Chapter 7
“You’d punish a child for the sins of her parents?” my father asks, jutting his cleft chin out, though his legs are trembling.
“Please,” says the captain, drawing the knife away from my throat just long enough to gesture toward both my parents. “Do go on with your ethics lecture.”
“Not until you release our daughter,” says my father.
The captain laughs, the sound more bristly than the stubble of his jaw scraping against my temple. “So entitled to your loved ones. Tell me—what makes her so much more significant than everyone else’s?”
“Ma. Pa.” I scan my parents’ forlorn faces. “Please. What is he talking about?”
My father won’t look at me, but my mother will. Pools well in her lower lids. “I’m so sorry, Wendy. I only wanted to protect you.” She turns her face to the captain. “Please. Take me instead. Kill me. Punish me. Whatever revenge you’ve been plotting, take it out on me. The blame is mine and mine alone.”
“Oh, how I would prefer it if that were enough,” says the captain. “But I’m afraid I wish you to hurt as I do. Thankfully,” he says, “I, unlike you, have a meager set of ethics by which I abide. I won’t kill your daughter simply for revenge, no matter how much I’d love to watch that lovely smile slip from your face as I bled her lifeblood.”
My mother breathes a sigh of relief.
“Your son, however.”
The captain snaps his fingers, and my heart caves in as a man appears from an adjacent room.
Michael. No. But it’s not Michael fighting against the bulky man’s grip. It’s John.
“Let go of my sister,” he screams, but it’s no use. I’m not the one whose blood they intend to spill.
“Please. Just take me instead,” I whisper, awed at the way the trembling in my voice stills, the sobs go quiet. All around me, the world goes numb. I don’t feel it at all. Don’t feel this wretched man’s hands around me, the touch that set me aflame only half an hour ago. Don’t feel the pounding of my heart against my chest or the agony in my parents’ eyes or the dread of what will happen to John.
I’ll feel it all later. It will cascade around me in a torrent of grief, shoving my face underneath the water and drowning me, over and over, until the shadows take me into their blissful oblivion. That is, if I weren’t about to die.
But for now, I feel nothing. “Please, Nolan. I’m begging you.”
The captain’s breath falters; the blade against my throat stills. “Very well.”
He removes his blade from my throat, tossing it at the feet of my parents. It clatters when it hits the marble floor. His stubble scratches my cheek as he gestures toward it with his head.
“Slit your own throats, and I’ll spare the boys,” he says.
“No!” John cries, fighting against the henchman. But my brother, though he’s gained muscle mass over the last few months, is still slender-framed compared to the man holding him. In the end, his fighting proves little use.
“No.” I’m not struggling against the captain anymore. Not when my mother meets my gaze and smiles, the edges of her lips quavering.
“Spare her too,” says my mother, but the captain shakes his head.
“The boys will go free. It’s that, or all your children meet unfortunate ends.”
My mother and I make eye contact, and in that single look we exchange a silent acknowledgment. It’s okay, I tell her. Because this is the end we’ve been preparing for my entire life. It was a fool’s dream, thinking we could escape the shadows. Clearly the captain intends to steal me away as bounty, but he doesn’t know to whom my soul and body belong. He doesn’t know that at the hour’s end, the shadows will come to claim me, dissolving me from his reach.
If we can just save John and Michael, I can welcome the shadows in peace.
My mother nods in understanding, tears streaming down her face. She kneels and plucks the blade from the ground, her fingers as delicate with the hilt as they might be with the handle of a steaming teacup. My father lurches forward to stop her, his hands shaking as they close around the blade.
For a moment, they wrestle for the hilt, but my father’s desperation shows through at the widening of his eyes as he pleads with my mother. “Forgive me, Mary Darling. But we both know you’ve always been the stronger of the two of us. I can’t bear to watch you go.”
My mother smiles gently and lets go of the hilt.
“I’m so sorry, children,” says my father.
In a motion swifter than I would have thought possible, my father brings the blade to his throat. There’s the sickening slicing of flesh, then blood pours from the wound, and the room goes silent as my ears flood with a deafening roar. Faintly, I think I can sense my brother screaming, but I can’t actually hear it.
My father crumples to the floor, still clutching his throat. I watch as my mother picks up the blood-soaked blade and brings it to her own.
It takes longer for her to die than my father. I’m not sure if she simply missed an artery that would have hastened the process, or if she fights longer to stay in the same realm as her children.
When she goes down, there’s no smile on her face. Except for the bloodied sliver of crimson curving against her throat.
I’m not sure how long I stare at my parents’ bodies, crumpled on the floor. My mother pale in her gown of blush silk. My father’s cravat crooked.
I’m not sure how long it takes for the noise of the ballroom to come crashing to my ears again, but when it does, it’s because the clanging of metal brings me back to the present. Bells. Signaling the third quarter of the hour. Just how my parents set the clock tower for the night so I could keep up with the time.
A quarter hour until the shadows take me.
A quarter hour until the captain with a vendetta against my parents realizes he’s been duped.
“Captain,” I say, fighting the blackness threatening to steal my vision. I need to stay alert. Find a way to get John and Michael out of here before the shadows come for me. “I believe you said my brothers could go free.”
The captain hesitates, his grip still firm on my shoulders, but he mutters something to Evans, who must have appeared next to us while my vision was tunneling. Evans disappears through the door through which Michael disappeared with the bald man.
“Go get your brother,” the captain says to John, whose glasses are askew, balancing precariously on the bridge of his nose as he stares blankly at my parents’ corpses. The henchman holding John releases him, and John blinks rapidly, stumbling forward. He takes two steps toward our parents before righting himself and swerving to follow Evans, but he stops in front of me and the captain.
“What are you going to do to her?” John’s voice is analytical, technical, though I know from years of studying him the tells of sorrow in his logical features. The way his brown eyes glisten, the slight way he scrapes his teeth together.
“I’m not sure you want to know,” responds Captain Astor, meeting my brother’s stare.
John blinks. Like he’s wiping fog from his glasses.
“Will you wait? To do whatever it is you’re planning? Until my brother and I are gone, I mean.”
Captain Astor sneers. “What a courageous brother you have. Sure you don’t want to revise your previous request to take his place?”
John’s throat bobs. His gaze flits to the floor, but I know my brother. He’s no coward. He wants to know if the shadows will take me before the captain can lay his hands on me.
“Rest assured we don’t have time to dally,” says the captain, which, though it doesn’t appear to reassure John, at least convinces him he can leave.
He turns to go, but before he’s made it two paces, he spins back around. A few of the captain’s henchmen make to stop him, but Captain Astor holds up a hand as John runs up to me and places something cold and metallic into my palm. “Something to remember us by.”
The matching glass pocket watch to mine. I fight the urge to give it back. This pocket watch isn’t something that reminds me of good times. John thinks of them as gifts from our father. I only think of them as my father’s well-meaning but pushy method to get me to find a husband.
“John, I—” I go to hand it back to my brother, but instead of accepting it, he pulls the crown from the body of the watch and twists.
That’s when the pocket watch explodes.
It happens so quickly, just as the second hand hits midnight—ten minutes early. Dust and cinders and lightning spark from the watch, causing a rattling boom to echo across the hall.
All around, the pirates keel over, covering their sensitive pointed ears in agony as the pocket watch squeals. Light soars from within it, ballooning out across the room, though it doesn’t burn me to the touch.
A bomb made of faerie dust.
John meant to banish the shadows when they came for me. As the room lights up in a flash of blinding white, I wonder if perhaps his plan would have worked on the shadows after all.
“Wendy, come on!”
A hand grabs mine. Free now from the grasp of the stunned captain, my brother and I take off into a sprint. I can’t see anything. Nothing but the burning white light that envelops the ballroom.
We trip and stumble over bodies on the way, but John and I have spent years of our childhoods running around the manor in the dark. We don’t need our vision to make our way to the exit, so long as we don’t get caught up in the limbs of a corpse.
Eventually John stops in front of me, and I can hear him scrambling for the latch on the door. There’s a click, and then a welcome shadow pours through the crack in the wall, cutting through the pixie light.
We push our way through, and suddenly everything goes dark. Like spending the noontime hours strolling in the sun, then entering a dimly lit home. My eyes refuse to adjust, but still, John and I run, hand in hand.
“They took Michael,” I cry. “They took him this way.”
“I know,” says John. “I know.”
We race through the halls, and slowly my eyesight corrects itself, bringing the walnut-paneled corridors of my familiar home into focus. My mind races for where they might have taken my brother. The manor itself is huge, but there’s a staircase at the end of the hall that leads…
“Toward the stables,” I tell John. “That way, they could make a quick escape if they needed to. Take him hostage if they needed a way to get me to cooperate.”
“A back-up plan.” John nods.
We throw ourselves into the tiny winding staircase, our haste accentuated by our panicked breaths and the pads of our footsteps.
It’s only when we reach the bottom of the staircase, toward the stables, that we hear him. Inside, my sweet little brother is whimpering. “It’s okay, Michael. Mommy’s got you. Don’t be scared. Mommy’s got you, Michael.”
John and I exchange quiet glances. The accuracy with which Michael has captured our mother’s voice chills the space between us.
“Something wrong with you, ain’t there, boy?” says a low voice from the other side of the door. “Something not quite right.”
On any normal occasion, hearing anyone insult Michael would incite rage within me. At the moment, I’m too preoccupied with coming up with a plan to get Michael out of the stables and to safety to dwell on it.
I jerk my head to the side. Toward the stall whose adjoining wall has a hole in it that John and I used to crawl through as children. It was too small for a horse to get through, so my father never bothered fixing it.
John blinks at me from behind his glasses. His eyes go wide as I step out from behind the barrels, my hands raised above my head.
“I’m here,” I say, my voice shaking. “Please, surely you don’t need my brother. Just let him go and I’ll come with you.”
The bald man’s eyes sweep over my figure, hay needles already sticking into the fabric of my ball gown.
“Captain didn’t expect you to put up a fight. Surprised you made it this far,” he says.
I swallow, my eyes trained on Michael. He’s plucked the button off his non-collar and is twirling it in his fingers as the bald man keeps his hands firm on his shoulders.
“Just let him go. Captain Astor doesn’t want him anyway.”
The bald man’s eyes go to slits. “Pardon me, but were you there when the captain told me to take this one away?”
I shudder at what the cruel captain might have planned for my innocent little brother. How deep he’s allowed revenge to leak into his heart.
Just then, a steel horseshoe comes flying. It smacks the bald man’s head, his eyes rolling back into his skull as he slumps backward. Michael yelps, then skitters out from underneath his grip and toward me.
“It’s okay, Michael. Mommy’s got you,” he says, threading his hand through mine.
John appears from the shadow of the stall behind the bald man, staring down at his unmoving body.
He’s wondering if he killed him or not.
“We don’t have time to check,” I say, remembering Evans wandered down this way at some point.
John nods, then we’re off.
We make it up the stairs and down the hall when we hear the yell. A glance through the window reveals the captain and his men, their figures warped in the glass of the windows from the section of manor across from us. From the looks of it, Evans has met back up with his crew. There’s only a bridged walkway between us and them.
John and I both reach for Michael, and we sprint through the hallway and down another set of stairs. As soon as we reach the door at the bottom of the steps, we hear angry voices on the other side.
There’s nowhere else to go.
We’re surrounded.
We’re in a viewing room. One that looks out into the courtyard. If it were daylight, there would be speckles of colored light painting the floors and benches.
I don’t let myself think before I rush to the window opposite the door and shove my elbow into the stained glass. Pain lances my arm, shards of glass peppering my skin. I bite back a scream, then pick away what’s left of the window before climbing through.
My feet hit the grass, damp from the downpour of rain. Thunder rolls overhead, but I ignore it as John passes Michael through the window to me.
As soon as John has wriggled through the window and into the courtyard, we sprint across the lawn. I open the door to the base of the clock tower, and nod for John to climb.