Unhooked(37)
I want to have a normal life, a normal home. I want to find a place where I fit without pretending to be something I’m not. That’s what made Westport feel like home, I remember then—I had someone there who didn’t look at me like an outsider, who didn’t ask questions that forced me into lies. I had Olivia.
The ground beneath my hands goes hot, burning against my palms as an ache travels up my arms. I open my eyes and jerk my hands away, scraping them against the ground just to be free of Pan and the uncomfortable heat.
He’s watching me with an intensity that’s almost uncomfortable. An intensity that makes me think he knows what’s just happened. All at once, I realize how easily I was taken by his words. How completely I’d fallen under the spell-like pull of his appeal. And I’m shaken by it.
I glance away, because his gaze is too steady and expectant for me to hold any longer. I focus on the broken flower and make myself ask the only question that matters. “Will you take me to Olivia now?”
He considers me a moment longer, and for a second I think he knows everything—how close I came to accepting, how much part of me still wants to. But he smiles, pleasant as ever, and I think maybe I was wrong.
“Of course,” he says, standing and offering me his hand.
A minute later we are aloft again, soaring over the tops of the trees, the falls passing beneath us as we make our way farther into the island. Up we fly, toward the craggy center of the mountains, until we come to a place where there is no jungle. He lands in a clearing where there is only the smooth face of a cliff and the barren rock beneath our feet. Behind us, a gaping chasm in the ground separates us from the rest of the island.
“Where are we?” I wrap my arms around myself. The air isn’t any colder here, but the bleak landscape sends a chill through me just the same.
“Home,” he says simply, a smile teasing at his lips. “This is where I live. Where I keep my boys.”
“Here?” I ask, looking around. There isn’t anything here but the flinty face of the rock rising up around on one side of us, and the gaping tear in the earth on the other. My stomach sinks. “Where’s Olivia?”
“Inside,” he says, gesturing grandly to the sheer cliff.
I don’t know what he’s talking about—there is no door or portal or split in the rock that could be an entrance to a cave. “There’s nothing there.”
“Isn’t there?” he asks wryly.
I look again at the rock, and just as I’m about to tell him, No, there isn’t, the earth beneath my feet begins to tremble. I grab for Pan’s arm as the entire wall of rock begins to move. With a thunderous grinding, the cliff shifts backward slowly, rearranging itself and revealing the silhouette of jagged spires and towers.
When the land finally goes silent, I’m standing in the shadow of an enormous structure. A castle. Or maybe a fortress would be a better description, because it’s too massive, too violent-looking to be anything as romantic as a castle. It towers at least six stories above us, hewn from the red-gold rock of the cliff that bore it.
Its walls are solid rock, and its windows are narrow slits high up from the ground. The only opening at all is a deep, dark tunnel that leads straight into the mountain itself. Even without the chasm that cuts it off from the rest of the island, even without the steep bluffs that pen it in safely on all sides, this is not the sort of place anyone could attack easily.
Pan’s eyes are dancing, his mouth twitching in amusement as he glances at the grip I have on his bicep. “Ready, my dear?”
I try to pull away, but he stops me by placing his hand over mine and tucking my arm more securely against his body. He smiles then—a truly breathtaking sort of smile—and the look in his eyes is enough to make my cheeks flush with warmth.
I glance away, uncomfortable. There’s something about the way he looks at me that makes me think he sees something in me that no one else ever has. Like I am something whole and strong and important. Being looked at like that—being seen—is something completely new and absolutely intoxicating.
And I don’t trust it one bit.
But I’ve made my choice. Before us, the towering fortress waits. The Captain and his ship feel very far away. London feels even farther. With the warmth of Pan’s body next to mine, the scent of him, wild and free as a winter night, surrounding me, and the promise of finding my friend ahead of me, I take one last look at the open sky above and walk on.
The boy had grown ever more sure he might never see his brother again, so he did not hesitate to grasp him in a tight hug once he realized it was no apparition before him. His brother smiled, flashing the crooked tooth in his worn-out grin. “Volunteered to come up to the front,” he told the boy. “Couldn’t leave you to have all the fun.” But the boy knew, from the worry darkening his brother’s eyes, that wasn’t it at all. . . .
Chapter 18
THE ENTRYWAY OF THE FORTRESS is lit by the same floating phosphorescent blobs that Pan had with him on the ship. They hover around us, guiding us through the dark tunnel as we make our way deeper into the mountain. I reach up to touch one that comes close to my face, but Pan snatches my hand away before my fingers can brush against it.
“Fairy lights,” he tells me. “Never can tell how they’ll react.”