He wasn’t mad, but she thought she would have preferred anger to his flabbergasted disbelief. “You are the worst flier I have ever seen in my life.” The insult stung harder when Gwen realized just how long Peter’s young life had gone on for. “I didn’t know people could be this bad at flying.”
“You surprised me.” She didn’t realize how meek she felt until she heard the pitiful tone of her voice.
“Flying is all about surprises! That’s why grown-ups don’t do it. It’s too surprising for them. The way you fly, it’s like you forget you’re not one of them mid-flight. I’ve seen kids worry they might be getting all grown up, but never in the middle of flying!”
“I’ll get better,” Gwen promised. She didn’t say I promise to Peter, but she said it in her head. She had to. It was either that or get older.
“I hope so.” Did he say that in earnest, or was he mocking her? Did he want her to get better, or did he just want to be done with her? His voice gave no hints. “Can you at least get back to the grove? I don’t want to have to carry you.” He made a face, as if the thought was repulsive the same way carrying a slug would be. “Foxglove and Hollyhock will be there for pixie dust before we go. You’re not allowed to fall into the ocean while we’re flying back, or get struck by lightning, or anything. I can’t have you dying right now.”
“Believe it or not,” Gwen announced, launching herself off the branch and leaping back into the air, “I’m not planning on dying, and it has nothing to do with what you want.”
“Just so long as you stay alive.”
“I will.”
The conversation was curt, and then it was over, but only until Gwen thought to ask, “Were you looking for me?”
“Of course. We have to leave,” Peter slowly rolled onto his back as he flew, bobbing on the air and playing in it as he went through it, as if it were not some invisible, intangible thing.
“Wait, right now?”
“Well, we’re going to stop by the grove first…”
“But it’s the middle of the night!”
Peter rolled his eyes, and then flipped back onto his belly. “Not where we’re going.”
“People will see us flying if we arrive in the day… what kind of plan is this?”
“The kind that requires espionage-levels of stealth, clandestine operation, and covert maneuvering.” He sounded so happy uttering the phrases.
She laughed, and her flight stabilized. “I’m going to try to be stealthy with you in tow?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “We’ll have disguises.”
The prospect of dressing up for a stealth mission with Peter took her smile and bolted it to her face. Just like that, she started looking forward to this absurd adventure back to reality.
In the grove, Bard and Jam were waiting with armfuls of clothes. Rosemary was on the ground with them, taking the contents of the picnic basket and loading them into a more durable backpack. Hollyhock and Foxglove had subjected themselves to Spurt’s will, which dictated that he hold them and use them for signaling Peter and Gwen like an air traffic controller. He had always wanted to be an air traffic controller, ever since the idea occurred to him several minutes earlier. The patient fairies let him wave them in gibberish instructions as the older children landed.
“What is everyone doing up so late?” No one ever complained about bedtimes—there weren’t any—but the underground home collectively went to bed on a schedule that sometimes ran far ahead of Gwen’s own rhythm. It was unusual to find them out like happy nocturnal creatures so long after dark.
“Right this way, Miss Dolyn,” Jam announced, ushering Gwen forward with a hand as soon as she had landed. “Here are your clothes.”
“We got them from real people!” Spurt exclaimed.
“How long ago?” Gwen asked, holding the heavy felt skirt out in front of her so she could get a good look at it.
“Umm, last week?” Spurt asked.
“No, we haven’t flown back since, like, a month ago,” Jam announced, proving that her sense of time was almost as perturbed as his. Gwen didn’t know what decade the skirt was from, but certainly some point in the twentieth century.
“We got it in case of an emergency,” Bard told her. “In case we ever needed to spy on real people, we wanted real people clothes.”
“Why are they so big?” She pulled on the skirt; it fit her fine, but came down to an awkward length just beneath her knees.
“I thought it was a dress,” Jam pouted. She handed her a blouse that was straight out of the seventies. “This one too. It was hard to tell. We took them off their clothesline at night and didn’t want to get caught.” She laughed. Gwen wondered if she’d ever seen a clothesline, aside from the one the girls strung up on laundry days when they were playing house or pretending to be old washerwomen. She pulled the paisley blouse on over her dress. Although Jam tried to insist Gwen had to take off the dress she’d been wearing, she was neither going to take off her clothes in front of everyone nor explain why she refused to. She kept her back to Peter though, uncertain whether he’d reached a point in his maturity where he would share her sense of discretion.
She felt like she must be wearing her grandmother’s clothes. The skirt was nondescript from a distance, but the blouse was ostentatious and outdated with its bright pattern and billowy cut. Retro was in though, right?
“Okay! Enough,” Peter announced, sending the little costume designers retreating and finally drawing Gwen’s eye.
She stifled a laugh but could not get her hand over her mouth fast enough to cover her smile.
“What?” Peter asked, standing in acid-washed jeans—the cuffs rolled up—and a windbreaker that was equal parts sunshine yellow, hot pink, and turquoise. If he had a mullet, the look would have been complete.
“Your clothes are old. Suspiciously old.” She walked over to him and tried to imagine how Claire or Katie would do “damage control” on an outfit this outrageous.
She unzipped the jacket—he had the zipper all the way up, which she was pretty sure hadn’t been trendy since the eighties. He had a polo shirt underneath with a popped collar.
“Okay. If you don’t want to attract attention, you’re going to need to get rid of the jacket.” He took it off, and Gwen creased his collar back. She knelt down and started unrolling his pant cuffs.
“It’s cold where we’re going,” he warned.
“Trust me, you don’t want to wear that jacket… although… I’ll be right back.”
She sprung up, and Peter finished unrolling his pant cuffs while she dove back into the underground home to grab a better jacket. She returned a minute later. “Here,” she told him, “put this on.”
The sweatshirt was a little big on him—Peter was neither as tall nor as broad-shouldered as Jay—but the bagginess was fashionable. The acid-washed jeans were a bit of a statement, but at least they were jeans. He could pass for a modern teenage boy, and that disturbed her. Peter Pan in denim seemed so false that it was inherently wrong.
“That looks good,” she told him.
“Don’t forget shoes,” Rosemary exclaimed, running up to them with five socks of all different colors and two pairs of sneakers that were almost peeling apart. Gwen was glad for the reminder. She was so used to going barefoot that shoes probably wouldn’t have even crossed her mind until she set foot on the frosty ground of reality.
By then, the other children had come up from the underground home. Sal and Newt had been hard at work in their tunnels with Blink’s assistance, but they knew Gwen’s departure was imminent once she had come down to grab her sweatshirt.
Her shoes laced up, the backpack full of supplies, and her nerve feeling like it would only be worked up for so long, she asked, “Which way are we flying tonight?”
Blink dumped a black ball in Peter’s hand. Its surface looked like cracking asphalt, but something glorious and golden was glowing inside. He smiled, the way he always did when he was about to share something wond
erful. “We can’t be spotted,” he reminded her. He tossed the ball in his hand and caught it as it came back down. “We’re going to go through the storm.”
Hollyhock and Foxglove preemptively tucked themselves into the spider-silk purse Gwen was bringing specifically for concealing fairies. They did not want to leave even a hint of pixie dust on the wind, but the bag was also waterproof. Hollyhock grumbled about the close quarters, but Foxglove dragged her in and they got comfortable cuddling together in the safety of the bag. They insisted Peter carry them, however. Gwen couldn’t blame them, but she resented they were starting to doubt her flying, too.
“Goodbye, Gwenny!”
“Come back soon, okay?”
“I want to meet the Piper!”
The children were a chorus of requests and desires that could not be addressed at the moment. Rosemary was the odd one out, quiet and content. Gwen felt perturbed by how happy her little sister was to see her leaving. Before she took off, she gave Rosemary a big hug. The little girl whispered to her, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so glad you’re my sister.”
Her concerns eased, but did not disappear. Gwen felt full of mush and melted-down emotions. “You stay safe and come find me soon, okay? I’m going to need your help.”
Rosemary stood, poised and beaming. “I know.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too!”
Gwen ruffled Rosemary’s messy hair for good measure, and then took off as Peter called to her from the sky.
She tried not to look back. It would be dark. She wouldn’t be able to see. She couldn’t help herself. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked down but could not distinguish which of the funny, shadow-shape children was her little sister.
The stars seemed to get bigger as they flew higher, but Gwen didn’t trust her eyes as they left Neverland. An uneasy feeling clung to her as she and Peter headed for reality. She had a bad feeling about this mission.
“Are you ready for this?” Peter yelled to her.
“Ready for what?”
“For the storm!” he declared. “I don’t know how much farther we can go before it hatches.”
Gwen zoomed forward. She couldn’t figure out a way to maintain good flying posture while weighed down with the backpack. Peter had started to glow though—an act of illumination usually reserved for fairies—and Gwen wanted to know why.
The orb in his hands released a light so startlingly bright it burned the pattern of its golden cracks into her eyes. Peter didn’t look directly at it, but Gwen didn’t know where else she was supposed to look.
Her eyes darted back to the ball again, but she knew to look away faster this time. It still hurt her eyes, but the glance served its purpose. She could tell the cracks were getting deeper, longer, and more volatile. Peter’s terminology was perfect: it looked as if it was about to hatch. She realized that the low roar she was hearing came from within the egg-like object.
“What’s inside of that?”
Peter gave her a sly look. “A thunderstorm.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“How could it be dangerous?”
“That looks like an awfully small container for a whole thunderstorm. What if it explodes?”
“Oh, don’t worry—it will.” Peter’s confidence was contagious. Despite the alarming facts he gave her, she found it easy to trust his nonchalant attitude. “I’m going to hold onto it until the last possible moment, but when I drop it, we’re going to have to stay as close behind it as possible. As long as we’re above it, we’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“We’re going to have to fly fast.”
“Okay.”
“It’ll be a hard landing.”
“Okay.”
“Can’t you say anything besides okay?”
“No,” Gwen replied, sticking her tongue out at him.
He laughed. “For a second, I thought your voice puppet might have gotten stuck.”
The thunderstorm in his hand rumbled again. It shook, and bits of the black rock flaked and fell away. In the darkness, she could not see that they were expanding like popcorn into ominous clouds below.
It took both hands for Peter to contain it. Hollyhock and Foxglove still huddled in their pixie purse, securely strung around Peter’s belt. Soon, it sounded like they were actually caught in a storm. The air stayed as still as the silhouetted horizon, but the sound of thunder engulfed them. As the contents of the orb reached their brightest, they began pulsing with unsustainable flashes of near-blinding light.
“You ready?” Peter yelled.
Gwen’s reply could not be distilled to a single-syllable answer, but anything else would be lost in the fury of noise. Fudging her feelings, she shouted back, “Yes!” She thought she would have just a moment more to brace herself, but before she had finished the word, Peter dropped the storm.
As soon as it left his hands, it was free. There was nothing to hold it back. Even Peter had relinquished the pretension that he could contain it… and the wind knew.
An invisible wave crashed down on them. A furious force flew toward the storm. Every violent wind and mischievous current for miles around came as instantaneously as light. The storm sucked clouds toward it like stars to a black hole. It was summoning them, so it would have a clouded sky to explode into. It needed a stage, so it dragged everything in the sky with it, including Gwen and Peter.
Her mind shot back to the reality bombing that had struck a few weeks ago. Her arm had finished healing little more than a week ago, and some faint lettering was still visible to the discerning eye. She could not bear to endure that hellish experience again, yet she was in the midst of a wind totally out of her control. She realized she was screaming only when her throat began to hurt. She couldn’t hear herself over the sound at the heart of this storm, the ball just out of reach. It was not a question of trying to keep up with its swift free-fall, but rather keep control of the speed it forced on her.
Peter grabbed her hand and clamped down on it. She knew he wouldn’t let go; he wouldn’t lose her. She tightened her grip and tried to give herself over to his instincts—hers were no good in this fury. If she was going to survive, she had to suspend her sense of panic and trust in Peter.
Sparks of lightning sputtered out of the orb, breaking their way through the surface and decaying what remained of the storm’s rocky, black containment. They weren’t bolts, not yet. They stretched out like uncertain fingers grasping for some unknown object. They were not as fast as proper lightning. Shorter in reach and longer in duration, the proto-lightning shot in all directions, creating a crisscross of slender, electric obstacles. Peter didn’t blink. Tears poured from his wind-ravaged eyes, but they stayed as steady as his grip on Gwen’s hand. They could not lose sight of the orb and risk drifting from the heart of the storm to be caught exposed in the sky.
Up, down, left, up, right, down, left, down, left… there was no pattern to the sputtering electrical outputs. Peter responded to each with extraordinary reflexes that jerked Gwen in random directions, yanking and shoving her so they traveled as one entity through the chaos.
As they got closer to the ground, the storm clouds caught up. The ball was disintegrating and becoming harder to follow through the thick clouds, but the lightning was getting stronger and faster. The openings in clouds and passages between shocks of lightning were getting slimmer. A spark flashed out and struck Gwen’s loose hair. It crackled and singed, but the wind put the flame out. All Gwen noticed was an instantaneous flash of fire in her peripheral vision and the brief smell of burnt hair. She grabbed onto Peter’s arm with her other hand, pulling closer to him and praying she was near enough as she pressed against his arm.
Peter jerked her back in the opposite direction. Gwen felt some parts of her slowing, and other parts continuing down at terminal velocity. Her bones—particularly those in her hands, crushed in Peter’s grip—were feeling this force. Her stomach and assorted other vital organs felt like they were hu
rtling toward the storm.
She joined him, fighting against the pull of the storm and strength of the wind. Together, she and Peter made a desperate effort to escape the force of the storm, which was shrinking down to a mere marble of light that would, at any moment, explode in the meteorological equivalent of the big bang. Gwen realized with horror that they would not escape it, that they could not get away in time. As the clouds gave way to a thick fog, she saw how close they were to the ground and how fast they were falling toward it. She screamed—this time loud enough to hear herself over the screeching of the squall.
Peter flung himself around her. He wrapped his arms around her neck and back, trapping her arms against him. She felt tucked into him like an infant swaddled in covers. The monolithic storm that surrounded them was so loud, her thoughts seemed quiet and calm in contrast. She was going to die on impact, but at least she felt safe in Peter’s hands.
Tossed around and uncertain of anything with her stomach gone and her bones squeezed to a pulp in Peter’s grip, Gwen only knew which way was down because the wind was still blowing her hair in the opposite direction, away from Peter.
They were no longer vertical. She was on top of him, and he was about to take the brunt of the impact. Was he trying to save her? Didn’t he know it would be impossible for either of them to survive?
Whether it is impossible is irrelevant, he’d told her once.
She could feel even as he gripped her how calm his body was, how little tension there was in his muscles. He was free falling like a dead man. He was not afraid. He was relaxed, because there was nothing he did better than the impossible.
Gwen could not unglue the fear from her body. Her muscles braced for a collision her body knew she couldn’t survive, but she gently closed her eyes. She forced her lungs to breathe at a rate ten times slower than her frantic heart was beating.
Through her closed eyes, a golden light exploded into being all around her. The first strike of true lightning touched down on the earth, and the flash overpowered the dark of the clouds. She was falling through a sky made of light. It was beautiful, even if it was all on the other side of her eyelids. She knew what came next. She knew what always followed lightning.
The Piper's Price Page 6
