He snarls at me and I stumble away.
Then he darts at Peter Pan and when the two connect, Pan goes sailing backward, flying over the lagoon and landing in the center.
Water splashes up around him and then he’s gone, disappearing beneath the surface.
Now it’s just me and the Crocodile, the Devourer of Men.
He turns on me.
“We’re on the same side, remember?” I tell him, but even I know that’s shaky at best.
He stalks toward me.
“Bloody hell, will you get a grip?”
Then a fae soldier rams into me from behind and the Crocodile leaps over me, grabs the fae, opens his mouth wider than seems possible, and devours the fae in one gulp.
There one minute, gone the next, with no evidence of him ever having been.
I’m suddenly numb.
I stare at the aftermath with wide, unseeing eyes.
Have I lost my bloody mind?
The Crocodile turns his head toward the twilight sky and lets out a satisfying sigh.
Then he turns to the rest of the beach and all of the men and women left to devour.
And he gets to work.
31
KAS
I know what Tilly is doing.
I know illusion magic. How it feels. How it looks. But that doesn’t mean I can just as easily break out of it.
The sand is writhing beneath me and I can’t keep my balance on it, even though I know none of it is real.
Bash leaps forward and grabs a low hanging branch from an oak tree, then waggles his fingers at me, gesturing for me to follow.
I take the offering and we both leverage ourselves into the tree.
Our sister takes flight and rises before us.
“Well done, sister,” I say. “You’ve cornered us in a tree. Now what?”
“Stay out of this and walk away from it,” she says.
Bash and I look at one another. He snorts his derision. “How many times are you going to stage a coup, only to lose?”
“Does it look like we’re losing?”
“I don’t understand this.” I shimmy down the length of the branch to get closer to her. “Why go to all this trouble when you clearly don’t want the throne.”
She’s shocked by this insinuation, as if the thought had never crossed her mind.
“Of course I want the throne. I will do what needs to be done to protect it and to protect Neverland. I will never stop.”
Bash walks himself upright using one of the thicker branches in an elbow in the tree. “If you wanted the throne, your soldiers would not be so weak. You would be training them, day in and day out. You would be prepared for a takeover. Not saddling yourself with weaker men.”
The expression on her face softens. I’ve hit a sore spot, but even worse, one very close to the truth.
“Why do you continue to fight?” Bash asks.
“It’s what Father wanted. It’s what Mother would have wanted, too. She hated Peter Pan and he’s still running Neverland like some god.”
“Tinker Bell hated that Peter Pan didn’t want her,” I remind her. “There’s a difference.”
I notice my brother’s stance, the ease in his knees, the tension coiling in his back.
“Forget Mother and Father,” Bash says. “You need to ask yourself, dear sister, is it worth it still?”
I may have been separated from my sister for a very long time, but I recognize the sadness that comes across her face.
The weight of it all is crushing her.
She was never raised to have the throne. And almost every monarch that came before her has been surrounded by family.
But Tilly has no one left.
Not our parents. Not Nani. Not us.
I feel pity for her.
And deeply sad.
“We don’t want this for you,” I tell her. “We never did.”
“It’s why we made the decisions we made,” Bash adds.
“We wanted to shoulder the burden of the court, Til,” I say. “We never wanted you to have to sacrifice anything.”
And it’s absolutely true.
We never would have killed our father if we’d have known this is where our little sister would end up.
But there is selfishness propelling me forward now.
I no longer want the throne to protect my sister.
I want it for myself and my brother.
Because it is rightfully ours.
I look over at Bash as our sister’s silence stretches between us.
She’s breaking right before our eyes, but we can no longer be weak for her.
We don’t need our fae language to know what the other is thinking.
Now, Bash says with his eyes.
We both leap from the tree and tackle our little sister.