Page 17 of Losing Wendy

CHAPTER 7

“You’d punish a child for the sins of her parents?” my father asks, jutting his cleft chin out, though his legs are trembling.

“Please,” says the captain, drawing the knife away from my throat just long enough to gesture toward both my parents. “Do go on with your ethics lecture.”

“Not until you release our daughter,” says my father.

The captain laughs, the sound more bristly than the stubble of his jaw scraping against my temple. “So entitled to your loved ones. Tell me—what makes her so much more significant than everyone else’s?”

“Ma. Pa.” I scan my parents’ forlorn faces. “Please. What is he talking about?”

My father won’t look at me, but my mother will. Pools well in her lower lids. “I’m so sorry, Wendy. I only wanted to protect you.” She turns her face to the captain. “Please. Take me instead. Kill me. Punish me. Whatever revenge you’ve been plotting, take it out on me. The blame is mine and mine alone.”

“Oh, how I would prefer it if that were enough,” says the captain. “But I’m afraid I wish you to hurt as I do. Thankfully,” he says, “I,unlike you, have a meager set of ethics by which I abide. I won’t kill your daughter simply for revenge, no matter how much I’d love to watch that lovely smile slip from your face as I bled her lifeblood.”

My mother breathes a sigh of relief.

“Your son, however.”

The captain snaps his fingers, and my heart caves in as a man appears from an adjacent room.

Michael. No. But it’s not Michael fighting against the bulky man’s grip. It’s John.

“Let go of my sister,” he screams, but it’s no use. I’m not the one whose blood they intend to spill.

“Please. Just take me instead,” I whisper, awed at the way the trembling in my voice stills, the sobs go quiet. All around me, the world goes numb. I don’t feel it at all. Don’t feel this wretched man’s hands around me, the touch that set me aflame only half an hour ago. Don’t feel the pounding of my heart against my chest or the agony in my parents’ eyes or the dread of what will happen to John.

I’ll feel it all later. It will cascade around me in a torrent of grief, shoving my face underneath the water and drowning me, over and over, until the shadows take me into their blissful oblivion. That is, if I weren’t about to die.

But for now, I feel nothing. “Please, Nolan. I’m begging you.”

The captain’s breath falters; the blade against my throat stills. “Very well.”

He removes his blade from my throat, tossing it at the feet of my parents. It clatters when it hits the marble floor. His stubble scratches my cheek as he gestures toward it with his head.

“Slit your own throats, and I’ll spare the boys,” he says.

“No!” John cries, fighting against the henchman. But my brother, though he’s gained muscle mass over the last few months, is still slender-framed compared to the man holding him. In the end, his fighting proves little use.

“No.” I’m not struggling against the captain anymore. Not when my mother meets my gaze and smiles, the edges of her lips quavering.

“Spare her too,” says my mother, but the captain shakes his head.

“The boys will go free. It’s that, or all your children meet unfortunate ends.”

My mother and I make eye contact, and in that single look we exchange a silent acknowledgment. It’s okay, I tell her. Because this is the end we’ve been preparing for my entire life. It was a fool’s dream, thinking we could escape the shadows. Clearly the captain intends to steal me away as bounty, but he doesn’t know to whom my soul and body belong. He doesn’t know that at the hour’s end, the shadows will come to claim me, dissolving me from his reach.

If we can just save John and Michael, I can welcome the shadows in peace.

My mother nods in understanding, tears streaming down her face. She kneels and plucks the blade from the ground, her fingers as delicate with the hilt as they might be with the handle of a steaming teacup. My father lurches forward to stop her, his hands shaking as they close around the blade.

For a moment, they wrestle for the hilt, but my father’s desperation shows through at the widening of his eyes as he pleads with my mother. “Forgive me, Mary Darling. But we both know you’ve always been the stronger of the two of us. I can’t bear to watch you go.”

My mother smiles gently and lets go of the hilt.

“I’m so sorry, children,” says my father.

In a motion swifter than I would have thought possible, my father brings the blade to his throat. There’s the sickening slicing of flesh, then blood pours from the wound, and the room goes silent as my ears flood with a deafening roar. Faintly, I think I can sense my brother screaming, but I can’t actually hear it.

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