Losing Wendy: A Dark Fantasy Peter Pan Retelling (The Lost Girl Series Book 1)

Chapter 1

Sometimes the shadows whisper.

Sometimes I whisper back.

They writhe on the white oak windowsill, splaying like handprints clinging to the wood lest they slip and fall two stories onto the cobbled street below, slain by the dingy glow of the faerie dust street lamps.

“I could end your pain, Wendy Darling,” they promise.

My hands tremble, causing the light radiating from my lantern to falter.

“I’m a happy person,” I say, though the way my voice hikes in pitch is hardly convincing.

The shadows lick at the edge of the windowsill, crawling down the wooden slats before spreading outward across the ivory chaise upon which I’m perched.

“Of course you are,” the shadows say, but they’re only placating me.

The shadows slink like spilled ink, staining the plush chaise pillow. They linger at the hem of my silk nightgown. If they were to spread just a hair more, they’d seep into the baby blue fabric.

But the shadows don’t have to close the gap for me to feel their touch. A chill chases my dread, my skin tingling just underneath my skirts where the shadows come close to engulfing my knee.

“I could end your pain,” the shadows promise again, as they always do.

“I have no reason to be in pain,” I insist. As I always do.

It’s a tired game the shadows and I play.

So why do I never grow weary of it?

“Of course you don’t.”

We perch together, the shadows and I, in silence for a moment.

“You could come with me tonight, you know. It’s foolish of you to put off the inevitable.”

Blood thuds against my ears, my chest, the forefinger I have stretched out against the windowsill, chilled by the evening breeze that creeps in through the slat where I’ve left the window cracked.

“I don’t want to come with you.”

The shadows laugh, and it’s somehow pleasant and terrifying—the way the sound reverberates through my bones. “What pretty lies you speak.”

I clench my fist, shuddering at the way my perfectly rounded fingernails scrape against the cracks in the wood. “Haven’t you heard? I’m going to free myself of you.”

The shadows tremble. I get a sneaking suspicion it’s not at all similar to the tremble of dread that inhabits my bones, but rather the echoes of morose laughter.

“If you don’t wish to come with me, Wendy Darling, pray tell why you cast the glow from that lantern against the windowsill every night.”

My throat constricts, but I keep my chin level. “If I’m going to be stalked by a monster, I’d rather keep my eyes on it.”

The shadows swirl, spilling onto the floor, weaving warped paths around my feet and skirts, until I’m surrounded by glittering darkness. A dreadful flicker fans at the edges of my fingertips, prickling at the bottoms of my bare feet. The sensation reminds me of standing on the precipice of the clock tower that serves as the centerpiece of my parents’ estate.

“You’re miserable here, you know.”

Anger, hot and bubbling, roils through me. I jump to my feet, careful not to let my toes dip into the swarming shadows. They shift with my sudden movement, splaying out around me in a flurry of smoky tendrils.

Still so careful not to touch my bare skin.

“I’m miserable here because of you. Every second of my life that could have been joyful has been soiled by the knowledge it was all fleeting.”

To my surprise, the shadows actually deflate, separating the two of us—flesh and darkness—with a wide berth. When the shadows speak, their usual silkiness is absent, replaced by cool indifference. “If that’s the case, you might as well let me have you.”

I stand my ground, even as the estate clock tower tolls midnight. “One more day. One more day before you can have me.”

“Oh, Wendy Darling. Have you forgotten?” The shadows circumvent me in a playful dance, resuming their taunting demeanor. “You’re already mine.”

I fight not to close my eyes as the shadows deepen around me, their wisps concentrating into a black as thick as sludge. When I was a child, I made a habit of slamming my eyes shut when the shadows visited me.

Closing my eyes never did much to drown out the darkness. So now I watch, keeping a close eye on them at all times, tracing their approach lest they come for me.

They never do. They can’t touch me. That part of the curse I learned the night I burst into my parents’ bedroom screaming.

My mother meant well when she told me they weren’t allowed to touch me. Yet.

As the midnight bells toll, “yet” is a dwindling wick, a dry twig readying to snap.

I watch the shadows take form at my feet, spreading across the rug in a pool of tar. As they pile atop themselves, they grow, until directly in front of me floats a whirl of darkness. Beads of black spread out behind the swirling form, the silhouette of wings slicing across my petal-patterned wallpaper.

When the wings beat, I shudder, a chill too direct to be slipping in through the cracked window caressing my face.

“Come on, Wendy Darling,” whisper the shadows, and for the first time, it’s not a slippery taunt I hear. This time, the shadows offer a sincere invitation. “What have you got to lose?”

From the shadowy mass appears a tendril that soon snakes into the shape of a hand. Extending. Offering.

My chest heaves. And not for the first time, I reach out—not to touch—at least, I tell myself I won’t. Just to revel in the space between its outstretched hand and my trembling fingertips.

Only a flicker of light from my lamp separates us now—flesh from shadow.

We’re so close, it would only take a mildly violent tremor, and I will have initiated contact.

Just one more day.

There’s nothing about the offer that should tempt me. I should be taking advantage of my last day in the light of this world. Should be plotting and scheming just like my parents to break my curse. Their bargain.

But part of me wonders if the curse has already been fulfilled. If I’ve been living it since the moment my mother pulled her sweat-soaked daughter into her lap and told me of the fate that awaited me upon my twentieth birthday.

A tutor once told me that humans receive more pleasure from anticipating an event than from the event itself. I can’t help but wonder if anticipation and terror share this phenomenon. Perhaps I welcome the moment the shadows engulf me, taking me for their own, drowning me in darkness. At least then there will be nothing to fear.

One cannot fear what one knows, after all.

“Come on. It won’t be so bad,” whisper the shadows. “I promise.”

I made a vow to myself years ago I wouldn’t close my eyes, but tonight I make an exception.

And reach.

“Wendy?”

My eyes shoot open as light floods my bedroom.

When I turn to meet my brother’s concerned gaze, the shadows have already retreated, leaving me to wallow in my last hours of freedom.

“You were talking to it again.”

My brother’s silhouette is framed in the doorway, backlit by the faerie lanterns that line the hallway of our parents’ manor.

“Talking to what?” I ask, schooling an ever-practiced smile onto my face.

John frowns, letting his shoulders sag. He’s only eleven months younger than me, so it’s no surprise that the spindly frame I’m used to has filled out with lean muscle over the last few months. Still, the weight he’s put on, coupled with the set of round spectacles he switched to last week, gives him the air of a man rather than a child.

It makes my heart ache a bit, and I can’t place why.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he says, stepping into my room and closing the door gently behind him.

The light from the hallway extinguishes with the clicking of the door handle, but John’s lantern glows more brightly than mine, the glass pristine enough to ward off the shadows.

For now, at least.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s the light that truly keeps them away, or if the shadows simply allow me to believe as much as a courtesy.

“I don’t have to do what?”

“Smile like everything is okay. Like your life isn’t ending one way or another in”—he pulls out his glass pocket watch—“twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes.”

It must be habit now, because I actually have to coax the muscles at the edges of my lips down from my smile. Mother keeps a yogini on staff and is always urging me to join them in their morning rituals. I stopped going long ago, when I realized my body was never going to obey my commands to relax, and that the well-meaning woman would never understand why.

“If Mother and Father have it their way, my life as I know it will end a few hours before then. They don’t want us cutting it that close.”

John lets out a noncommittal noise before padding over to my bed. In the laziest motion I’ve ever seen, he unlatches his satchel, dumping a pile of dust-ridden books on my silver-etched sheets.

“I’m not entirely certain of the terms, but I don’t know that the Prince of Never will permit me bringing along reading material,” I say.

John raises a brow over his thin-rimmed golden spectacles. Mother makes him cut his bangs obscenely short. Perhaps she thinks this will prevent him from growing up. “You’re not even considering the fact that you might succeed in breaking the curse.”

I let out what’s supposed to be a laugh, but it ends up sounding more like a sigh as I plop down on my soft mattress next to the pile of leather-bound books.

“If it were up to my will or your determination or Ma and Pa’s optimism, I’d be certain of victory.” I bite my lip, allowing my fingers to caress my neck, where just below my chin, a rivulet of my skin glows the faintest of gold, swirling in delicate lines up my jaw, framing my left eye at my cheek and forehead in freckles of shimmering light. “But we both know breaking the curse has been left in the hands of men. I imagine the Sister knew what she was doing when she left my fate up to them.”

John grunts in dejected agreement, then drops a rather hefty volume onto my lap. “Well, the way I see it, we have twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to figure out a way to make it up to us.”