Chapter 49
“Simon?” I ask, my feet begging me to step away, my soul tethered to the life of my brothers. “What’s going on?”
It’s not Simon who answers.
“We didn’t want to have to hurt you. Everyone likes you, Winds,” says Nettle, and his voice is all innocence, no cruelty. “We like John and Michael too.”
“I didn’t tell John anything,” I say in a rush. “He knows I wanted to get us out, but I didn’t tell him anything more than that.”
Nettle blinks back tears. “He was getting close anyway. He would have figured it out, eventually. I followed him at night, when you were gone. Did you really think he didn’t notice? You didn’t wonder why he said nothing?”
Realization dawns on me. While I was out visiting the captain, John was doing his own investigating.
“I don’t understand why you’re protecting Peter. If the two of you know what he plans to do to you.”
Nettle shakes his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Wendy. Peter’s the best of us, but it means that he was never going to be strong enough to do what had to be done.”
My heart stops in my chest. “Peter didn’t kill Thomas?”
Slowly, Nettle shakes his head.
“How do you know?”
Simon lifts his face, his fingers still twined in Michael’s hand. “Because I did.”
My breath leaves me, panic overtaking my bones. My mind tries to picture it—innocent, kind Simon killing Thomas in cold blood. Strangling the air from his lungs, but I can’t picture it. Can’t imagine it. Simon, who was the first to befriend me. Simon, who talked and joked with me for long hours as we went on hunts.
“No. No, Simon, you couldn’t. You couldn’t have…”
“Winds, please,” he says, his face distressed and pleading. “Please don’t make this worse. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean…” His eyes go out of focus, like they’re trying to roll back in his head, but he’s willing them to stay put. “We were just roughhousing, like we always did. It was nothing. I got him in a headlock, then I…” His breathing goes ragged. “I didn’t know. Didn’t realize what I was doing. I guess I held on too long. We were just having fun, I swear. I didn’t mean to…”
The picture swarms in my head, making me dizzy. A pair of boys laughing as they wrestle, like they always do. Simon getting a hold of Thomas’s neck. Squeezing too hard. Thomas beating at his shoulders, trying to tell him something is wrong. Simon thinking it’s just part of their game. Thomas’s lips turning blue. Simon not being able to tell from behind.
Simon blanches, and I watch as he tugs Michael further away from the edge.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell Simon. “It couldn’t have been your fault.”
Simon stares at me blankly. “Tell Victor that.”
“Does he know?” I ask.
“None of them can know,” says Nettle.
“Simon,” I say, breathlessly. I hate to feel relieved at this news. In fact, I feel sick, but it’s not as if this misunderstanding can’t be resolved. “I know you didn’t mean to. I know you. I promise I won’t tell the other boys. Not unless you ask me to. You don’t deserve for them to hate you.”
He just stares at me blankly, like he’s not processing what I’m saying.
“The rest of Peter’s journal,” I say. “Remember what I told you on the beach? Each of you were destined to meet terrible fates, too early. Too young. Before you came to Neverland, you were supposed to die of the plague. Peter worried that, even though you escaped death once, fate might still find you here. It wasn’t you, Simon. It was an accident. Thomas’s fate, come to get him. There’s nothing you could have done.”
I expect a reaction from Simon. Signs that he’s struggling with relief and guilt, something. But he just keeps staring at me with mournful eyes, and says, “Oh, Winds.”
I glance back and forth between him and Nettle. “You don’t understand,” I say. “Simon’s not a killer. Neither of you are.”
Nettle shakes his head. “That, Wendy, is where you’re wrong. I’m afraid you’re the one who doesn’t understand.”
I shake my head. “No, Simon. You’ve just gone through something traumatic. And Nettle, you lost your friend. But there’s help, I promise. The two of you are good kids.” Except they lost more than one friend, my mind reminds me. But I’m scared to ask what happened to Freckles and Joel.
Simon sobs. Nettle doesn’t. He just lets out a wry laugh.
“Come on, Winds. Who told you that Neverland was created to keep the Lost Boys from suffering untimely deaths?”
“Peter,” I say, who I now realize wasn’t behind the death of Thomas at all. Meaning he was lying to the Sister about killing him. Who’s to say he didn’t lie about killing Freckles and Joel, too?
“Think, Wendy. Is that really what Peter said?”
I frown, crinkling my brow. “Of course. He told me the Sister came to take your lives early to keep you from suffering. To keep you from dying of the plague.”
“Think. Did Peter ever say that? Did he ever say that we were going to die of the plague?”
I run back through my memories, siphoning through them.
She told me there was a plague within the walls of the orphanage, one that had already infected the boy. A disease that he’d already spread to some of the others.
“He said it was a plague. I assumed…” But that couldn’t be right. “He had to have been talking about the plague. Neverland—it was made to keep you safe. It was made to protect you. All of you, from dying of the illness.”
Simon squints, squeezing tears from his eyes as he rests his forehead in his hand. “No, Winds. No, it wasn’t.”
I turn slowly to Nettle, to Nettle, who remembers everything. He cranes his head at me, sympathy dousing his expression. “Think, Wendy. Did he tell you what the symptoms of this plague were?”
My mind goes wild, frantic, sure Peter told me of rotting limbs and rattling lungs and slow death. But there’s nowhere for my flitting mind to perch. Victor said he’d woken in Neverland deathly ill, that all of them had.
I’m about to mention as much when Nettle interrupts my racing thoughts. “Neverland wasn’t made for keeping our fates out, Wendy. It was made to keep us in. Neverland isn’t a haven. It’s a prison.”
My mind goes blank,whirring.
“A prison. You’re just…” Children is what I mean to say, though they’re not much younger than I am. And when I look at Simon, I don’t see a child. I see a young man carrying a secret heavy enough to crush him.
But then it hits me—the story of the three Sisters. The Middle Sister’s job had been to dispose of evildoers before they could reap great harm in their realms. “The Sister who came to kill you…it wasn’t the Youngest Sister, taking pity on you. It was the Middle Sister,” I say, my words croaking in my throat. “She didn’t come to spare you from an awful death. She came to stop you before…” I whip my head to Simon. “But she made a mistake. She was only supposed to take the worst of murderers. You didn’t mean to kill Thomas.”
“I didn’t,” says Simon. “But afterward.” He won’t look at me. Instead, he just stares at Michael. “I liked it. I was horrified, yes. But after it happened, I kept reliving how it felt when that last breath escaped his lungs. Kept wishing I’d known what was happening then, so I could have known to relish that moment.”
My heart goes cold.
“I hate myself for it. I promise I do, Winds.”
“Simon. Simon, you need help. There’s help…” I want to tell him of the doctors back home who assisted the ill with things like this. “You’re sick. You didn’t mean to.”
But even as the words come out, they sound less and less convincing.
“The shadows will tell you, you know. If you listen. If you don’t block them out,” says Nettle.
“You’re a shadow-soother, too?” I ask.
“Must not be as good of a one as you,” he says. “Peter never dosed me half as much as he did you. Never dosed any of us like he did you.”
My heart goes cold in my chest. “The shadows were torturing me.”
“Yeah, the truth has a tendency of doing that sometimes,” he says, then looks casually out into the distance. “I couldn’t sleep that night—the night the Sister visited us. I heard the whole thing, you know. Didn’t remember, of course, once I got to Neverland. The Sister wiped our memories once we got here—the spell made us sick for weeks.” I think back to the illness Victor recounted upon his arrival. Nettle continues, “But one day I stopped eating the onions. You know, I never did like onions. Not even before. Too bitter. Started giving my portion to Simon when Peter wasn’t looking. I adored Peter as much as the next Lost Boy, but the texture made me gag. That’s when the shadows started whispering to me. That’s why Peter gave us the onions—there’s something wrong with them, something that makes it so that we can’t hear the shadows when they’re in our system.”
I rifle through memories, trying to reconcile Nettle’s claim about the onions with my encounters with the shadows. I’ve been eating the onions throughout my time in Neverland, yet they’ve still been able to reach me, except for when I’ve taken the faerie dust. And the second time Tink attacked me.
Peter made it seem like my ability to see the shadows was unique, but if Nettle can see them too…
I don’t get the chance to finish that thought, because Nettle’s not done. “But even though my mind didn’t remember what happened before Neverland, my shadow did. I was so upset the night the Fate came to visit the orphanage, so terrified, my shadow drank the memory, drank up my pain. It remembered it so that I didn’t have to. Then it told me the truth.”
I blink back tears. “What’s the truth, Nettle?”
“She was going to kill all of us that night. You see, that orphanage was the special sort. The kind for boys who demonstrated abnormal behaviors, according to the alienists. There were doctors there who were supposed to help us, but most of the time they either beat us when the lights were on or crawled into our beds when the lights were off. The warden was the worst of them. Always said the human touch had healing properties. That it was medicine all in itself.
“We went into that orphanage as freaks, every last one of us, but by the time they were done with us, we were killers. Not technically. None of us had any blood on our hands, but it was in our hearts. One night, I told Thomas what the warden did to me after the lights were off. After everyone else went to sleep. He said the warden did the same to him. So we decided just how we’d kill him. How we’d chop off his privates first, while he was awake, then we’d hack off the rest of him bit by bit, just like he’d done to our souls over the years.
“Except the night the Fate came, I realized that wasn’t all Thomas had planned. He was angry, you see, that none of the other staff had come to save him in the night. I understood, of course. I hated the staff as much as him, but there were those who I don’t think had a clue what was going on. But he wasn’t just angry with them. He was angry with the other boys, too. For not waking up in the night and hearing what was being done to him. For waking up, and being too scared to do anything. Thomas was angry at the world, angry at our parents for letting the shrinks convince them to take us away. He hated everyone, everyone except Victor. And his father, who hadn’t consented to the boys’ being committed to the orphanage. You see, Thomas didn’t just want the warden. He wanted everyone. Everyone who had ever made a decision that led us into danger, whether they knew what they were doing or not. Whether they’d been tricked and lied to or not.”
My heart shivers. I remember asking Peter if Thomas had been the first boy the Sister intended to kill.
“Do you know what would have happened, Wendy, had the Sister not intervened that night?”
I open my mouth; the only sound I can manage is hardly audible over the howling wind that pierces the night.
“Do you know what would have happened?” Nettle is yelling now, his voice breaking over the wind.
“No. I don’t—” I don’t want to know, but I stop myself, seeing the desperation in Simon’s eyes. I’m afraid if I shield myself from anything at this point, he’ll see it as a sign that I’m shielding myself from him. “I don’t know.”
“It was written in the tapestry, no matter how many times the Middle Sister tried to undo it. I was going to help Thomas butcher the warden. But it wasn’t going to stop there. Thomas had our files, each and every one of them, underneath his bed. Thomas had the names of our parents, their addresses, our siblings even. Every person who knew they were sending us away. Every person who could have raised their voice to stop it. He was going to have us butcher them all.
“He’d already started recruiting them. I didn’t even know it at the time,” says Nettle. “I thought our plan to take down the warden was the only one, but he’d already planted seeds in the minds of the other boys. All but Peter, who was on staff at that point. He wanted to kill Peter too, for knowing what they did to us at that orphanage, and choosing to come back and work there. The things he was going to convince us to do, Wendy…”
“Peter brought you here, convinced the Sister to extract you from your realm to keep you from becoming killers? To give you a chance at a life where you could remain innocent?” I ask.
“Innocent is rather subjective,” scoffs Nettle. “Hard to be innocent when someone’s held you to your bed in the middle of the night while your friends are trying to pretend they’re asleep.”
“You were innocent, though. Even if you didn’t feel it. You didn’t do anything wrong,” I insist.
Nettle’s shaking now. “I hate that Sister. She came for us too late. If she really wanted us to stay innocent, she would have slit our throats in the middle of the night before we ever set foot in that wretched place.”
My words of comfort get hung up in my throat. For some reason, they don’t feel appropriate. Instead, I say, “I thought Peter was supposed to end you when you came of age, but that wasn’t it at all. He was supposed to kill you if you showed signs of becoming murderers.”
Nettle nods, then swallows. “He was never going to be able to do it, though.”
My mind goes to Joel. Of him coaxing a rat into the fire.
A stone forms in my belly.
“You didn’t tell me it was all Thomas’s idea,” whispers Simon to Nettle. “You said we were all going to grow up to slaughter our parents. But all this time, he was the one who was going to put our hands to the hilt.”
“He was hardly going to have to,” Nettle insists. “Thomas, Benjamin, and Smalls were going to die the week of the massacre, after the guard rounded them up and caught them. Joel was going to hang a week later. Simon here was going to run off to Estelle and stalk whores in the night, never to be caught. I—” Nettle stops, steeling himself.
My heart thuds as I watch realization click into place behind Simon’s eyes. “Ironic that Thomas was the one to die first.”
No. “Your memories were wiped in the hopes that none of you would remember the atrocities you suffered before,” I say. “So none of you would remember what had driven you to plot against your family, your town. Peter was trying to cure you.”
Nettle’s eyes are glowing with rage now. I can’t help but notice the way his grip tightens on my brother, John’s head slumped to the side. “You can wipe someone’s mind, but you can’t wipe someone’s soul. It’s like trying to yank a fishing hook out of your flesh once it’s already wrapped around a tendon. You can’t rip that out without losing something else in the process.”
“You knew, somehow,” says Simon, his gaze blank as he stares at Nettle. “You knew it was me who killed Thomas. I thought it was because you could see it in my eyes, see through my grief. I thought it was because you remembered something about me, something from before. Something that made me a killer through and through. You came to me afterward and told me you could help me. That you could protect me. Keep me from hurting anyone else. I was so sure I was a monster, I never stopped to question how you knew.”
My heart stops in my chest. “Thomas’s death wasn’t an accident, was it?”
Nettle’s rage is visceral now, reddening his features. “Peter and the Sister might have wiped Thomas’s memories, but they couldn’t wipe what was in his heart. You can’t just fix someone like that, someone like him.”
My mind goes back to the picture, the happy-go-lucky smiling boy on the parchment. Is it true that a darkness lurked beneath the surface, unable to be expunged?
“Clearly he and Victor were close,” I say. “It’s not as if he wasn’t capable of loving.”
“He wasn’t healed. Like I said, it’s not possible to fix someone like Thomas. He came out of the womb with some part of his soul missing. One day, he was going to snap, and then he was going to kill us all.”
“You told Thomas what you remembered,” I say.
Nettle rolls his eyes. “I gave Thomas the chance to repent. A chance to convince me he’d changed. He denied having those inclinations.”
“That’s because he didn’t remember,” I say, exasperation slipping into my tone. “That’s why he started asking Peter questions. You frightened him, and he wanted to know if you were telling the truth.”
“Whether he remembered or not is of no consequence. The point is that he was hiding his inclinations, refusing to admit to them. He knew he was a monster, yet he wouldn’t let me help him. Besides, he kept telling everyone that I was lying about remembering our pasts. Trying to undermine me in case I ever thought it prudent to tell them about the freak living in their midst. He did such a swell job of making me look like a sniveling idiot grasping for attention, even Peter didn’t take it seriously. Of course, then when you got here and started asking about what I remembered, I had to think fast. I’d heard Michael singing that nursery rhyme, so I knew if I referenced it, you’d recognize the details and think I was confused.”
“How did you do it?” Simon asks, eyes glassed over. “How did you kill Thomas?”
“Rushweed,” I answer for Nettle, realization washing over me. “He dosed Thomas with rushweed before you and he wrestled. Made it look like an accident. Knew you’d choke him from watching you wrestle all the other times.” Victor’s warning when he gifted me the pouch of rushweed after Tink’s first attack returns to my mind. “If you steep it, the effect is delayed, but it’s dangerous because it can cause breathing difficulty with exertion. Nettle slipped it into Thomas’s tea. The exertion of wrestling must have activated the rushweed. His muscles would have gone limp. He wasn’t able to tap on your arm and tell you he couldn’t breathe.”
Simon gags. “You. You made me kill my friend. You made me like it.”
“Better he ruin one of us than all of us,” says Nettle. “We all have it in us, somewhere—that craving for blood. The inclination to take our pain out on something living. It’s tattooed on our souls. You’re the purest of us, Simon. It had to be you. I knew you’d be the only one who could handle it. Who could learn to get the cravings under control.”
Simon’s shaking now.
“Simon, please,” I say. “Please bring Michael over here to me.”
Simon doesn’t appear to hear me. “You made me a killer.”
“But I didn’t make you like it. That was all you, Simon. Can’t you see, Wendy, why someone needed to step in?”
I feel as if I’m going to be sick. “You knew Joel tortured animals sometimes. You told me in the kitchen that night that Peter had relocated him to the garden.”
“You have to know it’s a sign of an imbalanced mind,” says Nettle, then he stares sadly down at John. “As is the ability to chop off one’s own finger.”
My heart stops. “What? No, John did that to get into the reaping tree.”
“You really think that’s the case?” Nettle says. “It’s not natural, Wendy, to harm oneself. You shouldn’t be able to make your mind do it. None of us who end up in this place are natural. Besides, I overheard what he said in the bathroom about wanting to take vengeance out on the man who killed your parents. He’s going to trigger that vile part of himself someday, if he hasn’t already.”
“Nettle,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. I reach my palms out in an appeasing gesture, but Nettle shakes his head, and I bring them back to my sides, fisted. “John came here because of me. No Fate came to get him. I made a bargain with Peter to bring him and Michael along. They’re here because of me, not because of some Fate. Not because of anything to do with them.”
“No one just comes here, Wendy. Not even you. Did you think we wouldn’t notice you wandering off? Did you think we couldn’t see it in your eyes? Your pupils—they were pits by the time you came back from your little excursion the night Joel died. We see the effect the faerie dust has on you. It’s only a matter of time.”
My breath fogs the dark, moonlit air in front of me. “Only a matter of time until what?”
“Until John’s a killer like the rest of us. You. Me. Simon. You think the way you stabbed that man was normal? I saw the wound. That wasn’t the kind of blow you administer in self-defense. There’s a rage inside of you, Wendy. One that you don’t often let out, but when you do…” Nettle whistles.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know he was innocent. He was coming after Peter. There’s so much I didn’t know.”
“Did it stop you from liking it?” asks Simon, his voice dry. “When you let him fall to the ground, did you like it?”
“Simon.” I blink back tears. I open my mouth to say of course not. That killing that man has been haunting me since the moment I took his life. It’s all true, but Simon’s eyes are begging me to be like him. Like he sees some purity in me, and he’s thinking if perhaps I could struggle with the same brand of darkness, he could glimpse a light in himself as well. And then I hear John’s voice, echoing the same sentiment. Wondering if it felt good, cathartic.
I swallow any words of reassurance, and something like a shadow overcomes Simon’s face.
“You know we’re right,” says Nettle. “You know there’s evil in your brother, just like the rest of us.”
“There’s evil in all of us,” I say. “There’s evil in the people back home.” I think of my suitors in the parlor. Of my mother, who left me in there with them. Of the creature who dwells within Peter. Of Captain Astor, who for all his cruelty, cherished his wife so dearly. “That doesn’t make us special.”
“No,” says Nettle. “No, it doesn’t. But it does make us dangerous.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask, dreading the fact that I think I already know.
Nettle glances at Simon, like he thinks he’ll be able to console me better. Simon barely looks at me. “Peter was supposed to take us out if we started showing signs of going down that path. So far, he hasn’t. We worry he’s grown too attached.”
“So the two of you have taken it upon yourselves?” I ask. “That’s why you killed Joel.”
“You saw him with those innocent animals, Wendy.”
Salty tears sting at my eyes. “Joel needed help. He hadn’t killed anyone yet.”
“It was only a matter of time.”
“Of course it was only a matter of time,” I snap. “He was tortured, abused. Broken as a child. And then he had even the memory of that taken away from him. You said yourself that the memories couldn’t take away the damage that had been done. The body remembers that sort of thing, even if the mind doesn’t. Joel needed help, and the two of you stalked him down in the night and killed him.”
Simon shakes his head. “I didn’t hurt Joel.” I can’t help but notice he says nothing about Freckles. I consider how sick Simon was the day he came to tell Peter about Freckles’s death. How he kept having to take breaks to vomit in the woods.
Nettle offers him a withering look. “As if you didn’t know I did it. You’re as complicit as I am. So is Wendy. You sure did make it easy, luring him out into the open while you were high as the rafters in this storehouse.”
The words stab at my chest, but all it does is make me crave more, more, more. Behind Nettle and John is the shed, and within it, I can hear the faerie dust whispering to me, promising me.
I can take away your pain.
I should have trusted Peter. Should have come to him about the journal and had him explain. Should have trusted my Mate.
Darling, oh so trusting.For some reason, I hear the sentiment in Captain Astor’s voice. Trusting, except for the one time it actually counts.
“And Freckles?” My voice warbles. I imagine them luring him out to the cove, far enough away that no one would hear his screams. Was it Nettle who drove the dagger into his belly, ruthless and vindictive, or Simon, apologizing to Freckles for what had to be done?
Nettle’s blade quavers. “Freckles’s response to Thomas’s death was unnatural. He didn’t care like the rest of the Lost Boys. It was almost like he was glad Thomas was gone.”
“You were glad to be rid of Thomas!” I practically scream.
Nettle shakes his head slowly. Like he feels sorry for me. “I did what was necessary. I bore that burden for everyone else. For Freckles to be pleased about his friend’s murder just because he was jealous of the attention everyone gave Thomas… You can’t tell me that wasn’t a sign of something sinister.”
I can hardly breathe, hardly address Nettle’s way of thinking. Instead I ask, “What if we can keep the other boys out of trouble? What if we can keep them from showing signs of murder? I’m sure there’s something to be done.”
Nettle shrugs. “It’s our fate, Wendy. Did you escape yours?”
Panic floods me. There’s no reasoning with Nettle, and the knife in his hand flashes at John’s throat. Still, he could have killed John immediately, but he didn’t. He wanted to explain himself to me. Needed to explain himself to me.
Wendy Darling, an expert at making others feel heard. Just a mirror, showing people the parts of themselves they’d like to see. Never my own person.
I’ve always hated that quality of mine, but now that I’m face to face with John’s potential murderer, I realize something.
Mirrors can be sharp, too, when they’re already broken.
I nod, gulping, and then I do what I do best. “It was cruel of the Sister to trap you here. Cruel of her to give Peter hope for you, when she knew all along this was inevitable.”
Nettle blinks, surprise overtaking his face. “I don’t blame Peter,” is all he says.
I shake my head. “I know you don’t. How could you? How could any of us? He’s only been trying to protect us from ourselves.”
“He likes to pretend that everything is happy. That everything is okay. He’s wrong, but it was nice getting to pretend for a while, wasn’t it?” says Nettle. “But now that I know the truth, I can’t go back to pretending.”
“I know. I know you can’t.”
And then I let my voice shake. Let it rattle in anger. “The Sister should have let Peter take the rest of you. Should have killed Thomas in his bed. He was the one that was the true threat. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for him.”
“It was his idea the whole time. He was the one who planted it,” says Nettle. “And once that seed took hold, got its roots in me, I couldn’t yank it out, no matter how hard I tried. I never wanted to thirst for blood. I never wanted any of this. I never…” The muscles in his neck flex as he wrestles with the words. “I never wanted to have to hurt my friends. They’re my friends. You know that, Winds.”
“I know,” I whisper.
I’m halfway across the cliff now, my hand outstretched slightly, hoping Nettle will welcome my embrace. He’s just a boy, after all. A boy who never had anyone hold him just for the sake of keeping him safe. Even now, with all he’s done, though the dread of him makes my skin crawl, pity wells up within my stomach.
And for a moment, I think it’s going to work. But then Nettle squints, locking his eyes onto mine. Pleading.
It’s a look begging for forgiveness. Forgiveness I’m not going to be willing to offer.
“I won’t hurt Michael,” he promises. “He’s innocent. And Peter will take care of him. You and I both know that. He’ll be safe, and none of us will ever corrupt him.”
“Nettle, please. No one has to be corrupted.”
“Maybe that was true once,” he says. “But not anymore.”
His hands tremble, and I lunge.
There’s a moment when everything slows down, though not to a halt as it should. I watch as blood beads on John’s skin as Nettle presses the blade to his throat. Self-loathing warps Nettle’s face, but it does nothing to curb his impulses.
He felt the urge to kill, so he found a way to justify it. A way to make it righteous.
The scream is on the cusp of my throat as Nettle’s hand flexes, as he begins to slide the blade across John’s throat. My hand is outstretched, but I’m not going to reach him in time.
But then the knife falls, clattering against the rock beneath. John’s limp but unharmed body is next, the grass softening the impact of his head against the ground.
Nettle is shaking, a gargling sound scraping from his throat. He stares down at his ribs. At the dagger hilt protruding from his side.
“Oh, thank the Sisters,” he says, and the desperate relief in Nettle’s voice rattles me to my core.
Behind him stands Simon, his hands red with Nettle’s blood. His face is blank as he drives the hilt in further, sending Nettle to his knees.
When Nettle falls face-first onto the grass, Simon takes a sharp inhale, then slowly looks up at me. “He made me believe I killed Thomas,” he says, as if the blood on his hands needs explaining. As if I walked in on the blood-spattered aftermath of a crime, rather than witnessing the whole thing.
“I know,” is all I say.
“Careful, Michael, or you’re sure to fall.” Our necks snap to the side, Michael’s voice summoning us out of the moment.
My legs break into a run, a mad dash for my little brother, whose voice has heightened in pitch after watching Nettle bleed out. He’s at the edge of the cliff, kicking stones and watching the crumble of dirt and debris fall into the crashing sea below.
But the cliffs aren’t prepared for my brother’s weight. Or maybe they are, and the sea is simply hungry, the cliffs executing the sea’s bidding. Because the edge of the cliff collapses underneath my brother’s feet.
I hurtle myself across the grass, flinging my hand at his ankle. My fingers brush the heel of his boot.
And then Michael slips away.
I’m sure I scream. At least, my mouth opens and air whooshes through my throat, but it’s caught up in the wind, which carries away my scream like I don’t deserve the catharsis of agony.
Because I let my brother fall.
I did this, in alerting Simon. In trying to rescue all of them, I failed my brother, who it was my job to protect.
No. No, no, no.
I’d distracted Nettle long enough for Simon to sneak up on him, and I’d traded one brother for the other.
Soft dirt scrapes underneath my fingernails, causing a shooting pain as I drag myself to the edge of the cliffside. The idea of looking makes me want to vomit, but I have to. Can’t bear the idea of not honoring Michael by sheltering myself from the evidence of my failure.
I hope he passed out on the way down.
I hope he flew higher than the faerie dust ever took me.
Foaming, angry waves lash up against the cliffside, obscuring the surface of the water in a foggy haze. I try not to imagine the waves beating my brother’s body against the shore, but refusing to imagine it feels like refusing to be there with him in his pain. But then, a dark form appears from the mist, a shadow from my memories.
A shadow with wings.
My hands somehow find my mouth as I choke out a sob, throat burning. I watch in trepidation and hope and agonizing fear as the shadow takes form below, as it soars upward out of the fog, shooting past the edge of the cliff and into the sky.
Peter lets his wings relax, and floats ever so gently in front of me, his blue eyes flickering with a fierceness I’ve yet to see.
In his arms is Michael.
My brother is whispering, “Do you want to do it again?”