After a few minutes, Michael stops shaking and begins twirling his fingers through my hair.
“Hey, Michael,” I say, struggling to speak the phrase that will spur him up the ladder, remembering the last time he cited it to me. I’m not sure these words are the right ones to use, given how they’ve entangled themselves with John’s death in my mind. But for Michael, I remind myself that they’re a fond memory of a childhood that was ripped away from him, something familiar. “Last one to the top’s dead meat.”
Michael jumps from my lap and races toward the rope ladder. I have to scramble to my feet to catch him, but as the rope ladder sways and my brother giggles in delight, I watch him from the bottom and soak in the moment.
And then, I climb.
When I reachthe deck of the ship, Nolan is nowhere to be found, but Charlie quickly finds us. She explains that after she completed the adamant pocket watch—the one designed tohouse Peter’s shadows—the Nomad had sent her and Maddox to theIaso, claiming that was the location we’d reconvene after kidnapping Tink from the Whittakers’.
“Of course, by the time we’d realized he’d lied to us… Well, I suppose we’re all together now, so I’m not sure that it matters,” she says, waving her hand as if to dismiss the memory of the Nomad altogether. “I’ve already had a bath drawn in our room,” she says, turning her nose up at me in a way that says I need one more than Michael. Makes sense, as Michael was probably freshly bathed at the Whittakers’.
I nod and follow her, Michael in hand, to her room, the room we once shared when I thought I was a prisoner on this ship. I hadn’t known what it meant to be a prisoner at the time.
I sink into the drawn bath as Charlie watches Michael in her room, speaking with me loudly through the walls.
“So explain to me what exactly happened,” she says.
I groan and sink back against the edge of the metal tub, allowing it to dig into the space just underneath my shoulder blades, where I can feel knots forming and a headache creeping in.
“Can it wait?” I ask, not wishing to relive tonight. Or maybe I just don’t want Charlie knowing what a horrible person I am for allowing Tink to be carried away by the man she so clearly fears and bargaining away my firstborn child in one night.
The door creaks, and Charlie peeks in with an exaggerated scowl on her brow. “How long am I agreeing to?”
I let out a laugh. “I feel as though at least one sleep is fair.”
“I’ll prepare the bed,” Charlie says, whipping her head out of the doorway and closing it with a snap.
My relief at not having to explain myself doesn’t last. It’s not long before saving Nolan is clouded by the reminder that I haven’t actually saved him. Not from death, at least.
He’s still sick, his illness the direct by-product of me severing his Mating Mark.
Nolan is dying, and I don’t know how much time with him I have left.
My stomach aches at the thought. That and the realization that he and I will never have children. It was a stupid dream, but one I clung to in my captivity with Peter. A clandestine place I let my mind wander during the long nights in Peter’s arms.
It was only made worse after Nolan told me how our lives were supposed to turn out. Before he changed both of our fates by turning over part of his Mating Mark to Peter. I was supposed to help raise his and Iaso’s daughters as my own, and Nolan and I were to have a little girl too.
I miss them, these children who never got the chance to exist. I don’t understand it entirely, how I managed to have a child in that version of reality, when I never fell pregnant with Peter.
But that version of Wendy had never been addicted to faerie dust. I don’t know what sort of effects its misuse has on fertility, but the idea leaves me sullen, and I find my fingers tracing my belly, thinking of the children that will never grow there.
My fingers stumble upon a section of raised flesh.
I jolt upward in the bath and stare down at my belly, but the water leaves me unable to see what my hands are feeling. When I extract myself from the bath, that’s when what I’m feeling becomes clear.
It’s the mark of a bargain. And it’s in the shape of an infant, placed directly over my womb.
I choke on a gag, anger welling up within me. Hatred for the Sister eats at my stomach. She could have marked me anywhere, if I had to bet, and she felt the need to taunt me. Remind me of what I can never have.
Why? Unless she’s trying to tempt me. Give over one child, and I can keep all the rest.
But she doesn’t know Peter never let me utilize preventative measures. Meaning she doesn’t know there’s a possibility I’m barren. That the faerie dust has eaten away at my womb. Because of the curse the Eldest Sister placed upon her, she can’t see me or Nolan in that tapestry of hers.
“Wendy?” Charlie calls from the other side. “What exactly am I to do with the fact that Michael is flicking his boogers across the room?”
With haste, I dry myself off, throw on the nightgown Charlie left out for me, and try not to think about the brand marring my belly.
I’m notsure what time it is when Charlie finally wakes me. Sleep had been fitful, but eventually my body succumbed to its allure.
