Page 42 of Losing Wendy

Of course, the clock tower wasn’t quite this high.

When I come to the fifth alcove, I’m sweating so profusely my palms have gone slick and I have to rest on the platform for a while until my hands dry again. It takes longer than I want it to with the humidity fighting against me.

But I slowly fall into a rhythm. Climb, rest, climb, rest, until I finally reach the top of the cliffs.

There’s part of me that longs to gaze down, to take in the great heights which I just climbed, but wisdom reminds me that if I don’t find the faerie dust, I’ll have to climb back down. So perhaps looking isn’t in my best interest.

The cliffs themselves jut out over the water and come to a point. It’s there at the tip I find a ramshackle warehouse. I can hardly believe my luck as I race over to the dingy structure. When I reach the door, I find it locked, but that was to be expected.

I pull out one of the many hairpins left over from how my hair was styled for the ball. I haven’t been able to bring myself to take it down. Not when it was my mother who insisted on running a brush gently through my tresses before the maids set to work on their task.

I can’t think of my mother now. Not when John and Michael are still alive and I need to keep my focus honed on saving them.

When we were ten, John and I got on a spy kick and read all the books in our parents’ massive library on the subject. It took usseveral weeks of sheer determination to learn how to pick a lock. Looking back, I realize it was quite impressive for ten-year-olds, which is likely why my parents allowed it to persist. Eventually, after many grueling fights and bickering and tears that rendered John’s glasses smudged and useless, we successfully picked the lock to our father’s study.

Of course, as soon as he found us roaming around in there, we were sentenced to grounding for a month. During our imprisonment, we continued to practice from our separate rooms. By the time our punishment was over, we’d become rather proficient at the process.

I tenderly place the two pins into the lock, feeling for the gentle give that will tell me the first is in place. Nurturing the lock takes a while, especially since my hands are still shaking from the exertion of my climb, but eventually it sends the feedback I’m looking for down the little pin. Like it’s pressing a gentle hand to my shoulder to urge me to continue.

There’s a rhythm to lock picking that reminds me of strumming my fingers against a harp, losing myself and my thoughts in the gentle hum of its strings. My excitement builds as I feel the tension of my pick, indicating I’m about to succeed, but then a sensation I haven’t experienced in a long while washes over me.

A cool dread seeps through my veins, begging me to let it in. And now I’m not the one breaking in but the one being broken into, the walls around my mind and heart crumbling as the darkness seeps into the cracks, threatening to overcome me.

Someone, a woman, cries out in the distance, her beautiful voice ringing in my ears.

The makeshift picks fall to the earth, lost to the dust that’s the same shade as I cover my ears with my palms to drown out the sound.

Horror, damp and dark, slips through the spaces my fingertips can’t seal, whispering atrocities in my ears. Begging me to come and see, to come and lay my eyes upon its terrors.

Shadows, dreadful and fierce, take shape around me, forminginto shapes of people, tall and small, adults and children chanting words I can’t grasp. And through it all, a woman’s voice slices deep into my soul. Screaming, begging for me to listen, to drown in her sorrow with her.

They urge me to turn around, to face them for what they truly are, to hear their stories, but I know these kinds of stories. The ones that will torment me until I’m paralyzed, feverish.

Except now, my mother won’t find me seizing on the ground. My father won’t pick me up and carry me to the soft comforts of my bed, where my mother will place a cool cloth against my head and nurse me back to health, reassuring me that the shadows aren’t real. That my nightmares, the visions, aren’t real.

The nightmares beg to differ.

CHAPTER 16

I’m paralyzed, my hands clutching the door handle for support, my knees digging into the dirt as I kneel, refusing to turn around.

Something moves behind me, something with padded feet and a growl that reverberates in my very bones.

The shadows are crying out, though whether they want me to face them or run, I can no longer tell. Their grief is so devastating, it pierces through my chest. I can’t breathe, much less move.

The woman shrieks again. Her agony rips through me, conjuring the beginnings of a scream on my lips.

A hand wraps around my mouth, pressing a palm to my lips. Faintly, I taste something that reminds me of plucking honeysuckles from the hedges at the manor garden.

“Dangerous here at night,” Peter whispers into my ear as, quietly, he pulls me into his arms, forcing me to rest my weight not upon the door, but upon his heaving chest.

And then he turns us around.

“See?”

My eyes go wide, my breathing ragged as my sense of thepresent returns to me. The shadows drain from the edges of my vision.

And then I see it.

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