Page 3 of Losing Wendy

It makes my heart ache a bit, and I can’t place why.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he says, stepping into my room and closing the door gently behind him.

The light from the hallway extinguishes with the clicking of the door handle, but John’s lantern glows more brightly than mine, the glass pristine enough to ward off the shadows.

For now, at least.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s the light that truly keeps them away, or if the shadows simply allow me to believe as much as a courtesy.

“I don’t have to do what?”

“Smile like everything is okay. Like your life isn’t ending one way or another in”—he pulls out his glass pocket watch—“twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes.”

It must be habit now, because I actually have to coax the muscles at the edges of my lips down from my smile. Mother keeps a yogini on staff and is always urging me to join them in their morning rituals. I stopped going long ago, when I realized my body was never going to obey my commands to relax, and that the well-meaning woman would never understand why.

“If Mother and Father have it their way, my life as I know it will end a few hours before then. They don’t want us cutting it that close.”

John lets out a noncommittal noise before padding over to my bed. In the laziest motion I’ve ever seen, he unlatches his satchel, dumping a pile of dust-ridden books on my silver-etched sheets.

“I’m not entirely certain of the terms, but I don’t know that the Prince of Never will permit me bringing along reading material,” I say.

John raises a brow over his thin-rimmed golden spectacles. Mother makes him cut his bangs obscenely short. Perhaps she thinks this will prevent him from growing up. “You’re not even considering the fact that you might succeed in breaking the curse.”

I let out what’s supposed to be a laugh, but it ends up sounding more like a sigh as I plop down on my soft mattress next to the pile of leather-bound books.

“If it were up to my will or your determination or Ma and Pa’s optimism, I’d be certain of victory.” I bite my lip, allowing my fingers to caress my neck, where just below my chin, a rivulet of my skin glows the faintest of gold, swirling in delicate lines up my jaw, framing my left eye at my cheek and forehead in freckles of shimmering light. “But we both know breaking the curse has been left in the hands of men. I imagine the Sister knew what she was doing when she left my fate up to them.”

John grunts in dejected agreement, then drops a rather hefty volume onto my lap. “Well, the way I see it, we have twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to figure out a way to make it up to us.”

CHAPTER 2

When John and I were young, we sometimes stole down to the base of the manor’s clock tower—our excursions scheduled around when our nanny snuck out to spend time with her suitor, of course. We’d pick the lock on the door with my hairpins, then make wagers on which of us could climb to the highest rung of the rusty ladder. As children do, we adored the danger—the thrill it offered in exchange for letting it hold our safety in its precarious fingertips.

Looking back, it’s strange to think that John and I rebelled in such a way. Neither of our temperaments leans toward disobedience. But by the time we found the clock tower, we were already aware of my curse. Perhaps we felt as if the world had already betrayed us, and this was the last bit of recklessness the two of us could manage before reality swept in and stole it away.

When our youngest brother, Michael, came along and showed a preference for running and climbing, we brought him into our game. At random times in the day, one of us would shout, “Last one to the top is dead meat,” which would send us into a frenzied dash for the clock tower, the three of us shoving and clawing at each other the entire way.

Once upon a time, that clock tower was my haven. Now it clangs with a reminder of what’s to come, screaming at me with every hour that slips from my fingertips, along with the pocket watch Father gifted me on my nineteenth birthday.

I’m fairly certain he gave it to me intending for it to hasten my search for a husband. An ever-present, ever-ticking reminder that my time in the light is running out. I’m also fairly certain he realized how inconsiderate of a gift it had been because he gifted John a matching one on his birthday.

I’m making my father sound worse than he is.

It’s ironic really. My father is rather progressive. The last man one would expect to make his entire life’s mission to catch his daughter a husband, but the Fates had other schemes.

My father doesn’t really have a choice.

In the end, John and I find nothing substantial to help free me of my fate that’s to take place in, say, eighteen hours now.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I have something else I’m working on.”

There’s little confidence in his voice to inspire any in me.

John leaves my room at first light, rubbing at his eyes and sending his glasses askew. It makes him look boyish again, and I sketch a portrait in my mind, silently promising never to forget my brother’s innocent sort of determination.

It’s a good thing he leaves when he does, because my mother comes barreling into my room not a minute later, almost tripping over my rug as she does.

My mother isn’t the barreling and tripping sort, but today isn’t exactly a normal day, either.

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