Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
WENDY
I fiddle with the quaint metallic key, turning it over in my fingers. I unshackled myself as soon as the captain left the room, but now that I’m free to roam about, I don’t seem to know what to do with myself. After stretching my sore wrist out, I lift myself to my feet, wary of my balance. I’m somewhat lacking in the coordination department at the moment—a mixture of having been bedridden for days and the unpredictable sway of the sea below the ship.
There’s a nervous energy wound up in my chest, a constant ticking, except I’m unsure what the clock is counting down to. Whatever the captain needs me so desperately for, I suppose.
I should be doing something. Devising an escape. Finding a way back to my brothers. But I’m paralyzed by the daunting task of figuring out where to start. It would be foolish of me to think I’ll be getting off this ship a moment before Astor wills it. Even if I wander up to the deck, it’s not as if I can simply toss myself overboard and swim to shore. I could try to get my hands on more faerie dust and fly away, but I’m painfully aware of my limitations when it comes to my ability to control the quantity I consume.
Flying away won’t do me much good if I have no concept of where I am in space.
So I pace about the captain’s chambers, a poor attempt at tricking my body into thinking it’s at least doing something.
John is likely frantic right now. At least, in the way he gets frantic—a frenzied sort of focus, undeterred by his environment until the problem is solved. But I’m gone, and he won’t be getting me back anytime soon. I’ve gone and left him, just like our parents did. Left him to care for Michael on his own.
My chest throbs as I consider all the choices I could have made that would have prevented me from being separated from my brothers. I should have told Peter that I’d found Astor washed up on the shore. Should have trusted him with my secret. In the moment, I’d worried he would act impulsively and end Astor, carried away by a drive to keep the Lost Boys and me safe. As I’d hoped to discover the reason behind my parents’ deaths at Astor’s hand, I couldn’t afford that.
Maybe that’s why Peter left me. He’d come to the beach to save his Mate, but he’d found a version of me he didn’t know. I try to consider how I would have reacted if I’d discovered that Peter had been hiding another woman from me, going to meet her at night.
No. I shake my head like it will somehow clear the lies out of my mind. Peter doesn’t know I’d been hiding the captain from him. When he let Astor take me, it had nothing to do with my betrayal.
I twist the emerald ring around my finger. It’s even looser than it was the day Peter proposed, likely from how little I ate while the faerie dust was working its way out of my system, how much water I lost as I sweated it out. Still, I cling to it like the topmost rung of the ladder in my parents’ clock tower. The proof that Peter is real, not some conjured figment of my imagination. That my Mate’s love for me is real.
It’s just inaccessible at the moment. Locked underneath the calloused exterior the Sister crafted for him so that he can accomplish her will without too much resistance. You can’t love without pain. Not really.
That’s why he’d left me on the beach. Bargained me away. It had been both a logical and impulsive decision, a combination irresistible to Peter. He can’t feel the agony of wondering what the captain might be doing to me while he has me trapped away in the hull of his ship. He can’t feel my absence like a phantom limb, like I feel his.
And I feel his.
Now that I’m sober, it’s worse than before, clawing its way into my chest and plucking out my ribs one by one. I close my eyes and cling to the cool metal band on my finger.
Peter can’t feel pain, but he knew to protect the Lost Boys. Even without the pain to urge him on, he knew he needed to save them, protect them from the pirates. Which means he also knew he needed to protect me.
I spend the next hour obsessing over that last conversation between Peter and Astor, trying to extrapolate meaning from every insignificant detail. When Peter had struck his deal with Astor, what had he been careful to leave out? How exactly had he worded it?
What’s in it for me?
Six months with Wendy.
You’ll grow tired of her before then. Trust me, six is a mercy.
I search his words for clever games, clues left behind by a boy in love with adventure, but I’m either too weary or too dull to crack it.
But I know this much.
Peter is nothing if not calculating. And if he left me in Captain Astor’s clutches, he had a reason.
I just need to figure out what that reason is.
Warm salt air coats me like a blanket when I reach the deck. The wind is rambunctious tonight, tossing ocean spray my way. I wrap my shawl around my face to protect myself from a portion of the sting, but it feels nice to be outside of the wretched cabin. To breathe fresh air for the first time.
I’m not sure what I’m doing up here, just that I couldn’t stay in the captain’s cabin any longer and I didn’t know where else to go.
My head still hurts. I wonder if it’ll ever stop aching until I get a taste of faerie dust again. Mercifully, breathing in the ocean air helps some. Hearing the waves lap against the side of the ship—it’s grounding, strangely enough.
The captain must have told the crew not to bother me, because though a few of them look up from their duties as I cross the deck, no one approaches me or asks what business I have up here. I meander about for a while, trying to find a place I can curl up with my thoughts. I feel trapped, crowded on this vessel. Charlie’s been with me most of the past few days, and when she’s been gone, Astor has been there to pester me.
My soul craves a moment alone, so I search the deck until I find a pile of crates I can perch on near the edge of the ship and watch the moon’s rays dance across the waves, situating myself between the crates and the railing so no one can see me. I stare up at the sky and search until I find a pair of twin stars, offset by the night, watching over me. They wink, taunting me. Reminding me that I have no way of getting back to the man I love. No way of getting back to my brothers.
After a few moments, though, my aloneness feels less satisfying than I imagined it would. There’s an aching in my bones, a longing to be held by no one other than Peter. But Peter isn’t here.
Peter left me.
“What were you expecting?” asks a female voice. The unexpectedness of being snuck up on makes me jolt, but it’s the way the voice is so eerily familiar that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. “No one has ever wanted you.”
I glance around, hands fisted at my sides like that’s going to help anything, but I can’t see the origin of the voice in the dark.
“Oh sure, they wanted you for a while. For a moment. For a few stolen touches and a host of wicked things.” Someone steps out from behind the crates. A woman, my height, of slender build. I can’t make out anything else about her in the dark, but there’s something so familiar about her, her voice crawls up my arms like spiders. Like I should know that voice intimately, but don’t. “Maybe they wanted the excitement of something forbidden. Or maybe it was the thrill of touching a girl with a Mating Mark—how many of them will ever get that chance again? How many of them have already divulged every detail of what you let them do? Tell me, do you ever wonder how many of your suitors came to meet you just because they’d heard from a friend how easy you were? Have you ever wondered how many of them have sat around a table, drunkenly sharing their stories of conquering you? Just how far you let them go?”
My skin goes cold, clammy. The humid air turning to ice against my gooseflesh. “How do you know about that?” I ask. For a moment, I wonder if Astor told the entire crew about what happened in the parlor. If he took what I foolishly told him in confidence and laughed at me with his crew over drinks as soon as we arrived.
“It doesn’t take much to figure it out. It’s written all over your face. It’s in the way you tremble around anyone who intimidates you. It’s in the way you can’t seem to manage a clever response, how you freeze under the slightest commanding touch. Really, I can’t tell what makes you more dull-witted—that you never have anything clever to say or that you thought you of all people could keep Peter’s attention. You couldn’t even keep the attention of those dull human men for more than a night. None of them even came back for seconds. And yet, you thought Peter, a fae, a perfect specimen longed for by even the Fates, would not tire of you.”
“Peter’s my Mate,” I say, stepping backward until the base of my heel hits the crate behind me.
The woman laughs. I still can’t distinguish her facial features in the dark, not with the way she keeps to the shadows. “Of course he is. Why else did you think you managed to keep his attention as long as you did? Really, you should have known the second he looked twice at you that something supernatural was going on.”
Tears sting at my eyes, a burning swelling in my throat. I want to tell her she’s wrong, but all I hear are Peter’s words ringing in my ear.
You’ll grow tired of her before then. Trust me. Six is a mercy.
“Why can’t you see that no one wants you? Are you really just that dull, that you can’t piece the evidence together? Perhaps if you were half as intelligent as your brother, you might see it. John sees it. He’s seen it for a long time. He’s just too bound by his loyalty to tell you. But his life would have been better without you. Michael could have had his mother, if it weren’t for you. And now you’ve gone and traumatized him for good.”
I glance at the stars, but this only feeds the woman’s antagonism. “You keep looking toward the sky, but tell me, do you see anyone coming?”
My mouth works, but no sound comes out.
“What are you going to do?” the woman asks. “Just wait until the captain gets what he needs out of you? Wait around until time passes, and he’s forced to give you back to Peter? Do you think Peter will be glad to see you? It only took him a handful of months to lose interest. What do you think half a year will do? And Michael, he might have healed of what you did to him by then. Can you imagine how far it will set him back to see you again? It’s selfish, really, to try to go back to them. You’ve only ever made everyone’s lives worse by your presence. Well,” the woman laughs. “Except for those men in the parlor. You did them the favor of providing them a story. Why don’t you just do the people you love a favor and…” The woman gestures toward the railing.
I stand, hardly able to face her. I’m not sure I want to make out her face. Put skin and eyes and hair to the voice that makes me writhe inwardly. She should be hideous, a nightmare, but I have a feeling she is not, and that will only make things worse.
The boards of the deck are slick against my feet, damp from being so close to the railing, unprotected from the stray wave that makes its way over the edge. When I reach the railing, I have to support myself on it, my hands trembling as much as my legs.
Below, the dark waves almost look kind. Playful. Inviting.
They look as if they’d be warm.
I fidget my engagement ring around my finger and feel its cool kiss around my skin. It stings, but part of me clings to the feeling. A part of me died on this deck the moment we crossed the warping out of Neverland. It ripped me in half, being separated from Peter, though he felt none of it.
I’ve already died alone once.
“I could endure it, you know—the pain,” I whisper to the strange woman, now quiet behind me. “I could hurt forever if I thought I could keep John and Michael safe.”
“But you know better than that.” The woman almost sounds sad, the bitterness in her voice drained.
“I never wanted to, but I’ve only ever caused them trouble…” I say. “John—he would have gotten out of Neverland with Michael. He would have found a way, but he stayed for me. Because I wanted to stay.”
“And if you were gone?” asks the woman, her question as steering as the lower lights guiding a ship in the fog.
“If I were gone, John could take Michael and move on. They could live out their lives in our realm. Where they belong. John’s clever—he could make a life for himself and Michael. They could be safe. Happy.”
Below, the waves lap against the hull of the boat.
“You love them very much,” says the woman, as tears stream down my cheek. I watch them, like I’m going to be able to tell when they hit the water.
In the end, that pursuit is vain, too.
When I climb over the edge of the rail and jump, I can’t help but wish I had made my last climb just a little higher. That I could have had further to fall.