The Never King: Chapter 24

When I come up from the tomb, I find the Darling in the library curled in one of the leather chairs by the giant circular window. She’s just staring at the glass as rain plinks against it, but there’s a book open in her hands.

The sun is gone, but it’s hard to know for sure, the sky is so heavy and dark.

She is a tempting sight. Like a wild, exotic bird that I want to capture and cage so that only I can hear her sing.

When she realizes I’m there, she blinks over at me and shifts in the chair, unfolding her legs from beneath her. She’s wearing only an oversized sweater, her legs bare. I could easily slip my hand up her thighs, steal in beneath the sweater, make her writhe beneath me.

I get a flash of what I did to her last night and my cock aches for a repeat. I don’t get lost in pussy that often. Sometimes I need to fuck just to feel, but I haven’t fucked like that in a long time.

“Hi,” she says to me.

It’s such a simple word, casual and light. A mortal word.

No one says hi to me. Hi is for friends and I have no friends.

Only enemies and allies.

And even the latter feels hollow and thin lately.

“Hi.”

She smiles at me, pretty little Darling girl. I want to drive her to the floor and shove my dick in her mouth, watch her gag on it.

I am not a nice man. I am a worse king.

I can pretend though, for now.

“What are you reading?”

She shuts the book and looks down at it, as if only just now realizing she had it. “Frankenstein.”

“Classic.”

“I guess.”

She’s reading a book about monsters in a den of monsters.

How fucking poetic.

“I need to prepare you for tonight,” I tell her and she looks up with interest. I don’t usually warn the Darlings of what’s to come. I don’t know why I feel the need to warn her.

“Okay.”

“My shadow,” I say. “It was a Darling that took it.”

She frowns. “Which one?”

“It was a very long time ago. Several generations back.”

I can’t speak her name because I have forgotten it.

There is only a dark void where she used to exist and all that remains is the feeling of her.

“Memories of your ancestors can be inherited,” I tell her. “Buried in blood. But memories are wild and tumultuous in children. That’s why…” I trail off, sighing.

“That’s why you take the Darlings at eighteen,” she guesses.

“Yes.”

“How do you search the memories?”

“The fae can get inside a mind, but especially the queen.”

Her tongue flicks out and wets her lips. “That’s why they all go mad, isn’t it?” Her eyes well up and I have to fight the urge to reassure her.

It’d be a fucking lie, anyway. It’s the truth. When Tilly comes, by the end of the night, the Darlings are changed.

So then I bide my time, waiting for the next generation to come of age, waiting for this moment.

But now… I don’t want this Darling to change.

Usually when I take them, they rave and scream, or they sob and quiver.

This one is like a feral cat that wants to push the saucer of milk off the table just to watch it spill.

I like that about her.

Brave little Darling girl. Wild and reckless, always up for depraved adventure.

“Is there any way to get to the memories without risking the insanity?” she asks.

I lean back into the chair. “I wouldn’t know. That’s not my area of specialty.”

“So what is?”

Good question. I don’t seem to have one anymore. I used to have many. I could fly, for one. I could look beyond myself, into the island and just know things about it. I could make anything appear out of thin air. Food or animal or trinkets or treasure. If I thought it, I could create it.

I haven’t been able to do any of that in a very long time.

Now the bushes don’t produce the same number of berries, and the coconut trees produce fewer coconuts and the bays are yielding fewer catches. The weather shifts more than it used to.

I claimed the shadow of life a very long time ago and it was my responsibility to keep it.

And without it, the island is dying.

I am dying.

“I don’t want to go mad,” the Darling says.

Her voice catches and her eyes fill with tears.

She can go toe to toe with the Dark One but facing the loss of her sanity is the thing that terrifies her the most.

I think perhaps we have more in common, this Darling and I.

“Get dressed,” I tell her.

“Why?” She’s immediately on guard.

“Let me take you for a walk and show you something.”

She narrows her eyes at me.

“You will be safe,” I tell her. “From me and the island. I assure you.”

“All right. I could stretch my legs.”

She sets the book aside and passes me and I have to fight the urge to reach out and snatch her. This is why we never touched the Darlings. Once you’ve got a taste, it’s hard to forget the flavor.

She goes to her room and I go to the loft to pour a drink.

I’m not as tired as I was yesterday, but my fucking head is pounding.

I sling back a shot of whisky, then light a cigarette, letting the smoke ache in my lungs.

I don’t know where everyone is and I don’t fucking care.

When the Darling comes back, she’s wearing her dress and that sweater that hangs off her bony shoulders, and something stirs in my gut at the sight of her, so tiny and fragile.

I can’t breathe.

“Lead the way,” she says.

There are many paths that lead from the house into the island’s forest. The forest is what stands between us, Darlington Port, and the fae territory.

The rain has let up to a breezy mist that coats my skin.

I take the Darling on the path that heads north into the heart of the forest. She’s silent beside me but it’s hard not to notice the loudness of her presence.

“Where did you get your scars?” I ask her.

She inhales sharply, keeps her eyes on the path.

“Darling.”

“A hazard of being a Darling, I suppose.” She tries to smile up at me, but it’s forced.

“Who did them?”

The thought of someone carving her flesh makes me angrier than it should. I shouldn’t fucking care. I don’t care.

Yes, you fucking do.

“People my mother hired.” She grabs a firecracker flower from a listing bush and starts plucking petals from the stem, leaving them behind us like bright red breadcrumbs. “She was trying to protect me.”

“She had an odd way of showing it.”

Darling rubs a petal between her thumb and forefinger, then brings it to her nose, inhaling the sharper floral scent now that the oils have broken through to her skin.

“It was because of you,” she says, her voice edged in accusation. “If you didn’t kidnap Darlings, I might have had a normal life.”

Guilt burrows into me.

But I am nothing if not fair. I only give what I get.

“If the Darling hadn’t stolen my shadow, I wouldn’t have to steal Darlings.”

She frowns over at me. “I guess that’s true.” She tosses the naked flower stem into the brush. “How did she steal it anyway? My ancestor?”

Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.

“There was a coup,” I tell her and that will be all I tell her.

“Who?”

Those are skeletons I don’t want to unbury.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. We’ve arrived at our destination. “Look.” I pull back an overgrown fern to reveal the Never Lagoon.

The Darling stops on the path, her mouth agape, her eyes wide. “Whoa.”

White sand surrounds the lagoon and the water that fills it is bright turquoise, even beneath the gloomy sky.

It butts up against Marooner’s Rock so that the lagoon is mostly hidden, nestled between rock and forest.

Rain continues to patter against the leaves. “Come closer,” I tell her and take her hand, and she inhales at my touch.

My chest tightens.

We go to the water’s edge.

“Look down,” I tell her.

There is no great depth to the lagoon, but it’s full of magic. Or it was once, and so when you look straight down, it’s like looking through a portal.

And in that swirl of water and magic, glowing shapes swim back and forth almost like a slow-motion dance.

Every now and then a face turns to the surface, eyes glowing bright.

“Holy shit,” the Darling says and staggers back. I catch her before she stumbles over her feet.

I can’t help but laugh. The sound of it catches me off guard.

“What are those?” she asks. “They look like mermaids or ghosts.”

“Maybe a little of both.”

Tink once told me the lagoon was a portal to the afterlife, that the shapes swimming beneath the surface were trapped souls.

I skirt the shore and pluck a stone from the sand and send it skipping over the water. Swirls of light rise up to meet it.

“This is…amazing,” the Darling says.

“Your mother said the same thing.”

She frowns. “You brought my mom here?”

“She was…not well,” I admit. “Sometimes the lagoon can be healing. I thought maybe it would help her.”

The girl is looking at me now like she doesn’t recognize me.

“You tried to help her?”

She softens and takes a step toward me.

I turn away. “She was sobbing all night long,” I say. “Had to shut her up somehow.”

That’s not true. Not entirely. Merry had been sobbing, but for a much different reason.

And when she told me—

I pluck another stone from the sand but this time when I toss it, it sails clean across the lagoon and lets out a resounding crack when it hits the face of Marooner’s Rock.

“Did it help her?” Darling asks. “The lagoon?”

The rain picks up again and when I turn back to the Darling, she’s trembling in the cold.

My chest catches on a growl. I take off my shirt in one quick yank of fabric and go to her. “Arms up, Darling,” I order and she dutifully follows my command. It’s not a thick shirt, but it’ll do for now.

“Tell me,” she says and peers up at me. Mist clings to her lashes and rain drips from the end of her nose. “Please.”

I sigh. “I think so, for a while anyway.”

She nods. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” I say. “The reason she was in need of anything was because of me. Remember?”

She frowns at me, her gaze searching for things that I don’t think I possess but desperately want to give her.

“Come. Tilly will be to the house soon. We best get back.”

She needs warm, dry clothes. That’s what she needs.

It’s the least I can give her before the fae queen digs into her head.