Chapter 22
“It truly is impressive that he held on to consciousness as long as he did,” muses Lars, standing over the Nomad’s limp body as he stares at the blood on the floor. “That has to be enough blood to fill a swine trough.”
I wait for Lars to examine the Nomad, but he simply shrugs and takes a vial of gray matter I assume to be my marrow, along with a few vials of my blood, over to his counter for examination.
Rather shaky myself, I slip from the table and allow my feet to touch the slick floor. Normally, I wouldn’t mind leaving the Nomad in a pool of his own blood. In fact, this would have been the ending of a nightmare I would usually long for.
But Lars is right. It’s a lot of blood.
I don’t know how easily fae bleed out, but I’d rather not risk it. Not when he’s the only one with an answer for how to get my voice back.
So when I kneel down beside him to check on him, it’s certainly not because I feel grateful for his helping me just now.
It’s odd—seeing the Nomad’s face still. I’d never noticed before, the effort it must take to maintain his carefree expression. One would think that asleep, his face would be peaceful. Instead, there’s a fissure between his eyebrows, a set to his jaw.
And for the first time I wonder about when the Nomad dreams. Whether he has nightmares too, and who haunts them.
I go to touch his face. The curve of his jaw is angular, but his skin is clammy, cold and slick. When I glance down at his hands, they’re still bleeding.
Strange. The fae usually heal faster than this. It’s not as if I punctured all the way through his hands.
I stand and go for the counter. In a drawer I find a roll of gauze and something labeled “antiseptic.” When I kneel and pour it over the Nomad’s hands, it sizzles.
His entire body seizes, and I expect him to reach out and grab me, but instead, he goes limp once more.
Once I’ve wiped the blood away and poured the antiseptic over his wounds again, I examine the wounds.
They’re deeper than I’d realized. I’d known I was digging into his flesh, but I assumed it was with the same force as I’d always dug into my own palms when Peter was bloodletting me.
Now, I remember John telling me that our brains won’t allow us to harm ourselves the way they’ll allow us to harm others.
Guilt crawls through the slits in my ribcage. The wounds are as deep as the length of my fingernails. How the Nomad didn’t throw me across the room baffles me.
I glance at his face once more, searching it for clues.
People—fae or human—don’t simply withstand that kind of pain of their own volition.
Not unless they’re used to it. Not unless they’ve been wounded like that before.
My gaze crawls down from his face to the collar of his shirt, where a button is left undone.
And for the first time, I wonder what I would find underneath that next button.
I’ve done my share of research on the Nomad. I’ve kept my ears peeled for the rumors, leaned in closer to gather the whispers. They all say the same thing—no one has ever touched him, not even to manage a scratch. The Nomad is as elusive as they come.
And yet.
“If you’re wondering, there aren’t any visible abdominals under there,” says the Nomad, startling me. “Believe me, I’ve tried, but they say it’s all in what your parents gave you, and I’m afraid to say that mine never gave me all that much.”
I jerk my hand away from the button and continue wrapping his hands, tying them off tighter than I probably have to.
“Owww,” says the Nomad, drawing out the word so that it sounds more like a disappointed command.
When I don’t react, he says, “You have quite the grip strength, you know. Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your time at the circus.”
I wipe the blood on my hands on my pants, grab the notepad on the desk, and write, I did some of the acrobatics when someone else would break their ankle. But that wasn’t my main job.
“I know,” he says. “They kept you in a cage. For others to gaze upon you like you were some animal.”
Or like I was an insect to be examined and experimented on, I write, but I add an upturn of my lips to the note.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was better than being bloodlet.
The circus master might have been cruel, but he didn’t want my appearance to suffer, so he never laid a hand on me.
I roll my eyes to go along with that last part, and the Nomad watches me carefully.
“That’s where you met Peter.”
Is that a question, or do you already know everything about me anyway? I write.
It’s meant as a quip, a way to shut down the conversation, but something about the way the Nomad stares at the paper for a long while makes my heart skip a beat.
When the silence becomes so long that I find myself afraid of what he’ll say when he finally responds, I write, Yes, it’s where I met Peter.
The Nomad sits up, wincing as he does and trying to keep the weight off of his hands, and leans against the shelves of the counter. “Tell me about it?”
The way he asks is strange, so I lift an eyebrow.
“I’m in quite a bit of pain. It would be nice if you would distract me with your own.”
I can’t help the smile that flickers on the edge of my lips. I don’t particularly like talking about Peter, don’t particularly like thinking of him. But then I look down at the Nomad’s hands, blood already staining through the bandages.
I take my quill to paper.
He was an orphan. That was the first thing I liked about him.
The Nomad raises his brow. “Because you have that in common?”
A lump rises in my throat. I left home the night I had a dream that the Nomad came to find me in my parents’ home. I’d realized they would never be safe if I was around to lure him in. Not that I can tell him that.
Practically speaking, is what I write. Peter hardly had any money, so he pickpocketed circus guests so he could visit me every day. He would always come in the down hours, that way we would have time to
I stop writing.
The Nomad cocks his head to the side. “Have time to what?”
My hand quivers, and so does the quill.
Talk.
A hand, bandaged and bloodied, finds mine, wraps its fingers around my trembling hand to steady it.
Once my hand is steadied enough to write again, I pull it from his grasp without ever looking at him.
Do you want to hear something disgusting? I write, though even as I do, I realize with a pang that the Nomad won’t be hearing anything.
“Consider me hanging on your every word.”
My chest tightens, and I write, I still think about those conversations sometimes. Still replay them in my head.
“Let me guess, you’re trying to figure out how you didn’t realize earlier what kind of person he turned out to be.”
I shake my head. I wish. I replay them because I liked those conversations. Because I liked having someone to talk to.
For a moment, the Nomad goes silent, and I regret admitting this to him. How pitiful I must seem.
Just as I’m about to stuff the notepad away, he says, “If I were to bet, I’d bet he thinks about those conversations too.”
The response shocks me so much, I glance up at the Nomad, expecting to see mockery on his face where I can’t find it in his voice, but I don’t find it there either. Just sincerity.
No, I write. He only ever approached me because the Sister needed my voice. Anything he ever did regarding me was so she would give him Wendy. Or, at best, so she would save the Lost Boys in Neverland.
“Perhaps so. But we sentient beings are complicated. He thinks about your conversations, I assure you.”
How would you know? I write.
The Nomad sighs. “Because you’re clever. And fiery. And because, even if everything Peter ever did was to get to Wendy, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re right—you and he did have something in common. You were a companion to him when he was lonely.”
I was stupid for ever trusting him, I write, suddenly feeling tense.
“Why?” asks the Nomad. “You were in a cage, and he set you free. What reason did you have to mistrust him?”
I should have known, I write. There were signs, I’m sure of it. And had I seen them, I would still have my voice. Still have my wings.
“Maybe,” says the Nomad, not at all sounding convinced.
What? I write, annoyed.
The Nomad leans forward. “I think you tell yourself those things to make yourself feel better.”
I tell myself that it’s my fault my voice and wings are gone to make myself feel better?
“Yes,” he says, a bit too smugly for my liking.
Explain.
“I think you tell yourself you should have known better. Because if you should have known better, if you had acted differently, then you could have prevented a very bad thing from happening to you. If you had done something differently, Peter couldn’t have hurt you.”
But he did hurt me. So how does that make me feel better?
“Let me ask you this, Wanderer. Do you know better now?”
Of course I know better.
The Nomad breaks out into a smile that for the first time in this conversation seems cruel. “Well, if you know better now, then you know what that means.”
I stare at him, refusing to ask the question.
“It means that, so long as you know better, you’re in complete control. It means that, so long as you know better, no one can ever do bad things to you again.”
My throat goes cold, and so does the air in the room around us.
“Is that not what it means?”
But before I can address the Nomad, Lars returns. “Well, the results are mixed. But I think I can help. The only problem—I’m going to need faerie dust. A lot of it.”