Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Wendy trips, sprawling face first into the foliage carpeting the forest floor. She scrabbles forward, disappearing beneath the underbrush. I don’t dare look to see if she’s made it to safety, as at that moment, the air sparks and the Aeternalis steps from the shadows.
His golden hair is windblown and his face is flushed. A playful smile dances over his elven features, and his grass green eyes sparkle as he drinks in my shock.
“Cousin,” he intones with a wink. “What a pleasure.” His tongue rolls over the word in a lascivious manner, and a disgusted shiver climbs up my spine.
“Far from it,” I mutter. I gesture to his chest, bare but for a few mismatched weapons belts slung over the gash reaching from his sternum to his groin.
Nausea roils in my stomach, my gaze instinctively skittering away from where his organs glisten grotesquely, focusing instead on where his feet sink into the moss of the forest floor.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a shirt? Or shoes?
It’s like you roll directly out of bed and into my way. ”
Pan laughs, the glittering sound raking through the space between us. “Clothes are a construct…used as masks, as social dividers. As bindings and chains.”
His gaze roves over me like he’s imagining peeling away the fabric of my dress, and when I bare my teeth in warning, he laughs again.
“Unlike some of us who cloak ourselves in costume, I prefer to be what I am.” His tongue swipes over his lower lip, and I clutch my hands into fists to keep from ripping it out as it rolls silkily over the next word. “Bare.”
He steps forward from the shadows, and unbidden, my gaze draws back to the unnatural wound.
His golden magic pulses beneath my sudden attention, and my heart leaps into my throat.
Aboard the Indomnitus, Pan’s magic had been encapsulated in a small pool behind his heart, but now, it threads between his ribs, veining outward in a multitude of sparkling rivulets.
It winds around his intestines and disappears behind the cage of his skin like it is woven into his very being.
I sacrificed the dreams of the island to release the Aeternalis’ control of the children, and it had been for nothing. He’s found a way to increase his power without the children, without the island. How am I to stop something I don’t understand?
“And what about you, littlest darling?” His breathless voice draws me from the sudden panic I’ve ensnared myself in as he takes another step closer. “You’ve shed some of your costume.” Pan’s gaze flickers to my shadow behind me. “When will you discard the rest and emerge as you were meant to be?”
“I prefer to keep my shirt on, thanks,” I bite out acerbically, ignoring the way my shadow shudders at his attention.
“Do you think a pretty dress will keep them from seeing who you are at your core?” He asks with a saccharine smile. “Lace and silks…well, they are transparent, are they not?”
Before I can respond, Pan sniffs. He tilts his head curiously and sniffs again, deeper this time, like he’s trying to discern something in the air. My breath stutters in my lungs as his face flashes skeletal—distorted skin pulled taut, empty sockets where his eyes were just a moment before.
The air snaps, and a wave of power ripples through the wood. A moment later, Wendy appears between us, bound and gagged by tendrils of Pan’s golden magic. Her eyes find mine, the sharp edge of her fear stinging the space between us.
The Aeternalis lets out a delighted guffaw, his exuberant clap scattering the few remaining will-o-wisps into the safety of the leaves. “You are full of surprises, cousin! Wherever did you find such a long-lost toy?”
The green of his eyes sparks with madness as they rove over Wendy, his expression a terrifying picture of contradictions: his features ancient and experienced, while his eyes sour with the possession of a jilted child.
He steps forward to slide a hand over Wendy’s cheek, wetting his fingertips with her tears. He brings them to his mouth and sucks, his eyes rolling in pleasure. “I’d nearly forgotten,” Pan says, more to himself than to either of us, “how delicious your fear tastes.”
More tears spill down Wendy’s cheeks in response, the rapid blink of her eyes and the terrified wobble of her lower lip the only movement Pan’s magic allows her.
“Do you have any idea how long I searched for you?” he breathes. “The worlds I scoured…the lives I ended.” He grips her chin, wrenching her terrified gaze to his. “You know better than anyone, Wendy Darling…no one leaves the Strayed.”
He squeezes a pained whimper from her, as he hisses, “No one leaves me.”
I dip into my magic with harried fingers, sloppily painting a picture of Wendy’s freedom. Pan seems to have forgotten all about me as he leans in to lap at Wendy’s tears with his tongue.
Hot rage threads through me, because the Aeternalis may be thousands of years old—a creator of myth and legend—but he is the same at his core as so many men.
The ones who leave a trail of destruction behind them everywhere they go; the ones who believe everything was created with the sole purpose of their pleasure—that the world is theirs to destroy at will, and people are theirs to freely ruin.
My shadow claws at my shoulder, its hunger ballooning in my stomach as I send my magic careening outside of me.
It simmers in the air, not gold like the Aeternalis’, but the silver light of a star. It circles around Wendy, before winking out. Dissipates into nothingness.
Pan tears his gaze away from Wendy to set it on me, that same rotted mask flickering in and out in time with his deranged laughter. “You think she deserves your loyalty, Willa?”
I plant my feet, hatred pulsing through me. “You were the one to tell me that family means everything, weren’t you? She’s just as much my family as you are.”
Pan stares at me, his expression unreadable. Then, with a blink, his magic loosens. Wendy tumbles to his feet with a sharp whimper, tendrils of her hair tangling between her fingers as she tries to claw to safety.
The Aeternalis spits at her. “She is no longer kin. She chose to believe that death was more powerful than the life I give, but she was mistaken. I am the Creator, and any who choose to leave me forfeit the protection of my power and embrace the blade of my wrath.”
Wendy lunges to her feet. Fresh tears pouring down her cheeks, hands trembling on the grip, she levels a small automatic pistol at the Aeternalis’ head. “I know your secret, Peter.” Her voice shakes. “I didn’t choose death. I chose you.”
His lips peel back from his teeth, the magic threading through him pulsing ominously.
“Wendy,” he tsks with false pity. “The self-proclaimed king of death had no power over me. It is pathetic to think you’ll be different.”
Wendy doesn’t reply. She pulls the trigger.
Her aim is true, and the world seems to slow around us as the bullet explodes through the Aeternalis’ forehead. I watch the grotesque gape of his mouth, the subtle widening of his eyes. I watch the blood spray, the pieces of skull and brain matter spatter on the tree trunk behind him.
It feels like the universe holds its breath as Pan stumbles backward. One step, then another—and the Everlasting falls to the ground.
Seconds pass in silence. Wendy and I both stare at his motionless form, watching frozen as blood stains the moss beneath his head a deep crimson.
The forest comes to life around us, a sudden cacophony of sound that buzzes against my skin and wakes me from my shock.
A beast roars in the distance, and I move forward to grab Wendy by the forearm and pull her away from Pan’s body.
Though there are no children here to drain, I won’t trust his death until he’s sliced into pieces and dumped into the sea.
Wendy’s skin is ice cold beneath mine, the color leeched by shock and trauma.
“That was a good shot,” I tell her gently, unaccustomed as I am to being a comfort. A compliment is the best I can manage through my own shock, even if it’s a dark one.
She hardly seems to hear me. “I—I loved him.” Her words are a broken whisper, and she slips from my grasp, falling to her knees beside Pan’s body. “I truly did. I loved him.”
More tears gather at her lashes, but these ones don’t fall as she repeats the same words, over and over, in a hushed chant: I loved him, I loved him, I loved him.
I stare at her, unsure what to make of her anguish. Is she horrified by her love of a monster?
For a moment, I consider leaving her to it as whatever she’s feeling is certainly none of my business. But something keeps me rooted in place, shifting my weight awkwardly from hip to hip behind her.
When she finally turns her attention from the Aeternalis, the anguish in her eyes is enough to make my heart stutter. “He hurt me…so badly, Willa…and after all of it—I…I loved him truly.”
She shakes her head. “In gaining power over him…I—” She swallows hard. “I gave him power over myself.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, even as her words hit something fragile inside me. Something crafted of glass, delicate and thin. And when she meets my gaze, I think it may shatter open.
Wendy’s breathing rattles through her, like each one is painful. “I gave myself the power to hurt him, but every slice hurt me, too. It isn’t fair—it’ll never be...”
“Even.” I finish for her, because I feel her words in my blood—feel them in the echoes Niko left in my heart and on my skin. And no matter how he hurt me, no matter how I thought to even the score—I’d only hurt myself in the end.
Wendy nods, like she’s grateful someone understands. And I do. How love can live inside you even after it’s been starved and beaten and ignored. How it can drive you beyond your logic, beyond your reason. And how power is capable of the same thing.
“Why don’t you come back with me to—”
The rest of the words never make it out of my throat.