Chapter 51
CHAPTER 51
WENDY
“ P eter,” Iaso gasps, her voice almost in a trance as she finally recognizes the boy from her childhood, now lost to the influence of the shadows. “What happened to you?”
He must sense her presence because his ears flick, but he doesn’t seem to be able to hear or see her any more than Astor does.
“How did you find us?” asks Astor.
“Your time is up,” says Peter. “Six months. This,” he says, pointing to the mark of their bargain, still silver against his shadowed skin, “led me right to you.”
I reel, confused. We still have twelve days. Twelve days…
Based on the Estellian calendar. But not on the moon cycle.
I check Astor’s reaction for any hint of whether he knew Peter had meant six months based on the moon cycle, but he doesn’t argue against Peter’s timing.
I realize then why Astor meandered a day. He couldn’t have killed me while still within the six-month time period. He must have known Peter would be coming after us.
“You didn’t return what’s mine to me,” says Peter.
“I never specified that I would,” says Astor.
“Well,” says Peter, his teeth pearly and baring. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
When he moves toward me, Astor backs up, spurring me toward the cave wall behind us. His grip on me is too gentle for someone who plotted to kill me. “I’ll give her back,” says Astor. “But only if that’s what she wants. And only if you shift out of that form.”
The laugh that echoes through the cave sends chills through my bones. “Are you implying that I might hurt her?” asks Peter. “That I might lay a hand on her? Or is shedding her blood permissible so long as her maidenhood remains intact?”
For the first time, I witness a flush climb the captain’s neck, and the way he hesitates to answer tells me it’s not from anger. He cranes his head softly toward me, behind him. “Do you want to go with him? Do you feel safe with him?”
In answer, I untangle myself from Astor’s protective grip. His hand lingers on my shoulder, his thumb grazing my neck, for just a moment too long, so I shrug him off. As his Mark leaves my flesh, it’s as though I’ve been seared in the gut. “I don’t feel safe with anyone,” is all I say.
Peter’s smile is feral, hungry, as he takes me in. As I cross the cave room to him, Iaso glides in front of me. “Something’s wrong,” she says.
It’s cruel, but I laugh at her. Hurt flashes across her face, but she gets out of my way.
When I reach Peter, he doesn’t touch me. Probably doesn’t want to shift back into his fae form while the captain is anywhere close. I wish he would. The faster I can get him to shift, the more time for him to return to his right mind before he gets me alone.
My skin crawls thinking of what he might do to me if he doesn’t shift. What almost happened in the Carlisles’ reading room.
So, for once in my life, I take advantage of the little control I have left and interlock my fingers with Peter’s. He flinches as the shadows dissipate to reveal tanned skin and copper hair, though his eyes remain painted black.
Still terrifying, but at least the hand I’m holding is flesh. At least the ink in his eyes will drain. Eventually.
At this point, all I want is to get back to my brothers.
“Come now, my Darling little thing,” says Peter, wrapping a possessive arm around me as he leads us backward out of the cave.
“Wait,” I say, sliding my hand into my pocket and retrieving the calling stone. I turn back to Astor, who can barely stand to look at me. “You should keep this,” I say.
Iaso gives me a grimace, but Astor’s eyes land on the stone. There’s hope there, but something lost, too.
“Thank you,” he says, throat raspy. When he steps toward me to retrieve it, Peter makes a clucking noise and plucks it from my hand.
“Forgive me if I don’t trust him,” Peter says. “I’ll bring it to you, Captain.”
Astor tenses, but he waits for Peter to cross the room.
When Peter presses the stone into Astor’s Marked hand, he offers the captain a feral grin. “You shouldn’t have touched what was mine.”
Shadows, silky as ink, drip off of Peter’s hand, coating the stone like tar.
“No!” Astor bellows and yanks the stone from Peter’s grip, but it’s too late. Across the room, Iaso’s bluish veins have turned black, jettisoning inky streaks across her face. Her hands go to her throat, and she gags as tar pours from her open mouth, coating her front in black blood.
My hand finds my mouth to cover my gasp, but it’s too late. Astor’s gaze snaps to me at the wretched sound, distraught recognition overcoming his face.
“What’s happening to her?” he snarls.
“Peter, stop. Please,” I say, racing over to Iaso. She’s on her knees now, and though I try to comfort her, there’s nothing I can do when my hands sweep through her. She turns to me, her eyes as black as Peter’s, though they’re wide in horror.
“Peter, please !” I scream, but my pleas are drowned out by the captain.
He’s on his knees in front of Peter, begging. “Please, just don’t hurt her,” he says. “I’ll do anything. She’s your friend, too,” he says, confusion swarming in his eyes.
“What’s to say you wouldn’t try to hurt Wendy again to bring her back?” asks Peter, staring down at Astor in cruel delight. “What’s to say you wouldn’t keep trying to take her from me? You can’t give a present, then expect it back, Astor. But you never did realize that as a boy either.”
“This isn’t you,” I say, as Iaso’s skin starts to fade from silvery blue to gray. She’s trying to mouth something, but I can’t make it out against the bubbling black foam. “Once you’re yourself again, you’ll regret this.”
Peter ignores me, staring down Astor.
“Whatever you want,” says Astor. “Just don’t hurt her.”
“That’s the thing,” says Peter, black eyes flashing. “What I wanted was for you not to touch my things.”
The stone in Astor’s hand explodes in a flurry of shadows, sending orbs of magic shooting across the room. They light the abandoned torches lining the cave walls, casting an eerie burning glow across the cavern.
Iaso screams, a wilting cry of anguish that must pierce through the veil of the dead, because Astor snaps his neck toward where she’s kneeling, his eyes wide in terror. He runs to her, but it’s too late. Shadows are pouring out of her mouth, her nose, her eyes, ripping through her chest, her fingertips, her belly. They’re eating her from the inside, writhing worms of darkness.
They consume her until there’s nothing left.
Astor’s crying, reaching for a wife who’s no longer there. He doesn’t realize it until he turns to find the look of shocked horror on my face.
We exchange one last glance. I don’t school my face in time.
He looks as if he’s been speared in the stomach, and then something in him shifts. He blinks, then kneels, brandishing his sword from its scabbard.
When he fixes his gaze on Peter, there’s nothing of the kind man I thought I knew in his eyes. Nothing of the tenderness I was beginning to recognize.
“There,” taunts Peter, “problem solved. Aren’t you grateful that I put your wife out of her suffering? She’ll probably thank me in the next life. I bet she’s grateful that you’re no longer imprisoning her here.”
Astor bellows, then lunges. Sword clashes with shadow as Peter parries the captain’s attack with a whip he’s conjured of shadows. The shadows curl around Astor’s sword, attempting to wrestle it from his hand. But Astor is schooled in combat. Rather than attempt to regain control of his sword, he releases the hilt, spinning and striking at Peter from behind with a spare dagger he unsheathes from his boot.
Peter dodges well enough, sensing the attack without having to see it. When he whips around to face Astor, there’s unadulterated malice—the amused sort—in his expression. Astor thrusts his dagger toward Peter, but it’s deflected by Peter’s shadows. This time, Astor’s prepared, and brings the dagger back to his chest before the shadows can wrap their tendrils around it. When he swings again, the tendrils aren’t ready, and he manages to nick Peter’s shoulder.
The gash cuts through Peter’s leathers. It’s nothing, really. A simple slice of flesh. The kind of wound someone like Astor or Maddox would likely not even notice during battle.
Not Peter. Peter gasps.
It’s a quick inhale, coupled with a flash of shock on Peter’s face. He hides it almost immediately.
Not fast enough.
“Thought you said he couldn’t feel pain,” says Astor, eyes brimming with a hunger for blood.
Peter blinks, stepping backward. He looks unsteady, like the bit of pain he’s experienced has rattled him. And why shouldn’t it?
Peter’s not supposed to be able to feel pain. He likely hadn’t remembered what it felt like.
My mind whirls, trying to make sense of it. Slowly, as Astor approaches Peter, backing his shocked opponent into a corner, my attention pivots to the place Iaso Astor withered away.
Spirits only have a limited amount of magic to offer after they die. What you and the captain want—there won’t be enough magic for both.
She’d overheard me tell Astor that Peter couldn’t feel pain. Not only that, I’d admitted that this was my original intention in visiting the Seer, to heal my Mate.
So when he’d ripped her from the inside out with his shadows, when he’d torn her spirit apart, she’d used up her well of magic to break his curse.
Something tells me she hadn’t meant it as a gift.
Grief mingled with renewed vigor propels Astor, all brute strength. Peter, usually nothing if not quick, precise, falters with every dodge.
He doesn’t realize he’s trapped until his back hits the cave wall.
Something within Astor splinters. All the rigid restraint he usually carries in his firm shoulders, all the rage channeled into purpose—it’s unleashed now, the last remaining bolster of the dam snapped.
I remember my alienist telling my mother that when humans undergo more stress than their minds can handle, they revert back to a shadow of who they were as a child. Regress into the comfort of the person they’ve built the rest of their persona around.
When Iaso was banished from this realm, when her spirit was destroyed, magic had spewed out of her, lighting the abandoned torches on the walls of the cave.
There’s one over Peter’s head. Astor removes it from the wall, its flame flickering in panic, as if it knows its end is near. Astor snuffs it out.
Then steers it toward Peter’s chest.
I gag, though I don’t know if it’s from the scent of burning flesh that hits the cave air, or the way Peter screams, his body writhing in agony. Perhaps it’s the way watching Peter, my Mate, suffer feels as if Astor has taken the brand to my own chest.
Or maybe it’s just that as Astor tortures Peter, I don’t see Astor, but Nolan. And I see the little wraith who ran for help in the village. The little boy who was concerned not for his own safety, but the newcomer’s. The child who, after being tortured, forgave, knowing it wasn’t Nolan who’d hurt him—not truly.
It can’t end like this. Not between the two of them. Peter had been kind once. Forgiving. He’d befriended little Nolan Astor, even after being tortured by him.
This can’t be how it ends.
As I make my way toward the garish scene, I kneel, retrieving Astor’s abandoned dagger—the one he dropped after slicing my throat—from the ground.
They start out pure, my intentions. When I go to fasten my fingers around the hilt, I intend to save both of them. Peter, from the torture and the death surely to come at Astor’s hand. Astor, from murdering his oldest friend, the boy who had shown him kindness.
But when I stand, the weight of the dagger in my hand, I realize I’m already holding something else.
Astor was right, that night in the crow’s nest.
I’m so very angry.
I think perhaps I’ve never recognized it, because it doesn’t match the anger I’ve seen in others. It doesn’t burn hot, only to consume itself quickly, fizzle out because it’s guzzled more oxygen than its environment contains.
No, mine’s been fed slowly. So slowly, I hadn’t noticed it growing. And as I’ve never attempted to put it out before—why put out a fire you don’t know is burning?—I find I have no way of containing it. No blanket to throw over it. No basin of water nearby.
With the dagger’s icy hilt in my hand, I feel Astor’s betrayal over again. Except this time, I let myself feel it. Iaso is gone, so there’s no use in tempering my feelings on her behalf.
Astor slipped Peter’s ring on my finger, knowing exactly what it would do to me as he kneeled. Then he used the very same hand to pick up this dagger with the intention of killing me. The same hand he used to cup my cheek the night in the crow’s nest.
It happens in a flash, but my mind slows it down. Possibly because of where I’ve been fixating.
I watch as Astor’s desire to make Peter suffer burns out. I can see the moment it changes in his face—when his face falls and he just wants it to be over.
I watch as Astor brings his dagger down with his Mated hand.
Later, I’ll tell myself all sorts of reasons for why I did it. I’ll tell myself I was saving my Mate, that my Mark drove me to it. I’ll tell myself I was keeping the captain from killing his first friend, saving the little boy Nolan from growing up to murder the one person who showed him forgiveness. Later, when my dreams torment me by replaying this moment, I’ll convince myself it was because I wanted to get back to John and Michael. That Peter was my only way back to Neverland, to my brothers.
For now? For now I know the truth.
When I bring the dagger down, I know exactly what I’m aiming for.
And it’s not the captain’s blade.
The cut is so clean, I hardly feel it reverberate against the hilt. Barely get to feel the satisfaction of a perfect hit.
Astor’s hand goes flying.
I sever it from his arm just in time for Peter to scuttle out from underneath his dagger, dislodged from its target. By the time Astor’s hand hits the ground, the gold of his Mark has already shriveled to gray, matching the deathly ill skin of his forearm.
His blood drips from the edge of the blade I’m clutching.
He’s so shocked, so stunned, he doesn’t even cry out. He just stumbles, falls to his knees, and stares at the stump at his wrist, bleeding profusely, covering the dead tendrils of his Mark with blood.
Now that the Mark is gone, now that there’s nothing tying me to Astor, I wait for the pain to drizzle away.
It seems I’m going to be waiting for a very long time.
The captain’s gaze slides up to me, his mouth barely agape. There’s betrayal written all over his face, grief and loss, too, but there’s something else. Something I can’t quite place.
The captain swallows. “Well done, Darling.”