Page 94 of Losing Wendy

It’s lightning and falling and crashing and picking up my broken bones to do it all over again. Something slides into place within me, the rightness of it all, but also the wrongness. The wrongness that this is the first time I’m tasting his kiss, when it should have occurred long ago. When I’ve been his since the moment he extended his hand in that clock tower.

It’s the first time we touched all over again, except this time, instead of my touch stitching his shadowed form into flesh, it’s the other way around.

His touch unravels me. I’m the spool, his kiss what sends me spinning across the floor, the tight thread around my heart unwinding. When Peter fists the fabric of my shirt at my back, I feel as if he’ll never let me go.

“I want to hear you say it,” he whispers to me between kisses.

I don’t even have to ask what, because my lips are already forming the words. “I’m yours.”

Peter’s ravenous grin presses against my mouth in answer.

“Wendy?”

Shock barrels through me at the sound of my brother’s voice. I startle, my limbs doing their utmost to put as much distance between myself and Peter. But Peter’s hands are still firm on myback, keeping me close though he pulls himself away from the kiss. It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t let me go, given I was lurching straight for his bedside table, where I might have hit my head.

“John, I—”

“I thought you were drugged.” His words are directed at me, but his stare is locked on Peter.

Unsteady laughter rattles through my chest as I wipe sweat from my brow. “Obviously, the effects have worn off.”

“Is it—obvious?” John asks, sweeping his gaze over to me. I watch his attention linger on my trembling hands, but we both know the shaking has nothing to do with the faerie dust.

“Yes, it is,” says Peter, though he slips his hands off of me, pushing himself off the bed. “What do you need?”

John blinks, caught off guard by the way Peter doesn’t try to argue with him. “Simon wanted me to remind you that tonight’s the blood moon.”

Peter actually blanches, but the effect only lasts for a moment. He spins on his heel, taking my hand and planting a kiss on my knuckles that has my face heating even more than it is already. “I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this later,” he whispers to me with a wink.

He grabs a satchel from his closet, then turns to leave. I jump from the bed, but that turns out to be a mistake because my legs are still weak from the aftereffects of the faerie dust. In a moment, he’s at my side, catching me before I fall.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m afraid my tasks as a Shadow Keeper aren’t limited to Neverland.” He says it with a quick glance at John, so I assume he’ll tell me more once we can be alone again.

Then he sets me gently on the side of the bed and dissipates into shadows. In a blink, he’s gone, leaving me alone with John.

I open my mouth to explain, but he beats me to it. “Glad to see what happened last night actually worked in your favor,” he says. “At least one of us ended up having a pleasant evening.”

His words puncture my throat, but it’s his caustic tone that twists the blade. John never speaks to me like this. I bite my lip. “How’s Michael?”

John snorts. “How do you think?” He crosses his arms, highlighting streaks of red across his forearms. The lantern light flickers, revealing more scratch marks on his neck.

Guilt pricks at my stomach, but anger, too. “I thought you were going off the assumption I’m too drugged up to think. You can’t have it both ways, you know.”

“Fine,” John says. “I’ll let you choose for me: Should I hate Peter for taking advantage of you when you’re not in your right mind? Or should I hate you for having a tryst with our captor while I spent the evening trying to console our brother after you almost choked him to death?”

“John—”

“I’m fine either way. You just let me know.”

CHAPTER 35

After the dreadful evening when my mother and father sat me down at the foot of their bed and shattered my world by telling me of a sickly girl and a bargain struck with a shadow, I didn’t sleep for weeks.

When my young, restless body finally succumbed to slumber, I began walking through the house at night, screaming when I would awake to find myself lost in the wailing shadows.

My mother, as incapable of handling my pain as she was the dreadful night I fell ill, came up with a solution.

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