The Fae Princes (Vicious Lost Boys #4)
The Fae Princes: Chapter 7

KAS

Nana used to collect interesting things and interesting people. When I was a boy, she met a young man in Darlington Port named Lafayette who she immediately took under her wing, and who she made stay at the palace.

By fate or determination, he found himself in the Seven Isles having crossed over from the mortal realm on one of the many ships that got blown off course. Neverland was his third island, and he told Nana it was his favorite so far.

He was supposedly one of George Washington’s proteges, and like Washington, he considered himself a Stoic. One of his favorite things to say was amor fati or, the love of one’s fate.

His ship had been blown off course, and he’d left his world and found himself stuck in another and yet, he took it for a grand adventure.

The love of one’s fate.

Sometimes I think about those words.

It takes just one decision. It may seem small at the time or inconsequential. But that one small decision can change the course of everything.

What would have happened to our lives if Pan had never killed my mother? Or what if we hadn’t killed our father in order to protect our sister and our birthright to the throne?

What if I hadn’t gone to bed last night on the left side and instead slept in the hammock? Would I have seen Mother first instead of Pan?

What if our sister hadn’t banished us?

I can’t love my fate when I am full of regret and what ifs.

Nana loved to say you must let go in order to get to where you’re going. I know it was much like a Stoic tenet. Full of wisdom to make the chaos of the world feel manageable.

But I can’t, Nana.

I can’t let go if I’m to protect Darling and my brother, and hell, even Pan and Vane.

But somehow going to my childhood home with the plot of breaking into the vault and stealing back my wings feels like a betrayal. That it’s more proof that our sister was right in banishing us.

That I cannot be trusted.

Can it be fixed? This rift between us? Can I have my little sister back?

I wish Nana were here to guide me. Sometimes she told us to get our heads out of our asses and just do what needed doing. But other times she would sit us down and make us braid sweet grass while she told us old stories or myths of the gods. Bash loved the story of Blue Jay, the trickster god, and Asteria, the goddess of falling stars. I loved them all because I loved listening to Nana tell them.

Right now, I could use some of her sage wisdom. But I would settle for her presence even if she was silent.

To Bash I say, I’m going to Nana’s grave.

He frowns at me. It’s been a while since we’ve been there, but he nods and says, I’ll come too.

“We’re going for a walk to clear our heads,” I tell Winnie and Vane.

“Don’t get too close to the fae territory,” Vane warns.

As if we would risk running into Tinker Bell now.

Just the thought of our mother being resurrected from the dead drives a cold shiver down my spine.

My brother and I are silent as we leave the treehouse and wind our way through the woods, following our favorite foot trails that we usually reserve for running. Our pace is steady but not rushed. After all, we’re off to see a dead woman, and she will wait.

As we leave Pan’s territory, the sense of danger is heightened and my heart picks up, thumping beneath my ribs. Nana is buried in the graveyard reserved only for the royal line, so there’s no reason to worry about running into someone.

Somehow, I’m still on edge.

When we come to the line between forest and meadow, Bash and I stop.

Snow falls in lazy flakes, coating the meadow in a blanket of white. Bash and I aren’t dressed for the cold, just t-shirts and pants we threw on before we left, but the cold has yet to touch me.

I think I’m burning too hot with anger and frustration.

I’m sure the alcohol helps too.

I take a step forward and the snow melts beneath my step, leaving a perfect imprint of where I’ve been.

Bash puts his hand on my forearm, stilling me.

He cocks his head toward the rolling land. There are several grave markers, many of them crude stone carved with symbols and names. They dot the landscape in rows, so at first I don’t see the figure at the far back where Nana’s grave lays.

I glance at my twin.

The figure has wings the color of an abalone shell.

Our dear sister.

Dare we? I ask my twin.

His eyes scan the landscape. I check the skyline. The snow is making it more difficult to see at a distance, but the world is hushed and I don’t hear the buzzing of wings.

Bash gives me a nod and steps forward with me.

We leave the safety of the woods and make our way up the hill. There is no fence. No sign to indicate the fae burial grounds. Just the rows of markers that honor the dead.

The oldest royals were buried closest to the forest where the ground is more level, the plots much easier to delineate.

The graveyard grows younger the further back we go and the further back we go, the more I can hear the burbling of the Mysterious River on the other side of the hills. Bash and I spent many afternoons floating down the river back to the fae palace, our skin pruning, our faces baked by the sun. The fae that worked in the infirmary created a salve for protection from the sun, but Bash and I never used it. And Nana would knock us with her favorite wooden spoon when we came back burnt.

The wind cuts in, swirling snowflakes around us as we climb the shallow hill and finally come up on our closest ancestors’ burial grounds.

Tilly’s back is to us, but I know she senses us.

She’s standing in front of Nana’s grave, hands hanging limply at her side. She’s not in her usual royal wear. No finery or jewels or crowns.

Just a girl with her hair down, mourning a grandmother who has long since passed, a cloak clasped around her neck, the long train shifting with the whims of the wind.

Where the fuck do you start when there is so much to say?

“What did you do, Til?” I ask.

Her shoulders sag and she turns to us. It’s clear she’s been crying. Her cheeks are still wet and her eyes rimmed in red, but she’s managed to stop new ones from spilling.

Instead, they glitter in her eyes.

She takes in a deep breath. “I did what needed to be done.” There is no tremor in her voice. No doubt or resistance. But I know my little sister. She also learned Stoicism from Nana, but Tilly always took it much further and embodied the word.

If she shows no emotion and wears her determination like armor, she will be stronger. No one can hurt her.

How utterly alone she must feel.

How heartbreaking that is.

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.

“Kas,” she says, her voice stilted. “Please.”

Tears well beneath her lids.

“You’re just a stupid little girl,” I tell her, echoing my own thoughts, my own fears. “We protected you all those years ago. We shielded you from the worst of it, bore the brunt of Mother and Father’s expectations so you could just be a spoiled little princess. We gave everything to you so you could continue to be a spoiled princess, and what did we get for it? Our wings torn from our backs. Our birthright ripped away from us. And now you’ve sacrificed the throne that our family has sat on for generations just so you can continue this campaign against Peter Pan? So you can be the most spoiled, powerful bitch on the island?”

Her face turns blue and her wings dull to match as tears soak her face.

“Kas,” she gasps out, slapping at my arms.

“Brother.” Bash comes up beside me.

I lean in, teeth gritted. “You are on a blind pursuit for power, and you’ve sacrificed the one thing any of us had for the resurrection of a dark, twisted, mother who never loved us.”

It isn’t until my own face grows wet that I realize I’m crying too.

“Kas!” Bash says as he yanks me away from our sister. “Take a breath.”

I don’t know if he’s telling me or Tilly, but we both suck in air. She chokes on it, wheezes, and turns away.

“You okay?” Bash pats my shoulder, pulling my attention to him.

When I focus on him, his dark furrowed brow, the flare of concern in his eyes, I finally come back to reality. I’ve always had him. In every dark moment, my twin has been there.

I look over his shoulder at Tilly, her lower lip trembling as she tries to hold her tears at bay.

Tilly never had someone like I had Bash. He goes to her now, but keeps his hands to himself, giving her the space she needs as he whispers consoling words to her. I collapse near Nana’s grave and look down at it, spotting several old wreaths of braided sweetgrass placed where her grave marker meets the earth. I pick one up and blow off the snow.

I didn’t make these mementos and I know Bash didn’t.

Nana loved us all, but I always thought she loved Bash and me the most. Tilly barely spent time with our grandmother, always preferring to follow our mother and father around like a lost little puppy. Mother and Father were the seat of power and Tilly had always been hungry to have a place.

Nana had the wisdom and Tilly never wanted that.

Hoisting myself back up, I cross the graveyard and hold the sweetgrass up. “These yours?” I ask her.

My sister and brother look over at me.

Tilly swipes away a tear with the pad of her thumb. “Yes.”

“Why?”

She frowns. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why were you here today? Why do you visit Nana’s grave? Why leave her mementos?”

Tilly licks her lips. The bruising left by my hands has already faded from around her neck. “I realized too late, that Nana was the only family we had who never wanted something from me.” Fresh tears fill her eyes and as soon as one spills over, she’s wiping it away. “I did what I thought Mom and Dad would have wanted me to do. Duty over family.” She gestures at us both. “Our duty was to the throne and the court. The family lineage. I didn’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to fail! And I—” She cuts herself off, teeth clenched. Her chin wobbles as she bites back the tears. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, does it? What’s done is done.”

She starts off down the hill.

“Tilly, wait,” Bash says.

I catch my twin before he charges after her. “She’s right though.” We watch her make her way across the graveyard, her wings still as her cloak drags through the snow. “What’s done is done.”

“She’s in trouble,” Bash says. “I can feel it.”

“So what are we to do? Save her again? I don’t think she wants saving.”

“I don’t think she knows the language of asking, brother.”

The snow falls thicker, swallowing up our little sister as she makes her way back to the palace without a throne.

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