Chapter 45
Itell myself there has to be an explanation.
Peter saved my life. Peter set me free. I owe him the conversation, at least. A chance to explain what was written in the journals.
As I’m pacing his floor, wading through my swirling thoughts, a voice calls out from beyond the shadows of the tunnels.
It’s calling my name.
Wendy Darling, it whispers.
Did I take my dose of faerie dust today? I can’t seem to remember.
My bare feet halt in place as a chill snakes up my spine. Slowly, I tread to Peter’s door and peek into the hall. At the end of Peter’s hall, there’s a tangle of roots that make up the structure of the wall.
The voice whispers my name on the wind, and the roots unfurl. Behind them gapes the mouth of a dark tunnel. Tears sting at my eyes as dread strums at my heart. The voice is wrapped in silky tendrils, like Peter when he used to speak to me from his shadow form. I bite my lip, unsure, but the shadows call again.
And I’ve always listened.
The tunnel is smallerthan the hall, so I have to crouch to enter. Thorns tug at my hair as the top of my head scrapes the ceiling. The further into the tunnel I go, the more the walls constrict around me, pressing in on my shoulders.
It’s almost as if only shadows are supposed to be able to crawl through here.
Voices echo through the tunnel, but they’re different from the voice that led me here. The voice that called my name was multi-layered, as if comprised of several voices. These are more distinct—one sultry, one familiar.
Eventually, the tunnel curves, and I peek around it.
Beyond, in an alcove where the tunnel opens into a cave, is Peter. Except it’s not the Peter I’ve come to know, but the Peter who came to take me away from the clock tower. His body is encased in shadows, his wings ethereal plumes that bat erratically, writhing in the darkness.
He’s on the ground, kneeling.
That’s the most terrifying part of all.
Because he’s kneeling before the source of the other voice.
It’s coming from a woman.
Shadows form into sensual curves, hugging the woman’s body tightly. At once, I’m struck by her beauty, though faintly, in the back of my mind, I recognize the error in this, given I’m unable to make out the features that would make her so. She stands above Peter on a dais, looking down upon him.
I don’t know how I know this, but I get the impression there’s a sense of derision on her face, underneath all those swirling shadows.
There’s an alluring beauty there, and I’m a child who can’t seem to help but stand on her tiptoes and touch her fingers to the burner.
I steel myself, used to Peter’s glamour more than I was when I first arrived. I bite down on my lip until I draw blood, but at least the pain keeps me tethered to reality. The reality that this shadow is dangerous and doesn’t care for my well-being.
“Tell me, Peter, why is it that you appear so displeased to see me?” pouts the woman, tracing a shadowed finger in a trail along Peter’s shoulder blade. Even underneath the shadows, I can sense him tense at her touch. Bile coils at my throat when she takes her sharp fingernail, protruding in inky rivulets from the shadows, and traces it up his neck, resting it at his chin to force him to look at her.
“You once sought me out. Do you not remember those days? How eager you were to find me when all the others claimed I didn’t exist?”
“I didn’t revere you then as I should have,” says Peter, the same emptiness in his voice as the night I chased him up the cliff and found him mourning the dead Lost Boys in his own peculiar way.
The shadow woman tsks. “You act as if you revere me now.”
“I fear you,” says Peter.
“Hmm. If only it were as impossible for fae to lie in this realm as in another I’m privy to. Perhaps I should find a way to set the same curse upon you, my love.”
“Is that what you want? For me to speak the truth?” asks Peter.
“Why would I wish for you to lie to me?”
“You always ask if I find you beautiful. If you wished to know the truth, you would not ask such foolish questions.”
I expect the woman to rear back with a shriek, but she doesn’t. Her shadows curl around her like the edges of a smile. “I always did like you, you know. Uninhibited by what shackles the rest of us.”
“You’re partly to blame for that,” Peter says.
The female laughs again. “I’ve only ever given you the gifts you requested. Have I ever gifted you with anything you did not beg from me with your very own lips?”
Something about the way she says beg has a pang of envy roiling through me. The sensuality of her tone. I sense that if I could see her eyes, they’d be ravenous with desire.
“Do not act as if I’ve denied anything you’ve ever asked,” she says. “Speaking of which, tell me, Peter, why have you yet to take advantage of my most recent gift?”
When Peter remains silent, she slices his chin with her fingernail.
He doesn’t even flinch.
“You’ve yet to take her, but why?” she says. “When you’ve craved the Darling girl for so long?”
Shock barrels through me, and hurt too, the shadow woman’s words directly contradicting what Peter told me the night we first danced in the sky, that he never desired me until I came to the island. That he barely remembers visiting me as a child.
I wait for him to contradict her. To explain to her exactly what he explained to me, but again he keeps silent.
I linger, telling my feet they should go. That anything else I might garner from this conversation will only harm me. That if the shadow woman realizes I’ve been eavesdropping, she’ll be vengeful indeed. But my feet are plastered to the floor, stuck in the quicksand of my own curiosity. The kind that wishes to wound me, it seems.
Besides. I have to know about Thomas. About Freckles and Joel and the man whose life I took. I have to know if I’ve fallen asleep in the arms of a murderer.
If that morning on the beach, I soaked my hands in the wrong man’s blood.
“It couldn’t be that you’re holding out for someone else, could it?” asks the shadow woman, and I catch it—her desperation. It’s in the way her voice hikes a bit. It’s not love or adoration for Peter, but a desire for conquest. The longing to be longed for.
When I first arrived, Peter told me the Sister has no friends. Only lovers and slaves. I can’t help but wonder if some hold both titles.
I think I might be ill. What all has Peter been required to do while within the servitude of this woman?
But then I remember the bargain that Peter could use against me at any moment. What might I be required to do in the service of his pleasures?
You’ve craved her, is what the shadow woman said. For how long, my mind wonders, and I’m scrambling to make it mean anything other than what I think. That he lied to me in the trees, that he’s wanted me since childhood.
That Peter is sick, and that his craving for me is not the same way I crave him.
If that’s the case, then with the bargain he holds over me, not only could he force himself upon me, he could keep me from fighting back. Could trick me into thinking I’m enjoying it.
A horrible thought crosses my mind.
What if Peter has already taken his side of the bargain? What if he’s already taken me up on it and commanded me to forget? If he’s commanded me to obey whatever he asks, he could technically wipe my memories. He could whisper in my ear that I was developing feelings for him. He could be the one controlling my attraction to him, my trust.
But no.
The Sister doesn’t seem to think he’s taken me. Surely she’d know if he had.
But he still lied about hardly noticing me all those years when he was in his shadow form. I can’t quite wrap my mind around the logic of it all. Why lie when, through the bargain, he could make me believe anything he wanted me to? It doesn’t make sense. Or perhaps it does, and the anxiety of the moment is making it difficult to fit the pieces together.
“I would have taken her many times,” Peter says, his wings rippling, “but my other half refuses to allow it on anyone else’s terms but hers. He wishes to woo her, it seems.”
My heart stops in my chest, my breathing too, chills snaking up my arm.
He’s not himself when he’s like this, I remind myself. No matter how many times I repeat it, I’m not confident it will be enough. Not when his journal is tucked into my inner coat pocket, the words inside as heavy as iron, as incriminating as a signed confession.
“Is there anything else?” Peter asks, returning to his previous state, on one knee in front of the shadow woman. She paces around him, stalking him like a cat would its prey. As she does, she traces her fingers lovingly, tenderly up his back.
Peter’s shadows lurch with every curve of his spine that her fingers travel. My stomach lurches with him as my pity for his slavery grapples with my anxiety over what Peter might have done on her behalf.
“You’ve grown displeased with me,” she says. “Increasingly so, since administering the boys’ unfortunate fates.”
The way the shadows leaching from the hem of her gown curve toward Peter has my stomach reeling. I hold my breath and wait for him to deny his part in it.
That moment never comes.
Instead, Peter just says, “You know I don’t like messes.”
It’s like I’m being stabbed through the ribs. I have to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out in pain.
“I’m surprised their deaths matter to you, of all people,” the Sister responds as I bite back silent sobs.
“I don’t like losing what belongs to me. Any more than I’d like losing the pair to my sock,” says Peter.
The apathy with which he says it infiltrates my chest as the boys’ faces flash across my mind. Thomas. Freckles. Joel.
I remind myself Peter’s different in this form.
As if that will ever be enough.
“Don’t act as if I didn’t warn you that this might happen. Your kind might have ascribed the term Fates to my sisters and I, but make no mistake, Fate itself is a different force entirely. My sisters and I can only coax it in a certain direction. We cannot force its hand.”
Peter’s cruel laugh echoes through the cave. “You wouldn’t call strangling one boy and stabbing two forcing Fate’s hand?”
“Those boys were ill. You knew from the beginning you might not save all of them. All we can do is try to cut off the disease before it continues to spread. I’ll be honest; I’d hoped it would have ended with Thomas, but you should have killed him long before you did. You had better be careful, Peter. Or I’ll start to wonder whether you’re up to the task, or if I should consider Neverland a failed trial altogether.”
My cheeks drain of color at her implications. At the images racing through my mind—Neverland dissolving into shadows, the realm unraveling with the boys still trapped within it.
This time, Peter cranes his neck up to look at her as she steps in front of him. “And you should know better than anyone else why I am capable.”
Again, I get the sense the awful creature is smiling. “Of course. You’re right. How could I doubt you?”
She takes her hand off his back, then turns as if to go. She must think better of it, because she says, “And Peter?”
“Yes, my lady?”
“I want the last of the ill ones dead before morning.”
In a whirl of shadows and smoke, she disappears.
Immediately, Peter collapses.
His shadows waft off of him like smoke being driven away in the wind, until all that’s left is his pale flesh, chafed by the whirl of shadows. He clutches his fists to the ground, back still facing me, the darkness of the cavern obscuring any part of him I would feel guilty about witnessing, especially since he doesn’t know I’m here.
His breathing is labored, but I get the impression it’s more out of relief that she’s gone than pain from the transition. Some shadows remain, clinging to his spine around where his wings fuse, but when he moves, the light shifts and casts a glow upon his bare shoulder.
Rather, it reveals a glow glimmering on his back.
What I thought were shadows appear more like a tattoo.
Except it’s not a tattoo at all.
It’s a Mating Mark.