Page 18 of Losing Wendy

My father crumples to the floor, still clutching his throat. I watch as my mother picks up the blood-soaked blade and brings it to her own.

It takes longer for her to die than my father. I’m not sure if she simply missed an artery that would have hastened the process, or if she fights longer to stay in the same realm as her children.

When she goes down, there’s no smile on her face. Except for the bloodied sliver of crimson curving against her throat.

I’m not sure how long I stare at my parents’ bodies, crumpled on the floor. My mother pale in her gown of blush silk. My father’s cravat crooked.

I’m not sure how long it takes for the noise of the ballroom to come crashing to my ears again, but when it does, it’s because the clanging of metal brings me back to the present. Bells. Signaling the third quarter of the hour. Just how my parents set the clock tower for the night so I could keep up with the time.

A quarter hour until the shadows take me.

A quarter hour until the captain with a vendetta against my parents realizes he’s been duped.

“Captain,” I say, fighting the blackness threatening to steal my vision. I need to stay alert. Find a way to get John and Michael out of here before the shadows come for me. “I believe you said my brothers could go free.”

The captain hesitates, his grip still firm on my shoulders, but he mutters something to Evans, who must have appeared next to us while my vision was tunneling. Evans disappears through the door through which Michael disappeared with the bald man.

“Go get your brother,” the captain says to John, whose glasses are askew, balancing precariously on the bridge of his nose as he stares blankly at my parents’ corpses. The henchman holding John releases him, and John blinks rapidly, stumbling forward. He takes two steps toward our parents before righting himself and swerving to follow Evans, but he stops in front of me and the captain.

“What are you going to do to her?” John’s voice is analytical, technical, though I know from years of studying him the tells of sorrow in his logical features. The way his brown eyes glisten, the slight way he scrapes his teeth together.

“I’m not sure you want to know,” responds Captain Astor, meeting my brother’s stare.

John blinks. Like he’s wiping fog from his glasses.

“Will you wait? To do whatever it is you’re planning? Until my brother and I are gone, I mean.”

Captain Astor sneers. “What a courageous brother you have. Sure you don’t want to revise your previous request to take his place?”

John’s throat bobs. His gaze flits to the floor, but I know my brother. He’s no coward. He wants to know if the shadows will take me before the captain can lay his hands on me.

“Rest assured we don’t have time to dally,” says the captain, which, though it doesn’t appear to reassure John, at least convinces him he can leave.

He turns to go, but before he’s made it two paces, he spins back around. A few of the captain’s henchmen make to stop him, but Captain Astor holds up a hand as John runs up to me and places something cold and metallic into my palm. “Something to remember us by.”

The matching glass pocket watch to mine. I fight the urge to give it back. This pocket watch isn’t something that reminds me of good times. John thinks of them as gifts from our father. I only think of them as my father’s well-meaning but pushy method to get me to find a husband.

“John, I—” I go to hand it back to my brother, but instead of accepting it, he pulls the crown from the body of the watch and twists.

That’s when the pocket watch explodes.

It happens so quickly, just as the second hand hits midnight—ten minutes early. Dust and cinders and lightning spark from the watch, causing a rattling boom to echo across the hall.

All around, the pirates keel over, covering their sensitive pointed ears in agony as the pocket watch squeals. Light soars from within it, ballooning out across the room, though it doesn’t burn me to the touch.

A bomb made of faerie dust.

John meant to banish the shadows when they came for me. Asthe room lights up in a flash of blinding white, I wonder if perhaps his plan would have worked on the shadows after all.

“Wendy, come on!”

A hand grabs mine. Free now from the grasp of the stunned captain, my brother and I take off into a sprint. I can’t see anything. Nothing but the burning white light that envelops the ballroom.

We trip and stumble over bodies on the way, but John and I have spent years of our childhoods running around the manor in the dark. We don’t need our vision to make our way to the exit, so long as we don’t get caught up in the limbs of a corpse.

Eventually John stops in front of me, and I can hear him scrambling for the latch on the door. There’s a click, and then a welcome shadow pours through the crack in the wall, cutting through the pixie light.

We push our way through, and suddenly everything goes dark. Like spending the noontime hours strolling in the sun, then entering a dimly lit home. My eyes refuse to adjust, but still, John and I run, hand in hand.

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