Chapter 6
The next hour is spent in a whirl as I’m passed from the arms of suitor to suitor.
I’m sure some of them are adept at conversation, but my mind is elsewhere, so I make a rather poor conversational partner.
Focus, Wendy, I tell myself, but focus has never been my strong suit. At least not when I have something else rattling in my head, competing for my attention. Like searching over the shoulders of my dance partners for an elusive captain who seems to have disappeared from the ball completely.
Questions I should have asked the captain berate my mind. I could stomp my foot for not thinking to ask them in the moment.
What sort of ship are you captain of?
Where do you sail out?
For which company do you sail?
If not to compete for my hand in marriage, why accept our invitation?
I have a sneaking suspicion the answer to that last question has to do with networking amongst a gathering of nobles. I’m not sure what all goes into being the captain of a ship, but I’m sure brokering deals comes with the territory. It’s clever, really, to attend a ball such as this one under the pretense of finding a wife, when really the captain is likely hunting for his next business venture.
On the other hand, one would think a dowry substantial enough to purchase five pristine ships would be the most lucrative use of his time.
“Miss Darling?”
The hesitant voice of the suitor I’m currently dancing with breaks me out of my trance. He appears to be about my age, with dark brown skin and kind eyes that glisten through his silver mask. He seemed to have barely summoned up the courage to shuffle over to me when he asked me to dance, and I feel a bit of a prick in my soul for not paying better attention to him.
“Are you quite well?” he asks, scanning my face for any signs of illness, I suppose, to explain my lack of attention.
“No. I mean, yes. I do apologize, Lord…” I hesitate, wracking my memory for his name.
“Evans,” he provides, quite graciously, with a full, knowing smile playing at his lips.
“Of course, Lord Evans. I truly am sorry. I’m not sure what’s come over me this evening.”
“Could it possibly have to do with the gentleman who you graced with not one, but two dances?” he asks.
Where I expect annoyance, I find only teasing.
I open my mouth to deny it, but given the way Lord Evans is looking at me, I figure there’s no use.
“Am I so obvious? How mortifying.”
Evans shrugs, his lean shoulders carrying my hand with them as he does. “It is your marriage ball, after all. One would hope you’d be able to find someone to your liking by its conclusion.”
“You’re being extraordinarily polite for someone I’ve practically spurned,” I say.
“Well, you seem like the type of lady who deserves someone to be kind to her tonight.” The smile on my partner’s face lingers, but there’s something more restrained to it now. My stomach turns with unease.
Does everyone at this ball pity me over the false assumption that I’m with child? Or do I simply give off the air of a woman who’s spent her entire life shackled to the whims of her dismal future? I’m about to toss aside decorum and ask Evans which it is, when over his shoulder I glimpse him.
My breath catches in my throat as I take in Captain Astor. My heart races. I’d convinced myself that he’d already left. There’s a part of me that wishes he’d look my way, but that part of me is a fool.
He’s mid-conversation with another suitor, this one clad in glittering cuffs of rubies. Just as I suspected, the captain is making rounds, buttering up the rich noblemen, probably convincing them to let him haul their cargo or man their vessels.
But then the captain does something strange. He glances over his companion’s shoulder at a suitor leaning casually on one of the ivory pillars, then flicks his head to the side, almost like it’s a tick.
That’s not the strange part; it’s what he does with his hand. The way he claps his fingers together.
Immediately, the suitor leaning against the pillar, a bulky pale-skinned man with a shaved head, pushes himself off his resting place and follows the path where the captain just gestured.
I follow the direction of the captain’s signal and find…
No, that can’t be right. My years of talking to shadows must have driven me mad, taught me to perceive mystery where there is none.
Because the captain can’t have been pointing to my brother Michael, who, as expected, is tracing squares (his favorite shape) into the velvet wallpaper.
“So, whose idea was it to throw a masquerade rather than a regular ball?” asks Evans, politely still even as I’ve been ignoring him.
“My father’s,” I clip, then realizing how disinterested I sound, add, “He’s always been drawn to the excessive.”
The bald man is making his way over to Michael, who doesn’t seem to notice him approaching, though surely there’s something behind the pillar I can’t see. Or perhaps I’ve made up this entire interaction in my head.
“Let me guess—you’re drawn to the simpler things in life?” Evans twirls me around, a bit too early for this particular tune. Perhaps he isn’t familiar with it.
When I’m back to facing him again, he’s pivoted, out of step with the dance again, so that I no longer have a good view of Michael. I bite my lip, aware of how my fingers are now shaking. Then, conspiratorially, I whisper, “I believe the turn isn’t until the second round.”
Evans just smiles. “Surely you break the rules on occasion, Miss Darling.”
A bead of sweat forms at Evans’s temple.
I can’t help myself. I glance over my shoulder, praying desperately that my anxieties are just that—the paranoid machinations of a woman who’s spent her entire life in dread. But the bald man has reached Michael, and he’s on a knee next to him, talking to him. Michael’s paying him no mind, of course. He rarely acknowledges the existence of strangers. But then the man pulls something out of his trouser pocket and offers it to Michael, who takes it without looking at the man. When the man grabs Michael’s hand, my brother swats him away, but with little effort.
Panic seizes my gut.
“Excuse me, but I really must—” I turn back to Evans, but the smile has been wiped clean off his face.
“But we aren’t finished with our dance.”
My heart feels as though it’s in my throat. “I do apologize, but I’m feeling quite ill.”
I step back to excuse myself from the dance, but Evans’s grip around me tightens.
“I truly am sorry, Miss Darling,” he whispers through his teeth, his brown eyes wide with apology. “You really do seem like a nice girl.”
Panic sets in, and for the second time tonight, I freeze. It’s only a moment, only a fleeting second before the urge to protect my youngest brother overtakes my spirit and ushers me to fight back.
I’m a moment too late.
Evans tugs on me hard, yanking me into his chest and spinning me around, pressing my back to his front while, in a single fluid motion, he brandishes a glistening dagger to my throat.
Gasps overtake the crowd, but are quickly cut off as what must be two dozen suitors slit the throats of the noblemen and women conversing next to them.
Their sparkling wine glasses hit the floor first, fracturing in chinks. The bodies follow soon after, landing in the shattered glass of their own drinks.
All the while, my eyes are on Michael.
In the moment Evans overcame me, the bald man threw my youngest brother over his shoulder. He’s thrashing at the man, but he’s so slight, so spindly, nothing he does is much use.
“Michael,” I cry, but my brother is too overwhelmed to notice. I watch in panic as he digs his teeth into the bald man’s shoulder and the man lets out a growl.
The bald man carries my brother through the nearest door and slips away.
My mother screams.
Or perhaps it’s me; we’ve always sounded so similar.
I thrash in Evans’s arms, but despite his narrower frame, he’s strong, and the knife he holds to my throat proves effective.
“Please, my brother. He’s done nothing wrong,” I beg, thinking surely this kind-eyed man will care something for the life of a child.
“Come with me,” says Evans. “Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”
“No!” My cry isn’t as shrill as I want it to be. It comes out choked. Weak. Stuck in my throat. But I slam my heel on Evans’s foot all the same. He lets out a grunt. The moment his grip falters, I duck beneath the knife and break into a run.
Bodies scatter the floor of the ballroom as I race toward the door where Michael just disappeared. Where is John? Where are my parents? I wonder, but there’s no time to search for them in the crowd. I don’t want to search for them in the crowd. Not when half of the crowd is on the floor, the other half’s hands are dripping blood.
I make it several paces across the throng of bodies before someone dares to step in my way.
Him.
The captain’s green eyes flash with warning, but I don’t heed it. I scramble to the side, but I’m not fast enough, and he snatches me into his grasp, hauling me toward him.
“I’m truly sorry, love,” he says, his body practically motionless against my struggle. I flail against him, but his grip on my wrists doesn’t budge. “Wendy,” he says, like I’m an animal or a child to be placated, an infant to be hushed.
“Please. Please, just let them go. Please, my brothers are innocent.”
“Are you not?” The captain cranes his head to the side. He’s maskless now, though I don’t know whether he removed it or someone else did in the struggle. He’s even more beautiful than I would have guessed, and it enrages me.
I scream, making to slam my fists against his chest, but his grip is too tight. As I stare into his face, gnashing my teeth, something catches my eye. A glint underneath a tuft of raven black hair. A single golden ring shines, but the position of it is disorienting—too high and far back to be an earring. But then as the captain shifts, his hair does too, and the realization dawns on me with the revelation of the pointed tip of his ear.
All sharp lines—that’s what I’d thought when I’d first laid eyes on the captain.
The mask wasn’t a nod to the past, but a means to hide his nature.
“You’re fae,” I whisper, dread crawling through me as I realize just how hopeless it is to fight. Why the captain seems so unfazed by my attempts to escape.
“Astute,” he says, but before I can respond he whirls me around, tucking me into his chest as he presses a serrated blade to my throat.
My mind reels. The fae are supposed to be extinct. Or if not extinct, close enough. In the ancient days, the fae overcame our world, enslaving humans with their incomparable strength and agility. But when the fae were cursed with mortal lifespans, everything changed. Fae don’t procreate as easily as humans, and without centuries to spend producing offspring, they quickly began to die out. The captain is a rarity, a fae come out of hiding.
“George and Mary Darling. Do come out, won’t you?” he calls to the crowded ballroom.
The still-living guests tremble at the hands of the captain’s men, several of them holding their dance and conversational partners at knifepoint.
“There’s no use hiding,” says the captain, his deep voice rumbling through the hall. “We will find you anyway. Might as well offer your daughter the gift of remembering you as the noble parents who gave your lives in exchange for hers.”
“No,” I cry, but it comes out as more of a whisper. I search the crowd for my parents, for John, but I find no sign of them.
“Come out, and I won’t tell her what you did,” calls Captain Astor.
No. I beg my parents inwardly not to reveal themselves. I’ll be handed over to the shadows come the end of the night anyway. There’s no reason for them to sacrifice themselves, not when they need to find Michael, need to get him and John to safety.
Footsteps clatter on the floor. Two pairs of them as my parents appear out from underneath the trapdoor in the stage where they’ve been hiding.
Between them, they’ve clasped their trembling hands. A united front as they meet my captor in the center of the ballroom.
“Why are you doing this?” I beg.
“Count it as a mercy that I’m choosing to keep that information to myself, Darling.”
The knife is cold against my throat, the tip of it exactly where my parents’ gazes are fixed.
“Please, they took Michael,” I tell them.
My father tenses, my mother searching the room for my youngest brother in panic, but I hate myself instantly for telling them. There’s nothing they can do. They’re going to die in the center of this ballroom, and now I’ve plagued them with the horror of what might happen to Michael.
I search the crowd again, desperate to find John, but relieved when I don’t. Perhaps he heard me. Perhaps he’ll go after Michael while the crowd is distracted.
Perhaps he’s not one of the bodies that litter the tile floor.
“What do you want?” my father asks, his bowtie bobbing as he attempts to swallow and fails. “Money, I assume. We’ve got it. Anything you want. Just return our children to us unharmed.”
“All of them?” The captain’s voice is a taunt.
My mother’s face drains of color.
“And what if I made you choose? What if you could only have two of them back? Which two would you pick? Which would you save?”
“No,” I cough, miserable at the hapless looks on my parents’ faces, when the choice is so obvious. “John and Michael. They choose John and Michael,” I say, because it’s the logical thing to do. Because it’s the only thing to do.
“There you go again, just letting life happen to you,” says the captain, his breath tickling my ear, sending shivers down my body. “Do you even know who I am?” he asks as my parents tremble.
Of course they don’t, but my father and mother exchange knowing looks, and my stomach falters.
“Please. Just don’t hurt her,” says my father, holding his palms up.
The laugh that escapes from the captain’s mouth is crackling ice on a frozen lake. “Do you know how many times I’ve woken in the middle of the night, begging the same of you?”
Something in my mind stops. Homes in on that tiny sentence.
“What is he talking about?” I ask my parents, my jaw nudging the knife still pressed against my throat.
“Please,” my mother says, clapping her hand to her mouth, like she always does when her expression threatens to betray her. “Please, it wasn’t her fault. She’s not the one who should be punished.”
“You mistake my intention.” I can feel the captain’s cruel smile break out, his lips grazing my ear. “Any harm that befalls her is meant to punish you.”