“It wants, it wants,it wants,”Pan sings ominously, teasing my anxiety to the surface of my skin where it prickles and burns. “Watching her blood spill…It feltgood,didn’t it?”
Acid climbs my throat and fills my mouth as Pan’s shadow leaves his side and saunters toward mine. It caresses against it, breathing in its malevolence, echoing of violence and pain and misery. Shame rises to strangle my breath, because as much as I despise him, he isn’t wrong.
The shadow is of my own making—my most horrible inclinations brought to life. And itdoeswant, its starvation a painful echo in my chest every moment since I woke in the Hollows.
“Your shadows call to my own, littlest darling. They are terrible, terrible things that no mere human will ever be able to understand.” His shadow writhes lasciviously against mine. “This kingdom will only want you so long as you pretend to be one of them. What happens when they discover you are not?”
His eyes glimmer at my flinch; at the way I instinctively tug at my shadow, like it’s still possible to hide it inside my ribs.
“Your father, your mother, your sister...the doctors at the camps…” He steps forward, and for some reason, I don’t measure it, even as his eyes darken and his face flashes skeletal. “That rotting corpse who calls himself a king. All of them used you up and spit you right back out, because they are mortals. They will never understand the call to power in the blood of gods like us.”
Pan’s inched close enough that I smell the blood on his breath when he leans in and says in a silky caress, “Stop trying to earn the love of those who do not deserve it. We are the creators of the universe, Willa.Theybow to us. We shall build our empires on their backs.”
Our shadows wrestle in a frenzied tangle, mirroring the feeling deep in my chest. Like the malevolent hunger isn’t just outside of me, but inside me too. Shadows slice at my ribs and leak from my tear ducts, just as they had when I met Niko in the Crocodile. They slip through my fumbling grip and pour into the air around us, until we are both bathed in shades of horror.
Pan lets out a delighted laugh, his eyes shining with avid fervor.
“No,” I whisper, clawing at the shadows; attempting to gather them to me even as more pour from my eyes and mouth. They taste of ash and bitterness—of slick shame and acidic regret—and I gag as more slip up my throat and over my tongue. “No!”
Pan brings the dagger up to my lips, swiping what remains of Wendy’s blood over them. It tastes of iron. It tastes of pain. And I think my sudden hunger for it will swallow me alive.
I thought it was power I’ve always hungered for, but perhaps I was wrong. Maybe the only thing that will satiate the black hole of my soul is drinking the pain of others—making them hurt as I’ve hurt.
Yes,my shadow croons.Destroy them all. Gorge yourself on their hurt.
“Yes, Willa.” Pan’s silky whisper is an echo of my own sins. “No one can love you but a god. No one can love you butme.”
My breath freezes like ice in my lungs, but before I can begin to untangle the emotions snarled in my chest, a loud crack reverberates through the island
Pan whips his head to the sky, watching the fireworks flicker and flare before tumbling down to fall somewhere in the sea.
I have seen the Aeternalis look terrifying, but it is nothing to his expression now. Bestial. Inhuman.
The Aeternalis’ face goes skeletal, his bellow of fury is still echoing through the trees long after he disappears into thin air. Leaving me alone to be strangled by the darkness of my own shadows.
Chapter twenty-two
I’ve just settled back on the couch, feet propped on the coffee table and a generous measure of whiskey in my hand, when the air pulls tight. A moment later, the Aeternalis appears in my captain’s quarters.
His chest and face are slicked with blood; the usual gold of his hair matted with the same. His eyes shine an inhuman green from beneath the mask of gore, and bloody footprints trail behind him as he stalks furiously toward me.
“Peter Darling, what a pleasure!” I exclaim in mock excitement that has that skeletal mask of his flickering in and out of sight. I tip back the whiskey and then set it on the table with a flourish. “Looking dapper as ever, never mind the blood…the gore…and theslightdisfiguration.” I raise an arrogant brow, taking in my own handiwork with pleasure. “Hardly noticeable. Truly.”
His eyes narrow, and though hatred is etched sharply in the lines of his face, his tone is even. “Nikolas,” he says by way of greeting.
My death jerks toward him at the mere sound of his voice. It is the sound of broken bones and humiliation—the sound of my childhood—and it takes everything in me to keep the ribbons close.
“Forgive my surprise, but last I knew, you were coalescing on the mainland. Licking your wounds and burying yourself in the cunts of whores like a school boy who’s just discovered his cock.” He gives me an assessing look. “Or perhaps you revel in the rot more than you once realized?”
He goes to the desk to pour his own drink, leaving a gruesome trail of blood behind him. “Is that why you’ve come back to my kingdom?” he asks with a dark smirk over his shoulder. “You can only get it up when they’re decomposing beneath you?”
I take another sip, appreciating the burn of the liquor in my throat against the cold of death in my joints. “Your kingdom,” I repeat with a laugh. “As far as I can tell, Peter—” I relish the way he stiffens with each use of his given name. “—Letum doesn’t belong to either of us at the moment.”
Like a spark to kindling, the Aeternalis explodes. He spins, his teeth bared, his face skeletal and monstrous. His shadow, which until a moment ago had behaved as shadows normally do, looms large above him, dousing the light from the bay windows in its darkness.
“Youdaresully the name of my island with the filth of your death,” he snarls. “Youdareto defile the Creator of Somnya with your few years of pretending.”
An arrogant smile draws over my face. “Still a little touchy, I see,” Itsk,crossing my boots and leaning back into the couch. “Perhaps you haven’t caught yourself up on current events, but I wasn’t the one who renamed the island. The people did.”
