The Hunting Moon (The Luminaries, #2)

by Susan Dennard

“Oh shit,” he says, swooping up his beer and twisting off the cap. “What a thing to ask me, Winnie.” He gulps back a long swallow. When he finally lowers it, a smell of yeast and sugar drifts Winnie’s way. It’s a welcome reprieve from the weed. She wishes it were bergamot and lime. “Winnie,” he says, squaring his torso her way. “This is not one of my make-out spots.” “Ah, too bad.” She shrugs. Then realizes a heartbeat too late how her words must sound. Jay realizes too, and somehow his eyebrows rise even higher. “I mean,” Winnie quickly amends, “it’s too bad for the world. Not for me.” “Right.” “Right,” she insists.

“I’m sorry, Jay.” Winnie reaches out a hand, as if to take his. But then she stops halfway. Her fingers fall useless to the frozen roof. “Me too.” His gaze flicks to her hand. One heartbeat. Two. Wind whips against him, pulling up his hair. Until finally, he reaches out and takes her fingers in his own. Then he slowly levers himself back onto the shingles and stares up at the sky. His grip is cold and damp from the beer bottle. For some reason, it makes Winnie think of the forest when it rains.

Because if Dad was framed, then why did he run away? If he was innocent, then why did he leave behind a convoluted set of clues for his twelve-year-old daughter to follow? Who does that? What innocent man abandons his wife to pick up the broken pieces of his family and then makes his child solve the crime he was allegedly framed for?

Winnie’s stomach flips. “Oh god.” “Exactly.” Ms. Morgan’s lips press tight. “It sounds disgusting. And you know what else sounds disgusting? Corpse duty. My point is, Winnie, that I don’t think most people here are in denial. The forest is violent and awful—and so is the rest of the world beyond Hemlock Falls. People die, sometimes in horrific ways, and the only way to really deal with that is to switch off your empathy switch and eat a lot of pizza.”

Her chest hurts staring at him. It has been so many years since she drew Jay—and it was always such a challenge because he never stood still. He was a creature of movement, a wild animal who could never be caged. No matter how many times she tried to sketch him, she could never get the life force of him onto the paper. He always felt flat, two dimensional, absent. Right now, though, as she stares at the subtle shading she used for his gray, gray, forever gray eyes, she feels almost as if he is gazing right back. And she doesn’t like it. Real Jay would never hold her eyes for this long.

But then the tapping comes again, and Winnie realizes there is a vaguely human-shaped shadow outside her window where the roof is super slanted. She almost falls out of her desk chair and does fall onto her bed after reeling across the rug. She rips back the curtain and finds Jay’s ghostly face waiting on the other side of her window. He gives a weak wave, as if it’s perfectly normal for him to be there right now.

“Oh my god,” Winnie says once she has hefted the ancient glass high. Cold, wet air sweeps in, and droplets from the latest drizzle hit Winnie’s face. “What are you doing here?” “I need to talk to you.” “No, I mean, here. On my roof and at my window. We have a front door.” “Your mom’s light was off. I didn’t want to wake her.” What he doesn’t add but that Winnie intuitively understands is Or have her wonder why I’m here at this hour to talk to you.

“Mom isn’t actually here.” “Oh.” He flushes bright enough for her to spot in the weak yellow of her lamp. “Should I … go to the front door?” “Don’t be ridiculous.” Winnie grabs his white V-neck by the collar and hauls him forcefully into her room. Her bed bounces; the box springs groan; water drips off Jay onto her bedspread; and Winnie stoutly avoids considering the fact that she and Jay are on her bed together.

“Here,” Winnie says once she finds the first flannel he lent her two weeks ago, the navy tartan recently washed and smelling like dryer sheets. “Oh.” Jay takes it. “Thanks.” He drops it onto the bed, and before Winnie can process what is happening in front of her, much less intervene, he removes his wet T-shirt. “Oh my god.” She claps her hands over her glasses and frantically flings herself toward her bedroom door. But it’s too late. She has now seen exactly what she felt on the motorcycle ride with Jay two weeks ago, and there is no erasing it from her brain. It’s like staring into the sun: when you close your eyes, the memory of the light still sears. Replace “light” with “abs” and that is all Winnie can see right now as she digs her fingers under her lenses. The image of Jay is permanently imprinted, with his waist (lean), shoulders (sculpted), and abs that did not used to be there.

Winnie twirls around to face Jay, pointedly keeping her attention laser-locked on his face. His cheeks are flagged with red as he clears his throat, and Winnie tries not to notice how defined his Adam’s apple is. It is an absolutely irrelevant feature upon his body, and in combination with the small glimpse of skin where he did not fully button up his shirt, there is nothing at all visible upon his person that Winnie hasn’t seen before. Therefore, he is a boring sack of flesh and she can stop hyperventilating.

“I’m Professor Teddy Funday.” “Fun … day?” “Oh yes.” The woman laughs, a wee twitter of sound. “I belong to three different clans—can you believe it? But saying, ‘Oh, I’m Professor Teddy Sunday Monday Saturday,’ is just such a mouthful, don’t you think? I tried Sunmonsaturday too, as well as Satmonsunday, but it just didn’t have the right ring.”

Thanks, she wants to tell Jay, but just like at the library, the word never comes. She can’t seem to force it when there is still this big looming question mark stuck between them. Winnie might now be standing on the tectonic plate labeled Tonight in which he will help her, but it doesn’t negate the one labeled Four Years Ago in which he wouldn’t. The plates still crunch and grind and burn so hot they could melt her all over again.

But looking down at him, his hood fallen back and his cheeks flushed with exertion, a faint glow of sweat across his brow, Winnie finds that her brain has deposited itself somewhere outside of her body so her body is now acting without proper supervision. Which is perhaps why she lets him grab her waist and ease her gently down. Lets his hands linger on her hips as if he needs to steady her when they both know she is absolutely solid on this mostly flat ground.

Then he releases her as if whatever just happened between them was totally normal and probably never happened at all. Just like when they held hands on top of the old museum. Winnie swallows. Jay coughs, and they both stride for the puddle and take up sentry on either side. Winnie gazes toward the southern and eastern walls of granite, he to the north and the west. They each take a full circle before finding each other’s faces again.

Then she offers Jay her hand. He doesn’t need it. He takes it anyway. His fingers are freezing and slightly damp, and she has a weird urge to clutch his hands and rub them like Mom used to do for her when she was a little girl. Jay’s boots squelch and filthy water splatters onto Winnie’s legs. Then he is out and they release each other. Again.

“A risk for him?” Winnie repeats. “The guy that might be innocent but still ran off and abandoned his family? He was at risk?” “I’m not defending him, Winnie—” “You sure about that?” “—I just get why he might have done what he did to protect you.” Jay pins Winnie with an uncompromising stare. “I also think that understanding his headspace will make it easier to follow his clues. He’s trying to lead you to proof so you can actually catch the real Diana. That means something here is important. I just … have no idea what.” His shoulders shrug, hands still in his pockets.

Jay adjusts his grip against Winnie. His fingers dig into her side, and she is deeply vexed that in the back of her brain, a silly little part of her hopes he likes what he feels. “It was hard to miss—hey, hey, Winnie, are you okay?” He pauses his forward stride to peer into her face. But Winnie only wags her head. Of course she isn’t okay. It’s why they have to keep moving. It’s why they can’t just stand here as they do right now with Jay cupping her jaw and studying her while she clutches at his hoodie and strains to stay upright.

Winnie awakens in Jay’s bedroom. In Jay’s bed, to be precise. It smells strongly of bergamot and lime, which Winnie is beginning to suspect must be the scent of his shampoo. Or maybe it’s the scent of pheromones that ooze out of his pores and drive everyone in Hemlock Falls wild—or at least everyone under the age of eighteen.

“Boop—argh!” Jay catches her wrist before she can make contact. His eyes snap wide, the gray irises almost swallowed entirely by throbbing black pupils. “Did you not learn your lesson last time?” His voice is low as if to keep from waking his aunt down the hall. There is also a ragged quality to it, since he was asleep only moments ago. Or maybe … maybe it’s something else that makes it ragged. Something Winnie doesn’t recognize or want to examine too closely. At least not right now, when she feels so, so good. “Never startle a nightmare, Winnie.” “But you’re not a nightmare.” She grins at him. “And you’re high.” He releases her wrist to boop her on the nose. Then his lips twitch into an almost grin of his own.

Winnie takes them and lets him haul her up. “That doesn’t bother you? That people think I’m your girlfriend?” “No.” He pulls away and sidles to his nightstand, where he snags her glasses. The neoprene cord still dangles off them. “Why would it bother me?” “Well, it bothers me.” “Ah.” His grip tightens on the glasses. “Because dating me would be such a terrible thing?” “Yes. I mean, no.” Winnie’s forehead scrunches. Then she shakes her head and snatches the glasses from him. “I mean, yes. It would be.”

His nostrils flare. “And why is that?” “Because…” Now Winnie’s lips pucker to one side. Jay isn’t reacting like she thought he would, and for some reason, it appears she has hurt his feelings. “Well, because you don’t like me.” “Of course I like you, Winnie.” “Not like that.” Winnie yanks the neoprene cord off her glasses, then deposits the lenses onto her face. Jay’s face crystallizes before her, surprisingly refreshed given everything he had to do for her last night.

He also looks surprisingly serious, and Winnie has the sudden sense she has stepped into dangerous territory. Like a non meandering into the forest after dark. Her heart starts pounding. “You don’t like me like that, Jay, do you? Not like everyone thinks?” “Or maybe,” he counters, “it’s you who doesn’t like me like that, which is not like everyone thinks.” Winnie’s eyes thin behind her lenses. The effects of the melusine blood must be muddling her brain, because she can’t seem to parse what Jay just said. There were too many negatives that might have ultimately turned into a positive…? Maybe? And the longer she squints at Jay, the less she seems to see.

He, however, just continues staring back at Winnie, his gray eyes cool in the dim, curtained light. “Winnie.” She has to swallow before she can choke out, “Yes?” Her heart is really pounding now. “If I kissed you right now, you wouldn’t like that, right?” Her breath snags in her lungs. Her eyes bulge to bursting. And against her greatest wish, she summons a ready-made image of her and Jay kissing in the forest, kissing in the old museum stairwell, kissing on a cold rooftop … “No?” she blurts. Then louder, “No?” Except for some reason, both times she insists this, the words come out like questions. So she tries again: “No? No, I wouldn’t like it if you kissed me?” She’s only making it worse. In fact, if she didn’t know better, she would also think she’s trying to lie right now—which she isn’t. Because of course she doesn’t want to kiss Jay. At least, not right now. Not like this.

And god, how typically Jay to take the time to record a voicemail welcome message, but then to half-ass the execution. Yes, I will give you my phone number, but then I’ll write it so small you have to hurt your eyes to read it. Yes, I will play in a band and bare my soul through song, but the instant I’m onstage performing, I will shut down and stare at the floor. Yes, I will train with you in the forest and even joke with you like old times, but the instant you want answers about the past, I will retreat and reject you.

And Winnie feels that pain as if it were her own. The whole coffee shop does. He is the siren, and they are captured by his song. And Winnie now understands why Erica flashed that mischievous grin before she departed. She knew darn well that this song was about Winnie.

At some point, Winnie leaves Joe Squared. She isn’t upset, although she knows she has every right to be. Instead, she is determined. Everything has been stripped away—everything she thought she knew about her, about Jay, about what they shared four years ago. It’s a photograph that has hung crooked for too long, yet now has been arranged upright again.

The cold and shadows of downtown press against her. She doesn’t move, and neither does Jay. His gray eyes look ashen in the moonlight. “You wrote that song about me,” Winnie says by way of introduction. No small talk. Just rip off the Band-Aid. Jay nods. “Does that mean you used to like me? Four years ago?” Another nod. Then, to her surprise, he adds, “Yes.” It is an unequivocal response. A sharp line drawn in the sand, a smear of bright blood on pallid birch trees.

Winnie tugs off her glasses. She is near enough to Jay that he doesn’t haze away completely. He simply softens and smudges from a moon-sharp line drawing to an impressionist painting. It is easier to hold his gaze this way. “And do you like me now?” she asks. “Yes,” he repeats, although this time he doesn’t nod. There is only the word to hang in the air between them. Yes. It is too heavy to be carried away by the wind. Yes. It is too uncompromising, too one-dimensional, too simple to be misinterpreted. Yes, I used to like you. Yes, I like you now.

Winnie never wondered why Jay even knew about that island east of the lake. Not once did she question why a skilled hunter like Jay might need a safe haven surrounded by running water where nightmares do not tread … A trained Luminary has no need to hide, but a boy hoping to survive the night? I had my own stuff going on. Understatement of the century.

She blamed Jay for ditching her, she blamed Erica for abandoning her, but not once did Winnie turn around and flip that mirror onto herself. So stop being such a hypocrite, Lizzy said back in Jay’s bedroom, and try looking at your own choices for once. Winnie thinks of Jay’s drawer of contraband now crammed inside her backpack. She thinks of the photograph with Jenna completely in love. Two ex–best friends with their own stuff going on.

A rasping breath slides through the night. Gurgling and weak and coming from the ground nearby. Winnie lurches around the tree … and there he is. The wolf. The boy she has always loved. He is fully nightmare now, his enormous lupine body curled into a ball against the darkened tree. He glows like a full moon, the blood smears on his abdomen like clouds wisping by.

“What if,” Winnie tries in one last attempt to salvage this night of her relentless wrongs, “I can prove Jay didn’t hurt anyone? What if I can prove the Whisperer did it all?” “Winnie.” Rachel says this with an unexpected tenderness, and her face finally softens. As if she has heard this argument before. As if she knows it’s ultimately futile, and Winnie will only end this night in pain. As if she really, truly doesn’t want to hurt her only niece. And Winnie can’t help but wonder if maybe Mom made a similar plea four years ago. What if I can prove my husband wasn’t a Diana?

Jay draws up short at the sight of Winnie. His gray eyes flash with golden sunrise. The hospital doors hiss shut behind him. Then he stares at Winnie while Winnie stares at him. It is like their moment outside Joe Squared all over again, except the yes between them has multiplied from a single word of confirmation into four years’ worth of secrets. A thousand swamp fires. A thousand lies all set free into the spring morning.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jay responds like a nightmare within: “I was afraid I would hurt you.” Winnie almost laughs at that. No, she does laugh—a weird, shrill huff. “That’s impossible.” She shakes her head. “You have never hurt me, Jay Friday. At least not when you were a wolf.” She doesn’t add that he hurt her as a human, because he knows that. And of course, she knows he wasn’t entirely to blame.

“What do you remember?” she asks. Then she adds, “From last night,” because she’s almost certain he can’t remember his other nights in the forest—a fact Mario probably knows more about. “Not much,” Jay admits. “Just the … end. When the mist came. But I know you were there, Winnie. I know you came for me. And I…” He pauses. Swallows. “I know I wouldn’t be standing right now, if not for you.” That is all they need to say. The only yes that still needed to fall between them before they could move in synchrony again. Winnie moves to Jay, Jay moves to Winnie, and then they are squeezing each other so tightly that they briefly morph into one.

So Winnie nods at him. “I’ll find you later,” she murmurs, shifting her weight so she can follow Marcus as he shuffles like a revenant toward the hospital doors. But where she expects to see a matching nod from Jay, she instead finds he is staring at her. Just staring, still as the boy she sketched onto paper three nights ago. The winds change. From south to north, they shift. Or maybe it’s just that they intensify, like the forest is giving a final okay. A physical nudge at Jay’s back that says, I release you for the moment, human. Do not waste this time.

So Jay doesn’t. He closes the space between himself and Winnie, cups her face with gentle, callused hands, and kisses her. It’s just a kiss on her forehead. A brief pressure of his lips against her skin, but it’s more than enough. A gesture that is too heavy to be carried away by the wind. That is too uncompromising, too three-dimensional, too simple to be misinterpreted. Yes, I used to like you. Yes, I like you now. Then he withdraws, and Winnie lets him go. She already said she would find him later, and this moment between them—this kiss across shadows into a bright fever—was his answering promise that he would hold her to it.

It makes Winnie’s heart ache to think about him—about the fact that Jay cannot heal unless he has the mist because the boy she once loved is physically gone, his cells rebuilt into something that isn’t human when examined beneath a microscope. His sparrow-shaped heart is the same, though. His integrity and his reliability—those never went away.

It’s strange how such a seemingly small detail—the tidy placement of tools right where he wants each person to stand—can reveal so much about him. How good he is at what he does. How much he cares to do it well. And how, even if he never looks at the audience while he plays his guitar, he will always pour his nightmare soul into the music.

Jay hears Winnie at last, jerking around to face her, a compound bow gripped in one hand. It is his bow, she notices, that he lent her a few weeks ago when they first went into the forest to train together. The sun slides over him. No darkness, only light. And a muscle feathers in his jaw as she approaches. His eyes—those gray, gray eyes … They throb with something more than mere exhaustion. She can’t tell what. She used to know everything Jay was thinking; now she can’t tell a thing. She is hopeful, though, that in time she’ll learn the new tics and traits of him. He is so much more than just an illustration in her sketchbook, after all.

And then she shakes her head, because this isn’t at all what she came here to say. What she wants to say is a very simple phrase that she can easily diagram on the whiteboard. I (subject) like (predicate) you (direct object) too (adverb).

“I like you too,” she blurts. It comes out loud and harsh. Definitely not the suave presentation she practiced in front of her mirror. But it’s too late to stop now, so she just blunders on: “I also liked you four years ago, which was another reason it hurt so much when you ditched me. Because I liked you, Jay. I mean, I really liked you. And while yeah, I understand why you didn’t want to stay friends with me, I didn’t know that at the time, so—” Jay moves so fast, Winnie barely processes that he has lifted his bow and taken aim—much less that he has nocked an arrow and let loose.

Jay shoots two more arrows, one after the other with a speed that isn’t quite human. And Winnie suddenly understands in a fuzzy part of her brain why he stopped running in the Nightmare Masquerade 5K. Never startle a nightmare. A heartbeat later, Jay is tromping off toward the target as if he wants to murder the thing with his bare hands. “Are you … mad?” Winnie asks his retreating back. When Jay doesn’t answer, she chases after, hurrying over new grass and old mud. “Are you mad?” she repeats once they’re beside the target and Jay is very, very forcefully removing the first arrow from the dummy.

“Not at you,” he snaps. The arrow rips free. Shredded foam and vinyl fly into the breeze. Then Jay rounds toward Winnie, now clutching the arrow with the same bone-breaking ferocity he’d clutched the bow.

“I’m mad at me, Winnie. I’ve been mad at me for four fucking years because all I have wanted to do was tell you the truth about what happened. Instead I wrote stupid songs—” “I really liked your song.” “—and tried to pretend I didn’t know how much I was hurting you. I’m sorry, okay?” He doesn’t actually sound sorry as he says this. He instead sounds furious, and now there are spots of pink rising onto his cheeks.

His gray eyes shine pewter, and Winnie is pretty sure if he doesn’t release that arrow, it will break in half. So she reaches out and cups his fist. With both her hands, she closes her fingers around his. “Jay,” she says quietly. He doesn’t relax. “I’m not going to pretend I forgive you, but you’re not the only one to blame here.” He still doesn’t relax. If anything, a confused tension rises up his spine. His forehead pinches. “I should have noticed what was going on with you, but I didn’t. I didn’t notice it with Erica either. I should have looked at someone other than myself for once and realized maybe they had problems too. But I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize.” Jay wags his head. Some of his posture relaxes. “Please, Winnie. I don’t want you, of all people, to apologize to me. Not after … after everything.” He doesn’t specify what everything might be, but he doesn’t really have to. Plu...

So Winnie simply says, “How about neither of us apologize, then?” Jay’s muscles soften a little more. Enough so that she can gently pry the arrow from his grasp and drop it to the sunlit earth. And enough so that she spies her chance to crack a joke. Something the old Jay would have laughed at. Something to diffuse the final tension stretched between them. “So is this one of your make-out spots, Jay?” He stares at Winnie for several seconds, incomprehension dulling his eyes to brushed steel. Then he laughs—a sound that is brimming over with the boy Winnie once knew. “Oh shit, Winnie.” He shakes his head. “You’re really hung up on that, aren’t you?”

She blushes. “Well, is it?” “No.” He tips his head to one side, still grinning. “It could be, though.” “Ah,” she replies, and her heart punches into overdrive. “So … if I kissed you right now, you would like that?” Another laugh, and a nod. “Yes.” He bites his lip. “I think I would like that.” And just like that, Jay changes before Winnie’s eyes. He is no longer the hunted version of himself, as she has grown so used to. Nor is he the hunter, ready to let loose wherever the bow is aimed. It’s as if he has spent days, weeks, years running and now the game is up. It’s time to turn himself in and submit to the sweet relief of finally, finally letting go. Winnie knows the truth of him. He knows the truth of her.

Jay closes the space between them, but where she thinks Jay will lean in and kiss her—where she wants him to do that, because she’s afraid her heart might pummel out of her rib cage if she has to wait any longer—he instead reaches up and slides off her glasses. He’s careful not to snag them on her ears or in her hair. And he’s careful as he folds them into the pocket of his hoodie. While Winnie appreciates that he is being respectful and cautious and possibly even a little bit romantic, she is way too impatient to put up with this. Four years was more than enough t...