The Serpent and the Swallow

My brother is dying.

I won’t allow it.

Cedric needs medicine—better yet, a fucking miracle—but given that we’re trapped in Neverland, I’m forced to turn to our enemies for help, the ones we’ve been slaughtering at any and every opportunity: Neverland’s natives. It’s suicide, but if death is what I risk to give him a chance, so be it.

Only… they don’t kill me. One of them saves ;me. I may be her prisoner, but there’s something more between us, something as forbidden as it is intoxicating. And as the lines between love and hate grow more blurred by the hour, I’m faced with an impossible choice.

Let down my walls and trust a stranger, my enemy, or risk Cedric’s life… and my own fragile heart.

Elvira

My brother flinched, my hand slipped, and I wanted to fucking scream.

Alcohol poured freely down his back, completely missing the wound I was attempting to clean and redress. Though I’d barely touched him, obscenities poured from his lips, colorful even for his standards. “Gently, damn it, and be careful!”

“Careful?” I slammed the bottle on his desk, nearly shattering it, but if Cedric was going to be a reckless ass, so was I. “You’re one to talk about careful when you’re the one wasting all our rum.”

He shot me such a venomous glare that anyone else would no doubt have winced or cowered beneath its weight. The numerous scars marring his face only added to the hateful illusion, but my brother would have to try far harder than that if he truly wanted to scare me. “I’ll get right on healing my own infection, then,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

“I’d settle for you letting me heal it. By not leaping out of your skin every time I get anywhere near you.”
Cedric grunted something unintelligible, and taking it as a sign we were both exhausted from this bickering, I returned to my work, slower this time. Before I could even raise a rag to wipe him off though, a voice piped up from the far corner.

“He’s getting worse.” Scarlett, my brother’s… lover? Partner? I didn’t know precisely what to call her, especially now that they were sleeping in separate quarters, but just like the rest of us occupying this sorry excuse for a ship, Scarlett didn’t have anywhere else to go. She met my gaze from where she crouched in the shadows, but didn’t otherwise move. “He tries to trivialize and lie about his pain, but he’s in quite a lot of it.”

Fuck. Equal parts fear and worry rose in my throat, but I kept my expression impassive as I turned back to Cedric. “Is that true?”

He hesitated, which was an answer in itself, so I fixated on the wound marring his back. What should have healed months ago was now a festering, gaping hole. Infected, yes, but even that was putting it mildly. Angry black lines snaked outward from its edges, crisscrossing Cedric’s already scarred skin like an intricate map, and the surrounding flesh was swollen and red. Heat radiated from him in waves, and when he glanced over his shoulder, I noted the sweat pooling at his brow. Gods damn it, now he’s feverish on top of everything else?

“You look like shit, and you smell even worse,” I said, but only to mask how terrified I was. Internally, I stifled a scream yet again, because this was serious, far more than I’d previously allowed myself to believe. Cedric’s only response was a faint grunt, confirming my suspicions and far more. “And you’ve been killing? This isn’t a result of the curse?”

“It can’t be,” Scarlett answered, at last rising to her feet and taking a small step forward. “Since he’s been too weak to leave the ship, I’ve ensured he’s had plenty of rat necks to snap. The rot heals, but his wound doesn’t.”

At the mention of decaying flesh, my own pain flickered to life. The worst of it may be concealed beneath several layers of clothing, but like everyone and everything else in this fucking forest, I was rotting, too. Such was Neverland’s curse, accidentally set off the same day Cedric had been stabbed, perhaps even the same moment. Death pays for death, which in simpler terms meant kill or decay. We were all actively festering from the inside out. Murder was the only thing that reversed the rot, but only for a week at most. It had been four days since my last kill, and there were pieces of myself quite literally beginning to slough away. If I didn’t find something to sink my dagger into soon, I would no longer possess the strength, and after that… Well, it didn’t matter, because from the looks of Cedric, he needed a solution within the same timeframe.

And if one of us was going to die, it sure as fuck wasn’t going to be him.