by Lisa Maxwell
Chapter 23
THE BODIES OF THE FALLEN boys are already waiting for us when Pan leads me and Olivia out of the fortress and to the edge of the trench. The dead boys are uncovered and unprepared for their final rest, and their skin is ashen and unwashed. And the blood of battle still marks their clothing and is already congealing at the edges of their wounds. Many of their eyes remain open, as though accusing the heavens for the cruel fate they’ve found themselves victim to.
Some are Pan’s boys, but most belong to the Captain’s crew. In death they seem even younger than in life. That patina of danger they’d carried on the ship like a badge of honor has rubbed away, leaving only the faces of children behind.
They are never going to know another day. They’re never going to grow up to become the men they might have been. And in this world, no one will even remember them. No one will mourn their loss. In days, or maybe even hours, no one will even remember them.
I wonder about the people they left behind. I wonder if anyone from our own world still waits for them to come home. I wonder if anyone waits for me.
Two older boys lift the first body—Owen. Grabbing him by the shoulders and feet, they unceremoniously heave his familiar freckles and ruddy hair into the pit. Then they reach for the next boy. I feared Sam on the ship, but now as I look at his broken body, I can hardly remember why.
When they lift him roughly, Sam’s arm flops like the dead weight that it is. Part of it is missing, but there is no bloodied gash like so many of the other bodies wear. Instead, like the boy who attacked me on the Captain’s ship, the lower half of his arm is simply gone, as though it cracked off along the line of his jagged tattoo. No blood. No bone. Just empty blackness where his arm was once attached.
Is this what happened to the Captain’s arm? Is this what drove him to accept the life the Dark One offered that night?
Pan is standing to my left, with Olivia tucked close to his other side. He’s watching the proceedings without any visible emotion as one body after another is lifted and tossed unceremoniously into the gaping pit. When Olivia turns and buries her tears in Pan’s shoulder, he comforts her without sparing me a glance. Ever since I plead for mercy on the Captain’s behalf, Pan has looked at me with barely concealed disappointment.
I can’t really be sorry for what I did, though. I couldn’t have watched the Captain die like that. On his ship, he told me that he’d saved me and that I owed him a debt. I consider that debt forgiven now, because Pan gave me what I asked for—he’s spared the Captain’s life. For now, at least.
But I can’t stop wondering why the Captain tried to make me believe Pan was the one who controlled the Dark Ones? After what I’d seen him do on that ship, I would have thought he’d have come up with a more believable story.
“Come, ladies.” Pan pulls Olivia closer and extends a hand to me. “Let us put this whole messy ordeal behind us, shall we?”
“I’m going to stay for a while longer,” I say, not taking his hand. My gaze is still steady on the last of the bodies.
I need time away from the chaos of the fortress. Time to mourn for the boys who died today—to witness the loss, even if no one else seems to understand the finality of it. Even though I understand that, in this world, time is probably the last thing I have.
And I need time away from Pan. One thing became painfully clear the moment Pan admitted Fiona was working for him—he does have a way to get us back. Fiona was in London, and if she’s on Pan’s side and not the Captain’s, she could take us back there. If he wanted her to.
So why doesn’t he want her to?
“Come in before dark,” he says after a beat of uneasy silence, not a request but a command. I give him a vague nod, and he takes Olivia in, leaving two of the fairy lights behind to guard me.
I stand in that pointless vigil long after the last body disappears into the gaping mouth of the trench. When my legs grow tired, I’m still not ready to face what waits for me in the fortress. I know Pan’s boys will already be pummeling one another, sating their appetites, and sleeping lazily in half-drunken stupors. I know the fortress will still be filled with the Fey, their watchful faces blank with careless indifference as they stand guard.
Sinking to the ground, I press my palms against the pulsing surface of rock to steady myself, wanting so badly to be able to go back and make different choices. To believe my mother, to leave the light burning and the window shut, to stop Olivia from coming to London. To stop any one part of this from happening. Beneath my palms, the ground grows suddenly warm, and heat licks across my skin.
And then as quickly as it flared, the heat is gone.
I pull away and stare at my hands. There’s no sign of a burn, no sign that anything at all just happened. Still, I know I didn’t imagine it, just as I’m more sure now that I didn’t imagine it at the falls with Pan—or in the tunnel, when I thought the island would bury us alive.
I stare at my palms for a long moment before I slowly lower my hands to the ground again, wondering all the while. I close my eyes and concentrate on the heartbeat of the island and—
“You play a dangerous game, Young One.”
I startle at the voice behind me and pull my hands away from the ground, tucking them into the soft folds of the tunic I’m wearing as I turn. No bright flash warned me of Fiona’s approach, but she’s there behind me, her bright hair a beacon in the dimming night.
“I’m not playing any game,” I say as I glance over my shoulder, where the chasm stands waiting. It’s not lost on me that we’re alone. The other fairy lights Pan left with me are gone.
She stalks forward, her steps as graceful as they are predatory. “Are you not?” Her voice is as menacing as a swarm of wasps. “What were you attempting, then, with your hands pressed as they were to this world?”
“Nothing,” I say, feeling immeasurably stupid for having even tried. Fiona cocks her head, expectant, clearly unwilling to let it go. “Pan told me Neverland answers those who belong here. I was just trying . . .” But it feels too ridiculous to say the words aloud.
“And did this world answer your call, Young One?” she asks, her eyes narrowed dangerously.
“No. I mean . . . I don’t know,” I admit, uneasy under the intensity of her stare.
“Perhaps it would be better for all of us if it did not.” She takes another threatening step forward.
I don’t ask the question I want to ask. Instead, I make myself stay perfectly still as she continues to stalk toward me, almost herding me to the chasm’s edge.
“The one who calls himself Pan has long searched for one to whom this world will answer.” She cocks her head to one side. “One of the Queen’s own blood.”
“The Queen?” I ask, my skin going cold as I take a step back.
“One who is more than human. And less than Fey,” Fiona continues. “One, perhaps, such as you.”
Sharp needles of warning are prickling across my skin, urging me to run, but I have nowhere to go. A few steps more, and I will tumble back into the dark abyss that has already claimed many bodies today. And in front of me, Fiona blocks any escape.
I shake my head in denial. “I’m not any Fey,” I say, curling my fingers into my palms.
“Pan believes so,” she says. “He believes you could be the heir to the Queen’s True Child, the Fey prince she left in your world many ages ago in exchange for the human child who became Pan. He has long heard whispers of this Fey prince and the children he left unprotected, a halfling with the Queen’s blood—the Queen’s power—in its veins. It is why he sent his Dark Ones to find you and bring you to this world.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. Because she’s wrong. “The Dark Ones overthrew his mother.”
“The Queen was never his mother,” she snarls. “The one who calls himself Pan was nothing more than a plaything for her. When she grew bored with his weakness, she cast him out of her palace, banishing him to the farthest reaches of the island. She never expected him to surv
ive. But she’d given him too much of her own power, revealed too many of her secrets.” Fiona’s sharp teeth glint in the night as she sneers at me. “Instead of dying, he found the Dark Ones, and they were more than willing to lower themselves to a mere human in exchange for the opportunity to exact their revenge for their fallen King.”
I take a shaking breath, willing her to be wrong. “But he hates them,” I counter.
“Of course he does,” she hisses. “He hates any reminder that he is not truly Fey, that he is weak and dependent upon our power.” Her mouth curves into a mocking smile.
“But I’ve seen—”
“Only what Pan wishes you to see,” Fiona interrupts, taking a menacing step toward me. “He showed you the Captain’s greatest secret in order to turn your affections, did he not? But Rowan is not alone in requiring the assistance of the darkest Fey to survive in this world. Pan also needs the lives they bring to him.
“This is why he has searched for one of your kind. He thinks he can claim the Queen’s power from your blood, the same as he has claimed countless human lives over the ages. And he believes that with that power, he could rule this world once and for all. Without need of the Dark Ones’ assistance. And with complete power over this world and my kind.”
I shake my head in denial, even as Pan’s words echo in my memory: I’m not trying to find a way out of this world. I would do anything to save it.
“I’m not—” But I can’t even say the words. “I can’t be.”
The way Fiona’s looking at me makes the prickling across my skin a hundred times more painful. “It is true that you do not seem as we do, but the one who calls himself Pan believes in your promise. For he is sure now that the other girl holds no such power. But you, he has a great interest in.”
“No,” I say. “I’m human. My mother’s human, and . . .”
“And?” Fiona drawls. “Who is your sire, Young One?”
I take a step back in shock. My sire . . . my father? “I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “But he can’t be . . .” But when I start to step back again, my heel reaches the edge of the chasm, sending a few small bits of rock tumbling into the depths.
Fiona only smiles. “Perhaps not . . . but I wonder, then, how you came to have these?” Fiona reaches out a single, claw-tipped finger and lifts the necklace I’m wearing made from the few blue-gray stones I managed to salvage from my bracelet. “Humans call these deora sí. Fairy tears,” she says with a sneer. “A stupid enough name, but such a powerful and dangerous gift can only be bestowed by one of the Fey.”
Before I can stop her, Fiona gives an abrupt jerk, and the thread breaks. The second the stones fall away, her finger transforms, the sharp, clawlike nail shrinking into a softly rounded manicure. I’m too surprised by her transformation to bother to worry about the stones at first. Instead of the Fiona I’m used to, a lovely and very human-looking girl stands before me. Her skin isn’t iridescent, and her teeth are completely normal.
She smiles—a perfectly normal smile now—but there is something in her eyes that gives away her otherness. “Yes, Young One. They allow you to see through our glamour, but they are not what has hidden you from him for so long,” she says, licking at the air, lizardlike, as if to taste it. “There is some other power doing that work. You would have been discovered long before now had you not been protected by those who were loyal to the Queen’s True Child. Someone knows of what you are. Someone has protected you quite carefully.”
With a shaking breath, I crouch to scoop up the few stones that remain. The second my fingers touch them, the Fiona I know is back. And touching them, I remember something else—a room in London, the foggy voice of my mother as she slipped the bracelet onto my wrist.
Is this why my father had given my mother the bracelet? Why she gave it to me? All those years, could it have been the reason she could see the monsters, and the reason I could see the truth of what Fiona was in London?
I stand back up and face her again. “Why are you telling me any of this? I thought you worked for him.”
With a hiss, Fiona glares at me. “I work only for my own kind. Pan believes in my loyalty, and that gives me power to work against him. To free my people and my world. But if you reveal your true self to Pan, if you give yourself to him, all my work will have been in vain.”
“I don’t plan on giving myself to anyone,” I tell her. “Your plans are safe as far as I’m concerned.”
“It is not enough.” Fiona runs her long tongue over those awful teeth. “You’ve chosen to betray the one ally my kind have in this world. Without the Captain, who will stand with my kind against the one who calls himself Pan? The Captain must be freed.” She gives me a smile that makes the prickling sensation across my skin intensify until it’s almost painful.
Understanding what she intends me to do, I take another step back. But there is nowhere else to go. As I stumble toward the chasm, Fiona’s hand snakes out to grab my wrist and hold me by one arm as I dangle over the gaping pit. She doesn’t immediately pull me to safety.
“You expect me to free him?” I ask, trying not to let myself look down at the blackness beneath me.
“The Captain is your only chance to escape from Pan, to ever see your miserable world again.”
I can hear the soft, distant echo of the shower of rocks I knocked loose from the edge of the chasm. My mouth dry, I plead with Fiona: “How can I save him? I don’t even know where Pan’s keeping him.”
“I can get you to the place where he is being held. Once he’s free, the Captain can help you find your way from the fortress.” Her grip feels like a vice as she jerks me back to solid ground.
I let out a ragged exhale, fear still squeezing my throat.
“Then we understand each other?” the Fey says, satisfaction dripping in her tone.
I glance up, still trying to catch my breath. Her expression is so arrogant, so sure, the panic running through me falls away. “Not even close, Tinker Bell.”
Her expression transforms into something cold and truly terrifying, but I force myself to stay calm. I’ve jumped from one mistake to another out of fear. This time, I need to understand more. I still don’t completely trust the Captain, and I need to know what I’m choosing.
“I need time,” I tell her. “To consider.”
Her eyes narrow at me, but to my relief she takes a step back. “I will give you one thing more . . . to consider. A gift, you might say, between distant kin.” She licks her lips, like she can taste my fear and uncertainty. “Fey power cannot be taken. It can only be bestowed. Guard your secrets well, Young One, and be careful with what you offer him.” She gives me a smile that I can feel prickling at my skin. “Be careful of what you surrender.”
The pinpricks turn into a thousand razor-sharp slices, and I feel like I’m being flayed alive. And in a sudden flash, the world explodes in light, and Fiona is gone.
At first the field was quiet, and for a moment the boy felt an unspeakable excitement. Finally, the adventure he had so wanted was his. Then, quick as a thought, a shell burst overhead, lighting the field. Exposing them all. It hung, still as a star, flickering above as though it were alive. . . .
Chapter 24
ONCE MY EYES ADJUST AGAIN to the evening light, I head back into the fortress. I need to find Pan. I need to figure out if anything Fiona has just told me is true. But I’m no sooner through the entrance when a boy I’ve never seen before runs up to me. He’s barely as tall as I am, and he can’t be more than ten or eleven. Still, with the thick club he’s holding and the wild look in his eyes, I take a step back.
“You were there, weren’t you?” he demands, taking another step toward me. “Today, out at the End. You went with Himself, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I tell him, inching back as I eye the club.
“Did Liam return with you?” he asks, taking a step even closer yet. “I haven’t seen him. And then with the fighting . . .” His voice trails off, as though he’s unsure of what
else to say. He chews on his lip nervously, his eyes darting wildly from side to side, like he’s afraid to look at me. From the state of it, I’d say he’s been chewing on his lip for a while now.
“I don’t know,” I say, trying to inch around him. I don’t want to be the one to have to tell him that no one came back from the End except Pan, Olivia, and me, but the boy is insistent. He won’t let me go.
“Himself said it would be fine. Just a bit of fun. But Liam ain’t come back yet, and I’m starting to worry.”
“A bit of fun?” I ask, confused. There was nothing fun about the morning’s excursion. The boys we found out at the End were beaten and bloody, and the gray mist. . . . I get a chill every time I think of what could have happened out there.
“It was just another game,” he tells me. “I should have insisted for us to be on the same side. Liam’s my best mate, see. We’re always on the same side, but . . .” He looks up at me. “You sure you didn’t see him?”
“What do you mean, a game?” I ask, ignoring his question.
The boy’s wide eyes regard me as though I’m something of an idiot. “Same as always. A bit of fun is all.”
The way this boy is acting, the things he’s saying have my instincts on high alert. “What about the Captain?” I ask.
“I dunno, but I ’spect whatever’s left of him is locked safe in the dungeon down below. I didn’t get a swing at him, though,” he says, his brows drawing together in disappointment.
“This morning, I mean,” I say, trying to get the boy to focus. “You were with Olivia this morning. Didn’t you see the Captain out at the End when you all were attacked?”
His face scrunches in confusion. “Weren’t no Captain,” he tells me. “Just a bit of fun with us lads.”
