His pewter eyes thin at this declaration, but he doesn’t contradict her.
Notably, he doesn’t confirm her assessment either, and Winnie finds her ire rising. She used to know everything Jay was thinking. Now she can’t tell a thing. “I don’t need your help,” she repeats. “I can handle corpse duty on my own.”
“I know,” he says, and Winnie hates that he actually sounds like he does. “I was just trying to help, Win.” He turns to go. At the tree line, though, he pauses long enough to call back, “Happy birthday,” before the forest swallows him whole.
“See you at school!” Bretta shrieks into the pines, but no answer returns.
She deflates; Winnie’s front teeth start clicking. She’s glad Jay is gone and annoyed he remembered her birthday. Most of all, though, she’s annoyed that in the five seconds he was here, he managed to poke a hole in her vampira theory. He said he had followed tracks to the body, but vampira don’t leave tracks. Their stilt-like legs end in needle-sharp points that barely graze the ground.
She scans the forest floor, eyes squinting behind her glasses. What did Jay see that she missed? Did a sylphid do this? Or maybe a kelpie? She supposes she could chase after him and ask. She supposes she should chase after him and ask. After all, it would be the responsible thing to do as corpse-duty leader—and what a future hunter would do too.
But she isn’t going to. Not in a million years.
“He never notices me,” Bretta says mournfully. Then almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Or anyone else, really.”
“Huh?” Winnie shoves her glasses up her nose and blinks at the other girl.
“Jay Friday,” Bretta explains. “Me and Emma might as well be invisible whenever he’s around. He’s, like, so in his own head.” The way she says this makes it sound like an appealing trait. “We go to every one of his shows at Joe Squared, you know, but he always leaves right after performing.”
Winnie doesn’t know. She avoids the local coffee shop like a nightmare avoids running water. She has heard that Jay’s band plays there on Saturday nights, though. And she has noticed that half of Hemlock Falls seems to be in love with him.
It makes no sense, really, since Jay seems to have absolutely no interest in—or even awareness of—anyone in town.
Then again, maybe that’s part of the appeal.
Against her better judgment, Winnie takes pity on Bretta. “He doesn’t perform for attention, so I’m not surprised he leaves after the show. If you want to talk to him, try going to Gunther’s after school.”
“The non gas station? Outside Hemlock Falls?”
Winnie nods. “He’s there pretty much every day working on his motorcycle.” Or his aunt’s motorcycle, but Winnie doesn’t see the point in specifying.
Bretta’s eyes widen, her dimples crease inward, and Winnie can practically see her connecting thoughts one by one. Gunther’s gas station leads to motorcycle leads to Jay leads to time with Jay leads to getting noticed …
She claps her bloodied cornflower hands. “Oh, thank you, Winnie! I … we will definitely do that today. But how do you know so much about him? Are you two friends or something?”
“No.” Winnie tugs off her gloves. They thwack! like gunshots across the forest. “Jay is not my friend.”
CHAPTER
4
He used to be, though.
That’s why Winnie knows about him. That’s why Winnie hates him. Because the truth about Jay Friday is that he and Winnie used to be friends, along with Erica Thursday. 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.
Jay was a year older when they all met, but their respective parents (or in Jay’s case, his aunt) were all buddies, so a carpool had been born. Every afternoon, they had ridden together to the sprawling Sunday estate, where all the Luminary classrooms and training halls are housed. After enough time spent debating Pokémon, then debating nightmares, and finally debating which professors were the scariest, they forged a bond that they truly believed could never be broken.
But that’s the thing about the forest: it can break just about anything.
And it did. When Winnie’s family became toxic because of her dad, Jay and Erica ditched her like everyone else in Hemlock Falls. Hard. Jay fell in with a bad crowd; Erica fell in with the most popular.
Just like that, the inseparable trio, triad, triangle was split in two: A right angle on one side, still welcome in the world of the Luminaries. A lost hypotenuse on the other, cast adrift, floating and alone.
CHAPTER
5
As the eldest on corpse duty and the driver of the four-wheeler, Winnie delivers the bodies to the Monday estate after everyone else has gone home to prep for school. There’s a trail through the forest that will spit her out onto the Monday lands. It’s covered in tire tracks from the Tuesday clan the day before. Winnie always tries to drive in their grooves when she sees them. As if by following what they do, she’ll be like them.
Everyone loves the Tuesdays.
This part of corpse duty—the drive to deliver bodies—is Winnie’s favorite part of the day: the time when she’s all alone and can sketch out new nightmares in her mind.
Today, they retrieved an intact earth sylphid. Winnie has never seen one before; she hadn’t realized quite how … human they are. Like miniature people with bark for skin and stone for teeth and horns. She’ll need to redraw it in her Compendium. She can already see how she’ll do it too, small hatch marks for the texture on their faces, a thicker pen to capture the full blackness of their eyes.
The other two nightmare bodies they retrieved are manticore hatchlings, which look like dog-sized scorpions. Winnie picks them up basically every other week, and they’re easy to draw. All carapace and legs. Simple, clean lines.
Maybe it’s because Winnie’s attention is so focused inward, her gaze so locked on Tuesday tire marks, or maybe it’s simply because the forest has a plan, but when Winnie reaches a familiar hill with a familiar red stake in the ground, she notices something out of place beyond.
Two feet.
Or rather, what’s left of two feet. These are bloodied, pale, and missing toes.
She hits the brakes. The four-wheeler stops, mud splattering over the red stake that marks the farthest spot that nightmares might appear. Each night, when the mist rises, the nightmares form. Most stay within the heart of the forest, near the sleeping spirit, but some try to walk outside. Some leave in search of humans for their nightly meal.
Which is why the Tuesdays have sensors to detect when a nightmare crosses into the wider world. In theory. But clearly a nightmare crossed the boundary and left feet here—which Winnie definitely needs to tell someone about. She also needs to get those feet.
She hops off the four-wheeler and grabs an old grocery bag from under the seat. It presumably held someone’s snacks, but for months now it has served as nothing more than a crinkly annoyance she’s been too lazy to remove. Now it will serve as a crude body bag. Or … foot bag.