Page 125 of Losing Wendy

That’s the most terrifying part of all.

Because he’s kneeling before the source of the other voice.

It’s coming from a woman.

Shadows form into sensual curves, hugging the woman’s body tightly. At once, I’m struck by her beauty, though faintly, in the back of my mind, I recognize the error in this, given I’m unable to make out the features that would make her so. She stands above Peter on a dais, looking down upon him.

I don’t know how I know this, but I get the impression there’s a sense of derision on her face, underneath all those swirling shadows.

There’s an alluring beauty there, and I’m a child who can’t seem to help but stand on her tiptoes and touch her fingers to the burner.

I steel myself, used to Peter’s glamour more than I was when I first arrived. I bite down on my lip until I draw blood, but at least the pain keeps me tethered to reality. The reality that this shadow is dangerous and doesn’t care for my well-being.

“Tell me, Peter, why is it that you appear so displeased to seeme?” pouts the woman, tracing a shadowed finger in a trail along Peter’s shoulder blade. Even underneath the shadows, I can sense him tense at her touch. Bile coils at my throat when she takes her sharp fingernail, protruding in inky rivulets from the shadows, and traces it up his neck, resting it at his chin to force him to look at her.

“You once sought me out. Do you not remember those days? How eager you were to find me when all the others claimed I didn’t exist?”

“I didn’t revere you then as I should have,” says Peter, the same emptiness in his voice as the night I chased him up the cliff and found him mourning the dead Lost Boys in his own peculiar way.

The shadow woman tsks. “You act as if you revere me now.”

“I fear you,” says Peter.

“Hmm. If only it were as impossible for fae to lie in this realm as in another I’m privy to. Perhaps I should find a way to set the same curse upon you, my love.”

“Is that what you want? For me to speak the truth?” asks Peter.

“Why would I wish for you to lie to me?”

“You always ask if I find you beautiful. If you wished to know the truth, you would not ask such foolish questions.”

I expect the woman to rear back with a shriek, but she doesn’t. Her shadows curl around her like the edges of a smile. “I always did like you, you know. Uninhibited by what shackles the rest of us.”

“You’re partly to blame for that,” Peter says.

The female laughs again. “I’ve only ever given you the gifts you requested. Have I ever gifted you with anything you did not beg from me with your very own lips?”

Something about the way she saysbeghas a pang of envy roiling through me. The sensuality of her tone. I sense that if I could see her eyes, they’d be ravenous with desire.

“Do not act as if I’ve denied anything you’ve ever asked,” she says. “Speaking of which, tell me, Peter, why have you yet to take advantage of my most recent gift?”

When Peter remains silent, she slices his chin with her fingernail.

He doesn’t even flinch.

“You’ve yet to take her, but why?” she says. “When you’ve craved the Darling girl for so long?”

Shock barrels through me, and hurt too, the shadow woman’s words directly contradicting what Peter told me the night we first danced in the sky, that he never desired me until I came to the island. That he barely remembers visiting me as a child.

I wait for him to contradict her. To explain to her exactly what he explained to me, but again he keeps silent.

I linger, telling my feet they should go. That anything else I might garner from this conversation will only harm me. That if the shadow woman realizes I’ve been eavesdropping, she’ll be vengeful indeed. But my feet are plastered to the floor, stuck in the quicksand of my own curiosity. The kind that wishes to wound me, it seems.

Besides. I have to know about Thomas. About Freckles and Joel and the man whose life I took. I have to know if I’ve fallen asleep in the arms of a murderer.

If that morning on the beach, I soaked my hands in the wrong man’s blood.

“It couldn’t be that you’re holding out for someone else, could it?” asks the shadow woman, and I catch it—her desperation. It’s in the way her voice hikes a bit. It’s not love or adoration for Peter, but a desire for conquest. The longing to be longed for.

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