“Very well,” he says. “Goodbye, Wendy Darling. I will not forget you.”
He turns to pace from the room, and I stare after him.
What wells up within me—it is not hot. It is cold. As cold as clasping the hand of a loved one hours after their death.
Peter grabs the latch on the door. He does not yet know that I have caused my shadows to enter the lock, willing them to harden within it, making it immovable.
When he turns around, he has the audacity to look hopeful.
I advance on him, then pin him to the wall by his throat with my hand. He flaps his wings at me, but it is no use. He might be a Shadow Keeper, but there is no more use in him fighting me than there ever had been in him fighting my Sister.
He must realize this, because he stills, and I get the sense that he’s breathing in this last moment of being close to me. Close to the dead mortal girl.
Disgust roils through me.
“So this is how it ends,” he says. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing so kind as that.”
“And this is the revenge, then?” he says. “At least I get to watch you enact it.”
“This is not revenge,” I say to Peter, though he cannot seem to comprehend any other explanation.
“Then why?” he says.
“Because I would have let you leave this room,” I say. “Even after all you did to that girl, to me, when I was her, after every time you touched me and I writhed on the inside, after the months you spent breaking me—I would have let you leave this room. Pursue a life of your own.
“But you cannot be trusted. How am I to know that you will not plot again and try to take my son from me? Use him as a bargaining chip? You will go back to your sad little realm, and you will connive, and you will scheme. And I will spend my entire life worrying over my son. Worrying what you might do to him with the hopes of getting back a girl who doesn’t exist.”
“I am defeated,” says Peter, trembling. “I will not try again.”
I laugh. “No, I don’t believe you will.”
When I dig the tendrils of my shadowed fingers into his chest, he screams. It is unlike me. Faintly, I am aware this is the cruelest thing I’ll ever do. But I cannot bring myself to regret it as I pry the shadows from his body.
Peter screams again, and then his fleshly body drops dead to the floor.
What comes out of him, what I draw with my tense fingers, is the shape of him. His shadowed form only, wings and all.
His shadow form stares at his hands, glances behind him at his wings in confusion.
“You thought this was a punishment,” he says, his voice a low and seductive thrum, “to kill the flesh and trap me in my shadowform alone. Except I do not feel the way Peter did before you killed him. You have made me whole.”
He drifts over to Nolan, encircling him. “You, one day, will die. But I will live eternal, and so will your wife. She will become lonely one of these days, whether it’s during your short life or afterward.”
Nolan doesn’t respond other than to stare at Peter’s body, slumped against the wall, lifeless. “How did we end up here, my friend?” he asks.
The shadow—Peter—glances at Nolan, clearly confused.
“He can’t see you,” I say. “Only the mortals who can see wraiths can see you. You are not Peter’s shadow self. You are less than a wraith. You are only shadows, no form to return to, except unlike a wraith, your soul is attached inside.”
Peter’s shadows whirl, darting directly toward my son. They pass right through him, and a moment later, he encircles me, coming to rest in front of me. He glances at his hands as he holds them out, looking back and forth between them. Again, he goes for my child, unable once again to grasp him.
“You have touched too much, too often, too carelessly,” I say. “But you will never touch anyone ever again.”
This time, when he reaches out, it’s for me.
“Goodbye, Peter,” I say, and with a flick of my hand, dismiss his shadows from the room.
