Chapter 33
Ihardly sleep that night.
I hardly sleep for several nights.
The man is there, the man who took Thomas’s life, and every time I close my eyes, he’s waiting for me behind my darkened lids. He’s sneaking in the shadows, slipping his hands around Thomas’s neck, digging his fingernails into the boy’s flesh. Fashioning the Reaper’s fox into Freckles’s cheek. And then I’m there, clawing at the man, begging him to tell me why. The man only laughs, and then he rips away the picture of Thomas I keep folded up in my pocket, shredding it to pieces with yellowed claws that turn into talons. He’s taking the talons to Peter’s wings, carving gash marks in his flesh in the shape of a smile. It bleeds and bleeds and bleeds, and the sand laps it up as if it’s parched from only ever consuming the salty waves, the water that’s too heavy and thick ever to quench thirst.
Somehow, the blood always ends up staining my hands.
I’m tortured every night until the visions slip into the daytime.
I wake, though is it truly waking if I never fall asleep? If I wake to bleeding palms from where I’ve tried to scrape the man’s death off of them? From where I’ve tried to pry my own fingers from the blade.
John worries about me. So does Michael, who often wakes in the night sobbing as he tries and fails to shake me awake from the awful dreamscapes that haunt me.
I haven’t brought up the nightmares to Peter yet, but he watches me carefully, his eyes often darting to my hands, which are never quite able to scar.
One night I wake to wrestling Michael to the floor. He’s scratching my face, John screaming at me as I press my hands into Michael’s throat, trying to strangle the stranger before he can sneak up behind Thomas. Before I have to watch the boy die again.
Shock and shame overwhelm me when I come to my senses and realize what I’ve done. Michael scrambles away from me, his body writhing this way and that, like he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs in space. Doesn’t know the difference between the ground and the ceiling. The difference between my damaging touch upon his throat and the collarless neckline of his shirt, into which he now claws his fingers, trying to rip it away. Like he thinks it might choke him as well.
I loose a scream, covering my mouth with my hand lest the sharp sound harm Michael further. He covers his ears, wailing, until John drags me by my armpits out of the room and into the hall.
“Wait for me here,” he says calmly, though there’s a hint of panic in his voice. I catch the downward twitch of pity on his face as he looks over me. Then he returns to our brother, where he’ll surely wrap him up tightly in his arms until Michael knows he’s safe again, until he stops clawing at his neck, at invisible hands that no longer choke him.
I sob, my tears staining my palms. My palms that I hate. I hate them for driving the knife into that man’s back. For placing themselves on Michael’s innocent skin, for strangling the air out of my sweet, innocent brother.
Regret and shame and self-loathing beat at my insides, threatening to tear me apart, and though I try to keep my voice down as to not upset Michael further, the sobs puncture my throat in pulsing staccato, the panicked labor of a war drum.
A hand finds its way to my shoulder, and when I look up to find John, I find Victor instead. His long, dark eyelashes frame eyes black as soot, but there’s understanding in them. Ink curving into letters meant to be read.
“I’ll get Peter,” he says, then goes sprinting down the hallway.
It feels like hours later when the dark silhouette appears. At first I think Peter is in his shadow from, but it’s just a trick of the light. His eyes are the same familiar blue when he kneels down and lifts me into his arms and carries me away.
“No, not me,” I whisper. “Michael. I hurt Michael. You need to help him.”
“John’s taking care of Michael,” says Peter, a softness in his voice I’ve yet to hear. There’s no lighthearted teasing in his tone, nor is there that utter lack of feeling.
“I hurt him. Michael. He’ll never forgive me.”
“You’re his sister,” Peter says. “Of course he’ll forgive you.”
“No.” The word grinds past my teeth. “You don’t know him like I do. He won’t understand when I apologize. I won’t be able to explain to him why I did it. That I didn’t mean to. I can’t tell him it was an accident. All he’s going to know is that I hurt him.”
“He’ll forget.”
A shudder ripples through me. “Michael never forgets.”
Peter carries me into a dark room. I don’t have to glance around to know that it’s his. I can smell the scent of amber and incense—the same scent from the night I snooped in here and Tink attacked me.
I find myself wishing her claws had run deeper. That she had succeeded in her purpose of killing me. Then I never would have killed that man.
I never would have hurt Michael.
The memory of my hands on his throat wrings another scream from mine.
“Wendy,” Peter says, voice uneven. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him sound like he doesn’t know what to do.
There’s someone else in the room. Victor, judging by his soft whispers. He must have waited here for Peter to return. “Can you help her?”
“I—” Peter’s at a loss for words, and when another vision of the man hits me, it’s like he’s here, in the room with us. I writhe my limbs, seeking to free myself from Peter’s grip, because now Peter is the stranger, and he’s going to kill Victor.
“Run, Victor,” I say, shadows whirling around my vision.
“What’s happening to her?” I faintly hear Victor say.
“She’s had a traumatic experience,” says Peter.
“We’ve all had traumatic experiences. None of us started hallucinating,” Victor spits back.
Peter pauses, grabbing my hand as I go to pluck out his eye. His grip feels constricting, makes me lash even harder. Shadows swirl around him, but they’re not his shadows, they’re the shadows from the storehouse where he keeps the faerie dust. They’ve come for me again, come to swallow me in my sleep. They wriggle themselves into my throat and choke me. I start retching, and Victor’s pitch soars. “Peter. You’ve got to do something for her.”
Footsteps as someone else runs into the room. “I heard screaming. What’s—Wendy?”
Simon appears above me, horror plastered on his face. Shadows crawl into his nostrils, turning his beautiful eyes crimson.
I claw at him, too.
And then the shadows take me under.
For a moment, all is dark. And then I see him—a dark figure clutching, overpowering a struggling boy—Thomas. A tendrilled arm shackles his neck from behind as the boy kicks and writhes, then goes limp. Faintly, I think I hear crying, but Thomas is already dead, and his killer is shaking over his body.
“YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING,” someone bellows.
I’m still trying to decipher the killer’s face, when something soft like powdered sugar and sweet like honeysuckles blooms on my tongue, and my entire being is blanketed in the sweet oblivion of light.
Faerie dust is morebeautiful than I’d ever imagined it.
The night I danced in the heavens with Peter, I’d only gotten a taste, the smallest droplet of nectar. He hadn’t wanted to give me too much, and I’d understood as soon as he pressed it to my tongue.
I don’t understand anymore. I don’t understand why Peter held any of it back.
It starts on the wet tip of my tongue, but it blossoms everywhere. I feel it before it even hits the back of my mouth. I trace it tingling in my cheeks, where it enters my bloodstream. It’s a kaleidoscope of colors, like the kind my father used to make for me when I was a child.
Most importantly, it’s nothing at all.
Because that’s what color is. It might seem like something, but it’s only perception. You can’t reach out and touch color. You can’t hold it in your hand. You can attach it to something else, but you can’t run your fingers through the rainbow, only ever chase it.
I don’t have to chase it anymore.
Because it’s inside me.
It is me.
I’m weightless. Must be, by the way Peter’s muscles have to tense to hold me down.
I don’t want to be held down. I want to be set free. Contentment keeps me from worrying about telling him as much.
Faintly, as if it’s happening to someone else, I sense him tuck me into the bed and pull the covers over me, but as I said, I’m weightless, and soon my body floats over the bed, my mind lost in a whirl of light.
I don’t mind. Because I’m the only one here in this clover field of blinding color.
Slowly, I feel the blanket, which is not at all weightless like me, slip off my body.
“Is she okay?” someone asks. I don’t hear the answer, but I’m not exactly listening.
Something warm wraps around me. Two warm somethings. Arms bring me to a firm chest, then lower me until my side hits the soft mattress again.
The sturdy body lands there with me, though more intentionally, anchoring me when I so wish to soar. Again, I’m too content to bother telling him as much.
“She’ll be fine,” says a voice that doesn’t sound like he believes himself. “You can go now.”
I don’t hear footsteps.
“Now,” says the voice, and there’s a hesitant shuffle before the boys leave.
Light shuffles behind me on the other side of my eyelids, but here is timeless, and I can’t tell for how long. I don’t really care to count. Eventually, the darkness of Peter’s bedroom begins to leak into the corners of my vision. I’m not upset by this. They’re just the regular sort of shadows. Not the types that whisper of murder and scream in anguish.
I can feel him next to me. The unsteady rhythm of his chest against my back tells me he’s more alert than I am.