Chapter 18
CHAPTER
I HAD PLANNED OUR escape after I promised myself I wouldn’t allow him to hurt me anymore.
“What are you doing?”
I was sitting in the treehouse, writing as fast as I could before the sunset and I lost light.
His voice was summer-bright, boyish, but beneath it throbbed something older. Patient. Certain.
“Journaling,” I said. “My memories.”
He leaned closer.
“Why?” he murmured.
My hand tightened around the journal.
“Because I need to remember who I am.”
The leaves rustled, too sudden, too synchronized.
Peter smiled behind me. I didn’t see it. But I knew it was beautiful in the way knives sometimes are.
Before I could close the book, his hand flashed forward. Too quick. Too eager.
The journal slipped from my fingers.
“Peter, no. Those are mine.”
He didn’t look at me. He was already thumbing through the pages. Roger’s voice. The sound of bells …”
“Stop.” My voice came out thin. “You have no right—”
He shut the book with a soft, deliberate snap. Not violent. Worse, possessive. “You have no memories, Wendy.” The words brushed the back of my neck. “I am your memory now.”
He pressed the journal to his chest, the gesture tender in shape but wrong in weight.
“Your thoughts,” he said softly. “They’re mine. Your dreams. Your fears. The way you breathe when you’re trying not to cry.” His smile widened, and something ancient stirred behind his eyes, something that had watched me far longer than I knew. “All of it. Mine.”
I had been a girl who believed in stories. Who followed a boy through a window because he made the dark seem like an adventure. And now I understood, too late, too clearly, that I had never been a companion to him. Never a friend. Never even a person.
I was a thing he had collected. A voice to tell him stories. A heart to feed his hunger for adoration. A soul he could carve out and wear like a coat when the cold crept too close.
“Give it back,” I said.
The flames crackled once, sharp, expectant, and the forest leaned in to hear his answer.
From somewhere beyond the trees came the squeal of a boar, the whoop of boys in pursuit, the thrum of drums stretched tight over bone.
Peter’s expression flickered. The boy slipped away, like a mask loosened by heat.
What remained was the thing that wore him.
“Get rid of it,” he said, and hurled the journal into the sand at my feet. “You just need me.”
“Peter …”
Then he stepped closer.
His hand rose, and I flinched. Eyes squeezing shut, bracing for a blow that didn’t come.
Instead, his fingers found my chin. Gentle. Almost loving.
He turned my face back toward him, slow and deliberate, the way one corrects a child who has forgotten her manners. His palm settled against my cheek, warm, steady, certain, and held me there.
I was trembling. I couldn’t stop. My whole body shook beneath his touch, and I hated him for feeling it, hated myself for letting him see.
“Look at me,” he said softly.
I opened my eyes.
He was smiling.
“Your thoughts,” he said, thumb brushing beneath my eye as if catching a tear I hadn’t yet shed. “They’re mine.”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
The drums outside the clearing quickened, as if the island itself agreed.
I looked down at the journal in the sand. My handwriting. My memories. My proof that I had once been someone before him.
And I understood, with a horror that settled into my bones like winter, that he would take all of it. Every scrap of who I was. Every thought I dared to think. He would drain me of life until there was nothing left but a girl-shaped thing that existed only to adore him.
That was what he wanted. Not love. Not companionship.
Erasure.
And he would call it forever, and he would call it belonging, and he would smile that golden smile while he did it, because to him, there was no difference between loving someone and owning them.
There never had been. Not for him.
In the morning I would wake John and Michael early. I’d run and fetch Roger, and we would finally leave this place.
He had appeared out of the dark wood, like something risen from it. No footfall. No breath.
Peter’s fingers clamped around my wrist, cold enough to sting and strong enough that I already felt the bruise blooming beneath his grip.
“Where were you?” His voice was bright and sharp like a snapped twig.
“Peter … please.”
Behind me, the palm fronds shuddered.
He laughed once, a bitter note. “With Roger,” he said, tilting his head, his smile stretching wide. “You’re going to run off with Roger.”
“Let her go,” Roger said, firm. “This is no place for her.”
Peter released me as if bored, and I pitched forward, falling onto the ground, my forehead striking a stone. Dirt lodged beneath my fingernails.
“You monster …” Roger said. And then I heard feet, a scuffling. I turned over and found them face to face, feet apart.
“You were always a coward!” Peter said, a sneer on his face. “Afraid of adventures. Afraid of choosing sides. Afraid to kill pirates because you’d rather become one.”
Somewhere in the trees, branches snapped, shapes waiting for a signal. My legs trembled as I pushed myself upright.
John and Michael stared in horror. Michael pressed both hands over his eyes, as if Peter’s face alone could ruin him.
Peter smiled at all of us. “Here we have the Darlings … and a boy I found begging for food behind a tavern. Hands torn from digging through rubbish.”
Roger stood still. Showing Peter no emotion. “Let her go,” he said. “Let all of them go.”
Peter shrugged as if none of it mattered. “Fine.” He slipped into the trees, and he was gone.
Roger brushed the hair from my face. “Wendy? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. My head throbbed.
The arrow hit him before I could draw another breath. A whistle and then a soft, wet thud.
The force knocked him back into the tree trunk behind him. The arrow drove straight through the left side of his chest.
Blood burst out in a hot spray onto my blue dress. My hands. My face. There was so much. Too much.
His mouth opened in shock. No scream, just a small, wounded exhale.
“Roger!” My voice broke. “No! No! No! Roger!”
I grabbed the arrow with both hands, unsure of what to do.
“Wendy, don’t—” John said, and I wailed, because I knew.
Blood pumped around my fingers in steady, horrible pulses. Warm. Thick. It splattered onto my arms, and I looked from my hands to his face, losing color. Growing white.
John knelt beside me, his hand on my back.
My own screams filled the air, bouncing off trees. Filling my skull until I felt something inside me dislodge.
I wrapped my arms around Roger’s shoulders. He sagged against me, breath catching.
“I’ll write you into every story,” I told him, because I knew he was dying, that he wouldn’t be coming back with us. “All of my stories. Every single story. For as long as I live. You are my story.”
“Wendy …” John’s voice trembled. “We need to go. Peter …”
I pressed my cheek against Roger’s hair. “You were going to come with me,” I whispered into his skin. “I was going to show you my home, and all of the years you missed living here. We were going to take them back.”
“Oh,” Peter said behind us, bright as a child showing off a trick. “I’m sorry. I thought he was a boar.”
Rage flooded me, drowning everything else. My hand slid to the dagger Roger had placed in my palm on Black Rock.
I stood on shaky legs, turned and drove the blade into Peter’s chest.
His scream cracked the open air. High. Wild. Awful. Not human. Not a boy. Like the whole of the island was screaming through him.
“Run,” Roger rasped. His voice was barely a thread. “Wendy … go.”
Michael sniffled in the background. “Wendy … I want to go home.”
I dropped to my knees beside Roger again. My hands slipped in the blood pooling under him. Soaking my skirt. Soaking into the earth.
“Stay,” I begged him. “Stay with me … please.”
I pressed my cheek against his, and I told him everything. I poured everything into him about me. Every memory. Every warm moment on the ship. Every laugh. Every glance from him and how that made me feel less alone in a place of nightmares.
Roger’s lip twitched in the faintest smile.
“Forget me,” he whispered. “Go.”
“Wendy!” Michael cried.
Roger fumbled weakly at his coat pocket and pressed something into my palm. His pocket watch. Still warm from his skin.
“One day …” his breathing frayed, ragged. “I’ll teach you how to read the stars.”
“Wendy!” John shouted. “Now!”
I looked into Roger’s eyes. I knew. He knew. This was the last time.
“Why?” I whispered. My throat felt torn.
“So you can live,” he said. “Out there.”
His breath hitched, then stopped. He … just stopped.
“Roger,” I whispered. “Roger …” His head fell against my shoulder.
The pocket watch ticked in my head. Steady and alive, when he no longer was.
John grabbed my arm. Michael clung to the other.
And we ran.
Thunder rolled through the trees. The ground buckled. The air warped, as the world folded in on itself and that place behind us. An island. A forest. A land that never really had a name.
The ash ring glowed ahead.
I didn’t look back. I could not.
Michael sobbed beside me. John pulled us onward with all of his strength.
The ash ring pulsed, sharp, white, collapsing inward like a dying star.
And then, we were through.