Page 76 of Losing Wendy
“I’d say I wish you had, but then would it be as thrilling tonight?” He brushes a finger through my hair as he says it, tucking my hair behind my ear. Then he spins me around to face him. I have to cross my ankles behind his back to keep my feet from dangling awkwardly.
“Would you do me the pleasure of allowing me a dance?”
“I don’t know how good of a dance partner I’ll be up here,” I giggle.
Peter’s eyes twinkle. “Good thing I have a solution to that.”
He dips one hand into the pouch at his side, keeping me fastened to his chest with the other. When he removes his finger, it’s coated with glimmering dust, though I can’t help but notice that it’s less than he commanded either Michael or John to take when it was time for them to fly.
“This should be enough to keep your feet steady,” he explains, pressing his finger to my lips, his eyes flickering when my tongue touches his fingertip.
A shattering warmth washes over me, cleansing me of the pain of Freckles’s death, of my parents’ deaths, though I’m not sure if it’s from Peter’s touch at my mouth, or the effects of the faerie dust, or a combination of both. When I gaze behind him at the sky unfolding beyond us, I can’t help but notice that the colors seem sharper, though the shapes of the objects on the ground below are less defined.
Definitely the faerie dust then.
I now see why he keeps it away from the Lost Boys, only using it on them in emergencies, like with John and Michael or when the nightstalker assaulted me at the warehouse. He’d given me such a minuscule dose then, I’d hardly registered it.
I can’t help but wonder if he’d give me another taste if I asked him. Before I can make my request, he interlocks his fingers through mine, keeping the other firmly at my hip.
And then we dance.
It’s like no dancing I’ve ever done, the carefully calculated waltzes of the aristocracy. Peter whirls me around like I’m a puppet at the end of his string, spinning me in a blur of dizzying streaks of starlight.
There’s nothing at all. Nothing but warmth in my chest and lights glittering around us and Peter’s touch.
It’s lovely and wonderful, and I never want it to end.
It’s his glamour enchanting you, says my mother’s voice, warning me nightly as a child, well intentioned as she filled my soul with dread.
But nothing my mother feared was as dreadful as what has actually come to pass. She spent her life warning me of Peter, when she should have been warning me of sullen captains and their sharp edges and their thirst for retribution. She should have warned me about the necessary evils that I’d be subjected to as someone whose life depended on ensnaring a husband.
I don’t want to think about that either.
So I don’t.
I dance.
CHAPTER 30
When the dance is over, Peter pulls me back into his chest and flies me to the top of a tree on a nearby cliff. We settle into the shelter of its branches, Peter slipping his arm around my shoulders as I lean into him.
It shouldn’t, but it fills me with an assurance of safety I can’t describe, can’t quite get a grasp on. While the joy in the sky jolted the melancholy out of me like lightning fraying a mast, nesting in Peter’s arms smothers the heaviness in my chest in the blanket of his embrace.
His wings are too large for our resting spot, so he cocoons them around us both, casually tracing my shoulder blade with his thumb. I’m as high on excitement as I was plummeting through the sky, and all it takes is his wayward touch.
“How did that feel?” he asks, his voice a whisper riding the breeze.
My attention is so focused on the warm trail of his touch, it takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about flying. Falling.
“It felt like letting go,” I say, and I’m reminded of entering Neverland, of Peter’s command. I hadn’t considered it much before now.Perhaps that’s due to the glamour he used on me. “Did you use magic to take away my fear of you when we first arrived?” I ask.
“It’s not quite as simple as that,” Peter says. “I can’t compel you with my glamour. Only suggest. Whether my suggestion takes root depends entirely on whether you let it. And even then, it doesn’t work on everyone.”
“Why does it work on me?”
He pauses. Considers. “It only influences those who already want it to.”
I bite my lip, waiting for the horror to skitter up my spine. It doesn’t. All my life, I’ve been afraid, and though there’s part of me, the part my parents trained into me, that screams I should quake at Peter’s power over me, it’s notmyfear. Not really.