He still seemed confused, but gave a slight nod. “Yeah… at sunrise, one morning after we'd first met at the lake. She came and found me again there. She'd said a lot of stuff about how much trouble you were in, but said she couldn't explain it… she told me that she could help me save you and bring you home from Neverland. She just needed to be human to do it.”
She just needed to be human to lie, Gwen thought.
“The stars were still out, but the sun was coming up, and she had that mirror you gave her… I don't understand how she did it, but as soon as I promised to help her, she sank underwater. She thrashed for a long time and I started to worry about her, but when she surfaced gasping, she, you know, had legs, and the mirror crumbled into dust in her palm.”
So Lasiandra had woven Jay into her web of star magic, too. She tried not to let her expression reflect how this wrung the hope out of her heart. “So you welcomed her into humanity in exchange for—”
“Your safe return home.”
Her safe return home. The words shattered like porcelain as they hit her. If they had made that pact with the stars, Gwen could not elude the destiny they'd written for her. Whether the lost children won or lost the war, the stars themselves would command Gwen back to reality.
She clenched her fists. She thought about everything she had sacrificed for this chance to run away and be free. She thought about Peter, about the fairies, about everyone here that she had fought to stay beside. It was all ending for her. But that didn't mean she would stop fighting.
“I have to go,” she declared. She scanned the room for her shadow, and saw it shaking its head with furious persistence. Sitting with its arms crossed, it made it clear it would not accompany her. Fine, thought Gwen, who needs a little dark splotch following them around anyway?
Jay grabbed her shoulders, and forced her darting gaze back to his steady but uncertain eyes. “I came here to help you,” he told her. “How can I help you? How can I help fix this? They're getting ready to unleash some crazy stuff, Gwen.”
“I overheard the Admiral,” she told him, hoping to skip another explanation of the SLAT team and will-o-the-wisp. “If you can do anything to slow them down, bog down their plans, confuse their communications… I don't know what to tell you.”
“Wait, Gwen—” Jay insisted, only to be interrupted. The metal door into the cabin flew open, startling both of them. Gwen almost shot out of the door in order to avoid getting apprehended, but Jay had a firm hold of her shoulders and she lacked the strength to tear herself away as she saw who entered. It wasn't the admiral, or any crew member, or even an adult. It was Peter Pan.
Chapter 33
Peter seemed just as surprised to encounter Gwen as she was to see him burst into the cabin. The difference between their reactions was that Peter's surprise didn't slow him down in the least.
“Unhand her you scoundrel!” Peter demanded, drawing his dagger and storming into the room. “She belongs to Neverland and I shan't let you steal her away from it.”
Gwen felt Jay bristle and stiffen as she pushed out of his hold. “What do you mean she belongs?” Jay demanded, his voice darkening. “I don't think its for you to decide where she belongs.”
She stepped in front of him, putting herself between the two boys. She raised her hands to signal Peter—and his dagger—to stay back.
“Peter,” Gwen began, her voice as full of caution as his eyes were full of reckless enthusiasm. “We've got a big problem.”
“And I have a little solution,” he replied, brandishing his knife.
Gwen wanted to approach Peter and try to reason with him in nonsense terms he would understand, but before she could, Jay pushed her back and put himself between her and Peter. “Drop that knife,” Jay told him, his voice stripped of goodwill. “I won't let you near Gwen with that thing.”
Her eyes held a dead serious look, and she was foolish enough to hope Peter would recognize the issue's gravity when he looked at her. “He's not the problem,” she told him. “We need to get out of here. The CAO and the Admiral are calling the shots, and they're sending special reinforcements to the island as we speak.”
“Nonsense!” Peter contradicted her. “Captains are in charge of ships, and I'll fight any captain who brings such a boatful of ill-intent to Neverland, let alone one who lays a hand on you!”
“He can help us!” Gwen shouted. “It's complicated. I can explain, but he's not the enemy.”
What she said, she said truthfully, but Gwen could not account for the playfully vengeful mechanics of Peter's mind and loyalties. He had no sympathy for adults, or anyone who desired to grow up at all. In his world, anyone that came to Neverland on sea meant trouble for him, and he gladly accepted the challenge of any villain that designed to abuse his whimsical paradise. For Peter, everything always felt like a fairytale.
“Rubbish and rutabagas,” Peter replied, charging forward. “Let me at the villain!”
She tried to push past Jay and stop him, but he held her back. To Jay, Peter must have seemed deluded. His first impression was doing nothing to undo the prejudices Lasiandra had sown with her duplicitous stories.
Perhaps what confused and unnerved Jay was the absurd combination of Peter's seriousness and sheer lack of malice. His words and intention offered no room for doubt—he possessed far too great a zeal and conviction. However, that same zeal animated him with an excitement, a delight, which belonged to a child at play, not a man at war.
“What!” Peter asked, sizing his opponent up, “Are you unarmed? It's not a fair fight if I've got a dagger and you're without.”
“No,” Jay answered, grim and simple, as he pulled a pistol from out of his uniform. “It's not a fair fight.”
Gwen's head swam in a panic. “Don't!” she yelled, hoping at least one of them would heed her and stop this escalating conflict from rushing into dangerous action.
“Before you take another step with that dagger,” Jay told him, “you should think about what six shots of anomolium will do to you at close range.”
Knowing that Jay had only magic repellent ammo did little to calm Gwen's nerves or deter Peter's fighting spirit. Peter, deep down had a human heart, but it had beat magic through his blood for so long she couldn't help but worry that the draining shock of the blue bullets would arrest him with a painful, and maybe even lethal, wound.
Peter understood the threat, but not how it affected the situation. With reluctant civility, Peter cast his dagger aside, throwing it into a cork-board hung on the wall. It's sharp point struck a crude map of Neverland and kept the blade impaled on the cork-board. “Very well then. You really should have brought a sword, but I can beat you whether we fight armed or unarmed. I'll beat you silly, wrestle you blind, and throw you overboard barehanded!”
This made no sense to Jay and he stared with bewildered eyes at Peter. The boy had disarmed himself, and yet still aimed to fight. Peter's cockeyed expectation took a moment to register with Gwen as well—he waited for Jay to put aside his gun and have at him in a fair fight.
Peter had a boy's sense of justice and a gentleman's sense of combat. He hadn't attacked Jay when he had assumed him unarmed—such a dasterdly move would be unsporting. Peter's good form was an instinctive relic of both a time in history and youth that Jay had abandoned. Unlike other enemies Peter had faced while frolicking Neverland, Jay did not aspire to play by invented game rules when the stakes were real and high to him.
He took a step aside, toward the control panel. This exposed Gwen, but he kept his gun trained on Peter to protect her as he nodded to the communication equipment. “If you so much as lift a finger to hurt Gwen, I'll call for the CAO and whatever backup he wants to apprehend you with.”
Peter, seeming amazed at Jay's response to his challenge, looked to Gwen and asked, “Why would I want to hurt her?”
Gwen breathed the first breath of relief she'd had since Peter stormed in. With them argued to this standstill, she just needed kept them calm long enough to ex
plain the situation to their mutual satisfaction.
“He's not the enemy, it's a trick, Peter,” Gwen announced, approaching him and making sure she could shield him from Jay's fire. She'd already been shot today. She knew she could survive it. It would strip her of her ability to fly off and escape this dangerous ship, but better that fate befall her than Peter. “If you get distracted by him, we don't stand a chance to save Neverland.”
“What foolish bug bit you?” he demanded. “Let us have a proper fight! I'll not stand for any captain that threatens Neverland!” He charged forward toward his perceived enemy, but Gwen stopped him before he could get close enough to force Jay's hand in the situation. She pushed against him, trying to communicate that he needed to halt, but Peter squirmed like a child as he tried to barrel past her.
“No, Peter!” Gwen would not yield and risk Peter's warped sense of the situation endanger Jay, or himself. She shoved him back and he, unprepared for this resistance, stumbled backward and banged his hand on one of the high metal chairs bolted to the floor. He looked shocked and disgusted with this turn of events. Steadying himself and steeling himself against all possible answers, he asked, “Whose side are you on?”
“I'm on Neverland's side,” she answered.
But she had wounded Peter in the one place he could not stand to be wounded. With this blow to his pride, followed by the condescending sentiment that she was the one fighting for Neverland, he lost what little temper he had.
“Hey, get back from her!” Jay yelled, taking aim again with his gun.
“Stay out of this Jay!” Gwen yelled right back. She didn't need him to rescue her, and she hoped to the high hill of Mount Neverest that she had made that clear to him.
If Peter had any quaint qualms about not fighting girls, he abandoned those quaint sensibilities. He sprung at Gwen with the intent to tackle her down, but she saw it coming. Peter's transparency meant his intentions were always printed all over his face. She pushed back and grabbed his arm, forcing him back. Both off balance, they gripped each other and stumbled back in a desperate attempt to stay on their feet.
“You don't know what you're doing!” she told him.
“You never know what you're doing!” he retorted.
They continued to wrestle, each trying to force the other off their feet, but Jay was too invested to standby idle as this transpired. Lasiandra's convincing and conniving rhetoric may not have held water against Gwen's own claims about Peter's moral fiber, but the mermaid's accusations were reinvigorated as he watched this boy try to overpower the very girl he'd come to protect from him. Unarmed, he didn't pose much of a physical danger to Gwen, but Jay didn't want to wait until that changed. Picking up the communicator he warned, “If you don't let go of her, I'll call for officers right now!”
Gwen, fighting for more present and pressing stakes than Peter, managed to trip him and pin him down as he fell. “He can help us,” Gwen insisted, “and fighting him will accomplish nothing.”
For a moment, it looked like she had won. She knew better than to expect Peter to listen to reason, but had hopped a fight would sober him up and force him to recognize the situation for what it was. Instead, he fought harder. Shoving against her with both muscular and magical strength, Peter forced her up so fast and so far that in a second he had her pinned down—against the ceiling.
Gwen used her own strength as much as gravity to help thrust him back off, but he had as tight a grip of her as she had of him. Rolling along the ceiling until they hit the edge, they continued to wrestle down along the wall.
Jay shouted, as surprised as terrified by this sudden and physically impossible shift. Gwen didn't pay attention to his reaction, but continued battling with Peter until she realized that Jay had the intercom on. “This is the captain! I need the CAO in here now and—”
As they wrestled along the wall, Peter spun out of her reach and grabbed his dagger.
Her heart collapsed when it should have beat, and for a second Gwen feared for her life at the hand of her friend. As soon as he had it in his hand, however, he threw it with his usual precision and impaled it in the speaker Jay spoke into. The blade came alarmingly close to Jay but didn't so much as scratch him. Garbled language came out of the device, but Jay discovered he could neither continue nor clarify his request.
Peter and Gwen continued trying to overcome the other. Intermittently using gravity and flight to aid them, they both tried to force the other into surrender. “He's not the problem,” Gwen insisted, a feeling of faintness started to overtake her. “They're only using him to get to the mermaids!”
“Lies!” Peter declared. “What would some grown-up boy have to do with mermaids?”
The fight was draining Gwen of her energy, and a piercing headache returned as she panted for breath. She was in no shape to stop Peter, and did not have it in her heart to hurt him, no matter what he threatened to do. Wheezing through her gritted teeth she told him. “He made a deal with a mermaid.”
Had Gwen known what reaction this would elicit form Peter, she would have started with that fact. At once, he seemed to forget the frustration that had him battling with his friend. Confusion captured his face and Peter asked, “He did what?”
But he did not let go of her and she stayed pinned to the high wall. Gwen knew she had finally broken through to him, but below them Jay stood on the floor with no such understanding. Stripped of the intercom, Jay had only one weapon with which to protect Gwen with, and now a brief enough pause in which he could fire it in the confidence that he would not hit her.
As soon as the fight started to subside, a greater crisis exploded out of Jay's gun. Gwen, focused on Peter, saw only his expression, the pain that instantaneously seized him. If he made a noise of shock or agony, it was lost in the sound of the bullet firing. She felt his strength leave his body like water draining irretrievably down a sinkhole. Tension sprung into her muscles just as fast, and she grabbed at him as he fell. She used her own flight to break his fall, but she couldn't do much beyond soften and share the blow as they tumbled to the ground.
“Gwen!” Jay cried. “Oh my god, are you okay?” He hadn't anticipated she would go down with Peter, but raced over to her and helped her up—much against her will. She batted him away and knelled back down beside her moaning friend.
Peter opened his eyes when he felt Gwen's hand on his head, and looked at her with wordless questions.
Gathering her breath and wits, Gwen elaborated, “He made a deal with a mermaid—Lasiandra. She misled him. He thought I was in danger. He wants to help. Please, Peter, get up. You need to get up. We need to figure out what on earth we're going to do.”
He looked up over her shoulder, at the confounded boy trying, almost as immaturely as Peter, to defend what he loved. “This is a friend of yours?”
“Yes, from before I came to Neverland,” Gwen answered. Peter reached up and took her hand. As bad as he'd fallen, Gwen had hurt herself more than she should have trying to save him from it. He could see how bad state she was in, and even he could worry for a friend. She held his hand tight, and when his grip strengthened, she helped pull him to his feet.
Peter gave Jay a surly look and told him, “State your business.”
Jay, to his credit, seemed repentant now that the fight had subsided. Still concerned for Gwen, he now comprehended that for better or worse, she had tethered herself to Peter and his mission. Overcoming his disorientation and defensiveness, Jay told him, “I'm here to help Gwen and protect her.”
Peter's stony face didn't change, but he was too weak from his fall to manifest his resentment into conflict Gwen propped him up and kept his arm slung around her shoulder as he spoke. “She's trying to save Neverland. You're no help to her if you're set against that.”
“I understand that, and I'll help—so long as I know she's not in danger from you.”
“Furthermore,” Peter boomed, outrage building in his voice, “Gwendolyn Lucinda Hoffman does not need protecting—from any
danger. She is one of the most think-full and brave girls ever to take to the air, and easily worth twenty stupid fellows in boats.”
Jay nodded a little, and did not defend himself against the accusation that he was a stupid fellow in a boat.
“But as long as your here,” Peter told him, calmer, “you might as well make yourself useful.”
With a glance, a little timid and slightly frustrated, to Gwen, Jay answered, “I think I can help.” Hurrying to a set of metal drawers inlaid in the wall. He had a key on his belt that unlocked the middle drawer, and from out of it he pulled a thick packet of paper, bound with industrial strength staples. Peter fetched his knife from the cork-board and stuck it in the sheath at his hips.
“You're going to want to get out of here fast,” Jay told him. “The Chief Anomalous Officer is heading over to speak me and will be here any minute.”
“Aha!” Peter announced. “That's who's in charge of this evil little escapade? I don't need to run—I'll slit him open and hoist him overboard!” This news breathed a bit of life back into Peter. Anything that took his mind off the blue residue of the paralyzing shot Jay had sent to his gut was a welcome distraction. He didn't need Gwen to support him anymore, but although his confidence had returned, she doubted his command of magic had.
“It won't do any good,” Gwen told him. “This isn't a renegade pirate ship, this is a small fleet of ships run by a bureaucracy. Even if you got rid of the CAO, the Admiral would take over.”
“So we feed both of them to the crocodile, and have the Captain here order the ship home.”
“You're forgetting the Vice Admiral, the Rear Admiral, and everyone else in the chain of command before me,” Jay told him. “By the time I assumed command, they'd already have the tree they came for.”
“No chance of it!” Peter exclaimed. “We've sealed every route to the Never Tree except for my personal secret passage. Nobody nonmagical will ever find it.”
“But they've got Lasiandra,” Gwen told him. “She's going to lead them to the tree.”
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 19
