Page 84 of Losing Wendy

In faerie tales, when a person stabs another in the heart, it’s a swift motion. A clean cut that’s over with in the span of a few words.

Killing this man is not like that.

I’m not strong enough to stab him thoroughly enough on the second blow, so I have to grit my teeth and strain. I feel everything, and it’s agonizingly slow. The crunching of ribs, the splicing of flesh reverberating through my blade. There’s a dreadful squishing sensation as the tip of my blade finally, finally, punctures his heart, but even that bit of muscle puts up more resistance than I’m expecting.

He falls forward.

The man is screaming. Screeching.

That, the storm allows me to hear.

In the end,he doesn’t die swiftly, and I’m too much of a coward to slice his throat and grant him that.

I tell myself that’s not what I should be doing anyway. That I should be getting information out of the man I’ve now rolled ontohis back as he moans and screams, the obsidian sand around him no darker as it licks up the blood from his wound.

“Who are you?” I ask, because that makes me feel better about not granting the man mercy. Not when I can’t bear the idea of my blade slicing against flesh yet again.

“Who are you?” I demand, but the man’s eyes are rolling back in his head, his pointed ears immune to my voice.

Finally. Finally, the Fates are going to grant me mercy and let this man die.

His hand lurches, and my eye catches on something I hadn’t noticed before. Something on his wrist.

It’s a bracelet.

Alternating red and blue beads. The one Joel said they couldn’t find on Thomas’s body.

Panic surges over me now, and I feel as if I’m going to be sick.

I watch until the murderer who’s been haunting Neverland takes his last breath.

His lungs rattle when he does.

CHAPTER 32

Nearby, Peter stirs. I hardly notice.

I killed a man.

I killed a man.

I killed a man.

It’s as if I think repeating it to myself will punish me somehow. Will make me believe it. I feel as if I should need to vomit, but nothing comes up. My hands tremble, black sand embedding itself underneath my fingernails as I stare at the open-mouthed corpse.

“You’re going into shock,” says Peter, scraping his cheek against the sand as he hefts his body to turn and look at me.

“I suppose that makes sense,” I say quietly, unable to take my eyes off the man I just killed.

Just a few moments ago, he was climbing. His robust body was scaling the rock in the midst of the storm. Strong and lithe and agile. It’s amazing what the human body can do, but the fae body even more so.

What is equally amazing is how quickly all that ability drains away. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. To die that quickly. That easily. Of course, it wasn’t quick, I remind myself. It wasn’tsome strange accident that removed the man’s head before he had time to register that death had come for its prey early.

I drove my dagger into his back.

No. Drove is too definite a word. I hacked into his organs, carving his flesh, his very life, from his chest cavity.

“He was going to kill me,” says Peter, his voice too even, too sure.

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