Page 16 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 16

“ W hy is it you always act so sullen, Victor?”

“I’ll stop acting sullen when Wendy wakes up.”

“She just needs the rest.”

“Needs the rest? It’s been three days!”

“Her body has been through a lot.”

“Her body has been through you.”

Silence.

I knit my brow, keeping my eyes closed. I try to grasp for what happened before the fog descended over me, turning my muscles to lead and submerging me in a sleep from which I cannot seem to fully wake.

“Astor?” is the only word I can make my lips form.

The voices don’t answer. The slamming of a door does. A hand finds my shoulder and squeezes it. “Come on, Winds. Wake up, why don’t you? Please.”

I don’t recognize the voice. I try to open my eyes. Maybe then I could place it. But the blanket covering my shaking body is much too heavy, and my body sinks until sleep is a coffin into which I’m lowered.

“Wendy Darling’s sleeping.”

Michael’s warm little body slides onto the bed with me. Instead of slipping underneath the covers, he sprawls across them, pulling them taut across my throat, choking me.

His voice is my first indication that I’m conscious.

The splitting headache at my temple is the next. Then, the craving. The aching for more.

“It’s time for Wendy Darling to wake up.”

My eyes flutter open, and I end up with Michael’s hair in my eye. I blink as furiously as possible in my nearly immobilized state.

“I’m awake, buddy.”

He grasps my cheeks, shaking my head as he stares at me, his head on the pillow next to mine. I let him shake me. I hardly have the energy to protest, but I wouldn’t, anyway. Michael’s the only person I want touching me anymore.

The door creaks, then a gasp cuts through the room. “You’re awake.”

Victor scrambles to my side, grabbing the stool next to the bed through the space between his legs and tugging it as close as he can toward me. “You need to drink something,” he says by way of greeting.

My parched throat croaks in agreement as I whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Wrinkles form between Victor’s black brows as he reaches for the jug on the bedside table and unstoppers it. “What for?”

I go to push myself up in bed, but my limbs are trembling with weakness, plus there’s the added challenge of unraveling myself from Michael. Eventually, I give up, and Victor presses the jug to my chapped lips. I sputter on the water but manage to get a few sips down.

“For not knowing how to stop.”

Victor watches me intently. “And how are you supposed to stop when he is practically shoving it down your throat?” When I meet Victor’s eyes, they’re not raging like they once did. Instead, the fire in them has gone out, replaced with something far more lethal, a bitterness that tastes of poison on the otherwise stale air.

I blink away the two heads forming from Victor’s neck, struggling to regain my hold on reality. Part of me feels as though I’m at risk of toppling into sleep again at any moment.

“He gave you too much this time,” says Victor.

Peter in the cave. Telling me it was for my own good. Forcing it into my mouth.

I feel sick, but there’s nothing in my stomach to heave. Tears sting at my eyes, the sensation so familiar now, I can’t remember what they felt like before. I try to take a steadying breath, but the air is too thin. “He’s going to keep me like this forever, isn’t he?”

I can’t bear to meet Victor’s gaze. It appears he can’t bear to answer my question.

I’m unsure how much time passes like that. All I know is that I return to the familiar. The cycle of dust, sleep, and eat plays routinely enough, but I’m never sure how long I’m out for. These days, I hardly make it out of the Den, and since we’re underground, I can’t rely on the sun to inform me of the time.

For a while, I try to decipher the time by Michael.

“Wendy Darling, wake up. Wake up, Wendy Darling.” But he’s gotten to where he says it regardless of whether I’m awake or sleeping, so who knows if he understands the timing of it.

Even when I’m lucid enough to think, I find myself in a frenzied spiral, an obsession.

Tink hadn’t killed me, either time, when she could have. The time she shoved me under the waves. In the cave when I’d attacked her first. Tink hates me. That’s evident enough, but she possesses the self-control to keep me alive.

So why kill John?

My mind goes back to the night that Tink held me underneath the waves. I’d been so panicked, the adrenaline rushing through me with such ferocity, the faerie dust had left my system. She’d blown a shadow into my face and watched me as the wraiths chased me barefoot into the forest.

And then I’d stumbled over the grave of Victor’s father.

But what if that hadn’t been a coincidence? What if the shadows had led me there and Tink had known that they would?

I usually consider the first time Peter dosed me to be the night I accidentally hurt Michael. But he’d dosed me before that, hadn’t he? The one time I’d climbed up to the storehouse on the cliff. I’d heard a wraith screaming, and then Peter had appeared and placed the faerie dust on my tongue…

He’d given it to me the night we’d flown in the sky, too.

But why give me the faerie dust that night at the storehouse? Just so I wouldn’t be frightened? I suppose if he knew wraiths might taunt me to kill myself, that’s reason enough. And perhaps that was reason enough for Tink to want me to see them as well.

So I’d kill myself?

But Tink clearly doesn’t want me dead.

I’d tried that, to leave Michael. That’s what I’d been doing, hadn’t I? Attempting suicide at Tink’s hand? All because I’m heartbroken over the fact that the man I love was never coming to get me at all.

Michael climbs into my lap and tugs at my hair. “It’s time to wake up, Wendy Darling.”

I frown, looking over his shoulder and into my hands. There are toy train cars in my hand. “I’m up, Michael. I’ve been playing with you.”

I think.

He grabs my cheeks, shaking my head back and forth. “It’s time to wake up.”

“I’m up, baby,” I tell him, too tired, my brain too slow to think of another way to communicate this to him.

Tears crawl down Michael’s face. Then my brother, always looking star-ward, looks me straight in the eye. “It’s time for Wendy Darling to wake up.”

From that moment on, I know what I have to do.

Over the next few weeks (I’m only guessing at the time that’s passed since Peter increased my dosage), Peter’s careful watch over me becomes more sporadic.

He’s probably gotten bored.

Lately, he’s been leaving the Lost Boys in charge of watching over me, but Smalls is the weak link. He’s only a child and can’t seem to stay awake for his entire shift.

So one night, while Smalls is snoring outside of Peter’s room, I sneak out of the Den and wander toward the beach.

The ocean water is frigid when I step into it. It takes me three times to fully commit to walking out into it. My heart’s already racing, so hopefully it won’t take much.

My feet are soaked, shivering in the wet sand as the water sloshes up to my knees.

I wade out far enough that the water covers my collarbone before I dunk my head underneath. Panic overtakes me instantly, shocking my system. Agonizing needles prick at my ribcage, and though I told myself I wouldn’t, I gasp in a breath; I can’t help myself. Water sears through my nose, my mouth, pouring into my lungs. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning and I can’t do this.

Without thinking, I yank my head out of the water and scurry my way back to the shore. I hit the beach coughing up water, my entire body trembling.

I cough and cough and cough, but I still feel the faerie dust inside of me. It still tingles at the edges of my fingers. Still swarms in my head. I search out into the night, call for the wraiths, now that I know they’re capable of following me, but none appear from behind the craggy rocks, none whisper to me in the night.

It didn’t work. The faerie dust is still running through my system. My attempt wasn’t a substantial enough adrenaline hit to drive it out, metabolize it.

Panic overtakes me, and dread, as I realize I’m going to have to try again. Tears pour down my cheeks as the pain overtakes me. I’ve heard stories of people cutting off limbs to escape fallen rocks in the cliffs. I don’t deserve to feel like that, not when nothing I’m going to do to myself is permanent. But I’m too weak to hurt myself, truly. At least, too weak to do it a second time.

I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

Reaching out from the darkness, a hand finds my shoulder. For a moment, fear that it’s Peter paralyzes me. But when I will myself to look, I find I’m staring into Tink’s face.

This is the first time I look at her and think she looks soft. Ocean spray gathers on her eyelashes, tears at her bottom lids.

She kneels, and she takes my trembling hand from where I’ve dug it into the onyx sand, sand now crusted underneath my fingernails.

“I’m not strong enough,” I say. “I can’t do it. Even for them. Even for my brothers.”

Tink shakes her head, but I don’t know what she’s saying. When she stands, she doesn’t release my hand. She gives a tug, coaxing me to stand up as well.

Then she turns toward the sea and leads me back into the frigid waters.

I’m still freezing, the panic still swelling in my chest as I imagine the pain of drowning. The utter helplessness I’ll have to experience before I can be rid of the power of the dust over me.

Tink looks into my eyes. There’s a question in them. I nod, and she grabs a fistful of my hair.

Then dunks me under the water.

This time, the cold isn’t quite as shocking, so I’m able to hold my breath for longer. I don’t let the water in, not immediately. I want to have time to panic more completely.

Pain bursts in vibrant flames in my lungs. They grapple with my mind to take control, begging me to breathe, impartial to the substance.

My lungs want air so badly they’ll happily take the counterfeit, even if it kills them.

I understand the feeling.

It’s when my lungs run out of air that the true panic sets in. I grasp at Tink’s wrists, trying to cue her to pull me out. I don’t want to do this. She’s going to hold me under too long, and I’ll drown. We should have agreed on a time.

But Tink doesn’t let go. She just shoves me more forcefully underneath the waves.

No, no, no. She’s going to kill me, after all. Just like I wanted her to only a few weeks ago.

But I’m too much of a coward to die. I don’t imagine anything good awaits me on the other side.

My body takes hold of the reins. My mouth opens of its own accord, and water floods me. Needles erupt from my lungs, puncturing them from the inside out. I push up against the sandy floor with my feet, but this time, there’s no surface. Not with Tink’s hands in my hair, pushing me further down. I scratch at her wrists, silently pleading with her to let me up for a breath of air, but she doesn’t.

Black specks corner my vision, appearing as if they’re swimming about me in the moonlit water.

I’m sorry, Michael , I think to my brother, reaching out to him in my mind.

And just as the blackness encompasses me, I feel a tug at my hair. Water gives way to salty air, burning at my nostrils, my mouth. My lungs fit, spewing water everywhere. I keep coughing, and even when nothing comes out, it’s as if my body still isn’t convinced we’ve purged ourselves of all the water.

Tink holds me close, my back to her chest so I have room to expunge the water, but she’s carrying me back to the shore, my legs almost completely limp.

When we get to the beach, she lowers me to my knees, slapping my back to assist. When I’m finally done, snot and saltwater still clinging to my nose, my sinuses and lungs on fire, I take in a breath.

Even breathing hurts. But there’s an absence there. The water wasn’t the only thing expelled.

The faerie dust is gone, used up with the adrenaline as my body fought to keep itself alive.

Tink softly takes my chin and lifts it upward. I gasp at what I see.

Wraiths gather around us on the beach. So many of them, I wonder if they’ll swarm us. But they simply watch.

And then one steps forward from the rest. He makes a motion as if he’s pushing at the bridge of his nose.

Like he’s adjusting his glasses.