March raises his brow and shakes off the effects of the last shock, ignoring the wounds he’s receiving as if it isn’t happening at all. He’s cradling me in his lap, protecting me from all sides, and it should fill me with fury. He thinks I’m weak! My face twists, but before I can attack him for the insult, he grabs hold of my hands and looks me in the eyes.
“Just because you can handle the pain, doesn’t mean you should have to.”
I blink, and then I blink again. Not once in my lifetime has anyone said such words, and the fury that momentarily filled me disappears. He doesn’t think I’m weak. He just doesn’t want me to get hurt.
He flinches when a particularly excited Lost stabs too deep, and even though he heals quickly, I know the wounds must hurt, no matter what he says.
“We have to get out of here before you piss them off for not reacting or they kill you a little too much.”
His form flashes for a moment, lingering on the corpse a little too long, and somehow, it unnerves a few of the Lost. Not many, but enough that I stare at them in surprise. I’ve never seen any Lost less than cruel.
“You know,” he purrs, his voice completely at odds with the fact that he’s being stabbed. “If you want to transform into that ravishing creature you’re hiding beneath your skin, you could probably bust us out of here.”
I blink at the Hare again. It seems I’m to be constantly surprised by him. “You’re a strange one, March.”
“I think you mean sexy,” he grins.
A long, loud howl goes up from the Lost below and the torture stops as suddenly as it began. Frowning, I look down beneath us, searching for the culprit, and when I meet green eyes and scaled skin, I freeze. He storms into the midst of the Lost, looking up at us from below, his face twisting in a scowl.
“I told you not to capture this one, you idiots!” he growls at the Lost, and they all shuffle restlessly. None of them speak up for themselves. None of them place the blame on another. I’m not sure I can pick out which of them were the ones who captured us in the first place. Some of them blend together even with the different horns on their heads.
And then those crocodile eyes narrow on me. March stands, pulling me with him, and though I can stand easily enough in the cage to look down my nose at Wolfbane, March has to bend just a little, his height a disadvantage.
“Hello, Crocodile,” I say, gritting my jaw.
“Hello,” he answers, his eyes flashing from green to blue for a quick second before returning to the reptilian slit. “Sister.”
March tenses behind me.
Chapter Fourteen
I can feel March’s eyes on me as I stare at Wolfbane, at the beast I once called brother. But he isn’t my brother anymore. My brother wouldn’t kill innocent people. My brother wouldn’t become the villain. My brother should be dead.
Peter killed him for a game.
His form shimmers and the scales give away to flesh and recognition, to the blue eyes I recognize far more than the crocodile green. He looks weary in human form, his shoulders tense, dark circles beneath his eyes. Wolfbane is draining the magic of Neverland himself, absorbing it, so why does he look so worn?
“Lower the cage,” he murmurs to the Lost. They hesitate for a moment but when Wolfbane snaps his teeth like a beast, they move quickly. The cage begins to lower toward the ground, and when the bottom touches the earth, Wolfbane steps forward to meet my eyes. “They weren’t supposed to catch you, Lily.”
I raise my brow. “You said you’d kill anyone to reach your goals, Bane. Don’t start feeling sentimental now.”
The corner of Bane’s lips ticks up in amusement, and then his eyes fall on March, and the expression is gone. “Who the fuck are you?” March doesn’t answer. Instead, he simply looks Wolfbane over, studying him, and it seems to get under Bane’s skin. “I asked you a question!”
“Enough,” I growl. “As far as you’re concerned, he might as well be my concubine.” I curl up my lips. “Now let us out of this cage and we can see which of our beasts is stronger.”
I don’t acknowledge which beasts I mean between us, because I’m near certain March is some sort of beast, too. There’s no need to draw attention to that, however. He can remain our secret weapon.
Shaking his head, Bane studies March a little closer, his brow raised. “You always did like the strangest men.”
“At least I’m not obsessed with a woman who will never see me as anything more than the boy who died trying to save her.”
The blue of his eyes shifts to reptilian and back again. Bane clenches his fists, annoyed with my words, no matter how true. “I have my reasons.”
“Pining away for Wendy when she could never give you her heart. All because you were stupid enough to walk into the Hollow and take Peter’s prize,” I hiss.
“She was wasting away in there!” he growled. “He kept her like a pet, holed up in that tree like some sort of bird. I was trying to be good, trying to be better. I sat outside that Hollow for days before I made a move, when Wendy’s voice started to grow weaker. You should have helped me when I asked you to!”
I blink. Had he asked me for help?
“I came to you, saying I suspected Peter was holding someone hostage in his tree. You said that it wasn’t our business. So I made it mine.”
“I didn’t know it was Wendy.”
“It shouldn’t have mattered who it was!” he growls, stepping closer. “I was trying to be good, and I paid for it dearly. Now the rest of Neverland will, too.”
“There’s more at stake here than the past and your warped morals, Bane.” Behind me, March shifts, keeping close but not saying a word. It’s as if he knows he can’t offer anything in this argument, that it’s one that’s been a long time coming. The fight between siblings are always dangerous. “Wendy will never love you. She gave her heart to Hook the moment she saw him.”
“Hearts can be changed, sister. You only have to look at your own to see that.”
I scoff. “You think Wendy is some key, such utter nons—”
“Wendy is the key. Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.” He shakes his head. “You can’t always be the Chieftess, Lily. Sometimes you have to be the observer.” He reaches up and touches his fingers to a tiny crystal tear hanging from his headdress, right alongside his feathers. “Wendy will be the one to get me out of this hell.”
“Why not let everyone out? Why kill all of Neverland just so you can escape with Wendy?” It’s the question that’s been running around in my head. Why go through so much trouble to get Wendy away from the others? Why can’t he just open the door and not care who makes it out or who doesn’t.
“Because no one else deserves to keep on living,” he snarls. “I certainly don’t think Peter or Hook or Tink should be allowed to roam other worlds. I can’t fathom pirates and our people running rampant somewhere else.”
“That’s not your decision to make. Everyone has a right to live.”
“Except me,” he murmurs. “Except me, Lily.”
Because Wolfbane had died trying to save Wendy, but before he could breathe his last breath, he made a deal with Neverland itself. He gave up his humanity for a chance to live. It’s a deal that my tribe knows well, one that is never done for fear of the monster it turns us into. I already bear the evidence of such a deal on my head, but I didn’t have to give up my humanity for mine, though I didn’t have much left to give. Long ago, I only had to sacrifice a drop of my blood.
“Wendy will never love you,” I say again because it seems the Croc doesn’t truly understand. “She’s strong, but she has a human heart. Killing everyone she cares for will breed hate, and she’d sooner skewer you when you’re not looking.”
“Love can be grown.”
“Not that way, it can’t. Bane, try and see reason. There’s no need for all—”
“There’s every need. No one came searching for me after I died.”
“Because no one knew!” I g
rowl. “I didn’t know what you’d run off to do. I only knew you were in the Tribe one moment, left, and never came back!”
“Wendy looked for me,” he murmurs, his eyes narrowing on me. “The woman who could never love me came for me.”
“She came for a body,” I argue. “She wanted to bury you.”
For a moment, neither of us speak, staring at each other, remembering the time before the Crocodile was a threat. There’s so much history hanging between us, I don’t know how we can wade through it, not that Bane wants to. The man standing there wears the face of my brother, sounds like him even, but his moral code has been warped by the deal he made with Neverland. I don’t know if my brother is still in there somewhere, if he’s been changed by Neverland so much that he could never be my brother again.
“Bane—” I whisper, reaching my hand through the bars. It seems lately, I’m holding out my hand for others to take, waiting for them to reach out.
“I’m not Bane anymore, Lily,” he says, staring at my hand. He doesn’t reach out to take it, and I’m not sure if it’s because of fear or something else. “I haven’t been for a long time.”
“You could be,” I whisper. “If you tried.”
He hesitates, his fingers twitching at his side, and I wait. March’s heat soaks into my skin from behind, helping to keep my hand steady. I don’t shake, not for Wolfbane, because this is a monster of his own making. If he wants to attempt to be more man than monster, I can try to help him, regardless of what the others will think. But I can’t help him if he’s too far gone to recognize what’s he’s become.
His hand twitches again, raises a few inches, and hope blooms in my chest, but before anything else can happen, the world begins to tremble.
March tilts his head. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know. It’s not something I’ve heard in Neverland before.” The sound grows, multiplies, and moves closer.
“It sounds familiar.”
Wolfbane growls and shifts back to the Crocodile, prepared to take on whatever is coming. He probably expects the Daughters, but it’s coming from the opposite direction they would be, and still, they wouldn’t make that sound. The Lost turn in the direction of the sounds, too, but no one lifts us back into the air. No one even pays attention to the two prisoners in a wooden cage.
March stiffens. “That’s not good.”
I glance at him. “What is it?”
Studying the cage around us, March tests the bars, pulling against them. He doesn’t answer right away, focused as he is on getting free of the cage even though it’s pointless to try that way, but when he finally answers, the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
“It’s a chimera storm.”
I don’t ask him how he knows, because the words reverberate in my head, telling me all I need to know. March is familiar with the creatures, even if I’m not. And it feels like we’re in a world of trouble sitting in a cage, trapped, while a literal storm of creatures bears down on us.
“Will this cage break?” March asks, testing the sides.
“Not unless whoever wove it releases it.” My eyes flick to where the Crocodile stands ready to face off against the creatures coming. I can’t make out anything except for a cloud of black dust kicking up in the distance between the mangled and rotting trees, a strange sight in Neverland. Even the Dark Side doesn’t have such things. It’s far enough away right now that we have some time, but it’s moving fast, far faster than anything I’ve ever seen. “And Wolfbane doesn’t seem inclined to let us go before this chimera storm appears.”
“Well,” March says, turning in a circle. “Fuck.”
“Are we in trouble?” I have no problem admitting my weakness in this moment. Sometimes, admitting you don’t know something is a greater tool than pretending you do. “I don’t know what a chimera is.”
“I’m not in trouble,” he grumbles. “If those things get into this cage though, you will be.”
“Why wouldn’t you be in trouble, too?”
March turns and meets my eyes, his form shifting briefly, before returning to normal. He’s a constant shift between looking half sin and half corpse, and I’ve never been more intrigued, especially since the sin form seems to be the most constant. “Because they sense their own, Pretty Lily,” he admits softly.
And his mother wasn’t a Hare.
My eyes widen, but not as wide as they go when the chimera storm reaches the Lost camp in the same moment and begin sending everything into chaos. The dust swirls in first, enveloping everything it touches until it creates a strange eerie atmosphere, but that isn’t what my eyes are on. As the storm grows closer, I’m able to make out exactly what a chimera is, and I turn to stare at March with my eyes still dangerously wide when the beasts begin to devour the Lost they come into contact with. It’s like a mass of the tiny birds in giant form that I’d once seen devour a Lost, but instead, it takes them only seconds to tear into the creatures, only seconds to drop nothing but bones behind before they’re grabbing the next Lost.
“Does this make you fear me?” March asks, not quite looking at me, his eyes instead focused on the happenings outside of the cage. His ear twitches, but he doesn’t give any other sign of discomfort.
I glance over at the creatures as they rip the Lost to pieces, seeing the moment Wolfbane realizes he just needs to get out of the way of the storm. I watch as he turns towards me in the cage, his intent to grab me and run evident in his eyes, but the chimeras block the path too quickly, circling the cage, and I lose sight of the Crocodile.
March’s hands wrap around me and pull me into the center of the cage, away from the clawed skeletal fingers suddenly reaching through the bars in an attempt to get at me. I notice they don’t reach for March, just as he said they wouldn’t. His form shifts and he hisses at the beasts, and the similarities aren’t lost on me.
The chimera are mostly robbed figures, some sort of dragon-like skull peering through empty eyes, but when one of them tips back their heads, I realize that isn’t their face at all. The skull is just a mask, and the cracked, vicious face underneath is almost worse than any of the creatures in Neverland. I grimace and press closer against March. I really don’t want to find out if I can heal after being devoured by these creatures.
March, though he doesn’t look completely the same when he shifts behind me, I can still see the skull peeking through his form, the color of burnt flesh. Though he doesn’t look like a chimera, he has it’s features beneath his skin, the dragon skull they wear flashing over his cheekbones before melding with his skin. And then he returns to normal, as if he’s only the Hare.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whisper, allowing March to hold me in the center of the cage as the chimeras swarm the cage, circling it, climbing on top until they block out all light. Their hands reach inside, trying to grab me, but March keeps us just out of reach. “Even seeing this, I’m not afraid of you.”
“You really should be,” March murmurs before hissing at a Chimera that reaches inside a little too close. He whips out a hand and slices the arm clean off with claws I hadn’t expected and the creature screeches so loud, it makes me cringe. “I’m not safe.”
I turn and look at him over my shoulder, letting my skin shift slightly. I can’t shift all the way—the cage is too small for my beast—but I can enough that it would have unnerved anyone else. My face sharpens, teeth poking from my lips. Claws tip my suddenly too long arms, my skin shading gray. My wings can’t spread without a full shift, but I can use some of the most dangerous weapons at my disposal as I am. “I’m not safe either,” I tell him, meaning every word.
The chimera storm, though fast moving, doesn’t seem to want to leave the Dark Side of the island, so they swarm over the black, devouring anything they find. I know Wolfbane escaped with most of his Lost on his heels, hovering just on the other side of the boundary, but that means March and I are the only appetizing meals left.
The chimeras swarm all around us, trying t
o get inside, reaching. The cage doesn’t break, it won’t, but it creaks with the force. I reach out to the trees but on this side of the island, it’s feels like useless power. The trees on the Dark Side no longer live in their mangled forms, their souls long gone, not able to be used in any sense I can utilize.
“I don’t know what to do,” I admit, looking at March. “None of my powers will work in these circumstances.”
“If I break the cage, they’ll grab you.” March looks around, searching the same as me, trying to find a way out. “I’m not going to hand you to the beasts.”
“So what?” I sigh. “We just stay in this cage until they grow tired?”
“Chimeras don’t get tired. They don’t feel much at all.”
“Fantastic. So we die here.” March opens his mouth, but I interrupt him. “Or I do.”
Somewhere above us, a bright light flashes and the chimeras screech, jerking away from the light, swarming away from the cage just in time for me to look up and see bright red hair and straining muscles.
“You’re not dying, Lily,” Peter growls, latching onto the top of the cage and lifting us into the air.
Peter has always been strong, even before we grew up. Something about being part of Neverland allows him to have more power than any of the others realize. As the only one that can leave, the only one that can bring children to Neverland, Peter is meant to be strong. As an adult, he’s far stronger than he was before. His muscles bulge as he lifts the cage with March and I inside, even against the chimera that try to grab ahold before we lift off completely. They never stand a chance against Peter’s strength and speed.
March steadies me when the cage wobbles violently. I would have slammed into the side, but March’s hand on my bicep keeps me close, his other hand locked around the top of the cage to keep us in one spot.
“Peter,” I call, and brilliant green eyes look down at me. The wounds on his skin still open and close, slowly, as if some invisible force slices him open every so often. How he can still fly with it happening makes no sense to me. It only makes me realize how strong he truly is to begin with.
Fierce as a Tiger Lily (Daughters of Neverland Book 2) Page 8
