The Fae Princes (Vicious Lost Boys #4)(13)

Bash and I did what we thought needed doing to protect Tilly, but I think we somehow made her even more vulnerable.

There were better ways to care for her. We were too blinded by our own self-interests to see clearly.

“How did you bring her back?” Bash breaks away from me, edging around our family’s burial plot.

I know what he’s doing. He’s boxing Tilly in while getting a better vantage point for the meadow down below. Just in case someone decides to ambush us.

Tilly levels her shoulders and grabs a length of her cloak, readjusting the thick fabric so it doesn’t trip up her feet. Smart move, little sister.

“I made an offering to the lagoon,” she admits, her chin held high.

Bash and I meet eyes across the open land between us. We don’t have to speak to know what the other is thinking.

Not surprised by this news. Still surprised by her stupidity.

After all, our father was already on death’s door when we killed him because he went into the lagoon looking for revenge.

“What did you give it?” I ask her, examining what I can see of her. Did she cut off an arm? No. A finger? Something else I can’t see?

The thought of my sister giving up something important for the resurrection of our wicked mother makes my stomach sour.

“What did you ask it for?” Bash edges around Nana’s grave. Tilly fidgets with her cloak and takes a step back, trying to stop him from getting behind her.

Her jaw flexes as she grits her teeth. “For a way to defeat Peter Pan once and for all.”

The cold finally hits me and I shiver.

I think Peter Pan now has a great many weaknesses. Darling is his biggest. Then Vane. Maybe even Bash and me.

Those weaknesses are inroads through his defenses.

But I think my mother is one of his weaknesses too. A different kind.

She is a blade that has always cut when he needed someone to cause another to bleed.

Now the blade has been turned on him, and I don’t know if he knows how to dodge its sharp edge.

There was always a little part of me that thought the way he killed my mother was a coward’s way out, speaking the words that should never be spoken to a fairy.

He did it because it was the only way he could cut her without also cutting himself.

Tinker Bell is also Peter Pan’s weakness because I think deep down her betrayal of him is one of his deepest wounds. One that has yet to heal.

When his own weapon turned on him, it broke his fucking heart.

Pan pretends to have no heart, but he loved my mother back when I imagine she was much easier to love. Maybe she was even his first kind of love. The kind he gave freely after he emerged from the lagoon, a boy with no name and no story and no mother.

Somehow Tink and Pan got through years and years of love before they realized their love for one another was different.

There was no going back then. And there’s no going back now.

The question is, why the fuck did the lagoon give Tilly what she asked for when it loves Pan so much? When it literally birthed him? It doesn’t make sense.

I thought when he reclaimed his shadow, his relationship with the island was good. I thought the island wanted him back on his throne, the shadow in his possession.

As much as I try to ignore it, there is a seed of doubt that has taken root.

Nana loved Neverland and she was more connected to it than the rest of us. Even though she was the matriarch of the family and the Queen Mother, she still tended to the palace garden, growing and harvesting the food the palace needed to sustain itself, even though a great many fae could just conjure food out of thin air. Nana said food borne of magic never tasted as good as food borne of earth. Her fingernails were always crusted with dirt, her skin a little wrinkly from the salve she made sure to put on to protect her skin from the hours spent beneath the heat.

“Listen to the Neverland soil,” she’d tell Bash and me when we visited the garden with her. “Can you hear it?”

My twin and I would try to hide our laughter behind Nana’s back as she made her way down a row of cabbages.

Did the dirt talk to us? No. It definitely did not.

We were just stupid boys back then.

What did the island tell you, Nana? And what the hell is it trying to say now?

“You still didn’t answer the question, dear sister,” I say. “What did you give it?”

She licks her lips and straightens her spine. “I gave it my throne.”

“What the fuck?” Bash charges at her and fists the collar of her cloak in his hand, yanking her into him. “Why the fuck would you do that??

Her wings turn a deep shade of crimson as they beat at the air. “It was an ugly thing anyway!” she shouts up at him. “It was a symbol of my offering.”

“It’s a symbol of the very seat of our power!”

She wraps her smaller hand around my twin’s wrist and bright light bursts from her grip, zapping Bash. He yanks back, shaking out his hand.

Tilly tries to take to the air, but I’m on her in a second, hand wrapped around her throat.

She gasps out.

I have always been the gentle twin. The nicer one. Until I’m not. Until I see the only path worth taking. I’m the twin that gets the dirty work done.

I squeeze, cutting off my sister’s air supply in tiny increments.

She grips my arm, trying to ease the pressure as her eyes widen.