Chapter 34
Iwake to the taut curve of muscular arms tethering me safely within the soft sheets, the ebbing of Peter’s chest pressed to my cheek. He’s awake. I can tell by the pattern of his breathing, even in my haze, the come-down from a high I hate to think I’ll never reach again.
My body feels worn out. A beaten rug that’s been slapped against the doorstep one too many times. Still, my sore flaccid limbs find comfort in the arms of the shadows.
“Have you slept at all?” I ask.
“Couldn’t,” Peter says, shifting me slightly so I can face him. His eyes are out of focus, and at first I wonder if he took the faerie dust, too. Perhaps he’s simply drunk on our nearness, high on the thrill of protecting me. I think I like that. “If I had, you would have simply floated away.”
“Are you being literal or figurative?” I groan.
“The poets had a tendency of being both.”
“You speak of poets like they’re an extinct species.”
Peter chuckles. “When was the last time you read a poem from this century that made you feel like this?” He trails a finger down my spine. My skin isn’t exposed, but it might as well be for how sensitive it is to his touch.
A soft smile tugs at my lips. “I don’t think a poem’s ever made me feel like this.”
“Then you haven’t read enough poetry,” says Peter, leaning in so that his mouth barely brushes my forehead. He lingers there for a moment, and my heart stops with the idea that he might kiss me, but he doesn’t. He just plays with the curve of my spine, teasing me in the most torturously wonderful way.
I’m not high from the faerie dust anymore. I don’t think so, at least. But the calm that seeps into my muscles isn’t natural. Not for me, at least. I’m not sure if it’s normal for anyone else, how others go about their day inhabiting themselves.
For years, I’ve successfully maintained the facade of calm, but it’s come at the cost of not feeling much of anything. Delicate happiness swells in my chest now, but even in Peter’s arms, it feels fleeting. Like a hummingbird buzzing in my chest, one that I feel I must trap in the cage of my ribs, suturing the gaps with tough and implacable skin lest it flutter away, leaving me wondering after it forever, grasping at this moment of peace for the remainder of my days.
“Why do you have a book on etiquette sitting on your bedside table?” I ask him, glancing at the leather book I noted the time I searched his room.
“I needed a reliable source on what it was to be a gentleman,” he says. “That way I could be certain I’d never turn into one by accident.”
“You did drug me, I suppose,” I say teasingly. “Not very gentlemanly.”
“You didn’t seem to mind too much.” He says it nonchalantly, but that doesn’t change the fact that until last night, Peter had been hesitant to give me any more than a minuscule dose. My throat goes dry remembering the shadows swelling over me. “Why do the shadows come after me?” I ask. “Why have they always come after me?”
Peter’s throat bobs.
“You weren’t always the shadows that whispered to me, were you?” I ask, breathless, thinking of the night terrors I experienced as a child, the ones that often sent me into a fever, from which I’d awake to my mother pressing a cold rag against my forehead.
Peter swallows, then shakes his head. “No. When I’d come to speak to you from the window, that was me. Or, my shadow self, at least. But I wasn’t the one who caused your nightmares.”
“Why did you let me believe that you were?”
“I didn’t want you to be frightened,” he says.
I shift. “I was still frightened. Just of you. Just of…” I stop myself before the words come out. The words that admit the spark in my chest I’ve stoked for longer than I care to admit to myself.
Peter averts his eyes, and I fight with the discomfort swelling in my belly. “I don’t want to ruin this moment,” Peter says, and I almost wonder if he’s sad.
I offer him a weak smile. “I don’t know when else I’m going to feel much safer.”
Something lights in his eyes, and it might be my imagination, but I feel as though he holds me tighter, claiming me in defiance of the shadows that so desire me.
“I’ve suspected since the night I found you at the warehouse that you might be a shadow-soother,” says Peter. My rounded ears perk at the term. It’s unfamiliar to me, which is a bit shocking given how much reading I did on shadows as a child. “Not all shadows are simply a by-product of an object blocking the light. Sometimes, shadows become infused with magic.”
“Like you?” I ask.
Peter shakes his head. “I’m a fae who was given a shadow form. What I’m speaking of…it’s almost like the opposite. A shadow coming to life.”
“How?”
Peter grins. “Magic.”
I frown. This isn’t exactly the type of answer that would assuage my brother John, nor am I fond of it.
Peter’s grin falters, and I get the sense that he doesn’t want to tell me.
“You don’t have to protect everyone around you from pain, you know.”
Peter smiles, wiping my hair from my forehead. “But it’s such a naughty thing, pain.”
“Sometimes necessary, though,” I whisper, though in my heart I don’t know if I believe it. Not when a night soaring in the blur of faerie dust has me wondering if pain is imperative to living at all.
My mouth salivates. Embarrassed, I swallow the craving, untangling myself from Peter’s arms and propping myself on the edge of the bed, hoping sitting upright will clear my head. Peter follows my lead. When he maneuvers next to me, our legs brush.
“It’s a dark sort of magic that creates Wraiths,” says Peter. “Shadows infused with life. It often requires someone or something to undergo such agony that the pain becomes palpable enough for the shadows to latch onto, to feed off of. Those who wish to create Wraiths often do so by sacrificing living beings, though some Wraiths are made through happenstance. An eager shadow that happens to be in the same place where intense pain occurs. They’re often found in old houses, where many have suffered agony as they watched at bedsides as their loved ones passed.”
“Makes sense as to why they were everywhere in our manor,” I say. “It’s been in our family for generations now.” I think of the ballroom and wonder how many shadows were brought to life on the night of the masquerade. My stomach rocks at the thought.
Peter nods, contemplatively. “There are some fae gifted with the ability not only to speak to the Wraiths, but also to wield them. If you can hear them, you likely have fae somewhere in your bloodline.”
I jut my chin backward.
“What? Disappointed?” Peter asks teasingly.
“No, just surprised. I didn’t know fae…” My cheeks blush.
“You didn’t know fae what?”
“I was always under the impression that the fae of old found humans undesirable. I’m surprised one took a liking to my ancestor, that’s all.” I’m not sure why, but my mind flashes back to the captain, to his utter disgust as he beheld me approaching him. Why would I be interested in dancing with a spoiled heiress who looks as if she’s hardly been weaned?
My stomach sours, but I tuck the memory away. No reason to let it crawl through the snug hold Peter has on me now.
“Who gave you that idea?” Peter asks, his eyes glinting.
My blood turns up the heat a few notches, so much so that I almost feel feverish. “Just a few books.”
“First the poets, now you’re believing fiction. We need to get you better read, Wendy Darling.”
“They didn’t tell me much about Shadow Keepers, either. Or, they did, but now I’m wondering if they could have provided false information. Perhaps you could educate me,” I say, breathless.
“Do you think I deserve that honor?” Peter asks.
“I think you deserve so much more than you give yourself credit for.” It’s not the couth flirtatious response my mother would have taught me. Not the type of thing you say to a man whose attentions you’d like to capture. It’s too honest. Too raw. Too open. The type of thing that makes men lose interest.
But I was never good at maintaining men’s interest, anyway.
Peter’s eyes flicker with something I don’t recognize. “You’re wrong, you know.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You think I can be more for you. Someone I can’t be. You think I’ll be your knight in shining armor.”
“I’m tired of knights in shining armor. They never came to rescue me from my tower. Only you did that.”
“Did I rescue you, Wendy Darling? Or did I steal you away?”
Our lips are close now. It’s a feat they don’t touch with how I’m trembling. “I’m starting to think that perhaps I needed to be stolen.”
The edges of Peter’s lips twitch. “I’m inclined to agree. You’re mine, Wendy Darling. Don’t ever start thinking otherwise.”
My breath catches.
“Does that frighten you?” he asks, blue eyes lingering on my mouth.
My answer comes without hesitation. “Yes.”
“And what about this?” he asks, brushing his lips over the edge of mine. “Does this frighten you?”
I don’t answer. Don’t have to. Because the way I’m trembling brings a sly grin to his face.
“Good,” he says, lingering so close it’s almost more intimate than actually touching.
“I thought you said you didn’t want me,” I breathe.
“I say a lot of things.”
When I can’t stand it anymore, I lean in.
Peter’s mouth is ready for mine, and his lips drag me into the kiss, suffusing me with a greedy abandon I can’t quite contain.
It’s lightning and falling and crashing and picking up my broken bones to do it all over again. Something slides into place within me, the rightness of it all, but also the wrongness. The wrongness that this is the first time I’m tasting his kiss, when it should have occurred long ago. When I’ve been his since the moment he extended his hand in that clock tower.
It’s the first time we touched all over again, except this time, instead of my touch stitching his shadowed form into flesh, it’s the other way around.
His touch unravels me. I’m the spool, his kiss what sends me spinning across the floor, the tight thread around my heart unwinding. When Peter fists the fabric of my shirt at my back, I feel as if he’ll never let me go.
“I want to hear you say it,” he whispers to me between kisses.
I don’t even have to ask what, because my lips are already forming the words. “I’m yours.”
Peter’s ravenous grin presses against my mouth in answer.
“Wendy?”
Shock barrels through me at the sound of my brother’s voice. I startle, my limbs doing their utmost to put as much distance between myself and Peter. But Peter’s hands are still firm on my back, keeping me close though he pulls himself away from the kiss. It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t let me go, given I was lurching straight for his bedside table, where I might have hit my head.
“John, I—”
“I thought you were drugged.” His words are directed at me, but his stare is locked on Peter.
Unsteady laughter rattles through my chest as I wipe sweat from my brow. “Obviously, the effects have worn off.”
“Is it—obvious?” John asks, sweeping his gaze over to me. I watch his attention linger on my trembling hands, but we both know the shaking has nothing to do with the faerie dust.
“Yes, it is,” says Peter, though he slips his hands off of me, pushing himself off the bed. “What do you need?”
John blinks, caught off guard by the way Peter doesn’t try to argue with him. “Simon wanted me to remind you that tonight’s the blood moon.”
Peter actually blanches, but the effect only lasts for a moment. He spins on his heel, taking my hand and planting a kiss on my knuckles that has my face heating even more than it is already. “I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this later,” he whispers to me with a wink.
He grabs a satchel from his closet, then turns to leave. I jump from the bed, but that turns out to be a mistake because my legs are still weak from the aftereffects of the faerie dust. In a moment, he’s at my side, catching me before I fall.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m afraid my tasks as a Shadow Keeper aren’t limited to Neverland.” He says it with a quick glance at John, so I assume he’ll tell me more once we can be alone again.
Then he sets me gently on the side of the bed and dissipates into shadows. In a blink, he’s gone, leaving me alone with John.
I open my mouth to explain, but he beats me to it. “Glad to see what happened last night actually worked in your favor,” he says. “At least one of us ended up having a pleasant evening.”
His words puncture my throat, but it’s his caustic tone that twists the blade. John never speaks to me like this. I bite my lip. “How’s Michael?”
John snorts. “How do you think?” He crosses his arms, highlighting streaks of red across his forearms. The lantern light flickers, revealing more scratch marks on his neck.
Guilt pricks at my stomach, but anger, too. “I thought you were going off the assumption I’m too drugged up to think. You can’t have it both ways, you know.”
“Fine,” John says. “I’ll let you choose for me: Should I hate Peter for taking advantage of you when you’re not in your right mind? Or should I hate you for having a tryst with our captor while I spent the evening trying to console our brother after you almost choked him to death?”
“John—”
“I’m fine either way. You just let me know.”