20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
W hen the carriage reaches the Lunaedon, I go straight to my chambers without a word. I don’t miss the flash of Willa’s fury as I slip into the cool entrance hall of the castle, but it’s all I can do to make it up the stairs without tumbling back down them. Words are beyond me, the answers she desires further beyond that.
My head is swimming, and every muscle feels crafted from sharp glass, scraping at my skin and piercing through my organs. I pushed myself too far, and a few hours of fitful sleep was only enough to take a fraction of the edge off. If the Strayed were to attack any part of the kingdom right now, I’d be useless to stop it.
They’ve been known to retaliate within hours of an affront, as self-restraint has never been one of their strong suits. In the centuries they’ve been alive, the selfish impulsiveness natural to the young has twisted into something far more malevolent—something never satiated. There is never enough violence, enough depravity, to fill the hollow carved by years of eternal childhood.
Fires burn in the hearths when I arrive in my room, a foresight of Marina’s, no doubt. Though I hardly have the energy to bathe, I drag myself into the bathroom. My clothes are crusted with seawater, and the taint of death is thick on my skin beneath them. I’d been so weak in the Crocodile—preoccupied with the nearness of both the Indomnitus and Willa—that I’d been able to ignore it. But alone in my rooms, I have to hold my breath to keep from gagging on it, trying not to think of its slimy feel as I scrub viciously at my skin.
After I’m finished, I slip into a soft pair of pants and collapse onto the bed. Normally, I’d play a few concertos on my piano in the atrium or drown my pain with a bottle or two of rum. But tonight, I can only muster enough energy to bury my face in a pillow. My ribbons are as exhausted as I am, so rather than writhing and scraping along my skin, they simply drape over my body. If I don’t move, I can hardly feel them, and I’m thankful for the momentary reprieve.
Closing my eyes, my mind wanders to Willa, as it seems to do whenever I’m too exhausted to bind my thoughts to more appropriate subjects.
She may be the one with the power to imagine, but I find my own to be perfectly adequate. I can see the part of her feral mouth, the way her caramel hair spread around her head like a halo on the black rock. Those wicked curves, that supple skin. I hadn’t been able to find one scar, not one thing that told me about her life before Letum. It made me want to strip her completely, search her with my hands. Break her open and discover every piece of her story.
Despite my exhaustion, my cock hardens. I resist the urge to fist it, because I know it’ll do nothing to relieve the ache. Thinking of Willa that way will only fuel my desire to touch her, until it becomes an uncontrollable urge—an inferno that destroys everything I’ve worked for.
I can’t touch her. There’s no changing that fact. Both because it would kill her the instant I did, and because I shouldn’t even want to. Not with whose blood runs through her veins.
His blood. Her blood. Peter and Wendy.
Willa is a walking conflagration of my greatest hate and my greatest love. It thrills me and disgusts me in turn, and I can’t decide which one matters more.
Probably neither. In a few months’ time, I’ll be nothing more than a distant memory in Letum’s history books, a villainous stain on an otherwise peaceful timeline. I tangle my fingers in the sheets, and force Willa’s face from my mind.
When I wake hours later, something has shifted in the air. My tongue feels like cotton, and though my muscles are impossibly stiff, I hurtle out of bed.
Something is wrong.
I feel it in my connection to the island but not the way I normally do. This wrongness burrows into the marrow of my bones, wraps around my lungs. My death feels it too, already far ahead of me. It slices through the still air of my rooms, before slithering beneath the door to the corridor. It yanks at my soul, tugging me toward it, and dread settles in my stomach.
Willa . Something is wrong with Willa.
I grab my discarded gloves from the end table, hastily shoving them onto my fingers as I dash into the hallway. Screams echo from Willa’s room—harrowing, terrified screams that resound so deeply in my veins, I’m barreling through her door with a bellow of rage before I can consider what awaits on the other side.
Sliding across her floor on bare feet, the air freezes in my lungs as my eyes adjust to the darkness of her room.
Two figures, made of sweeping shadows and inky darkness, lean over where Willa writhes on the bed. They have no faces, only humanoid outlines, but despite their incorporeal appearance, the instruments in their blurred hands are entirely physical. Willa’s eyes are squeezed shut as another scream is ripped from her throat. One of them binds her wrists above her head as she thrashes, the thick sob of despair that bubbles from her summoning a flood of dark fury careening through my veins.
The other leans over her with a syringe and whispers, “There is no need for the dramatics, Willa. Selfish, selfish girl. We’ve been through this. Hold still, or Celie will die.”
I don’t know whether it’s my death or me that lunges first, but the dark rot of my heart surges to my blood, and sharp pain slices through me in time with my ribbons impaling both of the creatures’ shadowed chests. And they’re proven to be real enough, as the smudged darkness of their forms bursts from the wounds, dissipating into the night air and leaving the room silent, but for Willa’s heart-wrenching sobs and my labored breathing.
Shock keeps me frozen in place until another desperate cry sounds from the bed. It latches beneath my ribs, pulling me toward her even as my head tells me I should turn and run. It was easy, before, with Willa’s violence and bluster, to never see Willa as someone who needed my protection. I know the cost of allowing someone to burrow inside me all too well. I’ve been paying the price of it for over two centuries.
But as she writhes in terror, I go to her despite the alarm bells ringing in my head. Her hair is wild around her as she thrashes, her small hands clawing desperately at the sheets. A tiny white nightgown is plastered to her body with sweat, the lashes of her closed eyes beaded with tears that gather thickly but refuse to fall.
She’s asleep .
I furrow my brow, thinking fast.
Willa’s magic. Pan’s magic. The ability to dream anything into reality. And right now, she’s dreaming of the worst things to have happened to her.
If I don’t wake her, more of her horrors will come to life and she’ll be forced to relive them all.
My death swirls above her as she sobs and trembles, tracing the outline of her nightgown. I feel its urgency in the frantic movements, a mirror of my own. Whatever happened between them on that beach must have been significant, because I’ve never seen my death so enamored. Have never seen it wanting to give instead of take. To heal rather than destroy.
Pulling my gloves tighter over my fingers, I hold my breath and gently shake her shoulder. “Willa Darling,” I whisper softly. “Wake up. It was only a dream.”
Her bones are delicate beneath my hands, so much smaller than I imagined. Perhaps it’s because her presence is so large—so magnetic, it draws the air from every room—I’ve never realized how small she actually is.
I shake her a little harder. “It isn’t real,” I whisper, running my fingers softly up the slope of her throat to cup her jaw. “Come to me now, Darling. I’m what’s true.”
Willa’s eyes snap open, and my heart leaps into my throat as her entire body jerks in terror. Without a moment’s breath, she lunges for me with a snarl, her fingers wrapped around the small gladius she chose from my armory.
I lunge backward before her hands can meet my bare chest, tripping over a chair and flying onto my ass with a painful thud .
“Fuck, Willa,” I curse, but there’s no anger behind it as she stands above me, breathing hard. “I should have known you’d sleep with a weapon under your pillow, you vicious woman.”
Willa’s eyes flicker around the room, before settling back on me as she slowly comes back to herself. She blinks, her brow furrowing as she seems to finally notice me sprawled halfway across the overturned chair.
Thick silence envelops the space between us, and I understand suddenly she doesn’t yet trust the world around her as reality.
“You’re safe here, Willa. From the horrors of the world and the ones in your mind. You’re safe with me.”
Agony and desperate longing crash over her face, so at odds with the steel wall usually erected around her. Her fingers loosen, and the sword clatters to the floor. Then she does the most heartbreaking thing of all—she curls up beside the bed, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She begins to rock, like the movement will keep everything inside; like if she curls her body tight enough, she’ll be able to keep herself from breaking apart entirely.
The sight of it, of her sorrow and loneliness displayed so openly, sends another wave of violence surging through me. I will shred apart whoever is haunting Willa piece by piece. Peel the skin from their bones and decompose each nerve, each organ, bit by bit, until they beg me for death. There may not be imagination for cruelty on the mainland anymore, but mine—mine is endless.
I climb gingerly over the chair, straightening to brush off my pants. “Who were they?” I ask roughly, the grit of my teeth the only thing anchoring my anger. The only thing keeping it from spilling out and destroying everything in this room.
Willa doesn’t look at me, only tucks her head further into her knees.
“If you don’t tell me, I won’t be able to skin them alive and deliver their rotting corpses to you.” My voice is a dark stain. There is none of the peace death can contain, only the brutality.
But rather than rearing back from it, Willa finally raises her head. “They’re already dead,” she says huskily.
My anger doesn’t abate; it howls in pleasure at her admission. “Did you kill them?”
She nods, and there is no contrition. No regret. My death sings in my veins, crashes against my heart, vibrates in the ribbons around me. “Good,” I snarl, ceding a step closer toward her.
Her confession doesn’t soothe her. If anything, she appears even more lost. “I thought—I thought ending them would end my nightmares, my fear—” Her lip wobbles. “—but it didn’t. No matter how far I run, it never leaves me.”
I go still at her admission. It’s the first time Willa’s allowed me a glimpse of the softness hidden beneath the thorny armor she wraps herself in. There’s an addicting intimacy to it, one that has me wanting far more than the sliver she’s granted.
“The plague…it affects children’s minds the most. Steals everything good about the world and drowns them in despair until they can’t take it anymore.” Her eyes drop to where her fingers twist in her lap. “They hurt themselves to make the pain stop. The world governments couldn’t figure out how to prevent their deaths…how to protect them from themselves. They set up the Amelioration camps to hold them. Most of them die there. And if they don’t…if they manage to get released…they come out as shadows.”
I know all about what her world calls a plague. And even more, I know the reason for its existence. But I don’t say any of this, for fear she’ll stop speaking, and I’ll be denied the pieces of her I’m so desperate for. I hadn’t been able to find any evidence of her past on her body, but perhaps I hadn’t looked deep enough. Maybe all the scars are hidden beneath her skin, imprinted on her bones.
“My sister came down with the plague and was taken to one of the camps. And my father—well, he was desperate to get her back.” Her throat bobs. “He sold me to the doctors in exchange for her. They experimented on me for years trying to find a cure.”
My death spears out from me as fresh rage pummels my chest like a furious wind. At her father, at her government. At the whole fucking world for daring to touch Willa. I have no right to the sudden ferocity of my anger, not when I have my own plans for her, but it pulses through me nonetheless. It’s all I can do to mash my lips together, and ball my fingers into fists at my side.
If Willa notices my rage, she doesn’t acknowledge it. Her gaze is distant and numb, like she’s somewhere far from the Lunaedon. Somewhere memories reach up and tangle themselves around her ankles, pulling her beneath their thrall until she drowns.
“I was there for almost ten years.”
My ribbons jerk and reach toward Willa, their fury and mine mingling viciously. And though I don’t understand why, I know now they have no intention of hurting her. So, I loosen my grip, allowing them to swirl closer, to thread through the air near her. To be her protection against the haunting of memories in a way I cannot.
Willa sighs, watching my death with something like longing. “They never found a cure. And after so long in their labs, I couldn’t take the pain anymore. I knew it was either escape or end up a shadow like everyone else. I escaped. And left all the others to the plague. Left all the other children to die.”
She gnaws on her lip for a long moment, tightening her arms around her knees as shame presses down on her shoulders. “When I got out, I learned none of my pain or sacrifice had even mattered. My sister killed herself when I was only in the camp for a year.” She meets my eyes. “She was thirteen.”
Willa tenses, almost as if she’s waiting for me to berate her. To shame her for her self-preservation as I have so many times prior. But if I’m honest, I’ve never despised her willingness to do whatever it takes to survive—I envy it. She sees her fierce drive as a flaw, as a reason for contrition, while I see it for the strength it truly is.
“You could have stayed there for centuries,” I tell her softly. “They were never going to find a cure for the plague.”
“You don’t know that,” she replies, though a wary hope edges her voice.
“I do, actually.”
I situate myself on the floor beside her, careful to maintain a healthy space between us as I lean against the bedframe with a stifled groan.
“I told you that Letum and your world are connected…that your plague killed imagination. But imagination dying is the plague, Darling. Nothing they find in science will ever be enough to cure it.”
Her lips part, and I force myself not to look at it. To examine my fingers, the wall, anything else, really, aside from the way she’s looking at me, eyes wide with relief.
My death curls up near her feet. “Our worlds are symbiotic. One cannot exist without the other. The magic of Letum is fueled by the imagination of your world while also feeding the very thing that sustains it.”
Willa’s brow furrows, as she mulls over my words. “I…don’t understand.”
“There was another king who ruled before me.” I hold up a finger before she can say the name. “And yes, that is the name your fables know him by, but here, he is known by another. He was the Aeternalis.”
The air shivers around me as I invoke his memory, the long-buried secrets of the island awakening from their deep slumber. “The Everlasting. The stories say he was the one who created this island, who used his power to imagine it into existence.”
Willa listens intently, her hands going still in her lap and her breathing softening, like she’s hanging on my every word.
“Letum was called something else then. It was a place where dreams burgeoned and the fantastical existed. And the greatest of the dreamers were always children. Pixies were born from their laughter and sirens from their mischief. The magic of their belief, of childhood wonder and innocence, nurtured the island and fed its power. The Aeternalis would bring the children through the wards as a tribute for the beauty of their dreams. The kingdom was fed by their inherent magic, and in return, so were their dreams.”
Willa’s expression is wistful, even as my ribbons shudder and twitch between us. For death has a long memory, and mine is no different.
“This kingdom was always meant to be a temporary stop on the journey to adulthood, a breath of fresh air as the road to reality grows ever more perilous. A gift of magic and adventure before the vise of responsibility leaves no more room for the possibility of enchantment. Childhood should be nurtured, never permanent. But the Aeternalis, who had lived longer than any could fathom and whose own magic was irrevocably tied to the island’s, began to resent the children for choosing to leave him and return home. As a boy, he’d been abandoned by his family, and he didn’t like being alone. But more than that, the children’s magic fed his—and he didn’t want to cede the power he acquired each time he brought a new child.”
An ancient ache throbs in my chest. My memories from the time before the Aeternalis stole me from a window in London have all but disappeared, blurred and erased by the years since.
“He began keeping the children. Brainwashing them to believe returning to their lives and growing up was the most terrible of fates. And the longer they remained by his side, the more of their magic he would siphon. He fed on them for centuries…until they were only empty vessels. His eternally loyal servants.”
“The Strayed?” Willa gasps.
I nod. “They were just simple children once. But we aren’t meant to be youthful forever. Children are selfish and impulsive by nature. They demand instant gratification and give into every emotion, no matter how rash. But the Aeternalis refused to let any of them grow up for fear they’d leave him. Any who showed signs were mutilated or killed. And so, they were stuck in stasis, growing ever more volatile with each passing century.”
Willa’s eyes widen in horror. “But…surely children are just trying to have fun. How could it have turned so sinister?”
I shrug with a casualty I don’t feel. “The thing about fun is that it relies on novelty. And after centuries, more is required to feel anything at all. And if there’s no one to teach you patience, no one to curb your worst inclinations…they grow in the dark like poisonous vines. The Aeternalis stripped them of everything that made them human, nurturing depravity to grow in its place. He siphoned the magic natural to children, the most potent of all, and left them as empty shells. Creatures that aren’t human. The Strayed do not feel, they do not love. And worse, they do not dream.”
Willa is bereft, and I understand it. Coming from a world where childhood is cherished to one that systematically destroys it. “Did any of them ever escape him?”
The ribbon closest to Willa flickers.
“A few of the most powerful ones did. It took hundreds of years for the Aeternalis to siphon a powerful child’s magic, so a few managed to sail away or escape before he ruined them entirely. But it was rare. The Strayed left in Letum have not been human in centuries, so there have been no more escapes.”
“Centuries?” Willa repeats in alarm. “The plague only began like…two hundred years ago.”
I hum in agreement, suddenly feeling every bit of my exhaustion. Perhaps it’s the adrenaline of finding Willa being attacked draining away, or maybe, it’s the toll of speaking of things I’ve long tried to burn from my memory. Things that siphon my energy, that leave my brain mired in mud.
“The beginnings of it were always evident if you knew where to look. Children in your world growing up faster. Becoming more cynical, more exhausted. It was always written off as the effects of technology, but it wasn’t.”
I lean my head back against the mattress. “It was the Aeternalis tainting the kingdom’s magic. Stealing more and more children away, and never returning them. It strained the island, strained your world. Eventually, things got so dire that forces rose up and slayed the Aeternalis. But his power was unique, the anchor through which the magic of both worlds flowed. They didn’t realize that killing him would unmoor the island. Every year since, both your world and mine have been dying a slow death.”
“What was his magic?” Willa asks softly, her face solemn.
“It was a rare power, one that drives not only magic, but life itself. Without dreams, there is no hope. No innovation. No goals for the future or empathy for a better world. There’s nothing to live for. Nothing to keep humanity afloat.” I stare at her, willing her to understand. “Imagination, Willa. You are a distant relative of the Aeternalis, a descendent of the family he left behind in your world. That’s why the Strayed want you. Why I want you.”
Willa grimaces like I’ve confirmed her worst nightmares. And maybe I have. “I won’t anchor myself here, Niko, no matter who it saves or who I’m related to. I’ve been torn apart and put back together too many times for the sake of others. I refuse to do it again. To be trapped anywhere I don’t choose.”
Nothing she says surprises me. I told Willa I saw her villainous heart for what it is, but the truth is, I saw to the core of it and wanted it. With a furious envy, with an unending desire. As someone who’s sacrificed my entire life, my happiness, my body, for the sake of the kingdom—and before that, for love—I wish I had Willa’s bravery to choose selfishly.
Even now, my choices may seem selfish to her, but they aren’t. They’re driven by a love of my people—of all people—one that’s tunneled so deep, it allows me to cross every boundary. Every moral line. For the greater good, for the sake of something better. Willa is ashamed of her survival, of the sacrifices she’s made, but she hasn’t yet realized that selfishness isn’t nearly as dangerous as devotion.
“I have no wish to trap you here, Willa.” A lie, in so many complicated layers, and then, the truth. “I want you to embrace your power of imagination and open the wards. I want to bring the dreamers back to Letum and restore the magic and life to both our worlds.”
She watches me with that steel gaze, and I can almost feel the thoughts whirring through her mind. Whether or not I’m being genuine; whether or not she has a choice, as if choice isn’t as fanciful an idea as dream tiger-beasts, and pixies who sprinkle magic dust.
“If you want to get back home, you’ll have to embrace your power. There’s no limit to what someone with your magic can do. Anything you dream could be yours.”
The longing in her face mirrors the one I’d detected in the cave. An ache for something more than survival, something fuller than a life of merely existing. “You could imagine the wards open. You could imagine yourself home. You could imagine an entirely new world.”
The air between us sparks with tension, and its only then I realize how close she’s leaned into me. Her breath smells slightly of mint, her hair of a floral shampoo. And it may be reckless, the result of being starved for so long, but I don’t pull away. I tilt my head, so that her lips are only a hairsbreadth from mine.
“The rest of the world would mire your feet in the earth, Darling,” I breathe onto her mouth. “But I—I would set you free into the sky.”
Her eyes fall closed for a long moment, and a shiver of pleasure runs up her body like I’ve stroked her with my fingers. My gaze darkens as her eyes blink open, long lashes framing her hazel irises in a manner that makes her appear innocent. Even as her tongue swipes out across her lips, and her thighs squeeze tighter together.
My gaze snaps to the movement, and I almost laugh as my own pleasure ripples through me. Power—that’s what turns Willa on. And by the second star, I understand. The way pure, unadulterated freedom sparks through your veins like the headiest drug. It’s what I felt on the decks of the Indomnitus— possibility.
“I’ll try,” she agrees in a husky voice. Her cheeks heat, and she clears her throat pointedly. “To work on my power, that is.” She glances at me sidelong with a distrustful frown. “I’m a little relieved, to be honest.”
I cock a brow. “Relieved that a lord of death and inhuman monsters both want you for a magic you don’t even know how to use?”
Willa scowls. “No,” she snaps haughtily. “Relieved that you only need my help to open the wards. I thought it was going to be something far worse. Like…taking over the world.” She shivers in disgust. “Or pretending to be your wife.”
“For someone who’s grown up in a place without stories, it seems you’ve read far too many of them.” My eyes rove coldly over her, even as my blood heats to boil. “There is no plot twist in the world believable enough to make you my wife.”
“Because I’m an inelegant urchin?” she seethes, throwing my own pain-addled words back at me.
“Because death has no companion.”
I mean it only as a fact, but when something far too close to pity edges Willa’s gaze, it feels more like foretelling. But rather than ruminating further, I shoot her a serpentine smile and rise to my feet.
My palm is pressed to the door when I realize she hasn’t moved. “Let’s not dawdle, Darling,” I scold lightly. “It’s been a long few days, and there’s no telling how long my feet will stay beneath me.”
I let myself enjoy the confusion flitting across her features, followed quickly by pure suspicion. “Where are we going?” she asks warily.
I raise my gaze to the ceiling in a show of measured patience. “What sort of monarch would I be if I left you alone in here to dream up anything your wicked mind pleases? You’ll sleep in my chambers. Tonight, and every night after that.”