The Whispering Night by Susan Dennard

Author:Susan Dennard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837840588
Publisher: Daphne Press
Published: 2024-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

30

When Winnie steps into the conservatory, she can’t see anything. Not because the room is too dark—if anything, it’s brighter here, with the moon to shine through a glass ceiling and reflect on white tiles. Rather, Winnie sees nothing because there is nothing to see.

There is nothing to hear, either. No blenders eating xylophones, no engines dropped down a mineshaft. It’s as if a winter coat has been draped across the conservatory, and it reminds Winnie of the muffling spell the Crow cast in the maze.

The Whisperer is here, though. The static of its magic scours like a backward comet against Winnie. Her teeth feel as if they’re detaching from her gums, and the urge to retreat fires through her muscles in short bursts of SOS and Get the hell out of here.

Winnie holds her ground, fingers tightening on the broken bottle.

She winds her arm back. Then flings. If the Whisperer really is here, it will shatter into a glass hurricane. Instead, the bottle whistles in a perfect arch like a rainbow after a storm. It clatters to the ground and slides over three tiles.

But that is when the sound finally does arrive: the whispering Winnie knows so well. That she thought for days was from a nightmare, before she finally figured out it was from a spell.

Famēs: These spells are self-feeding and sustain themselves in the forest.

The sound—so quiet next to the battles from the rest of the museum—rustles louder, and Winnie finds she’s squinting. Staring hard at where the Whisperer should be, but where empty air still remains.

The whisper boils louder until she can no longer hear the rest of the museum. A cheese grater starts flaying across her skin. Vertigo takes root inside her cranium. But she doesn’t run, and she doesn’t look away. Because why, why, why is the famēs so still—so concentrated in this place, like a flower folded inward?

Winnie can’t pinpoint when the singing begins. Only that somewhere, in all that radioactive chaos, a melody assembles. It’s like one of those psychedelic pictures that look totally meaningless until you stare at it long enough for a 3D shape to emerge.

What emerges here is Jenna’s song. Still wordless, still only melody, but it’s the song that Winnie hears when she dreams. That she still thinks saved her while she was beneath the waterfall’s waves. She once thought Jenna wrote songs that could break you—but that always put you back together again.

This one, though, isn’t going to fix Winnie. This one seeks only to destroy.

“Jenna?” The name drips off Winnie’s tongue, wholly silent because the Whisperer can’t help but consume it. “Jenna, is that you?”

A hand claps onto Winnie’s shoulder. She heard no footsteps, felt no shifting in the air to herald a person’s approach, but now there is a hand on her and it is gripping so hard she can do nothing but be towed away on a riptide of unseen muscles.

PURE HEART, the Whisperer says in a voice that is not a voice at all, but a melody shattered by space-time and regret.

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