Page 14 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 14

A s we approach the warping that leads into Neverland, the wind whipping at my hair, tearing it from my braid, Peter informs me it’s time for another dose.

“Why do I need to go back on faerie dust?”

The question is difficult. I have to pry it from my mouth. It’s going against my every instinct not to grab the pouch from Peter’s side and scarf down the tantalizing substance. My mouth is dry, and I have to remind myself that the faerie dust won’t fix that.

I wish I were strong enough to resist it for a better reason, but the only thought rapping at my head is that if Peter gives me a higher dose than he had been, I might not see Astor’s wraith again. I should be resisting for Michael’s sake, so that I can be a more present sister for him. But I’m too weak to be picky about which motivations are the most noble, so long as they keep me off of it.

Peter furrows his brow. “You don’t like it anymore?”

Of course I like it. It feels as if it sustains my very being. I’d felt somewhat better, if not more volatile, more irritable in the other realm, but the fresh air, the not-Neverland air, has helped clear my head some. While I still missed it, it wasn’t my only thought in Chora, as it so often is. Besides, Peter has already been backing off my dose.

“I thought you were trying to wean me off of it,” I say, trying not to stare at the pouch.

Peter frowns, hovering outside of the warping. “Not completely off of it. Just lower than the dose you had been taking. So you could feel like yourself again.”

“Well,” I say, swallowing and trying to make myself look taller. More certain. “I do. Feel more like myself, I mean.”

“Wendy Darling.” Peter spins me to face him, then places his hand on the side of my jaw. He looks sad, as he so often does these days. Strange, since it’s an emotion I never saw on him before.

Funny how I thought myself in love with a man whose sad I had never seen. Not truly. Of course, I hadn’t known he wasn’t feeling it. I’d just projected all of my emotions onto him.

“You know you can’t stop taking it completely.”

My hands are jittering, itching for it. I stick them in my pockets. Remind myself that Astor’s wraith might still come back, might change his mind. Remind myself that I can be a better sister to Michael without it. “I haven’t been taking it, though. In Chora, I didn’t take any. And when I was with Astor?—”

Peter’s jaw goes stiff. “You weren’t on an island bombarded with wraiths when you were with Astor,” he says. “And even then, the one wraith you encountered talked you over the side of the ship.”

I swallow again. “I didn’t understand that she was a wraith. Now that I know what they are and can expect them…”

Peter shakes his head. “It’s too dangerous. Can’t you see that? Just look at what they did to your brother. Wendy Darling, think of Michael. You can’t risk leaving him.”

The mention of my brother hollows out my stomach.

Shame washes over me, and as if that’s not enough, Peter continues. “Remember how you hurt him that night? I hate to bring it up, Wendy, but you’ve forgotten how bad, how dangerous your dreams had gotten.”

“I remember,” I say, gritting my teeth, because it’s impossible to forget the night I woke in a terror and almost strangled my brother, not knowing what I was doing.

John had spent the entire night holding Michael to keep him from hurting himself. When I’d seen John the next morning, he’d had streaks of blood all up his arm from where Michael had scratched him.

It’s not as if that’s something one can forget.

“But that was from the trauma of killing…” I stop myself before I say Victor’s father. Poor Victor still doesn’t know the man I killed on the beach was his father come searching for him. Not that I’d known it when I drove the dagger into his back. Sound carries down the tunnels, and I’d rather my friend not overhear.

Peter frowns. “You think you’re over that? You think you’re okay now?”

He doesn’t have to say it. We both know it’s true. I’m worse off now than I was that night.

So when Peter dips his hand into his pouch for the faerie dust, I don’t protest as he puts it to my lips.

My only thought when we return to the Den is whether I can still see Astor’s wraith. Like before we left Neverland, this dose isn’t enough to make me fly. Peter only used a few particles, but I’d been overcome with a sense of numbness unlike before we left Neverland. It’s like it’s dulling my feelings while making the colors around me brighter.

The fear that my body is more sensitive to this dosage now that I’ve spent a day and a half off of it nags at me. I try to reason with myself, remind myself that I’m being irrational, but the anxiety of losing my only connection with Astor has my mind on a constant loop.

Thankfully, Peter has duties to attend to on the island, and I’m able to sneak away just after dinner.

Panicked, I search the cave for Astor, but he’s nowhere to be found. I wonder if perhaps I light a lamp, he’ll come out, be unable to hide and meld with the shadows. But when I light my lamp, all it illuminates is the glittering onyx sand.

“Please,” I beg nothing at all. “Please don’t leave me. Everyone else has left me. Please don’t leave me, too.”

Something shuffles behind me. I spin around in a whirl, hope soaring through my chest. He came back he came back he came back.

But it’s not ivy green eyes that meet mine. It’s not even a shadow in the shape of a man.

It’s a faerie with cropped golden hair and glittering incandescent wings.

“You,” I say, practically snarling at Tink.

She lifts a brow, placing one hand on her hip. She’s dressed just as she was the last time I saw her, in a burlap sack that barely covers anything. Just the sight of her sends me back to the day she scratched up my cheek, the night she shoved my face under the waves of the ocean just to watch me struggle, just to enjoy watching me drown.

That’s not what has me angry, though.

“What did you do to him?” I ask. When she cocks her head at me, daring to look confused, I practically spit at her, my voice infused with vitriol. “What did you do to my brother?”

Her chest heaves, her lips curling like she’s laughing, but no sound comes out.

She points a finger to her chest and makes a face. As if to say, me?

Like she’s mocking me.

“I know he loved you,” I say. “You lured him out of the Den. Got him under your spell. Used your glamour. That’s what you all do. You treat us humans like toys, our minds like a pastime. You trick us and make us fall in love with you, and then when we betray you by becoming boring, you kill us.”

If only Peter would get bored of me.

Tink stills, blinks with her obnoxiously long eyelashes. I hate her so much.

“I know John didn’t take his own life. He wouldn’t have left Michael,” I say.

She points her finger at me, but it’s a question. As if to say, “And you?”

I don’t feel like confronting that question. No. No, John wouldn’t have left me either. Not of his own choice. He wouldn’t have left me, and Tink took him from me. I know she did.

I launch myself at her. She sidesteps me with ease, and I run into the cave wall, but she’s surprised enough by my attack that she hadn’t noticed me swipe with my dirty fingernails.

When I turn around to face her, she’s staring at a fresh tear in her already tattered wing, a look of shock on her face.

Her lips curve into a cruel smile. She reaches into a pouch at her side, shuffles with the contents, then tosses something in my direction, and I catch it. No, them. Two somethings. Two wooden tiles. Like the ones John made to help Michael communicate. Like the one I found in John’s coat pocket the night we found his body.

“WENDY ANGRY.”

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that she had the audacity to steal Michael’s communication tiles, or that she’s thrown them back in my face, or that I’m just so angry anyway that I would have launched myself at the first human being to find me breaking down in this cave, or that her claiming I’m angry reminds me of Astor, but I let out a wail. “How dare you?”

This time, when I launch myself at her, I hit her square in the chest. Were I the Wendy Darling who first came to Neverland, well, I wouldn’t be attacking her at all, but if I were, I’d be scratching her face like she did mine, the only way I knew to inflict pain.

But Maddox taught me better than that.

When I launch my hands toward her face, it’s not for her cheeks, but the corners of her eyes, which go wide with shock at what I’m planning to do. Tink’s spindly fingers wind around my wrists just in time to stop me from plucking her eyes from their sockets.

Now, I’m not the only one who’s angry.

Irritation sparks in her face, not as crazed as mine, but she’s not the one facing her brother’s killer, now is she?

I’m prepared and do just as Astor told me, rolling my wrists with all the power I have left in me toward her thumbs, which can’t hold the weight and will be forced to release me. When Astor taught me that trick, it was to give me enough time to get away.

I have no intentions of getting away.

Tink and I circle each other, the greater predator stalking the prey whose flight response has been mangled and damaged until all she knows how to do is engage in fights she can’t win.

And I know I can’t win this. Not against a faerie who outmatches me in strength and speed.

I think that might be the point.

Tink could have killed me the night she dunked my head underneath the waves, but she’d preferred to let me live. Watch me cower in fear of her. She’d let the wraiths chase me, blinded temporarily, across the island of Neverland until I’d stumbled upon the grave of Victor’s father.

Up to this point, Tink’s been in control. She’s reveled in watching me suffer. But I’ve never fought back like this. She clearly isn’t used to her prey knowing how to fight back.

As we circle each other, her limbs lithe, I can’t help but notice the fear bubbling in her blue eyes.

It’s nice for someone to be afraid of me for once.

I laugh, and it’s deranged, which only seems to frighten her more. I know I won’t win this, but the more I can scare her, the less control she’ll have. The more likely she’ll make a mistake. It’s not that I’m delusional enough to believe her mistake will allow me a chance for a killing blow.

But maybe, just maybe, it will incite her to make one.

I attack. This time, I go for her throat, and just like the first night she attacked me, she’s stunned for a brief moment as I close my fingers around it. Her throat bobs, and she loses her footing. We both fall, me on top of her, and her head hits the wall.

She grits her teeth, eyes stinging with pain. I press my fingers harder into her throat.

It’s not as if I expect to kill her. I just want to make one mark on this world before she takes me out of it.

As I dig my fingernails into her skin, I wait for her to throw me off of her. To smash me over the head with her fae strength. But Tink doesn’t fight back. She doesn’t even grasp at my fingers and attempt to pry them off. Instead, she fumbles through a makeshift pocket in the burlap sack she’s using as a tunic. Then she presses something wooden to the back of my hand. Another tile, face up.

“STOP.”

I laugh. “You think I’m going to stop? After what you did to my brother? After you strung him up in that tree like meat you’re trying to keep from other predators?”

Something in Tink snaps, because she grabs me by the throat and throws me off of her. My back and head hit the cave wall. Stars swim across my vision as I slump to the floor. I barely have the mind to lift my head up, to watch the harbinger of my death approach, but I manage it.

She really does look lethal, the way she’s stalking toward me.

I offer her my cruelest smile as she kneels down in front of me, places her hand underneath my chin and lifts it to look at her.

I ready myself for the snapping of my neck. The ending of this terrible story and its chapters I no longer wish to keep reading.

But tears are streaming down Tink’s cheeks, and they’re not the angry sort. Pity swells in her blue eyes as she stares into mine. Or maybe it’s the memory of John staring back at her.

These faeries really do love the humans they keep as pets. They’re like toddlers, playing too roughly with a kitten until the kitten dies and the parents have to explain why the kitten no longer moves.

My vision fades to black, and when I wake hours later, the sunlight is gone, and so is Tink.