Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
WENDY
W hen I wake, it’s to a dreadful cocktail. A pounding headache, a clear memory, and a vibrant recollection of every horrible thing I said when the faerie dust was working its way out of my system.
Charlie perches on the stool beside the bed, chin tucked into her palms, elbows docked on crossed knees. Her braid swings behind her as she shakes her head to the tune she’s humming quietly under her breath. She looks as if she might perish from boredom.
My mind recounts every awful word I called her over the past few days, my stomach turning over at the obscenities.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, my throat dry. It still feels like sandpaper, and though the desire for faerie dust still haunts the back of my mind, it no longer feels like going without it is going to rip my skull in half from the inside out.
Charlie flinches, like the sound of my voice is the agreed-upon signal to fling her hands in front of her face to protect herself from an oncoming projectile.
“Oh,” she says, blinking a few times as she examines me. “You’re you.”
I nod, embarrassment wafting over me as I curl the blanket, damp from how I sweated through my clothes, around my reddening neck. “I called you some awful things.”
Charlie shrugs, her carefree demeanor returning. “The name-calling wasn’t all that bad. It was the spitting I could have done without.”
When my eyes go wide with mortification, Charlie hesitates for a moment, then, still balancing cross-legged on the stool, extends her hand. I take it hesitantly, and when she shakes it, it’s like a shark shaking a wet fish in its clamped jaw.
“You’re going to have to work on that handshake if you want to make it as a privateer,” she says, and I don’t miss how she rubs her palm on her pants like it’s a nervous tick. I’m not sure what’s more mortifying—that she’s wiping my sweat off her palm, or that she is kind enough to hide that she’s doing it.
“I don’t think offering me an apprenticeship is what the captain has in mind,” I say, propping myself up against the cedar headboard.
Charlie whistles. “The captain was right about you.”
I crane my brow in question.
She offers me a teasing smile. “He said you were lacking in the humor department.”
Pain trickles down my chest, and it must show on my face, because Charlie immediately retracts her words. “To be fair to you, though, the captain’s sense of humor is the acquired sort. Like drinking coffee black.”
I crinkle my nose. I’ve only had coffee once. The beans don’t grow anywhere close to Estelle, and though my family lived in a harbor city, the tariffs in the tropical countries were too high for the ships to bother venturing that far south very often. The only reason I’ve tried it at all is that my parents invited a potential suitor from the island of Kalawai to stay with us the summer after my sixteenth birthday. He’d smuggled his own stores of coffee into Estelle, insisting he couldn’t be expected to live without it for an entire month.
Charlie stretches her legs out on the stool. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”
I’m no longer sure if we’re talking about coffee or the captain’s sense of humor. “I really am sorry for the horrible things I said. And the scratching.”
Charlie bounces up from her stool, her long braid slapping at its wooden seat. “And the spitting?”
I cringe. “Especially the spitting.”
She places her hands on her hips, then grins. “Consider it in the past, then. Just—please don’t continue to bring it up. I know how aristocrats are about that sort of thing.”
“I’m so—” I blush, then swallow, chuckling nervously when she offers me an I-told-you-so sort of look.
“So…” Charlie says. “Cap says I’m supposed to orient you to the Iaso once you’ve, you know, recovered.”
“The Iaso ?” There’s something about the name that rings in my memory.
“Name of the ship. Well, and the captain’s wife, but I wouldn’t bring her up again if I were you. She’s dead. But I guess you already know that.”
I cock my brow. “How do you know I know that?”
Charlie bites her tongue and juts her jaw out to the side like she’s considering her words. “You might have mentioned it while you were in an…unfortunate mood.”
Oh. Right. My mouth goes dry as I remember my last words to the captain. I can’t decide if I’m more ashamed of being so hateful about the captain’s dead wife, or that I accused him of lusting after me.
“Yeah, if that were me, I’m not sure I’d be able to look the captain in the eyes again,” says Charlie with a commiserating grimace.
“Avoiding him is going to be a tad difficult,” I say, glancing over at the shackle on my wrist.
“Ah, that,” says Charlie, tapping her hands against her thighs. “Well, the problem with that is that the captain has the only key.”
I swallow. “I don’t suppose you could ask him for it, could you?”
Charlie just laughs. “I’ll have to tell Cap that you have a sense of humor, after all.”
The faerie dust might have left my system, but the memory of it remains. The ghost of its taste lingers at the back of my tongue, haunting in the way that though I can recall it, I can’t quite replicate it in my memory.
There’s nothing that I want more, and that’s what frightens me the most.
I berate myself with images of John discovering that I’m gone. The fear he must have experienced learning I’d been taken. I castigate myself with the guilt of leaving him to tend to Michael alone. The fact that my youngest brother won’t understand why I’m gone.
Part of me believes that if I remind myself what I’ve done to them, leaving them to fend for themselves in Neverland, I’ll crave reunion with them more than I’ll crave the taste of faerie dust on my tongue.
It doesn’t work.
There’s a hole in my chest that the dust lets me forget. A hole that should echo the emptiness of missing my brothers. Instead, my heart has been devoured by the agony of being rejected by my Mate. The scene replays in my mind, over and over, until I’ve memorized every rise and dip of Peter’s tone as he traded me away.
As he let the man who killed my parents borrow me for a while.
Because Peter is a boy who feels no pain, and I’m a toy that was prettier in the shadows of my dusty shelf.
The next time the door opens, I’m biting my lip, hoping it’s Charlie, back with the key.
It’s not.
Captain Astor strides in, dressed in black sailing clothes that are hemmed to accentuate his broad shoulders and chest. I’m unsure whether it’s his posture or the new attire that makes him appear more formidable than usual. Either way, I find myself shrinking from his presence, though I can’t tell if it’s from fear of his wrath or mortification at the rather crude comments I made when I was not myself.
I open my mouth to apologize, but Captain Astor holds up his palm. “I swear, Darling, if I catch you apologizing to your captor, I’m afraid you’ll tempt me to say something I’ll regret later.”
Affronted, I suddenly no longer feel quite as guilty. “Why do you assume I was going to apologize?” I say, pulling my blanket over my chest with one hand.
He gives me a casual smile that dimples at the edges and knocks the breath out of me. “Well, were you?”
I avert my gaze.
This time, he doesn’t sit on the edge of the bed with me. In fact, he grabs Charlie’s stool and sets it across the room before resting atop it. I can’t help but wonder who the distance is for.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, Darling,” he says, folding his hands between his sprawled knees as he twists a wedding band I’ve never seen around his finger. His crew must have held onto it while I had him trapped in a cave in Neverland. “It would be for the best if you answered honestly.”
The sheets bunch between the crevices between my fingers and palm as I grip them. “I’m not going to betray Peter, so don’t waste your breath.”
The captain sighs, his eyelids shifting downward ever so slightly, eyelashes serving as onyx window slats for his ivy green irises. “We’ll address that slight issue later. And you will tell me what I want to know, one way or another.” A shiver runs the course of my spine as I wonder how he intends to pry the information out of me. “But for now, I need to know how long you’ve been a slave to the faerie dust.”
I blink, taken aback. “I can’t see why you’d care.”
“I can’t see why you think I’d tell you.”
I sigh, leaning my head against the headboard and letting my elbow hang from the shackle. There’s not really any harm in telling him. Not when he already knows that my affinity for faerie dust has become…problematic.
“The first time was when I was almost attacked by a nightstalker. The shadows on the island were paralyzing me, so Peter gave me a small dose so they couldn’t get to me. I wasn’t as affected by it then. It wasn’t all that bad the second time either. I liked the way it made me feel, but Peter gave me just enough so that…” I trail off, realizing how ridiculous this sounds considering where I’ve ended up.
The captain taps his fingers together. “Just enough for what?”
“Just enough that I could dance with him in the sky.”
Astor’s eyes narrow to slits. “A justifiable reason to risk lifelong addiction.”
I shake my head. “He didn’t give me enough to get me addicted. He knew what he was doing.” I get lost in my head a little, remembering how it felt to dance in the swirl of color in the air, how it felt to fall, over and over. “It was the third time that did me in. I was having nightmares. After I killed the man who attacked Peter.”
“Ah, yes. The child murderer,” says the captain. “As evidenced by possessing a cheap bracelet.”
I nod, hesitantly, and it feels like the worst sin I’ve ever committed, but I can’t bear to tell him the truth about Thomas and Victor’s father. That I killed a man whose only crime was searching for his children. Not with the way the captain’s posture makes his rickety wooden stool look more like a judge’s bench.
“I was having nightmares. They were making it dangerous for me to be around my brothers at night.” Memories of choking Michael assault me, filling my stomach with nausea as the ship rocks. The chain holding me to the bed clatters. “So he gave me another dose. It was supposed to help. It did help,” I correct myself. “So he kept me on a low dose, just to keep me safe. To keep everyone around me safe.”
“I’m certain it was all with noble intent,” says Astor in a tone that would suggest otherwise.
I don’t fight him on it, not when I’m remembering the day I wandered off to the storehouse and ended up in the rafters. Nettle murdered Joel that night, and I’d unwittingly handed him the opportunity. The only reason Joel was outside the Den was because he was searching for me after I didn’t show up to help him with kitchen duty. I’m afraid if I respond to the captain, the truth will burst out of me, just like the night I told the captain about the men in the parlor.
“And the nightmares?” Astor asks. “What were those about?”
The question takes me off guard, like I was expecting the captain to dig up my worst secrets, not the content of nightmares I couldn’t help.
“Mostly just nightmares about the Lost Boys’ murders. My imagination running away with me,” I say, but then reconsider. “Rather, the shadows running away with my imagination, I suppose. That night, I saw visions of Thomas’s murder.” My heart stutters as I remember the scene the shadows played out for me—the silhouette of a man choking Thomas from behind.
I hadn’t realized until now how accurate that vision was. Had the shadows replayed for me the event exactly as it had happened, with Simon choking his friend on accident?
“Mmm,” says the captain.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Before I can press him, the captain shifts topics, which I’m secretly grateful for. “Tell me about Peter.”
My mouth goes dry, but I remind myself that I’m the one in control of the narrative here, not Astor. As much as he’d like to make me doubt Peter, as much power as he has over my whereabouts, he doesn’t get to dictate my thoughts, my feelings.
“There’s something you have to understand about Peter,” I say.
The captain flicks at a beetle that’s just landed on his knee. “I know Peter. Or have you forgotten that I knew him before you did? The boy who refuses to grow up. The boy who would rather fly than land.”
I shake my head, unable to hold back the gentle smile tugging at my lips. If it were up to me, my voice would remain cold, harsh. But it’s not up to me, not when I’m talking about Peter. “No, but that’s just it. Peter doesn’t just fly. He soars.”
Astor takes a golden coin out of his pocket and runs it sidelong up and down his knee. “And what about you, Darling? Do you soar?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Call you what?”
I grit my teeth. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much. Perhaps because Darling feels like it should belong to my parents. “You know what.”
“Darling?” Astor’s scrunching brow is all innocence. “That is still your name, isn’t it? Or did you end up wedding Peter after all and taking his? What is the winged boy’s surname, by the way?”
The question hangs in the air between us, a taunt I have no response to.
“I see,” the captain drawls, returning to playing with his coin, glistening in the lamplight. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to offend.”
When I don’t answer, he gestures for me to continue. “You were talking about Peter.”
“Life’s been difficult for him, you know.” A dampness settles over my heart when I consider the torment he must have endured at that wretched orphanage where he grew up.
The edges of the captain’s lips lift in a close-lipped smirk. “Has it?”
“If you’re going to laugh, I…” I hug the sheets to my chest, like I think they’ll keep me restrained, prevent me from telling the captain more than he deserves to know. Peter’s trauma is his own; it’s not my place to share. “You know what? Never mind.”
The captain shifts his stool, dragging it closer to the bed so that his knees graze the mattress, almost touching my thigh through the blanket. When I instinctively pull my knees to my chest, Astor looks me up and down, then props his chin in his hands expectantly. “Alright, alright. I’m finished laughing now. Promise.”
I level him a glare. “I thought you said you didn’t make promises.”
“That one was clearly sardonic. Still, you should explain why you believe life has been harder on Peter than the rest of us.”
I sigh, averting my eyes from the captain’s glinting eyes. If I look at him too long, my neck warms, and I don’t want him mistaking my reaction for anything other than loathing. “I don’t know. It’s just… That’s the thing about soaring. I’m sure it seems great for a while. But when you’re the only one who can fly, it’s got to get lonely up there in the stars.”
“Seems like a proper reason to come down.”
“No. That’s another thing you have to understand about Peter.” Even now, locked to the captain’s bed in the dim belly of this wretched ship, I can almost taste Peter’s exhilaration, his contagious craving for adventure, the kind that was palpable as he twirled me among the stars. “He can’t stay down for long. It’s not in his nature.”
“But you’re down.”
My breath catches. “Pardon?”
“You. Are. Down.”
And Peter doesn’t want to be where I am goes unsaid, but it’s written in the way the captain leans forward, placing his elbow on his knee to examine my reaction. It’s in the way he sweeps my lower lids with his gaze, searching for the tears that are clawing their way out.
Peter left me. Traded six months of my life away to the man who slaughtered my parents. He’d left me helpless on the ground as he soared away. As the tears grow too weighty for me to hold back, Astor’s eyes trace their path down my cheeks, but they snag on the faint golden speckles of my Mating Mark, then bounce to the emerald betrothal ring on my finger.
Captain Astor and I realize at the same moment that we’re both twirling our rings.
“I think I’m done with questions now,” I say, breathless.
The stool squeaks as the captain jolts to his feet, returning it to its place by the wall. “Perhaps next time you’ll have an answer for me,” he says.
“An answer for what?”
“For my question. Do you soar?”
Before he leaves, he tucks a metal key into my hand and closes my fingers around it.