Chapter 29
The wind whirls through my hair, whipping it into my face as Peter launches us skyward. The stars are out tonight, painting streaks of light across the sky as we race toward them. It’s stunning up here, and exhilaration fills my chest, opening my lungs from their usual constricted position as we soar up and up and up.
We’re so high now. High above the troubles and fears and aches and pains that compel me on the ground below. If I peer hard enough, I can see the speckles of light glowing from the reaping tree. Can see the stretch of sand where I pound my feet into the ground to stomp out the pain.
Peter tightens his powerful arms around me, and we leave them all behind, until they’re fading speckles on the shore. Just as small and indistinguishable as one grain of sand from the next.
Light streaks around us, the colors of the painted night sky filling my head, my eyes, my chest, my everything, until Peter and I swim in a world of color, one that’s only our own.
This is his world, I realize. The world above the ground, the world of escape and joy and bliss and…
And laughter.
That’s the sound coming from my lips. Free and joyous and bursting from my lungs that have held it captive for so long. I’m laughing, and the sound is so unfamiliar to me, it’s like hearing music for the first time. The plucking of a harp string to a soul that’s never tasted the depths of its tremors.
I’m laughing, and the sky is swarming with color.
I’m soaring.
Rather, Peter is soaring, and he’s taking me with him, allowing me to taste the chill of the air as it whips against my face. It’s not that I haven’t flown in his arms before. But the night he stole me away from the clock tower, I’d just witnessed my parents’ deaths.
No.
I won’t think about them now.
Not when, for the first time since my mother told me my body belonged to the shadows, my lungs swell to their capacity. No weight bears against my chest, squeezing me until I can’t get a full breath of air.
Up here, my feet don’t touch the ground, and there’s a weightlessness to me that’s intoxicating.
There’s something about Peter that’s intoxicating, too.
I’d forgotten when I grabbed his hand the effect his fae glamour has upon me. The way it seeps into my veins like brandy into the bloodstream, filling me with a buzzing, limitless warmth.
I’d forgotten, but I’m glad I forgot.
Because once, just this once, I want to let myself feel this. I want to drink up the blissful attraction that is Peter and not deprive myself of the intoxicating sensation just because I’m afraid.
“You’re beautiful, Wendy Darling,” says Peter, whispering something wonderful into my ear, his cheek grazing mine as he does, undeterred by the Mark against my skin.
“You can hardly see me the way I’m turned away from you,” I whisper back.
“I don’t have to see you. I feel you.”
I laugh, this time nervously. “That’s hardly the same thing.”
“I’m not talking about this,” he says, stroking my belly where he has a firm grip on me. “Or this,” he says, burrowing his face into my neck so that his lips almost graze my skin. “I’m talking about you. About the aura you’re putting off.”
“Humans don’t have auras.”
“Not the boring ones,” he says, gently amused. “You, though—you’ve got that little bit left in you.”
“Perhaps it’s from communing with the shadows,” I say.
“Perhaps.”
I’d say I want to drown in how it feels to be tucked into Peter’s chest, to stare down at the ground far below us and feel my toes tingle with that pleasant numbness. Like my feet have fallen asleep, but without the pain.
There was a time in my life where I’d have let myself drown in a sensation like this.
But I don’t want to drown. I want to drink. I want this moment, this feeling, to slip down my throat and fill my empty, starving belly.
“Wendy Darling,” Peter says, leveling out as his wings send a gentle, constant breeze flapping into my face.
“Yes?” I ask, breathless.
“I’m going to ask you a question, and I’m going to need you to trust me enough to answer yes.”
“Okay.”
“Would you like me to drop you?”
My heart should plummet, and it does.
But I think I might like how it feels to fall.
“Yes,” I whisper. And it’s as if I’m parched and he’s asked me if I need fresh water. As if I’m starving and he’s offered me a plate of hot bread, freshly pulled from the oven and buttered.
“That’s what I like to hear,” he says.
Then Peter lets go.
All my lifeI’ve climbed. Higher and higher, chasing that raging numbness that would waft over my body, my limbs.
All my life, I thought it was the scaling I was grasping for.
All my life, I’ve been wrong. Sidling up to the precipice, too afraid to grasp what my heart truly desired. I’ve been scaling, thinking the top of the mountain was what I sought.
When all I ever truly wanted to do was jump.
Fall.
Plummet.
Feel my body cut through the air in a hasty descent toward the ground. Hear nothing but my heart pounding against my ears from the inside, the wind from the outside. A steady thrum in a world of color and chaos. To see the ground coming ever closer, closing in on me.
To stare down my future and feel the thrill rather than the fear.
It lasts for a few seconds and an entirety. A moment frozen—no, separate—from time. Like the space distinct from time I’ve always searched for in my bed, not wanting to wake from my slumber.
A place where the ticking minute hand can’t get me.
Steady, warm hands catch me, and then I’m floating in Peter’s arms, my breathing labored with exhilaration as I stare into his beautiful face.
A smile breaks across it, and I imagine it’s as crazed and wild as mine.
“Again,” I gasp.
Peter shakes his head in wonder, as drunk on the high as I am.
“Whatever you say, Wendy Darling.”
The next timePeter drops me, I’m prepared. I use the descent to twirl in the air, noting how my body feels with absolutely nothing touching it other than my clothes. Nothing bearing down on me from above, no weight tethering me to the ground below. It’s like iron shackles have been weighing my weary body down for years, and now I’m free.
By the time Peter and I take a break, I’ve lost count of how many times he’s dropped me.
How many times he’s caught me.
“I should have let you do that the first time you asked,” I admit, and that only incenses the mischief in his glowing blue eyes.
“I’d say I wish you had, but then would it be as thrilling tonight?” He brushes a finger through my hair as he says it, tucking my hair behind my ear. Then he spins me around to face him. I have to cross my ankles behind his back to keep my feet from dangling awkwardly.
“Would you do me the pleasure of allowing me a dance?”
“I don’t know how good of a dance partner I’ll be up here,” I giggle.
Peter’s eyes twinkle. “Good thing I have a solution to that.”
He dips one hand into the pouch at his side, keeping me fastened to his chest with the other. When he removes his finger, it’s coated with glimmering dust, though I can’t help but notice that it’s less than he commanded either Michael or John to take when it was time for them to fly.
“This should be enough to keep your feet steady,” he explains, pressing his finger to my lips, his eyes flickering when my tongue touches his fingertip.
A shattering warmth washes over me, cleansing me of the pain of Freckles’s death, of my parents’ deaths, though I’m not sure if it’s from Peter’s touch at my mouth, or the effects of the faerie dust, or a combination of both. When I gaze behind him at the sky unfolding beyond us, I can’t help but notice that the colors seem sharper, though the shapes of the objects on the ground below are less defined.
Definitely the faerie dust then.
I now see why he keeps it away from the Lost Boys, only using it on them in emergencies, like with John and Michael or when the nightstalker assaulted me at the warehouse. He’d given me such a minuscule dose then, I’d hardly registered it.
I can’t help but wonder if he’d give me another taste if I asked him. Before I can make my request, he interlocks his fingers through mine, keeping the other firmly at my hip.
And then we dance.
It’s like no dancing I’ve ever done, the carefully calculated waltzes of the aristocracy. Peter whirls me around like I’m a puppet at the end of his string, spinning me in a blur of dizzying streaks of starlight.
There’s nothing at all. Nothing but warmth in my chest and lights glittering around us and Peter’s touch.
It’s lovely and wonderful, and I never want it to end.
It’s his glamour enchanting you, says my mother’s voice, warning me nightly as a child, well intentioned as she filled my soul with dread.
But nothing my mother feared was as dreadful as what has actually come to pass. She spent her life warning me of Peter, when she should have been warning me of sullen captains and their sharp edges and their thirst for retribution. She should have warned me about the necessary evils that I’d be subjected to as someone whose life depended on ensnaring a husband.
I don’t want to think about that either.
So I don’t.
I dance.