Chapter 10
Peter’s fingers curl possessively around my waist as we soar toward the stars that seem moments from twinkling out. Around them is a gentle haze that distorts the misty black of the evening.
In the legends of the ancients—the ones John found during his research, prompted by the night I broke down and told him of my curse despite my parents forbidding it—there’s a story of a Fate who takes slaves for herself, slaves whose mortality she wraps into the Fabric of time itself.
The only price they must pay is their soul.
My thoughts are cut short as my fae master stops in midair, his ebony wings still flapping.
“The children first,” he says, the taunting in his tone evident as he gestures toward John, whose jaw is ticking. Michael pays him no mind. He’s simply whistling, spinning in circles in the air. As if the faerie dust has put him in the most wonderful trance, releasing him from the ground that has proven to be a shackle to how he’d prefer to move—smooth and untethered by space or time.
“Come on, Michael,” John says, taking our younger brother by the hand and leading him toward the distortion. He stops as he approaches it.
“A warping,” he says, peering at it through his round spectacles. “I wasn’t sure these actually existed.”
Peter yawns behind me, and John shoots him a menacing look. “You really expect for us to just enter a hole in the realms without questioning you?”
“I suppose not,” says Peter. “What I do expect is for your faerie dust to wear off shortly. As much as it would amuse me to sit back and watch you fall, dashing your mortal flesh upon the rocks below, I’m afraid my little pet here might cry over your deaths. And that truly would put a damper on my spirits. So I suggest you go on ahead.”
John grits his teeth, glancing at me. When I nod, he pulls Michael close and floats toward the distortion.
In a moment, a blink of the eye, my brothers disappear. As if they’d never existed at all.
“What do you think, Wendy Darling? Do you wish to follow them or would you rather dally in the outside world for a moment longer?”
Peter’s fingers play at my waist, flexing so that only a few hold me at a time.
Fear crawls up my throat. “I’d like to follow them now.”
“But you don’t know where we’re going. You never played my game. Tell me, don’t you ever wonder what it might feel like to fall?”
“No,” I say, the lie seeping through my clenched teeth.
How often did I forsake the clock tower’s rusty ladder to scale the outer facade, wondering just how many moments of sheer euphoria I would experience if I simply let go? If those fleeting seconds would be enough to cut through the watery numbness that had crusted over my soul.
But now that I’m this high up, the peaks of the mountains glimmering like the edges of white-hot blades, my toes are simmering with static, an unpleasant tingling overcoming my limbs.
“You’re shaking,” he whispers in my ear.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “I’m yours now. Why insist on torturing me?”
“Turn around, and I’ll tell you.”
His demand has my stomach roiling, but I’m at the mercy of his fading grip, so I do as he tells me.
I twist around, feeling his hands slip around my ribcage and toward my back as I roll in his grip, until my arms are wrapped around his neck, my chest tucked into his.
I squeeze my eyes shut, the pain of keeping myself in this position, my legs dangling at an odd angle, making my torso feel as if it’s about to shred apart.
“Open your eyes, Wendy Darling.”
“I can’t.”
“Open your eyes, or I’ll drop you and not bother to watch you all the way down.”
Fear lances my ribcage, and when I open my eyes, I meet his. Black and glinting with cruel mischief.
“Tell me, why did you not wish to open your eyes to look at me when you were so content staring at the ground below? Isn’t the ground more dangerous?”
His smirk is bitter, and a shiver snakes up my spine. I know good and well why I wished to keep my eyes shut. Because this close to the Shadow Keeper, his scent of amber and pine threatening to intoxicate me, his firm chest flush with mine, I can’t help but admire his beauty.
It’s tantalizing, like the flame that devours the moth, and the way Peter’s smiling down at me tells me he knows as much. Is well aware of the crippling effect his fae aura has on me as a human. It’s why the humans rose up and banished the fae all those years ago. Why so many humans blinded themselves in the war effort, so as not to be seduced by the fae’s tempting beauty.
“See, that’s not so bad, now is it?”
I notice now how long his dark eyelashes are, how they graze my forehead as he presses his face close to mine.
A calm sweeps over me, and it’s more terrifying than anything I’ve ever experienced. There’s a moment when I grasp for it, for the fear, but it’s slipping from my grip. As hard as I cling to it, it cuts free just the same.
“Do you remember the promise I made to you, Wendy Darling?” asks the Shadow Keeper, righting us in the sky so that we’re no longer perpendicular to the ground.
“No,” I lie.
A soft smile curves on his beautiful lips. “I promised I would take the fear away.”
That’s not entirely true. He said he’d take the pain away. Though I suppose to some, to me, they’re one and the same.
“What if I’m not ready?” I ask as we drift ever closer toward the distortion in the sky.
“Just let it go,” he tells me.
And his voice is so soothing, so intoxicating, I do.
I feel it fall, the fear I’ve carried so long on my shoulders. It drops like the contents of a package whose strings have come untied. I’m not sure how long it falls. If it ever hits the sharp edges of the mountains beneath, or if it’s caught by the wind and driven into the crashing waves. I don’t look down, because I can gaze at nothing but the engrossing pits of his eyes that I might just let swallow me.
“See? I told you that would feel better.”