Chapter 47
CHAPTER 47
JOHN
T here are echoes of my sister everywhere.
Wraiths are supposed to be made by acute events. Ones where the pain is so substantial, it’s potent enough for the shadows to lick them up, drink the pain until it fills them with life.
But as I wind down the trail on the back end of the cliffside and toward the beaches, I hear Wendy everywhere.
It’s as if she created wraiths wherever she went.
I had no idea my sister hurt so badly. To that extent.
Then again, the onions didn’t seem to work on her, so maybe it’s just that the shadows are more sensitive to my sister than they are to others.
When I reach the beach, I’ve no idea where to start, so I walk down by where the tide is coming in, the onyx sand glittering softly in the moonlight. It reminds me of glass, the way it glistens. Like it would cut my feet were I barefoot.
I’ve made it halfway down the southernmost beach when I hear voices.
One belongs to Wendy and makes my heart skip in my chest. It’s foolishness, but for a moment, I let myself believe it’s her. That she’s back.
I approach carefully. After all, the other voice is Captain Astor’s.
“You haven’t slept with him, have you?” says the captain.
Something clanks against the ground. “Must you always be this crass?” Wendy asks.
“I’m afraid I must, given your love life—or lack thereof, as the case may be—is all I have to keep me entertained during my solitary confinement.”
As I peek in, I hardly see anything. The moonlight skates across the cave floor, revealing the familiar shape of Wendy, hugging her knees to her chest as she so often does. On the cave floor across from her is a massive shadow in the shape of a male. The captain.
He doesn’t move, other than to speak, which strikes me as odd.
Peter said the captain stole Wendy from the island, but they’re sitting together, conversing, the captain hurling insults at my sister. Asking questions.
“Tell me—what about the winged boy revolts you so much?” he asks.
“It’s not for lack of desire, I assure you,” Wendy responds, sounding, for once, smug.
Heat stains the back of my neck. This conversation feels private, but as it’s with the captain, it’s not as if I can afford not to eavesdrop.
Wendy begins explaining why she and Peter haven’t yet slept together. Why she’s waiting until they marry. Again, the brother in me wants nothing more than to flee the scene, but knowing now what I discovered on the cliffside, what the Sister whispered to Tink… I need to know what really happened between Wendy and the captain. Why he waited to take her until after this conversation.
But then Wendy’s story takes a turn. She tells of a scheme our mother conceived. A plan for blackmailing a nobleman into marrying my sister.
My heart stops in my chest. Fills with cement. No. No, no, no, no, no. My mind races ahead of Wendy’s words, toward the only natural conclusion of this story. It pairs up with my memories outside of the smoking parlor that night, multiplying the memory as I realize it hadn’t been a one-time occurrence.
The words deaden the beating piece of muscle in my chest. There’s anger there, ready to brew, but simmering underneath the surface, not yet boiling.
It can’t yet, though I want nothing more than to feel outraged for my sister.
It’s your responsibility to protect her, son.
Wendy, your sister, she needs protecting.
My parents’ words ring in my ears. Flashes of memories, fragments of them, plague my mind, now warped by the truth.
I want to believe it was just my mother, only she who knew. That my father knew nothing of it, but then I remember my father’s billiard games. How he took me to the parlor across the manor. The less nice one. And always during Wendy’s meetings with the suitors.
How he’d play with me until my mother came to signal to him at the door.
She always looked so hopeful, that beautiful smile strewn across her face.
They knew.
No, they didn’t simply know. They planned. Plotted. Schemed. Blackmailed.
All in the name of saving my sister.
Instead, they’d thrown her to the monsters early.
The truth paints itself in sticky, tar-like streaks over the memories of those moments between my father and me. Those special activities that he told me were just for me. Just him and John time.
He was trying to keep me out of the way. Ensuring I never discovered what was happening to my sister on the other side of the manor.
My entire world shifts with one story. One memory. The words of one wraith to another.
My father, my idol, torn down.
And then the captain speaks. “You shouldn’t have told me that.”
Wendy’s confused. Hurt. But then the captain explains. “I mean you shouldn’t have told me that. Not if you ever wanted me to feel a twinge of guilt about spilling your sorry parents’ blood.”
And for a moment, the flicker of time, the ticking of the second hand on a pocket watch, I agree. I’m back in the ballroom, corpses of guests strewn about me, and there are blades to my parents’ throats.
But it’s not their own hands holding them.
It’s mine.
Anger sluices over me as I’m the one who cuts into their flesh, spills their blood. I’m the one standing over them as their bodies crumple.
My father reaches for me, hand over his throat as he tries to hold the blood in. I don’t reach for him back, though even now, I want to. Want nothing more than to erase the truth from my mind, place my father back up on his pedestal, forget what happened.
It’s as if I’m a navigator who’s just been told that North never existed.
I fragment. Every value I stand upon crumbles from underneath me.
“You have no right to be angry with them,” says a voice. I snap my head up, toward the wraith of the captain, still as death on the floor. “You knew. You overheard what happened that night, and you never told a soul. Think of all the times you could have saved your sister from her fate had you not been such a coward.”
No. It’s just a wraith. Not even the captain. But his words ring true, nevertheless.
“I should have killed you that night, too. Your sister would be better off. You tell yourself your mission is to protect her, but so did your father. You’re the same, just like you’ve always wanted. You thought you didn’t measure up to him, but you do. You allow harm to befall the ones you love. And then you retreat into books and tell yourself you’re doing it for their good. Finding a way to save them. But really, you’re just as much of a coward as your father. He trained you well. Better than you ever realized.”
I fumble for words, for a response. It’s irrational to argue with a wraith at all, but I can’t seem to find a valid counterargument.
“I’ll find her,” I say. “I’ll protect her from now on.”
The captain only laughs. “Protect her? How? You’re not capable. Not because you don’t have the knowledge, but because you don’t have the courage. How many times could you have saved her, but you didn’t? Do you even realize how many times she was assaulted in that parlor after you knew it was going on? How many encounters you could have prevented?”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t know it was happening routinely. I thought…I thought…”
Even though I can’t see the face of the captain’s wraith, the air tilts upward with his cruel smile. “I hope you rot like your father, John Darling. I hope you meet his same Fate.”
The sand is heavy underneath my feet, weighing me down as I trudge back toward the Den. Every step, it’s as if lead has filled my legs. It’s filling me up, almost to my lungs, ready to snatch the breath out of me, suture my airway so I can’t steal any more of it.
My mind is flitting about, landing every which way. The whimpering Wendy made that night I overheard her in the parlor. The constant backtrack to every memory of my father and me.
I’d spent years poring over books in the library, trying to save Wendy from the monster in the window.
When all along, the monsters were in the house.
And I was one of them. Complicit.
All at once, the grief I never let near me becomes too strong, washing over me in waves, drowning me. And I know I’m not strong enough to bear it. Too much of a coward.
But then the grief rinses away, leaving nothing but a plan in place.
One last thing I can do to protect my sister. To protect Michael.
Better off, is what I remind myself.
And I know what I have to do.
My sister is surrounded by monsters who claim to love her. The best I can do for her is rid her life of one of them.
I only wish I could speak with Tink one last time.
In the end, the best I can do is leave her a series of tiles in the cave where we used to meet. Then I head to the reaping tree.