by Lisa Maxwell
Chapter 30
LATER, I SLEEP CURLED INTO Rowan for warmth, my head propped against him as he keeps watch. At some point, though, the exhaustion of the day must have overtaken him. At some point he must have fallen asleep and let the fire die, because the sound of rustling and the smell of damp leaves wake me.
When I open my eyes, Rowan’s arms are still around me, and the bulk of his body is slumped over mine as he sleeps. But the fire has gone out, and the inky darkness already surrounds us.
The damp, aged odor of the Dark Ones intensifies as they gather. I feel the wet brush of their still-ghostly bodies closing in, and I start to shake Rowan, to try to wake him, but before I can, I’m swallowed by the darkness, and I can’t hold off the images that assault me, tipping my world dangerously on its axis until I tumble again into memory.
I am back in the same forest, the cool air of the night whipping through my hair, stinging at my cheeks, and a voice whispers words I cannot understand. The forest reaching for me, urging me on. That grating rasp is everywhere, echoing around me, reminding me. The path was so clear before. The craggy fingers of the dark trees reaching for me. Pulling at me. Encouraging me. Beckoning me.
But now that I have been to the untamed wildness of Neverland, I realize the trees in those memories have always been simply trees. They are not what I truly fear, nor what I was running from—or perhaps to—that night.
Cold and dark and the forest reaching for me as I run, but I am brushing aside its spindly branches as the voices whisper.
And then the image shifts, and my mom is there, her blue-gray eyes wild as the sky before a storm. Her face this close to mine, her breath sour and hot. “You have to forget this. You cannot speak of it ever again. Not to anyone, Gwendolyn. Do you understand?”
And suddenly the dark woods surround me and I’m there again, remembering other things I’d so long ago shoved down deep, pushed back into the unexamined corners of my mind. Things that make my heart race, my breath come fast and excited with wanting something I can’t explain. Things that make me want to run into the night, my arms open wide.
Outside the safety of Rowan’s arms, the Dark Ones are still gathering, their bodies like the wind rustling through dry leaves, but I can’t seem to stop myself from plunging down into the dangerous waters of my own memories. I can’t seem to stop myself from drowning in the images of the forest that night.
The warm fall night going cold, and I am lost.
The image shifts again, and I’m no longer in the woods. The spinning brightness of police lights throwing jagged shards of color across the dark trees. Heavily jowled men with serious faces looming over me. Their mouths moving, but I can’t make out their words, because instead of human voices, a rustling buzz echoes from their lips.
And then my mom is there, taking me away. Her thin arms are strong around me. How could you? her voice whispers, her blue-gray eyes stormy and lined with worry. Don’t say anything more. Forget, she commands.
But how could I have forgotten?
I’m remembering now, and the memories feel like the sharp point of a knife stabbing through the tender skin of all that I thought I was. It’s impossible. It can’t be anything more than a bad dream. But there’s more waiting for me in those memories, some devastating truth that the darkness teases me with.
It isn’t your fault, my mother tells me, and even then I could hear the lie in her voice. I will keep you safe, she says. This will never happen again.
And again I feel the point of a knife, sharp and wicked. The burn of memory.
And I’m screaming, crying. The tears are hot on my face as my mom says hush, my girl. Hush. And as she shakes me, her grip is as painful as the freshly knifed wound in my arm.
But those are not my mother’s hands holding me. My cheeks are still cold with the wet slick of tears that coat them. My arm aches from the phantom cut, but it’s Rowan’s voice that comes to me urgently through the darkness.
“Come now, lass, wake up,” he whispers, his hands tight on my arms.
My eyes flutter open, but it takes them a moment to adjust to the glow of a small fire. “What?” My voice is hoarse as it scratches free from my throat, and his hands become more gentle on my arms.
“The Dark Ones,” he whispers. “They’d have taken us for sure if your screaming hadn’t woken me. You must have been dreaming.”
But that didn’t feel like a dream. It had felt like a truth—like I was there again, living it again. I’d gone into the forest, chasing a voice, and when I came out, everything had changed. That was the first night my mom had packed our bags without warning so we could disappear before dawn.
“I’m going to let go of you now,” he says, and I clutch his arm in response. “To add more to the fire,” he tells me gently, his hand in my hair. “Easy now. It’ll take but a moment.”
He releases me then, and for a moment I feel adrift. Lost once again. The dark Fey move, rustling their great wings near, but they are unable to get any closer because of the light of the fire. Still, I almost feel myself beginning to fall into the memories once more.
Memories I now crave.
Rowan’s face is tense in concentration as he feeds the flames, never taking his eyes from his work as the fire grows. And as it grows, crackling to life, it pushes back the darkness, until the bright halo of light is even larger.
Then Rowan takes me into his arms again, tucking me between his legs, my back against his chest. “All’s well, lass,” he whispers. But his body is tense, and I know his words are more comfort than truth.
Beyond the glow of the fire, I can still hear the Dark Ones circling. I can sense their frustration, their disappointment that they cannot reach us. Beyond the glow of the flames, Neverland is nothing but darkness. Even the stars seem to have turned away.
My muscles still quiver, my nerves jangle from the overload of fear and adrenaline, and my mind is thick with confusion about what just happened.
Rowan adjusts his body, bringing me closer to him. In the circle of his arms, I feel safe from the dangers of the night. But even the strength in his arms and the protection of his body aren’t enough to brush away the memories.
The Dark Ones forced me to face my own truth. They plunged me deep into a past I had let myself—forced myself—to forget, and they had revealed a truth I didn’t want to remember about what my mother had done to protect me.
All those years of my mom worrying, all those moves from one small nowhere town to the next that I never understood. I do now. I remember. That night in the woods. The monsters chasing me through the darkness—until I made it out, just in time, to where there was light. I knew the monsters were there, but no one believed me. Except for my mom.
You must’ve imagined it, the policeman said, his heavy jowls wobbling as he shook his head.
She’s just a kid, they whispered, looking at me with grown-up eyes that made my stomach ache. A scared and confused kid.
But my mom believed me. You have to forget, she told me, her words as sharp as a knife. You can’t talk about this ever again.
I can’t help but rub the scar on my arm.
It’s not a vaccination. Or maybe it is, but not in the way I always believed. Not in the way I let myself remember. I was so young, I barely understood what was happening when my mom iced my arm and took out her silver knife.
I was so scared of what had happened in the forest—the way the darkness had tempted me away from the path and into the unknown. So I did what my mom commanded. I locked the memory of that night down deep, and I never let myself think about what happened after that.
But I can’t say any of that aloud. Not yet. And he doesn’t ask me for it. Instead, he sits in the silence with me, and after a long while, he speaks softly, close to my ear. “There’s no shame in being afraid, lass. I know a bit about dreams, myself.”
I don’t know how to tell him that what I’d experienced wasn’t simply a dream, so I don’t say anything at first. I just watch the fir
e flicker, listening to the scuttling stir of monsters in the darkness beyond the safety of its glow. I think of the way Rowan was when I found him in the tunnels. I remember the wailing screams I heard almost every night I spent on his ship, and I understand then, I am not alone in fearing the secrets the darkness can reveal.
“Will you tell me?” I whisper, hoping his words can push away the memory of my own horrors.
He’s silent for a long moment, as though gathering his strength, and when he speaks, his voice comes out not as the steady cadence of a tale well told, but as the uneasy whisper of a man confessing. “It’s not always the same,” he says. “Sometimes I dream of before, sometimes of after, but most often, I dream of the night it happened.” He stops then, silent and still, and I think for a moment that he will not—maybe he cannot—go on.
But the memories I’ve unearthed have made me selfish. I need to feel less alone. I need to know I am not the only one carrying the impossible weight of memory this night. “The night what happened?” I ask, pushing him more than I have any right to.
“The night I killed my brother.”
But then the sky went red with hellfire.
And his brother was there, screaming something the boy could not hear.
And then he was not.
Chapter 31
THE WAY HIS VOICE BREAKS at the word brother makes my heart ache for him. I wait, watching the fire flicker before me, taking some comfort in the warmth of his body against me, trying to offer him some comfort in return. I’m not sure, though, if I want him to speak anymore or to stay silent.
“My whole life, all I wanted in the world was to be like my older brother, Michael. When the war started, we were both too young to go, but we followed the battles and the news like it was the grandest of adventures.”
His words are not what I expected, and I’m confused. “Which war?” I ask, trying to catch the thread of his tale before it spins away from me in the night.
“The Great War, of course. What other would there be?” he said, his brow creased in confusion.
When I do the math in my head, my vision swims. World War I was a hundred years ago, but Rowan doesn’t look older than twenty. I hadn’t even considered that time in Neverland could be different than time in my own world. How long had we been gone already? Weeks? Years? The idea sends a shiver of ice through me not even the fire roaring before me can melt.
“There have been plenty,” I say weakly.
“They promised our sacrifice would be the last.” Rowan pauses, as though gathering his courage with his words. “I should have expected that would be a lie as well,” he says darkly. Then he releases me and sets to work adding more debris to the fire. He is careful not to look at me as he speaks.
“The day Michael turned eighteen, he enlisted, of course. I was so bloody jealous of him the day he left. My mam was crying her eyes out, but Michael’s smile lit his whole face. I didn’t see him again for almost a year, when he was on leave. He looked so completely different—my Michael and yet not. There he was in his starched uniform, all gleaming with the bits and bobs he’d won for doing what soldiers do. When my time with him was over, he put me on the train for home, but I didn’t go. I found myself in a recruitment office, telling the man behind the desk I was nineteen years old. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter. He took my name, and I signed the paper, and it was done.”
“How old were you really?”
He glances back at me. “That was the spring of ’17. I’d just turned sixteen the month before.”
Sixteen—he looked older than that now, but not nearly as old as he should have looked. “And they took you? Without any proof?”
“And why wouldn’t they? They needed men, and I was close enough.” His eyes turn back to the fire, and I know he is there, reliving his brother’s death again. “I never imagined it could be like that. They’d told us tales of blood and glory, of adventure and honor. And we went willingly, rushing toward our fates.” As he studies the fire, his mouth turns up, a wry smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “You’d think I would have seen Pan’s tale for the lie it was sooner.”
I don’t know what to say to him, so I don’t speak. I simply sit as witness to the story he tells.
“Michael thought he had to take care of me.” He huffs out a rough laugh. “He probably did at that. But it was my fault he went on that patrol the night it happened. I was angry at him for trying to mother me, so I volunteered. I was so convinced I was ready to be a man. So bloody convinced of my own bravery. Of course he volunteered as well.”
He glances up at me again then, his eyes filled with the pain of all that happened. “I was the only one who made it off the field alive that night. And I barely made it at all,” he said, gesturing toward his arm.
“That’s what happened to your arm?” I ask, thinking of the scarred skin on his shoulders and back.
He gives me a terse nod, but doesn’t say anything more.
He raises the steel hand then and clenches it, watching it move with the kind of terrible wonder he must have had in his eyes the first time he learned that his own arm was missing. Finally his voice comes again, small and broken in the darkness. “I don’t know what happened after. I woke in a French hospital without my arm and in more pain than I ever dreamed imaginable. I was in such desperate shape, I’m not sure why they even bothered to try saving me. Just as I’ll never be sure of why Fiona brought me here.
“At first I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, save my brother wasn’t here, but it wasn’t long until I forgot about Michael, about everything before this world. . . . Until I took that first boy’s life—that’s when the dreams began.
“Now, every time I close my eyes, Michael is there. Laughing. Dying. Over and over, and no matter what I do, I can’t change it. I can’t stop it.” His breath is ragged. His voice no more than a whisper. “The dreams torture me with what I’ve done, but they’ve saved me as well, for without them, I’d have been lost long ago. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to stand against Pan or protect the boys from dangers they can’t understand.”
I want to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, but I know the words are meaningless. Instead, I take his hands and thread my fingers through his, offering what silent comfort I can, but he doesn’t speak. We sit in the silence for a moment before I turn his gloved hand over in mine. “May I?” When he doesn’t pull away, I carefully peel away its soft leather covering.
The hand beneath is truly a miracle of engineering. Every one of the pieces is decorated with filigreed scrollwork, and it moves with an effortless grace that belies its mechanics.
“It might not be so bad if I didn’t have to remember what it was to be whole,” he says softly.
I want to tell him he’s still whole, but I don’t feel like muddying whatever it is growing between us with lies. “It’s part of you now, though.” I turn a bit so I can face him properly, then I open my hand and lay it palm to palm overtop his.
“It’s not quite the same as the original, but it serves me well enough for most things.” He pulls away and raises the metal fingers to touch my cheek. “For other things, though, I find it sorely lacking.”
He raises his other hand, then, and frames my face with his hands—metal and flesh, one hard and unfeeling, the other callused from unknown trials. Both equally Rowan.
I force myself to stay completely still, my heart beating wildly in my chest as he sifts his true fingers slowly through my hair, rubbing at the short strands. I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. Pan saw power. The boys in my own world looked at me next to Olivia and maybe saw a pretty girl, just not pretty enough.
I know he wants to kiss me again, just as I know this hesitation is his way of asking.
Yes, I think. Because if I have to die here—and I’m beginning to think it’s inevitable I will—I want to know him again on my lips. I want him to want me that way, this surly pirate of a boy who would sacrifice anything for those under hi
s protection. Anything, it seems, but me.
But he misreads the hitch in my breath and pulls away abruptly, moving back from me. His blank expression tells me that maybe I’ve made him dig far deeper into the pain of his past than anyone has a right to, but I can’t say I’m exactly sorry for it. I’ve finally met the person behind the mask of the Captain. The boy who chose to play the villain in order to battle a monster who calls himself a hero.
Rowan unfolds himself from the ground, leaving me cold and alone in the light of the fire. “Get some sleep, if you can, lass. We’ve a long and trying day ahead of us, if we’re to do what must be done,” he tells me. And then he steps away from the glow of the fire and into the darkness beyond.
When he woke, finally, terribly, on something rough against his cheek and reeking of death, he thought he had been delivered to hell. It had been a mistake. All of it. A horrible mistake. But the angel was there, gentle. Or if not gentle, at least sure . . .
Chapter 32
IN THE MORNING, THE AIR between us is charged with an unsettled energy, and I’m not sure what to say to Rowan. We stare at each other for a few moments in the soft light—moments when I think maybe he’ll close the distance between us and kiss me—but he turns his back so I can pull on my own clothes instead. When I’m once again dressed, I offer the coat back, and he takes it with a stiff formality that makes everything that happened the night before feel like a long-ago dream.
“The straightest path to where the Queen lies is to follow the water, though to do so, we’d have to venture out into the sea once more, and I’m not all that willing to test the Sisters’ mercy a second time.” Rowan points toward the dense green jungle that teems with life beyond the rocky shores. “We’ll have to cut through the jungle. Straight north to the heart of the island.” He pulls out the dagger Fiona left us and hands it to me, handle first.
I don’t reach for it. “What am I supposed to do with that?”