Chapter 61 #2
“That… That was inside of me? All this time?” asks my Sister, looking repulsed. “It always…” She stops herself and looks around to see if she can trust us. “I always imagined it to be so beautiful.”
The mortal man brings his foot down upon the creature. It squelches, blood seeping into the floor.
“Just in case you got any ideas,” he says to the Middle Sister.
She doesn’t answer. She just shakes her head slightly.
I’ve never seen my Middle Sister ashamed, but that is the only way I can describe how she looks now. I still cannot see her face. But I can tell from the movement of her shadows, slinking behind her, hiding in the dark corners of the room.
She glances around the room again and is met with silence.
I find myself aching for an apology, though not expecting one. What has happened today is more than I could have ever hoped for.
“Well. You know the way out,” my Middle Sister says. As she turns to leave through the door to her bedroom, she glances back at me once more. I think to call out to her, but then she shuts the door behind her.
Shame is a strange thing. Significantly more painful than what she was experiencing. It provides no thrill, like the curse did.
“She’ll need time,” says the mortal man, but there is no relief in his voice.
My instincts draw me toward the winged creature, who still holds the child in his arms. He glances down at the boy, then back up at me.
“Peter,” I say, “give the man his son.”
The shadows obscure both of us, and though I can see nothing of his face, I can sense in the way they swirl protectively around the boy that he has no intention of doing so.
“He could still be mine,” he says.
“Look at him again,” I say.
The winged creature glances down at the child again. And as if for the first time, he sees all the features that make him distinctly a Descendent.
“He is not yours,” I say.
He looks at me, but something shifts in his stance.
“Darling—” The mortal’s voice is a warning.
The winged man dissipates with the boy, then reappears next to the fireplace. In a moment, he’s holding the child over the flames.
The sweet mortal baby—my baby—begins to cry, and my shadowed heart lurches in my chest.
“What are you doing?” I ask, finding my pitch rising to panic. I reel it in, channeling my voice until it booms, echoes through the room. “Give the child back to his father. I will not ask again.”
“You can have him back,” says Peter. “I don’t want to hurt him. Wendy Darling, can’t you see that?”
“I am not Wendy Darling. The girl is dead.”
The winged man doesn’t appear to hear me. “I just want us to be a family. I just want to be home. I don’t care if he’s not mine. I just want you. I will love him like my own, and I will give you whatever life you want.”
“I want my child back,” I hiss.
“And you can have him,” says Peter, taking one hand from underneath my child, holding him even more precariously above the fire.
My baby begins to cry and wriggle, sweat forming on his forehead, glistening in his dark hair.
Peter extends his free hand, the one he is not using to secure my baby, toward me. “Wendy Darling, this is the last bargain I’ll ask of you. Just be mine. Be my wife. And I promise you, I will love your son as my own. I will protect him?—”
I don’t hear what else the winged man says. All I can hear is the way my child is hiccupping in panic at being overheated.
With a shriek, I unleash my shadows. The winged man startles and drops my child.
But I am there first. My shadows overtake the room, dousing every light in it, including the fire.
I snatch my boy from the fireplace before he can hit the cold, fireless floor of the hearth. Clutching him to my chest, feeling the soothing relief at how he wriggles against me, I back away from Peter, soothing my son.
There should be fear emanating from Peter. But it is only anger. Disappointment. Loss. And it is foolish of him, seeing that he no longer has a bargaining chip.
Peter glances at my child one more time. Then at me. He has seen what I can do and knows there is no defeating me.
“Very well,” he says. “Goodbye, Wendy Darling. I will not forget you.”
He turns to pace from the room, and I stare after him.
What wells up within me—it is not hot. It is cold. As cold as clasping the hand of a loved one hours after their death.
Peter grabs the latch on the door. He does not yet know that I have caused my shadows to enter the lock, willing them to harden within it, making it immovable.
When he turns around, he has the audacity to look hopeful.
I advance on him, then pin him to the wall by his throat with my hand. He flaps his wings at me, but it is no use. He might be a Shadow Keeper, but there is no more use in him fighting me than there ever had been in him fighting my Sister.
He must realize this, because he stills, and I get the sense that he’s breathing in this last moment of being close to me. Close to the dead mortal girl.
Disgust roils through me.
“So this is how it ends,” he says. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing so kind as that.”
“And this is the revenge, then?” he says. “At least I get to watch you enact it.”
“This is not revenge,” I say to Peter, though he cannot seem to comprehend any other explanation.
“Then why?” he says.
“Because I would have let you leave this room,” I say. “Even after all you did to that girl, to me, when I was her, after every time you touched me and I writhed on the inside, after the months you spent breaking me—I would have let you leave this room. Pursue a life of your own.
“But you cannot be trusted. How am I to know that you will not plot again and try to take my son from me? Use him as a bargaining chip? You will go back to your sad little realm, and you will connive, and you will scheme. And I will spend my entire life worrying over my son. Worrying what you might do to him with the hopes of getting back a girl who doesn’t exist.”
“I am defeated,” says Peter, trembling. “I will not try again.”
I laugh. “No, I don’t believe you will.”
When I dig the tendrils of my shadowed fingers into his chest, he screams. It is unlike me. Faintly, I am aware this is the cruelest thing I’ll ever do. But I cannot bring myself to regret it as I pry the shadows from his body.
Peter screams again, and then his fleshly body drops dead to the floor.
What comes out of him, what I draw with my tense fingers, is the shape of him. His shadowed form only, wings and all.
His shadow form stares at his hands, glances behind him at his wings in confusion.
“You thought this was a punishment,” he says, his voice a low and seductive thrum, “to kill the flesh and trap me in my shadow form alone. Except I do not feel the way Peter did before you killed him. You have made me whole.”
He drifts over to Nolan, encircling him. “You, one day, will die. But I will live eternal, and so will your wife. She will become lonely one of these days, whether it’s during your short life or afterward.”
Nolan doesn’t respond other than to stare at Peter’s body, slumped against the wall, lifeless. “How did we end up here, my friend?” he asks.
The shadow—Peter—glances at Nolan, clearly confused.
“He can’t see you,” I say. “Only the mortals who can see wraiths can see you. You are not Peter’s shadow self. You are less than a wraith. You are only shadows, no form to return to, except unlike a wraith, your soul is attached inside.”
Peter’s shadows whirl, darting directly toward my son. They pass right through him, and a moment later, he encircles me, coming to rest in front of me. He glances at his hands as he holds them out, looking back and forth between them. Again, he goes for my child, unable once again to grasp him.
“You have touched too much, too often, too carelessly,” I say. “But you will never touch anyone ever again.”
This time, when he reaches out, it’s for me.
“Goodbye, Peter,” I say, and with a flick of my hand, dismiss his shadows from the room.
He has no choice but to obey.