The brownies are dead. Because I killed them.
The fae queen comes over, the crowd parting for her. “I already told you, Mother,” Tilly says, “we’re short on brownies these days.”
Tilly gives me a pointed look.
“Be a dear, then, and take your brothers to their dressing room. I had their royal finery prepared for them.” Tink’s cheeks burn bright gold with her light as she looks at me. “I assumed you had no finery for my boys. No offense.”
She means all of the offense.
“Follow me.” The queen turns for the door.
The twins glance at me. They are used to asking for my permission, but I don’t know if the same applies here. I don’t know anything anymore.
It’s as if the ground is shifting beneath me, the landscape changing right before my eyes.
“Eyes open,” I tell them and they give me a nod and leave.
The party resumes. The band switches tune to a fast tempo fairy tune and the dancers match the pace, their slippered feet whispering over the stone floor.
Tink comes up beside me and hooks her arm through mine. “Walk with me, Peter Pan.”
I catch Darling out of the corner of my eye, lunging for me, but Vane stops her. I’m glad she has him. I’m glad I have him.
My heart thumps steady in my chest as Tink drives us through the crowd and to the bar. She snaps her fingers and the fairy behind the counter shakes a drink together, then pours the glowing pink concoction into glasses shaped like acorns. A pixie bug is added as a garnishment at the last second and it buzzes around the glass’s rim, glowing deep orange.
I’m already a little buzzed from the fairy wine, so I ignore the drink.
Tink takes hers in hand and sips it, watching me over the rim as the pixie bug darts around her nose.
My heart beats a little harder.
“Do you remember how we’d sit by the shore of the lagoon and ask it to tell us its secrets?” Her wings fold back, nearly touching, and she leans a hip into the bar’s front. “Do you remember the secret you asked it for again and again?”
I swallow. “I asked it many things, Tink.”
But I know the question she’s poking at. It’s one thing I haven’t forgotten from the past, the longing I used to suffer with, the void that was impossible to fill.
“‘Spirits of the Lagoon,’” Tink says, mimicking the old version of me, “‘do I have a mother?’” She ends in a trill of laughter and then takes another sip of her drink. Her fingernails are painted the same shade of my jacket. Her dress is the same shade too. When we were young, we would fashion clothing out of skeleton leaves and pretend Neverland was a deserted island and we its stranded children.
Tink had a mother who was dead and I had only a hole where my mother might have been. The island was our surrogate.
I didn’t want to long for a mother and so I pretended I never wanted one, plunging head first into the wildness of Neverland, hungry for adventure and freedom, and later, power.
“I never want to grow up,” I told Tink.
“Neither do I,” she’d said.
“Let’s stay young forever.”
She’d laughed then too, that high peal that sounded like wind chimes.
“Okay, Peter,” she’d said.
The emotion catches me off guard and Tink frowns at me over the rim of her glass.
My eyes are watery, so I blink and look away.
“I learned the answer to your question,” she says and comes closer, lowering her voice. “While I lay in the bottom of the lagoon all those years, listening to the spirits talk, I heard their answer.”
I don’t want to know.
And yet there is no answer I want more.
The band’s lyre player is practically dancing in her seat, her body moving in time with the beat of the music. The gathered crowd of fairies and humans alike are filling the air with laughter and revelry while I feel like my heart is being squeezed and squeezed till it bursts.
“Do you know what the spirits told me?”
“No, Tink, I do not.”
She snatches the pixie bug from its circling flight and tosses it into her mouth. I can hear the crunch of its wings as she crushes it between her molars.
It’s just a bug and yet I’m horrified by this. The Tinker Bell I knew might have been obsessive, maniacal, and sometimes cruel, but she never ate pixie bugs.
I stand up a little straighter.
Her lips curve into a smile.
“Peter Pan had a mother once,” she says, “and his mother abandoned him to the lagoon because he was an insolent little boy who didn’t fit in with his family. And his mother worried that if she let him stay, he would take and take and take…”
She steps closer.
“…and take…until there was nothing left.”
My heart stops.
My ears ring.
“And if a baby has a mother who simply abandoned him,” Tink goes on, “surely he cannot be—"
A myth. A god. Special.
She doesn’t have to say it. I know what she’s implying.
Tink frowns at me. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.” She sips from her drink and then sets it down. “We can talk more later. We have much to discuss. Enjoy the party, Peter Pan!”
Her glowing wings go dark and the crowd swallows her up.
15
WINNIE
“Hello, baby brother,” a voice says, pulling my attention away from Peter Pan and Tink.
“Christ,” Vane says. “What are you still doing here?”
“Plotting,” the man says with a devastatingly bright smile.
I think my mouth drops open when I take in the sight of the newcomer. He’s just a few inches taller than Vane, but he’s got the same build, and the same stunning features.
Except where Vane has one black eye and one violet, this man has unnaturally green eyes that when they land on me, produce a full-body shiver.
The Crocodile.
“Your Darling is cold,” Roc says. “Let me give her my jacket.”
“I don’t need a jacket.”
“She doesn’t need your jacket,” Vane says.
“Very well.” Roc puts a cigarette between his lips and lights the end. I glance around to see if this is allowed, but no one stops him. Maybe no one cares about smoking in the islands, considering half of them seem to be immortal.
“Looks like your Never King is having a bad night.” Roc points toward the bar with the smoking end of his cigarette.
Vane’s eyes tighten.
Pan is paler than normal as Tinker Bell speaks to him.
“Should we go get him?” I ask Vane.
Roc takes a hit from his cigarette and then blows out the smoke. “Tick, tock, baby brother.”
“Shut up, asshole.”
There is an unsettled feeling in my gut. The dread again. But now I’m not so sure if it’s mine or Pan’s.
I’m having a hard time telling the difference between Vane’s shrouded emotions and Pan’s wild ones. They come and go like shooting stars. There one minute, gone the next.
“Stay with her,” Vane says to his brother. “And protect her as if she were Lainey.”
“I’m not a babysitter.”
“Say it, Roc.”
“Fine.” Roc flicks the lit cigarette onto the stone floor and crushes it with his boot. “I swear it.”