that she wouldn’t exist today if not for Aunt Rachel right there to help her. I shouldn’t be here.
Behind it, the forest seems to change. At first, Winnie thinks it just a trick of her eyes, the result of filthy glasses. But no, the longer she stares, the more the forest really does change. It warps and bends, it shivers and quakes. Trees undulate and shadows stretch long—all in time to that frozen whisper that seems to bleed out from every pore and surface in the forest.
It starts off seething and whispered, her grip white-knuckled on the steering wheel, but it has reached “inside voice” by the time they hit the main road. Then “outside voice” by the time they turn onto their street. And finally “concert shrieking voice” by the time they park on the curb in front of their house. The actual words circle around three main themes: How could you be so reckless? Followed by What if you had died? And lastly, Why didn’t you tell me? Once Mom reaches the end of those subjects, she loops back to the start.
He wipes his hands on a greasy towel as he strides toward her. People move out of his way, not because he tells them to or because they even seem to notice him, but because he just has that effect on people. An unconscious force field that pushes humans aside. Then he’s standing before Winnie, still wiping his hands, and he says, “You’re late.”
Winnie makes a mental note to actively steer Bretta and Emma away from him. They deserve better than a slacker/stoner/deadbeat, and they especially deserve better than a slacker/stoner/deadbeat who clearly has no interest in them or anyone else.
Somehow Jay looks as young as he did when he and Winnie used to be friends, the angles of his face eroded away. Gone is the sense that he is hunted; gone is the sense that he is hunting. He is just Jay Friday, tired and familiar.
He has one arm under her throat, the other around her wrist, and his right thigh is pressed up against her legs, trapping her in place. Vaguely, Winnie thinks this must be how insects feel when collectors pin them.
First is a white swan for the Sundays. Their motto is Patience inside. Calm under pressure. Next, a white scroll with a black ribbon for the Mondays. Intellect at the fore. Knowledge is the path. A red scorpion for the Tuesdays. Strength of body and heart. We hold the line. Then comes the Wednesday black bear. The cause above all else. Loyalty through and through. A silver bell for the Thursdays. Always prepared. Never without a plan. A gray sparrow for the Fridays. Integrity in all. Honesty to the end. And lastly, a golden key for the Saturdays. Leadership in deed and word. Persuasion is
...more
Mom always used to say it was like a Lego starter kit. When a new spirit is born, it comes with a standard set of monsters—vampira, hellions, harpies, melusine, and so on—but over the centuries, it starts to create its own. As its mind expands with age, its dreams in turn grow more vast.
Jay slides his hands into his pockets. The loose pants cling in places on his body that Winnie wishes she weren’t noticing. She doesn’t remember Jay having thigh muscles before.
For once, thinking of Dad doesn’t make Winnie’s blood boil. She’s too absorbed by the meaning of what he’d told her. By the living, breathing, very well-muscled proof before her. The other clans might have top-notch training gear, but everyone knows that it’s actually the Friday hunters who often turn out the best.
He hits her. She hits the ground. Then the steps of the dance renew. Every time, she lands on her back with Jay pinning her down, his gray eyes inescapable while the forest breathes around them. With each onslaught, though, Jay seems to change. The skin on his face gains color, looking less like paper stretched over bone. As if the gray of the forest is releasing him. As if the old Jay is seeping back into his veins with each new surge of endorphins. Or maybe it’s Winnie who’s changing, her muscles and brain finally adapting four years of practice to accommodate a partner, a target, a forest.
...more
She looks at him again. This is an expression she’s never seen before, his eyes laser-sharp. Intense, Winnie thinks. It’s the only word to describe him right now. Intense.
“We go on at nine, and I need to shower before then.” He unzips his hoodie, as if to demonstrate just how filthy he is … But Winnie only finds herself eying the way his T-shirt hangs on his frame. It is disconcerting that he can be so extremely well-proportioned while also being, ugh, Jay. Part of her genuinely misses the boy he used to be. Most of her, though, is just impressed by what he’s grown into. Hunter training clearly suits him. Not just physically either, but emotionally. In that clearing, on that tree trunk, he’d been more alert, more alive than she’d seen him in years. This is the
...more
No, the danger is him. Seeing the shape of him in black sportswear is a lot different than feeling that shape. Even when he’d been pressed atop her in the forest, Winnie had been too adrenaline-fueled and skull-knocked to really feel him. Now, there is no escaping it. He is as muscled as he looks, and Winnie is utterly freaked out by it. Thank god he zipped up his hoodie, and thank god it’s made of thick sweatshirt material, or else she’d be touching just his T-shirt with her fingers, and she isn’t sure she wants that. No, she definitely doesn’t want that. Jay Friday isn’t supposed to feel
...more
Jay, Winnie thinks, is definitely the boring one of the three. Even if she can’t see him, she can imagine him in his standard uniform, his skin like old fireplace ash. His music, however, is anything but boring. Every piece of the song seems to center around his bass line—around that thrum in your veins that only comes inside the forest. That is the very forest.
Winnie suddenly understands what the twins mean about him being in his own head. She also suddenly understands why it’s so appealing, and never has Winnie been more aware of how much Jay has changed in the last four years. The thirteen-year-old boy she used to love is well and truly gone. And the twelve-year-old girl that she used to be—the girl who had put whipped cream on his nose and spiders in his backpack—she’s gone too.
He glances back while he unlocks the door, a crooked twitch on his lips that almost seems to say, You adorable little human. Is that why you’re so mad?
If the Thursday estate is a modern-art museum, the Monday estate is a college campus, and the Friday estate is a haunted mansion, then the Wednesday estate is Pemberley from Pride and Prejudice.
“You’re good,” she tells his profile. “The band, I mean.” And you too. He flushes slightly. His gaze darts to hers. “What songs did you hear?” “Just the first two.” She can’t remember their names. But like the music Jenna used to make, she remembers the tunes. She remembers the way Jay’s fingers flew across the bass, reverberating inside her.
Winnie tears off her glasses, reaching for a sleeve to frantically clean them … only to then realize the scales on her armor aren’t any good for that. Jay realizes too, and in an easy shrug, he slips off his hoodie and offers it to her. She yanks it from him and starts scrubbing away.
He pulls the hoodie and the glasses from her grip. For some reason, his eyes no longer look gray. Instead, they are the color of the hemlock creaking behind him. Of the stream rollicking by. Of the falls’ roaring crash when they hit the hard earth below.
Jay sucks in a breath, his chest expanding beneath his white T-shirt, and vaguely Winnie realizes he must be freezing without his hoodie on. Then he rises to his feet like a knight who has just been anointed. The hoodie and her glasses dangle from his right hand. His left hand flexes and fists against his side.
She belongs in the forest. She belongs as a Luminary. She belongs as a hunter. And Jay was right: Winnie isn’t as bad as she thinks she is. Hell, she might even be good.
This is worse than having Mario laugh at her theories and call them inspired. This is worse than having the Luminary Council dismiss her like a child with an overactive imagination. Because unlike those times, there is really a nightmare out there that she saw with her own eyes and now absolutely no one will believe her.
“Wednesday Winona Wednesday,” Lizzy says. And Winnie inwardly cringes at the use of her full name. Her Mom’s idea of “loyalty” is truly cruel.
Suddenly, she is painfully aware that, yet again, she smells like old sweat while he smells of lime and bergamot and forest. He braces his chest against her back and loops his arm over her shoulders, adjusting her grip and her stance and the angle of her body toward the target. Subtle movements that Winnie is pretty sure she won’t be able to replicate without his help.
“You’re a natural, Win.” His voice tickles against her ear. “Just remember that: the hunt is in your blood. You belong out there and always have.” Winnie’s throat swells up at those words. It might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her. She twists her head to peer at him. His eyes are right there, the pupils reflecting her face back to her. “Thank you.”
He smiles. “Of course not. I rented it from Falls’ Finest.” He flicks a cuff link, which Winnie notices is shaped like the Luminary moon. “The shoes, though, are all mine.” No surprise, Winnie thinks, peeking down at the motorcycle boots tucked under fitted tux pants. On anyone else, this ensemble would look ridiculous. On Jay … Well, Winnie suspects his adoring fans will be very happy, and against her will, she finds herself yet again scrutinizing his thigh muscles.
The white of his button-up glows, leaching his skin of color. Before Winnie’s eyes, he becomes a ghost. A ghost with very nice shoulders. “Here.” He offers her the coat. “You’re freezing.” She doesn’t disagree, and she doesn’t argue. The captured heat from his body radiates off the coat, and in seconds, she is snuggled deep inside. It smells like him. Like bergamot and lime and a forest shrouded in spring.
That’s why we’re called the Luminaries, Winnie: we are lanterns the forest can never snuff out.
Last comes Jay, and it’s weird because Winnie saw him only an hour ago, yet for some reason, seeing him on the stage, serious and clearly uncomfortable with how very much people are screaming at him, he doesn’t look like the Jay she knows. Nor even like the Jay she used to know. He is lonely and lost, and Winnie hates that she knows the feeling.
She thinks, weirdly, he might approve of her current look. And she thinks, weirdly, that she’s pleased by it. Then he smiles, and she knows he likes what he sees. It’s a tiny smile that only lifts one corner of his lips, but sets all his admirers into shrieking raptures.
For the first time in four years, Winnie forces herself to look squarely in the face of a truth she has stoutly ignored, denied, buried away since Jay ditched her: once upon a time, she liked him. A lot. More than a friend, more than a best friend. Which was why his sudden departure from her life, his cold rejection of her, had been so, so hard to bear. He’d been her first crush. Her only crush and he hadn’t even wanted her as a friend anymore.
You either trust the forest or you don’t, Winnie. In that moment, right before her feet—one with a shoe, one without—hit the river, she decides she trusts it. Fully and completely.
It’s just a brief, crackling connection, his pupils so deep Winnie could fall into them, but in that moment, she glimpses the same hunger, the same aching need to be always among the trees. And just like that, she understands why Jay had transformed within the misty woods a week ago—and why she had transformed too. It’s not just culture that runs thicker than blood here. It’s the forest too.
