Through the dark forest

by Kiki Thorpe

  Copyright © 2018 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, in conjunction with Disney Enterprises, Inc. Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks and A Stepping Stone Book and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Ebook ISBN 9780736436526—Trade Paperback ISBN 9780736436519

  rhcbooks.com

  This book has been officially leveled by using the F&P Text Level Gradient™ Leveling System.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.2

  a

  For Abigail —K.T.

  For Sophia, who started as my Gabby and is now my Mia —J.C.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  Far away from the world we know, on the distant Never Sea, lies an island called Never Land. It is a place full of magic, where mermaids sing, fairies play, and children never grow up. Adventures happen every day, and anything is possible.

  Though many children have heard of Never Land, only a special few ever find it. The secret, they know, lies not in a set of directions but deep within their hearts, for believing in magic can make extraordinary things happen. It can open doorways you never even knew were there.

  One day, through an accident of magic, four special girls found a portal to Never Land right in their own backyard. The enchanted island became the girls’ secret playground, one they visited every chance they got. With the fairies of Pixie Hollow as their friends and guides, they made many magical discoveries.

  But Never Land isn’t the only island on the Never Sea. When a special friend goes missing, the girls set out across the sea to find her. Beyond the shores of Never Land, they encounter places far stranger than they ever could have imagined….

  This is their story.

  Of all the strange, magical things that happened to her on Never Land, the one Mia Vasquez could not get used to was flying.

  Each time the fairy dust settled over her and she felt its magic—a tickly feeling, like soda bubbles rising inside her—Mia thought, This time will be different. This time I won’t be scared. And for an instant, as her feet left the ground, it really would seem different. When she floated up, light as a leaf, everything seemed possible.

  As soon as she was above the treetops, though, she started to panic. She had to close her eyes and take deep breaths. It was hard not to think about falling.

  But what choice did she have? Flying was the only practical way to get around Never Land, especially in the company of fairies. So Mia had learned to hide her fear. Her best friends, Kate McCrady and Lainey Winters, didn’t know she was still afraid of flying. Neither did her little sister, Gabby. And she certainly didn’t tell the Never fairies. Everyone thought Mia had simply gotten over her fear of heights, the way you get over a cold or a case of the hiccups.

  The trick, she found, was never to look down. Mia kept her eyes on the horizon. She forced a calm expression onto her face. Mia had gotten so good at pretending she wasn’t afraid that some days she even managed to convince herself.

  Today, unfortunately, was not one of those days.

  As Mia flew out over the Never Sea, a knot formed in her stomach. The cold ocean wind tangled her long hair. It raised goose bumps on her arms. Flying over land was hard enough. But flying above water was a thousand times worse. In every direction, all she could see were white-capped waves. Losing her nerve here was not an option.

  Keep going, Mia told herself. Think of Tink!

  Their fairy friend Tinker Bell was lost at sea in a little toy boat. Mia, Kate, Lainey, Gabby, and four fairies from Pixie Hollow had come out to search for her. But it was an impossible task. Looking for a toy boat in the vast Never Sea was like trying to spot a pinhead in a mountain of sand.

  “See anything?” Kate called over the wind.

  “Nothing yet,” Mia yelled back. Looking for Tink meant looking down, and that was the one thing Mia couldn’t do. “Do we even know this is the right way?”

  Kate shook her head. “Tink could be anywhere.”

  It was all Gabby’s fault. Mia glared at the back of her sister’s head. If Gabby hadn’t left their great-grandfather’s model boat in Pixie Hollow, Tinker Bell wouldn’t have found it. And if Tink hadn’t found it and taken it out sailing, they wouldn’t be out here looking for her now.

  As if she felt Mia’s eyes on her, Gabby glanced over her shoulder. She reached out her hand, and Mia’s anger softened. She couldn’t blame Gabby for wanting to find the boat. Their father had been so upset when Gabby lost it. The Treasure was—well, a family treasure. Gabby had promised not to come home without it.

  What their father didn’t know was that they’d lost it in Never Land. The magical island was the girls’ secret.

  Mia sped up and caught Gabby’s hand. It felt small and warm in her own cold one. She told herself that she was comforting her sister, not the other way around.

  Two seagulls, carrying the fairies Fawn, Iridessa, and Silvermist, came circling back toward the girls. The fourth fairy, Rosetta, was riding on Gabby’s shoulder.

  “Let’s turn around!” Iridessa shouted. The wind almost carried her voice away.

  But Mia heard her. Relief spread through Mia’s chest.

  “We can’t stop looking!” Gabby piped up. “Tink’s still out here somewhere!”

  “I don’t think she could have come this far. Not in such a small boat,” Silvermist said.

  “We won’t stop looking,” Fawn reassured Gabby. “But we don’t know which way Tink went. We need to warm up and rest. Then we’ll try another direction.”

  The group turned back toward Never Land, but the wind was against them now. Mia felt as if someone were holding her shoulders, trying to push her backward. Ahead, she could see Never Land’s shore with its thin white thumbnail of sand. Only a few more minutes and her feet would be on the ground.

  Abruptly, the air grew colder. Mia looked up and saw that a dark cloud had moved across the sun.

  They had seen the same cloud earlier. Mia was sure of it. From the ground, it had seemed little and harmless, a distant smudge in the bright blue sky. But up here, in the air, it looked bigger and darker.

  A raindrop splashed against Mia’s face.

  The search party stopped and treaded air. They were at the edge of the storm. Ahead, rain hung like a curtain between them and Never Land.

  “We’d better not fly through it!” Fawn shouted from the back of her seagull.

  “Let’s take the long way around,” Iridessa agreed. “We can fly north over the tip of the island and come in from the west.”

  Mia’s heart sank. That would mean at least another hour of flying, maybe more. And they were so close! “It’s only a little rain,” she argued.

  “I don’t like the look of that cloud,” Rosetta said from Gabby’s shoulder. />
  Mia saw her friends hesitate. If she didn’t do something quickly, they’d agree to take the long route. “You guys fly around if you want,” she said with a boldness she didn’t feel. “I’m going ahead.” Without waiting for an answer, she plunged into the storm.

  Behind her, Mia heard someone shouting her name, but she couldn’t tell who it was. The cold raindrops stung her skin and blurred her eyes. She could no longer see Never Land’s shore. Was she even going in the right direction?

  Mia paused to get her bearings. Then she made her worst mistake: she looked down.

  At the sight of the choppy sea below, Mia’s confidence fled. She dropped like a stone.

  She screamed, but the sound was lost in the wind. The sea sped toward her. Mia braced herself for the cold water.

  Then came a blinding flash. The cloud above her blazed from within. The air frizzled with electricity.

  And suddenly everything flipped. That was the only word Mia could use to describe it. The world seemed to turn itself upside down.

  A second later, she came down hard on dry sand.

  As a garden-talent fairy, Rosetta considered herself to be something of an expert on clouds. She knew which thunderheads held precious rain and which were all bluster. She could tell wispy clouds that signaled a sudden cold snap apart from the ones that marked a fair-weather day.

  But she’d never seen a cloud like this one. It was greenish black, so dark it seemed to suck light right out of the sky. A cloud with a secret. That’s what Rosetta was thinking when, with a deafening crack of thunder, Mia vanished.

  Gabby screamed, “Mia!”

  Rosetta had never had a sister, so she could only imagine it was sisterly love that made Gabby do what she did next. Instead of flying away from the menacing cloud—which, in Rosetta’s opinion, was the only sensible thing to do—she flew toward it. All Rosetta could do was hold on tight as they dove into the heart of the storm.

  The rain slashed down. The wind seemed to tear at them with claws. Rosetta clung to Gabby’s collar, terrified. She imagined herself blowing away like a milkweed seed.

  “Slow down!” she cried.

  Gabby either didn’t hear her or didn’t care to listen for she sped up.

  Then came a flash and a boom so shattering that it seemed to knock the whole world out of alignment. The sea, the land, and the sky looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had been knocked askew.

  The impression lasted only an instant. In the blink of an eye, the world put itself back together.

  But something was wrong. The earth was now where the sky should be. And they were falling toward it.

  “Fly, Gabby! Fly!” Rosetta tugged helplessly on the girl’s collar. The costume fairy wings Gabby always wore buzzed like the wings of a dying bee as they plummeted down—or was it up?—through the cloud.

  Rosetta squeezed her eyes shut.

  Thump. Gabby came down so hard that Rosetta bounced off her shoulder. She landed headfirst in warm sand.

  Rosetta got up, spitting sand. Two feet away, Gabby lay still on the ground. Her eyes were closed.

  Rosetta gasped and fluttered to her. She pinched the girl’s cheek.

  Gabby opened her eyes and blinked. “Where’s Mia?” she asked, sitting up.

  “I don’t know.” Rosetta looked around. They were on a beach ringed by jagged black rocks. To one side lay a flat green sea. To the other, a dark forest. A rust-colored sun hovered just above the horizon. Strangely, the ugly storm cloud had vanished.

  “I don’t like the look of that forest,” Rosetta said.

  “Gabby! Rosetta!” Mia came running across the sand. She gave Gabby a big hug. “What happened?” she asked Rosetta.

  “I don’t know,” Rosetta said again.

  They heard a shout. Kate and Lainey were making their way up the beach. Iridessa flew alongside them.

  “Well, that was lucky, huh?” said Kate when she reached them.

  “What was lucky?” Rosetta asked. So far, nothing about this trip seemed lucky.

  “I thought we were goners when that lightning started. I guess Never Land was closer than we thought.” Kate pushed her bangs away from her green eyes. “Where are Fawn and Silvermist?”

  They looked up and down the beach. There was no sign of the two fairies or their seagull.

  “Weren’t they flying next to you?” Lainey asked Iridessa.

  “Yes,” the light-talent fairy replied. “But my seagull threw me when it saw the lightning. I didn’t see where they went.”

  “I think the bigger question is, where are we?” Rosetta said.

  Kate looked surprised. “Aren’t we in Never Land?”

  “Not any part I’ve ever seen,” Rosetta said.

  Hands on her hips, Iridessa surveyed their surroundings. “I’m going to look around.” She fluttered off with a wave.

  Mia turned to Gabby. “Do you still have that map?”

  Gabby dug in her pocket for the tiny scroll. They’d found the map in Tinker Bell’s workshop just after she disappeared. It was a simple map of Never Land and the surrounding sea. But, strangely, it had been labeled Shadow Island. So far, it was the only clue they had to where Tinker Bell might have gone.

  Gabby unrolled the map and gasped. “Oh! Look!”

  The map had changed. Never Land was gone, as if it had been erased. In its place, an unfamiliar island was sketched in.

  “It’s a magic map!” Gabby exclaimed.

  “But what does it mean?” Lainey asked.

  “Maybe we found Shadow Island!” Kate said.

  “But Silvermist told us Shadow Island is just a myth,” Lainey said. “And anyway, we didn’t see any other islands when we were out searching.”

  “The storm!” Mia exclaimed. “We flew into the storm, and we ended up here. That must be what happened.”

  “Like a portal!” Kate said.

  Mia nodded. “And Silvermist and Fawn flew around it. That’s why they aren’t here. I wish I’d never—”

  “Hey! Over here!” A shout cut Mia off. Iridessa was calling to them from up the beach.

  They hurried over to her. Where the beach gave way to forest, the ground was soggy. Iridessa pointed to a line of tiny marks in the mud.

  “They look like footprints!” said Kate.

  “Fairy footprints,” added Iridessa.

  The friends looked at each other. Lainey raised her eyebrows. “Do you think it could be—”

  “Tinker Bell!” the others exclaimed.

  “Maybe the storm pushed her here, too,” Mia said hopefully.

  The tracks disappeared into the forest. The friends peered into the tangled undergrowth. The sense of unease Rosetta had felt since they landed grew stronger.

  “I think we have to go in there,” Iridessa said.

  Rosetta sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  Iridessa led the way since she had the strongest glow. The woods lay deep in shadow. Only a few weak shafts of sunlight peeked through the dense canopy. Weaving between the tree trunks, Iridessa was the brightest thing in the forest.

  They moved through the undergrowth, calling Tink’s name. Their voices seemed small and weak among the towering trees. The woods were eerily silent.

  Silent, but not empty, Rosetta thought. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.

  To distract herself, she studied the plants. Hardly any flowers grew in the shadowy forest. But what a lot of mushrooms! Rosetta had never seen so many different kinds. There were bright orange mushrooms that looked like coral. Mushrooms shaped like teacups, complete with tea-colored water inside. She saw mushrooms as small as pinheads and others as big as ostrich eggs. There were tall mushrooms with fringes and fat ones that looked like they were trimmed in lace. Here was one that oozed red jelly. And there—

&
nbsp; Rosetta did a double take. “Stop!”

  The girls walking behind her bumped into one another. Iridessa came fluttering back. “What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked.

  Rosetta pointed at a fungus with a pale blue cap and a stubby stem. “We passed that before.”

  “Pretty!” Gabby reached out a finger to touch it.

  Mia pulled her hand back. “Don’t! It might be poisonous.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same one?” Kate asked Rosetta. “Lots of mushrooms look alike.”

  “Not to me, they don’t,” Rosetta replied. “See how the edge of the cap is bent? I’m sure it’s the same one.”

  Iridessa folded her arms. “Are you saying I’m going in circles?” she huffed. “Because you should try leading if you think it’s so—”

  “I didn’t say we’re going in circles,” Rosetta broke in. “I think that toadstool is following us.”

  Silence. Everyone peered at the mushroom. Was it Rosetta’s imagination, or was it standing a little taller?

  “I think it’s holding its breath,” Gabby whispered.

  Mia rolled her eyes. “Be serious, Gabby. It just looks like a regular mushroom.”

  “We can’t let our imagination run away with us,” Lainey agreed.

  “That’s right,” Kate said. “The sooner we find Tink, the sooner we can get back to Never Land. Iridessa, which way now?”

  She turned, but the light-talent fairy was gone.

  “Iridessa?” Kate looked around. “Where did she go?”

  “She was here a second ago,” said Mia.

  They peered into the trees. Without Iridessa’s bright glow, the forest seemed darker than ever.

  “Iridessa, if this is a joke, we don’t think it’s funny,” Rosetta called.

  There was no answer.

  “Maybe she’s scouting up ahead,” Kate said.