Peter frowned as if he hadn’t considered it. “I’m not sure,” he confessed with a shrug.
Wendy’s fingers brushed against the acorn where it hung at the center of her chest.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Peter added earnestly.
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” she told him. She needed to keep Peter safe. If the shadow showed up, would she be able to protect him? The uncertainty did little to soothe her already frayed nerves. “Will you wake me up if anything happens?” she asked.
“You’ll be the first to know,” Peter told her with a nod.
Wendy reached out and clicked off her fairy lights, plunging the room into darkness. She never slept with them off, but she didn’t want Peter to think she was a child who couldn’t sleep without a nightlight. Wendy pulled the covers over her. The weight of them felt reassuring, but almost immediately she got too hot. Summer was no time to be hiding under a down comforter. She pushed it off. Wendy closed her eyes and tried to force herself to fall asleep, but her imagination wouldn’t let her. She rolled onto her other side. Every noise outside startled her and every shadow in her room seemed to shift.
Every nerve in her body was tense and screaming. She couldn’t relax. There was no way she could fall asleep.
Wendy’s hand shot out and clicked the fairy lights back on.
Peter was already watching.
“Sorry, I … can’t,” Wendy muttered. Shame sweltered on her skin. She felt like she needed to explain herself to him. “I—”
“It’s okay,” was all Peter said. His voice was gentle, which only made her feel more pathetic.
Wendy rolled onto her back and tried to will herself to sleep, but her mind wandered to the woods.
The gentle chirping of crickets drifted to her ears. She looked over at Peter. His eyes were closed, arms still tucked lazily behind his head, but his mouth was pressed into a small circle. Delicate cricket chirps flowed past his lips. Wendy blinked slowly, admiring the warm glow of the fairy lights on his skin. The slight dip in his throat. The trail of freckles down his bare arms. Wendy’s eyes slid shut. She drifted off with Peter’s cricket song and his smell enveloping her, lulling her to sleep with thoughts of Neverland.
CHAPTER 18
Pain
Wendy didn’t know how long she had been asleep, or what had woken her up. The fairy lights stood watch over her head and a soft breeze floated in through her window. Everything was dark and silent as it only was in the dead of night. There were no sounds drifting in from outside and no crickets chirping. Wendy rolled onto her side, searching for Peter, but she found only the abandoned sleeping bag and pillow.
Quickly, she sat up and looked around the room. “Peter?” she whispered into the room, but it was empty.
Through the haze of sleep, a thought occurred to her: What if the shadow had taken him? What if it had gotten into her room and did something to Peter while she was asleep? Wendy’s fists squeezed her rumpled sheets.
She leapt from bed, ran into the hall, and stopped at the top of the stairs, perched on her tiptoes. Where did he go? Wendy’s heart raced and she struggled to form a coherent plan. She was about to run down the stairs, to see if maybe—hopefully—he’d just gone to the kitchen for a drink of water, when she heard a soft noise behind her.
Wendy spun around. She expected the shadow to be standing there, waiting for her, but the hallway was empty. Just the locked door to her old room. She heard the noise again. This time, she could tell it was coming from behind the door. Again, she glanced around. The sound of her own breathing felt deafening in the quiet hallway.
Slowly, she stepped closer. Anticipation tingled in her fingers, like she was breaking a sacred, unspoken rule. Carefully, she leaned her ear against the door.
There were voices coming from the other side. The quiet murmurings from the woods. The same whispers that had followed her when she was chasing Alex, the same ones she heard coming from the tree. They were on the other side of the door, whispering to her. They grew louder, clearer.
Wendy pressed her ear to the doorjamb. For a long moment, there was only silence. Had she been imagining it? Maybe she was just—
Wendy.
The voice hissed right into her ear with such sudden nearness, Wendy leapt back. Her breath caught in her throat and a thrill ran up her spine. Hope swirled in her chest, dangerous and sharp. Wendy’s eyebrows tipped as she pressed her fingers lightly to the cold wood. If she could just open the door, she could hear what the voices were saying, she could understand them.