I know the second Vane’s shadow is gone.
I think my shadow recognizes the emptiness in him.
He is listless in the soldiers’ grip.
Holt motions with his fingers. “Get him up.”
The men do as they’re told.
I flail in the grip of the men holding me back and the blade at my throat pierces my flesh. I sense a bead, and then a trail of blood, running down my neck from the fresh cut. Their grip tightens, bruising my skin and the first bloom of anger comes to my chest.
There are only four men I will ever allow to mark my flesh.
Four men and four men only.
The anger spreads out like fire in my veins.
Before Neverland, before Peter Pan and Vane and Bash and Kas, I sometimes had to embrace the darker things in order to survive.
Sleep with someone I hated because I knew he had a car that could help me get somewhere.
Steal food from a neighbor’s house because I was starving.
Let someone carve me up because it was what my mother wanted.
Never have I embraced the darkness for something I wanted.
Because I have never actually wanted anything.
It’s hard to want when you can barely know the shape of need.
Holt gestures for his guards to take Vane to the cliff’s edge. The side where the drop is long and the rocks sharp.
“Because I know how much you love your revenge,” Holt says.
Can you hear me, Shadow?
I sense it stirring just out of reach.
“I am letting you in,” I say.
“What was that?” the guard says with a grunt.
“I let you in!”
The dark shadow swells like a storm cloud.
I am you and you are me and I embrace you and every dark thread of you.
There is a moment of quiet stillness, the eye before the storm.
And then a vibrating pulse in the air.
“What the hell?” the guard on my left says.
I yank my arm from the grip of the guy on my right and smash the heel of my hand into the nose of the one on my left.
Cartilage crunches loudly and blood spurts through the air. The man staggers back howling.
I backhand the man on my right and he nicks me again with the curved blade sending more blood running down the front of me.
I barely feel the pain.
There is nothing but the drive for recompense.
I will win.
Because I am more.
I no longer need. I want.
And I want Vane.
Because I am Winnie fucking Darling and no man will steal my power.
I yank the blade away from the guard and swing up.
The man’s shirt flaps away from his body, nothing but tatters and then he looks down at his bare midsection as blood gushes out of a cut running from hip to collarbone.
He looks back up at me. “Your…eyes,” he says and then collapses to the rocky slope of the mountainside, one last breath gasping out of him.
And I turn to Vane, to Holt and his remaining men, just as Holt plants his boot on Vane’s chest and kicks him over the edge of the cliff.
