Page 24 of Losing Wendy
The captain rights himself, lunging onto the landing, his fingers grabbing hold of Michael’s ankle. John lets out a yelp and kicks at him. The captain roars as his grip loosens and Michael slips free.
Wind beats at my face as Peter and I soar upward, but only when John and Michael clear the broken face of the clock tower do I allow myself to take in my surroundings.
The city of Jolpa is lit up in the gentle glow of faerie lamps cutting through the fog. The same material now works through the bodies of my brothers, keeping them afloat.
We rise higher and higher until the glass clock tower is barely a yellow glow in the distance, its broken face only a memory.
When I glimpse the houses shrinking into tiny dots below us, I let out a gasp.
“Frightened?” asks Peter, his breath warm on my ear.
“Yes,” I say, my words breathy.
“Good.”
For years, I’ve dreaded the Shadow Keeper’s possessive nature. Now, I try to take comfort in the fact that he’s not likely to drop me.
As we fly, I open one eye to peer down at the Estellian landscape below us. Twinkling lights speckle the ground, a mirror reflection of the starlit sky. I’d gaze at the stars too, but Peter has us flying almost perpendicular, his body a firm wall between me and the sky as he clutches me close. My head is still dizzy with the height. I’m used to climbing, but I’ve never been without a sturdy foothold, and now my entire lower body feels as if it’s being pricked with needles.
“Where are we going?” I ask once the kingdom of Estelle fades from view and the dark and swarthy mountains overtake the landscape.
“Tell you what, why don’t we play a game where you ask me five questions, then once your questions are up, you can guess where I’m taking you?”
“And what am I to gain if I win?” I ask.
“The answer, of course.”
“And if I lose?”
“Then I drop you.”
My heart stops in my chest, my vision tunneling as I stare at the ground so far beneath us, at the craggy tips of the mountains, the boulders that would break me upon impact.
“What do you say, Wendy Darling?”
I let out a chuckle that doesn’t at all sound like the scream I’m unleashing inwardly. My poor mother didn’t know what a terrible trait she was passing along to me, the inability to express my displeasure.
“I’d say I’m a rather patient person and do believe I can wait.”
“Well, that’s no fun, now, is it?” The teasing still tinges Peter’s voice, but there’s something sinister that’s crept into it. Something dark that I don’t dare disturb.
“What doesn’t seem fun is breaking my body upon the rocks.” I fight to keep my tone casual, steer the Shadow Keeper away from his madness.
“True. But think of the thrill of the game. Don’t you want to feel, Wendy Darling?”
I want to tell him that I do feel. That terror creeps up my spinelike spiders carrying their silk egg sacs on their back. That I feel his grip around my waist, firm for the moment, but with no promise anchoring it.
I want to tell him that I’m well acquainted with feeling. That I’ve felt nothing but fear and anxiety all my life, all because of him.
But as I consider it, it hits me that this isn’t entirely true. Fear terrorized me, overcame me as a child, but over time I learned to tuck it away, to sear my soul with a white-hot iron until fear could not touch me. Until the haunting shadows no longer stirred much of anything in me, except for perhaps the longing that one day they would either end the numbness or fulfill it.
I open my mouth, almost ready to play this maniac’s game, but then I think better of it, changing my question. “The captain. He knew you. He called you Peter.”
“Did you think you were the only person ever to be haunted?”
“No, but…” I bite my lip. “I don’t think you haunted him the way you haunted me. He knew your name.”
“You never asked me my name.”