Page 26 of Losing Wendy

“But you don’t know where we’re going. You never played my game. Tell me, don’t you ever wonder what it might feel like to fall?”

“No,” I say, the lie seeping through my clenched teeth.

How often did I forsake the clock tower’s rusty ladder to scale the outer facade, wondering just how many moments of sheer euphoria I would experience if I simply let go? If those fleeting seconds would be enough to cut through the watery numbness that had crusted over my soul.

But now that I’m this high up, the peaks of the mountains glimmering like the edges of white-hot blades, my toes are simmering with static, an unpleasant tingling overcoming my limbs.

“You’re shaking,” he whispers in my ear.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “I’m yours now. Why insist on torturing me?”

“Turn around, and I’ll tell you.”

His demand has my stomach roiling, but I’m at the mercy of his fading grip, so I do as he tells me.

I twist around, feeling his hands slip around my ribcage and toward my back as I roll in his grip, until my arms are wrapped around his neck, my chest tucked into his.

I squeeze my eyes shut, the pain of keeping myself in this position, my legs dangling at an odd angle, making my torso feel as if it’s about to shred apart.

“Open your eyes, Wendy Darling.”

“I can’t.”

“Open your eyes, or I’ll drop you and not bother to watch you all the way down.”

Fear lances my ribcage, and when I open my eyes, I meet his. Black and glinting with cruel mischief.

“Tell me, why did you not wish to open your eyes to look at me when you were so content staring at the ground below? Isn’t the ground more dangerous?”

His smirk is bitter, and a shiver snakes up my spine. I know good and well why I wished to keep my eyes shut. Because this close to the Shadow Keeper, his scent of amber and pine threatening to intoxicate me, his firm chest flush with mine, I can’t help but admire his beauty.

It’s tantalizing, like the flame that devours the moth, and the way Peter’s smiling down at me tells me he knows as much. Is well aware of the crippling effect his fae aura has on me as a human. It’s why the humans rose up and banished the fae all those years ago. Why so many humans blinded themselves in the war effort, so as not to be seduced by the fae’s tempting beauty.

“See, that’s not so bad, now is it?”

I notice now how long his dark eyelashes are, how they graze my forehead as he presses his face close to mine.

A calm sweeps over me, and it’s more terrifying than anythingI’ve ever experienced. There’s a moment when I grasp for it, for the fear, but it’s slipping from my grip. As hard as I cling to it, it cuts free just the same.

“Do you remember the promise I made to you, Wendy Darling?” asks the Shadow Keeper, righting us in the sky so that we’re no longer perpendicular to the ground.

“No,” I lie.

A soft smile curves on his beautiful lips. “I promised I would take the fear away.”

That’s not entirely true. He said he’d take the pain away. Though I suppose to some, to me, they’re one and the same.

“What if I’m not ready?” I ask as we drift ever closer toward the distortion in the sky.

“Just let it go,” he tells me.

And his voice is so soothing, so intoxicating, I do.

I feel it fall, the fear I’ve carried so long on my shoulders. It drops like the contents of a package whose strings have come untied. I’m not sure how long it falls. If it ever hits the sharp edges of the mountains beneath, or if it’s caught by the wind and driven into the crashing waves. I don’t look down, because I can gaze at nothing but the engrossing pits of his eyes that I might just let swallow me.

“See? I told you that would feel better.”

CHAPTER 11

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