The wave carries me home.
It washes me up on the shore next to the dock by the tree house, and I turn to say thank you to it, and I think it laps at my ankles extra to say that I’m welcome.
I empty my boots of ocean water, make sure my dagger’s still tucked away, and then I walk towards the tree house.
I’m out for blood. Ready completely to kill Peter for this, I am.
Part of me hopes he’s not in—that something happened to him, that he’s detained somewhere, or that there’s been an emergency. That’s a horrible thing to hope for someone you care about, but if he’s not detained and if there’s nothing wrong, then it means he just left me to die, and I think that might be worse.
When I walk into the room, the boys are playing football in the house across all the different stories of nets.
It’s Percival who spots me first, and he pulls a face when he does. “What happened to you?”
Kinley flies over to me. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll get you a towel,” says little Holden before darting out of the room.
And it’s then—then, when his game is interrupted—that Peter looks up and over at me.
“Whoa.” Peter laughs. “I totally forgot about you!”
I glare over at him. “I know.” I stand there, hands on my hips, chin low.
Percival gives Kinley a look, nodding away from us, and then scurries out.
Peter watches them go before he looks back at me. “Sorry.” He shrugs.
I shake my head at him. “Peter, I could have died.”
“Yeah, but”—he rolls his eyes like I’m crazy—“dying would be an awfully big adventure though.”
“I don’t want to die,” I tell him very clearly, and he rolls his eyes again.
“Well, then it’s good that you didn’t.”
“Peter.” I frown.
He flies over to me, takes less than three seconds for him to get from one side of the tree house to the other. How quickly he could have saved me if he tried.
He looks at me suspiciously. “How’d you get here?”
“I swam.” I gesture to my saturated self.
“The whole way?”
I shrug. “The waves carried me.”
His face pulls, and his brows knit together. “That’s weird.”
“Why?” I frown. “I would have thought you told them to.”
He pauses. “I did.”
“Right, so?” I lift my shoulders a bit, waiting for his point.
Peter eyes me curiously. “You’re way braver than I thought.”
I blink twice. “Than you thought?”
He nods, but he doesn’t look pleased. “And stronger, I guess?”
My head pulls back. “You guess?”
He crosses his arms, head tilted to the side. “How’d you get out of the maze anyway?”
“What do you mean? It was easy.” I shake my head, and his face flickers. “I stabbed the minotaur in the eye, and then he fell down, and he opened the maze for me.”
Peter says nothing.
“That’s the game, isn’t it?” I stare at him. “I won.”
“Right.” Peter nods, walking past me, and then he pauses, looking back. “You stabbed him in the eye?”
“Yes.” I nod. “He even gave my dagger back.”
“What dagger?”
I pause and my mouth forms a rather conspicuous O shape. I squash my lips together. “Hook gave me a dagger. For my birthday.” I say it lightly like it’s nothing. Tack on a smile at the end, just to keep it breezy, but it doesn’t work.
“You were with him on your birthday?” Peter yells, standing over me.
I scoff a laugh. “Well, I certainly wasn’t with you.”
“Yeah.” He rolls his eyes. “And whose fault is that?”
I wave my hands at him in disbelief. “Yours!”
“Mine?” He pulls back.
“Yes!” I yell, stomping my foot, but it does nothing because I’m on a net. “You went with Marin and Calla to find some stupid treasure.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” he interrupts. “You’re stupid.”
I look away, shaking my head, but Peter ducks, taking my eye.
“Did he touch you?”
“No,” I say quickly, and it’s mostly the truth. Right? It’s mostly true. He held my hand, and he pushed some hair from my face, but is that even really touching?
“Not how you touched Calla anyway,” I say mostly under my breath, but he hears me and gets up right into my face.