The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  ***

  Peter is plotting his retaliation against the latest bombing. Neverland needs an army, and Peter Pan is certain children will join him once they know what is at stake. The lost boys and girls are planning an invasion in suburbia to recruit, but in order to deliver their message, they will need the help of an old and dangerous associate—the infamous Pied Piper.

  ***

  The Neverland Wars Series

  Book 1: The Neverland Wars

  Book 2: The Piper's Price

  THIS book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  NO part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The Piper’s Price

  Copyright ©2017 Audrey Greathouse

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-63422-224-2

  Cover Design by: Marya Heiman

  Typography by: Courtney Knight

  Editing by: Cynthia Shepp

  ~Smashwords Edition~

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  For Alison—

  Because if Peter had ever come for me,

  I would have made him stop at your house, too.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Gwen lurched forward like a wounded bird. She struggled to stay afloat as she grappled with the air. Only halfway up the small mountain, she gave up and landed. Ever since she returned to Neverland three weeks back, she’d had trouble flying by herself. When she was with the other children, she derived a vicarious confidence from them. Alone, her mind had no playful distraction from its self-conscious apprehensions.

  Dillweed zipped up to give her another sprinkling of fairy dust, but she gently batted him away. “It’s no use. I’d rather walk.” He glanced skeptically at the last steep mile of trail. “It’ll be good for me,” she announced. After all, if she didn’t have Claire and Katie dragging her to yoga classes, how was she going to get exercise?

  The green fairy glowed indignantly at that grown-up line of logic, but settled on her shoulder as if in solidarity with her decision not to fly. “Just don’t tell the others,” she said, sighing as she began the strenuous climb.

  She knew he wouldn’t tell. Dillweed had kept her secret for weeks now, and Gwen had at least stopped feeling self-conscious around him. When they’d first gotten back to Neverland, she’d worried he would be mad at her for letting him nearly die of alcohol poisoning when he was trapped at Jay’s house party. On the contrary, he seemed grateful she had saved him and returned home to Neverland. Like many small tragedies and terrifying near misses, it had served as a bonding experience. She’d begun to learn the fairy language, too. The impatient fairies had only taken time to teach words to Blink, Bard, and now Rosemary. For the most part, they weren’t interested in educating the lost children, but Dillweed cared enough about Gwen to teach her and stay glued to her side.

  Although part of that was due to the drones.

  As they reached the mountain’s crest, the trail began to level out. It was the highest point in Neverland. Gwen was sure it had a name, but she couldn’t get a straight answer out of any of the lost children. She took to calling it Mount Neverest, and in a few days everyone seemed to have forgotten it had ever had any other name. They rarely flew up it, except for chores.

  At the peak, Gwen and Dillweed stood above the jungle-forests and could see all the way to the ocean. The beauty of the panoramic view was lost on most of the children, but Gwen enjoyed the sublime feeling of looking over the entire magical island. She pulled a borrowed spyglass out of her satchel and surveyed the horizon with it.

  Nothing was in the sea or sky. She collapsed the wooden telescope and put it back in her satchel. It almost disappointed her that she would have nothing to report back to Peter—no approaching hostile forces or missiles to give him a sense of impending adventure. Since meeting Antoine at the airfield, Peter had buried himself in his puzzling papers. The riddling hints within had consumed him—the only clues he had to the Piper’s whereabouts. It was a slow process, and quiet deciphering was not a becoming activity for Peter.

  Her lookout duty taken care of, Gwen followed Mount Neverest’s trail a short distance farther to the rocky nook on the other side of the mountain. Although she had completed the first of her chores, she still had to deal with Miss Daisy.

  The Never Bird sat in a massive nest of straw, twigs, and large, curling leaves. It barely contained her plump, white body, and her stately, blue-tipped feathers contrasted against the cobbled-together nest.

  “Hello,” Gwen cooed, hoping for a pleasant interaction this time.

  The Never Bird squawked threateningly.

  She never knew whether to call the creature Miss Daisy as Jam and the others did, or try to win its favor by referring to it by the title of Never Bird. It might have been a moot point—she didn’t know whether the bird could understand her at all.

  “Peter sent me for an egg. You know, Peter.” The bird squawked, but not as loud. It didn’t budge. None of the other children had any trouble fetching things from the Never Bird, but crabby Miss Daisy was never kind to Gwen.

  She took a step closer to the bird. It cawed, its stork-like beak opening wide. Miss Daisy did not seem to comprehend Gwen was a lost child, and all she wanted was one of the sterile, sloshy eggs filled with milk. Gwen tried not to get frustrated with herself for failing to negotiate with an imaginary animal for bird’s milk.

  She reached out slowly, thinking maybe Miss Daisy would be more amenable if first petted or allowed to smell he
r hand. The Never Bird was not a dog and resented being treated like one. It stood up and snapped at Gwen, catching her hand in its beak.

  “Owww!” She recoiled and nursed her hand. Once again, Miss Daisy settled her feathered rump over her eggs.

  At last, Dillweed intervened and began buzzing at the bird until it waddled off the nest. With its begrudging beak, it gently nudged one of its large eggs out of the nest. The milk-filled egg rolled unevenly toward Gwen’s feet. She picked the pale blue offering up with both hands. It was too big to fit in her satchel, so she tucked it in the crook of her arm like a football and forced herself into a polite curtsy for the Never Bird. It squawked once more at her, still hostile and unpleasant. Gwen hurried away, happy to leave it behind and return to those who accepted her legitimacy as a lost child.

  Gwen flew in short spurts down the mountain. Having procured Miss Daisy’s milk egg, she felt more confident, but she now worried she might fall and break the egg if she flew too high. This precaution didn’t stop her phone from falling out of her dress pocket. Gwen gasped and cringed as she heard the phone smash against the ground. “Please don’t be broken, please don’t be broken…” she muttered as she dropped to her feet and picked it up.

  There was a crack in one corner of the screen. It would still be usable, but Gwen wondered why she even cared. The battery must have absorbed ambient magic from Neverland because the device never died, but it wasn’t as though she got cell phone reception. She’d only been using it to look through old pictures earlier. Gwen stuffed it in her satchel and hoped it would be safer there as she continued.

  She was down Mount Neverest and back into the thick of the jungle when Dillweed shot up and yanked a lock of her hair in panic. She looked where his tiny finger pointed when he buzzed, Drone!

  Without the sound of her footsteps, Gwen could hear the malicious hum of the device’s four rotors. Like a tiny helicopter, the boxy metal contraption hovered through the forest in a steady and methodical search. A red laser light scanned the space ahead of it, helping the device adjust its flight and avoid trees while it searched for fairies.

  It was not heading for them, but if it kept on its course, it would cross the path they had just cut through the forest, and instantly identify the fading trail of pixie dust Dillweed had dropped. As soon as it did, it would switch from its search function to its capture one. Any sudden flight from the fairy would send a fresh cloud of dust into the air and trigger it even faster. Gwen set the Never Bird’s egg at the base of the nearest tree trunk, and then reached into her pack with the same slowness. She pulled out her tiny bag of emergency fairy dust and hurried to tie it to the longest stick in reach. Standing upright, she whispered, “Ready?”

  Dillweed buzzed yes, and then leapt into the air, sprinting on his wings as fast as he could. As he did so, Gwen took off running in the other direction.

  The drone sensed this activity and engaged in an immediate chase. Its rotors turned tenfold as it began whizzing toward the cloud of fairy dust almost as fast as a fairy, and with a mechanical perseverance that would be sure to exhaust and capture even the swiftest pixie. Fortunately, Gwen’s diversion worked.

  Dillweed’s head start left a trail of pixie dust, but Gwen’s simple decoy dropped a much more obvious stream of magic for the drone’s sensors to follow. She ran as fast as she could with the stick propped over her shoulder, taking long leaps that turned into quick bursts of flight. She headed weast and tried to keep as much distance between her and the drone as possible, even though she knew it would eventually catch up to her.

  She didn’t know how long her pixie dust supply would last. The whirling menace was still behind her, so she knew she hadn’t run out yet. Trying to stay focused, Gwen told herself she’d already succeeded. Dillweed had gotten away and was safe from the scouring drone. That was a small victory, though; if she didn’t manage to destroy the device, it would continue combing the island for fairies to capture and return to the Anomalous Activity Department in reality. The next fairy it stumbled onto might not be so lucky.

  Her breath grew short and a stiff pain settled in her lungs as she continued to run. This was an unfamiliar part of the forest for Gwen, and she couldn’t gauge how close she was to the creek until she nearly tripped into the water. She took an immediate turn to follow it downstream, and then continued to run. She desperately wanted her chest to stop burning and to take a moment to recuperate. Her initial spurt of adrenaline was wearing thin, but the drone had no bodily constraints. It was still flying with wicked determination.

  Whenever she could, Gwen took to the air. It wasn’t much faster, but at least it didn’t require the same physical exertion. She was too nervous to sustain flight, and she wished someone could take over for her. Batting her way through a canopy of vines, she had a brief opportunity to rush ahead while the drone went the long way around the entangling vines. Feeling a small fire kindling in her lungs, she decided to pretend. She pretended she wasn’t in any kind of pain as sweat began to run down from her brow. It surprised Gwen how much that helped. The stress of exertion faded as she imagined she was an Olympic medalist merely running track. She was always startled that such tricks worked in Neverland.

  At last, she came to the tributary she was looking for. The slender offshoot of water led only a little ways before dissolving into a muddy swamp. Previously used only for mud pies and other baking endeavors, the swamp had become a graveyard for drones. Hopping along rocks out to the sticky depths of the sweet muck, Gwen suspended her bag of pixie dust an inch away from the mud and stood as far off as she could. In seconds, the drone came sweeping down, and Gwen jerked the bag back with a quick twitch of her stick. Too late to adjust its course, the drone drove itself straight into the mire, smothering its thin rotor blades in mud. It tried to churn through the thick goop, but all it managed to do was make the mud bubble around it as the machine overheated.

  Trapped among half a dozen dead drones, it suffered a gloppy fate. Gwen hurled a rock at it as hard as she could, but it didn’t so much as dent the impressive war device. It was already doomed… but she watched it overheat and savored her victory, all out of breath and bitter in her joy. The drones were less destructive and easier to avoid than newsprint bombings, but they were just as terrifying in some ways.

  Once the drone had short-circuited itself and she had caught her breath, Gwen packed the remnants of her depleted pixie dust bag back into her satchel and meandered away from the swamp. She retrieved the Never Bird egg from the tree she’d left it under, and then leisurely made her way back to the grove, trying not to think about how frequent drone attacks were becoming.

  On her way back to the underground home, Gwen found Bard, Spurt, and Jam aboveground and weaving. Or rather, Bard was weaving. Spurt was running on his hands and knees pretending to be a werewolf, while Jam insisted Spurt was a dog and attempted to train him. Bard was the only one who had the attention span to continue work on the project they had started earlier that afternoon.

  The spider-silk yarn she was working with moved fluidly between her tiny fingers. The task did not require precision—the net didn’t need to be tight—but her net’s holes were all identical in size and shape anyway. She was almost done by the looks of it. Finished nets already hung on saplings around the island. By dinner, Bard would have another to drape over some little tree and the fairies would come with their domesticated spiders to spin finer webs between the net’s holes, creating another small haven away from the drones. The machines could not track magic when it was enclosed in these protective spiderwebs. The enchanted spiderwebs of Neverland could hide anything magical and stop it from radiating beyond the cover of the web.

  Spurt came galloping toward Gwen and pawed at her leg ferociously before pretending to gnaw on it.

  “BAD DOG!” Jam yelled. “STAY!” She came chasing after, blonde pigtails bobbing, and the freckly younger boy howled as he dashed away.

  Gwen didn’t mind them. “Hi, Bard. Nice net.”


  “Thank you. Is the egg for dinner tonight?”

  “I think so? I don’t know how to… uh, prepare it?”

  “Jam makes a very nice egg and flower soup. Maybe she’ll start that when she’s done training her puppy.”

  It occurred to Gwen that Bard was unusually alone with the spider-silk. The fairies that brought the spider-silk tended to stay with their benevolent weaver and encourage her or bring her berries, sweets, and trinkets for her efforts. “Where are the fairies?”

  “Some others came and got Foxglove and Hollyhock a few minutes ago. Blink followed them out to the blackberry bushes.”

  Gwen noticed a knot in Bard’s clump of spider-silk yarn. She sat down cross-legged and began untangling it for the girl. “Did Dillweed come back here?”

  “No—did you lose him?”

  She wasn’t surprised—she assumed he went to find a stiff drop of mead to calm his nerves after their frightening run-in with the drone.

  “He must be back at his hollow with the others. We found another drone.”

  Bard looked up, surprised and worried. “There’s so many.” She cast her gaze back down at the net she was making. “I didn’t think they were ever going to find Neverland again.”

  “When was the last time drones came?”

  A blank look settled on the girl’s face. She had no means with which to measure time. Gwen dropped the subject. “Where’s Rosemary?”

  Bard thought about it, but didn’t have an answer. “I haven’t seen her since Blink left with the fairies. She might be with them.”

  Gwen wandered back into the forest. It wasn’t far to the blackberry bushes—just beyond the grove, a towering mass of them grew in what appeared to be one giant clump. Not deceived by its appearance, she plucked aside one of the largest thorny branches to reveal an opening low to the forest floor. Crawling through, she emerged in the blackberry theater.

  She didn’t fear interrupting anything since she could hear the fairies from the other side of the brambles. They continued to trill words and conversation beyond her comprehension. Dark little Blink sat in the middle of the bright enclosure, quiet and unblinking. Hollyhock was there with her usual fiery-gold glow, as well as the purple and twinkling Foxglove. With them in discussion was Hawkbit, a fairy unfamiliar to Gwen. He had a pale yellow glow and seemed to be wearing armor made of tree bark.