A flicker of light, and I glance to my right. It’s the mortal, holding up a lantern he must have only just lit. The glow from it bounces across the hard lines of his face, his sharp angular jawline, his thick black brows. After eons, it is impossible not to recognize a Descendant of my Sister’s lover. There is fear in his green eyes when he gazes upon me, but something else too. Something akin to wonder.
“Darling,” he says again, and the name itself tugs at my soul, or perhaps it’s the shape of it on his tongue. But I am not this man’s Darling.
“Run,” I say, my voice the hiss of a teakettle. “I will fend her off as long as I can, but you must hide from her all of your days.”
Pain ripples across the man’s features. “I’m staying here with you.”
An infantile wail cuts across the dark fog. The man whips his head around, a primal instinct.
“Find your child and leave,” I command the mortal. He looks back at me, confusion written all over his expression.
“The curse spans generations,” I explain. “She will want your son as she wants you. You must hide him as well.”
“Our son,” the man says. “I must hideourson.”
My shadows droop, sadness overwhelming me. He cannot see that his Wendy Darling is gone, that I am not her. The tragedy of it threatens to shatter my heart, but before I can explain any further to the man, a blade of shadow slices through the darkness.
I catch it before it pierces my heart.
I launch myself in the direction from which the shadow spear came. My Sister is waiting for me, her shadows writhing in rageas I coil my own around her neck. She claws at the coil, pain rippling through me as she digs her nails into an extension of myself.
A surge of rage bursts into my head, and I pull tighter.
“You cannot hurt me,” I whisper. “You forfeited that ability when you locked me away. When you desensitized me. When you numbed me with years of mortal existence, centuries of mortal pain.”
She tries to evade me, but I refuse to allow it.
“We are equal matches,” she says. “You cannot defeat me.”
“No,” says a voice, and my Sister’s demeanor shifts as a snapping sound echoes through the room.
She stares down, only to find the adamant clasps around her wrists, the mortal man standing behind her, staring up at me expectantly. Another mortal expecting me to save them from the folly of my Sisters.
Sadness envelops me. “I told you to run. But I must thank you for staying. If I can offer you a blessing, I will.”
The man shakes his head in disbelief, but I have no time to wonder about mortals.
CHAPTER 61
“So you’ve bested me in a match,” says my Sister, her voice a snarl. “You’ve chained me. But to what end? You cannot kill me. None of us can be killed. It is only a battle that you’ve won, my Youngest Sister. But I will never stop hunting you and your family. You can chain me up, but I have servants you do not know about. And besides, as much as our Eldest Sister and I hate each other, we have, in our malice, found one common enemy that binds us together.
“She will free me. And I will not be entertained until I am hunting you again. You will live in exile, and even then, I will hunt you down and take everything from you. You could have been happy, you know. You could have raised your son. I would have allowed it. You could have even had Peter. But no, you had to have everything. You cannot even bind me in mortal form. Not without the help of our Sister. And we both know that no matter what enmity is placed between us, she will always side with me. You might be angry with me, but anger is nothing compared to envy. It does not root quite so deep.”
I stare into the shadowed face of my Middle Sister, the cruelest of all of us, and while anger flares in my heart, something else does too—pity. Pity for her sad, awful, eternalexistence, one without a glimmer of peace. She does not understand that, even now, she cares more than I do, that whatever pain she wishes to inflict upon me died when the body of Wendy Darling was lost to my shadows.
“You have had a difficult task,” I say to her. “I saw the tapestries. My Sister, constantly on a mission to keep evil from corrupting this world. Tasked with stopping the vile. And you have failed time and time again, though it is not your fault. These evil ones—some of them are just too stubborn, too clever, too set in their abominable ways. But failing them has hurt you. It’s why your bedroom contains no tapestries. It’s where you are kept safe not only from the evil of the mortal world, but your inability to save it.”
My Middle Sister scoffs. “Is this your strategy, then? Convince me that somewhere within me, there is good?”
“No,” I say. “That would not be worthwhile. While I do believe that there is good within you, it is useless so long as you cling to this miserable curse.”
She lets out a dry laugh.
“I didn’t curse myself, dear Youngest. That was our Eldest’s doing. I did not ask to have my heart crushed. I did not ask to suffer rejection, year after year, century after century.”
“It is like you said,” I reply. “I cannot bind you permanently. Not without the help of another Sister. I cannot free you either.”
“And what? You expect our Eldest Sister to have a change of heart? I assure you, if she hasn’t considered freeing me after all these centuries, it won’t be you who convinces her.”
