A dark thrill shoots through me at his words; at the savage cruelty lining his face, the lethal-edged lines of his body. Niko means to scare me away, but instead, my magic begins to hum beneath my skin as it recognizes its counter. I create and Niko destroys. Not my equal, but my perfect balance.
And what have I done my whole life butburn?
With regret and hatred? With fury and vengeance? It didn’t abate when I snuck into the Amelioration doctors' houses and slit their throats; nor when I gazed upon the graves of my father and sister. I’d burned so hot I couldn’tfeelit anymore, not even as the world around me crumbled into ruins.
Until Niko woke me up. Forced me to drag the burn to the surface; to feel its flames and worship its power.Mypower.
“Do you understand me, Willa? You want the truth about what happened? About me and my villainous heart? Well, here it is. I escaped the Strayed when I was fifteen and left everyone behind. I sailed away to other worlds and lived an entire lifetime without a thought of what horrors I’d abandoned a thousand others to. I didn’t care if the Aeternalis kidnapped a million other children, so far as I was left out of it.”
His death jerks at the sound of the dead king’s name, spiraling up from my feet and into the air around us. But Niko has eyes only for me, his gaze blazing as he takes in my every detail, every miniscule reaction. Waiting for a flinch, I realize. He wants me to run.
But my feet are planted. My chin is raised high. I’m not going anywhere.
“It was only when I befriended Wendy that I eventhoughtabout anything other than my own freedom. She was a scholar of history and had traced her lineage back centuries to a family from London—a family who’d lost a boy when he was only a baby.” Niko’s eyes rake over me. “The family of Peter Darling.”
The air goes cold.
“By that time, Peter had become something of a legend in your world. A boy abandoned, who’d spun his imagination and created a new world. A world of adventure and freedom. But Wendy had begun to notice chilling patterns…the disappearance of children that was once temporary, now eternal. She’d mappedthe patterns and tracked the slow, but definitive changes of society. And when she met me, my stories confirmed everything she’d suspected.”
Niko watches as my tongue wets my lips. As I shift slightly under his gaze.
“Together, we planned a return to Somnya. Wendy thought we could change Pan’s heart to what it had been when dreams were vibrant, and magic was pure. He’d always been obsessed with the idea of family, with what he’d lost—it was why he created the Strayed. An unassailable bond that he tested over and over, to make sure it would never leave him. Wendy thought if we could give him the love he so desperately wanted, it would unlock his heart. Return humanity to his corrupt soul and with it, light to both our worlds.”
Niko shakes his head in disgust. “Wendy cared deeply about others, but I…I only cared abouther.I had no interest in saving anything or anyone, but I helped her learn to use her Darling magic to open the wards despite my misgivings, simply because I enjoyed the way she looked at me. I have no magic in your world, so she hadn't witnessed the horror of what exists inside me. She saw me as human.”
My breath freezes in my chest, as I realize the stories were wrong. Pan never loved Wendy Darling—Nikodid. Enough to come back to the place of his deepest traumas, his loneliest years. Enough to damn his own kingdom.
“Wendy was right in her theories. Learning he had a family softened the Aeternalis’ heart, but after a thousand years of depravity and loneliness, he couldn’t curb his basest urges, even for her.”
Niko closes the last bit of space between us. His dark curls tumble over his forehead to frame his face as he gazes down at me.
“All I had to do to save Somnya was allow Wendy to suffer the attention of Pan for a few hundred years. To let him hurt her to his heart’s content, to twist and warp her love for him. To force her to prove that love, over and over, until he could finallyfeelsomething. Wen wasn’t like you…she was selfless to a lethal degree. She would have taken every bit of his abuse to save everyone else.” His expression is feral. “But she wasmineand I couldn’t allow it.”
My lungs begin to burn like all the oxygen has drained from the room.
“I drugged and kidnapped her. Forced her to open the wards at knifepoint. I sent her to a world where Pan would never find her. And so began our war. Death against creation. It ravaged the island, turned dreams into nightmares. It lost me my ship, my freedom. My soul.”
Death curls around him like wisps of smoke. “One night, I lured the Aeternalis to the Crocodile under the guise of ending our feud and promising to tell him where I’d hidden his most precious plaything. And then I carved his chest apart with a hook. He bled all over my favorite boots.” He cocks his head, his gaze monstrous. “The Immortal King. The Everlasting. The man who’d stolen me from my home. Who’d tortured me over and over. The boy whose power dreamed the very island into being. He bled the same color as everyone else. Everyone butme.”
Niko leans in so his lips barely brush my cheek. “So, tell me again how I don’t deserve this pain,” he whispers. “When after two hundred years, I have learnednolessons.”
I gaze up at him in suspended shock as the meaning of his words rains down over me. Beginning at the top of my head, it washes over my shoulders in an icy deluge, just like his cool touch of death.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean, Darling.” The gaze he sets me with is brutal, but rather than stepping back, I inch closer. Close enough to feel his warmth against my skin, to get dizzy on the cool pulse of his magic. “Wendy was only my friend, and I damned the entire kingdom for her. What do you think I’d do foryou?”
His words aren’t soft, nor sweetly edged; they’re a ruthless confession. In the fathomless depths of his eyes shines a mixture of self-loathing and obsession, and my heart stutters at the sight of it. Something in Niko recognizes its mirror in me—and he hates himself for it.
And I should hate him, too.Death. Decay. Rot. The King of Carrion.
All the things that fester in the dark, that thrive in the shadows. But I was torn apart in the shadows and rebuilt as something different—a creature like Niko, cloaked in the things other people fear. My entire life I’ve been pushed aside, shunned, sacrificed on others’ alters.
I’ve never beenchosen.
Not the way the Carrion King holds onto what is his. With claws and weapons, with fists and blood; with the covetous hold of death. Inescapable and enduring.
His obsession. His vicious cruelty.
