The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  An earth-shattering roar of thunder broke as Gwen and Peter slammed against the ground with the full force of their bodies. She felt the earth through Peter’s body as the shock of impact reverberated through him and shook her.

  They skidded, and she felt dirt and grass thrown up around her, pelting the parts of her face that she couldn’t press against his chest. For a moment, she forgot that it was really Peter she was clinging to underneath that sweatshirt.

  At last, it stopped. All of it. The thunder was in the distance, and the lightning could not be seen through closed eyes. The storm was elsewhere, and the air was still. There was no more motion—neither gravity nor friction. Gwen rolled over and felt the grass underneath her. She pushed her head over to look at invincible Peter. He was smiling at the sky. He didn’t bother with his hands as he rocked back, and then threw himself onto his feet. He dusted off his pants before striking a proud stance. His chin turned up and his boyish chest puffed out, he looked to be basking in his extraordinary glory.

  “That is the most remarkable storm landing you will ever see. That is, unless you ever see me land in a storm again.”

  She knew she shouldn’t humor his ego, but Gwen couldn’t help her awe. “That was impressive.”

  He extended a helpful hand and unhelpful remark. “I knew you’d be terrible at it. Girls never get it right at all the first time.”

  “I would have died by myself,” Gwen admitted. She wasn’t entirely clear on how Peter’s force of flight had stopped them from reaching a lethal velocity, but she was certain she wouldn’t have been able to do the same.

  Peter’s lithe hands untangled the ties of the pixie purse on his belt and let Hollyhock and Foxglove rush out of it like cats out of water. They flew in swooping circles, kissing the air. How they survived the fall was just as much a mystery to Gwen.

  “No,” Peter objected. “You’re not allowed to die without my permission. I need you, and falling to death isn’t an acceptable way to die anyway.” He extended a hand and pulled her to her shaky feet.

  “You say that like there are acceptable ways to die.”

  “Of course. Most of them involve pirates though.”

  They started to walk. The storm was moving away, and they had managed to avoid any rainfall. The grass was still wet and the trees were dripping around them, but Gwen could see that the nearby lake’s surface was still.

  “So if I got locked in mortal combat and died, would that work for you?”

  “Well, not now,” he complained. “I need you now. But yes. Providing your adversary was sufficiently nefarious.”

  Peter pulled an eighteenth-century compass from the pocket of his disco-era jeans. It only took him a second to check it before they started walking northeast, away from the lake and into the forest.

  “Where are we?” She couldn’t imagine where in the world the thunderstorm had taken them. What country was she in?

  Peter whacked through a bush and pushed on with intrepid enthusiasm. “Lake Agana.”

  “What?” Gwen stopped, and waited until he paused. “Your friend is here?”

  “About two miles northeast of here. This was just the closest open space we could land in without being spotted.”

  “How is this possible?” she demanded. “We’re an hour away from my house. How is it that the aviator lands in the closet airfield, the Piper invades my neighborhood, your friend—whoever that even is—lives beside the nearest lake… Why is all of this happening in my backyard?”

  Peter gave her a dull and dissatisfied look. The fairies were also staring at her. “I’m not going to stand around and answer all your dumb questions.” He started stomping through the brush again.

  “But—”

  “So keep up and listen.”

  Gwen dashed to his side, and didn’t interrupt him as he began to explain.

  “Magic is kind of… magnetic,” he told her. Hollyhock chimed in, but the vocabulary and concepts she was using didn’t have English translations. “Exactly. It is like a magnet with a limitless range. But the further away you get from it, the slower it moves toward more magic.”

  She thought back to the day Rosemary disappeared, and what she had heard from the police officers while eavesdropping through the heater vent. Her father worked with magic—Anomalous Resources, they’d called it—to help funnel power into the economy. They thought that had something to do with Rosemary being targeted. They could track magic to find it, and they thought Peter Pan could too. It wasn’t a tactical strategy though… it was just the draw of magic to magic.

  “A lot of magic has gathered here in the past decade,” Peter told her. “It’s impossible to know what started it.”

  Chicken and egg, Gwen thought. Did Peter Pan visit this place on a whim and leave a trail of magic that drew others to it, or did he come because something was already pulling him toward it?

  She tried to imagine the ramifications of this as she stomped down a thorny nettle bush and soldiered on through the brush. “What happens when too much gathers here? Is that going to happen?”

  A smile ripped into Peter’s face with devilish delight. “We’re counting on it to find Piper.” Without elaborating on that thought, he launched into another explanation to give her context. “That’s how Neverland works. It started out with just a little magic, but it has collected so much more. It’s powerful now. That’s why they want it. Grown-ups never let magic grow. They redirect it and use it up. They treat magic like a scarce resource, so that’s what it becomes for them. They don’t give back and put their hearts into it to keep it going and growing. If they ever got to Neverland, they would strip it clean.”

  She couldn’t imagine a Neverland deforested of its magic. “How are we going to stop them from getting there?”

  “That’s the one good thing—we don’t have to. Neverland is exerting such a magical pull… nothing can get in without ample magic.”

  “But how do the bombs and drones make it?”

  Again, the pixies tried to answer, eager to explain their homeland, but Gwen was not proficient enough in the fairy language to understand their intricate trills.

  “It takes less magic to send a thing than it does to send a person. They use some of their refined technology-magic to attack, but it’s the magic that finds Neverland, not them.”

  Peter pushed a sapling’s branch out of his way, then let go of it. It thwacked Gwen almost before she could get her hands up to shield her face. “But what’s to stop them from someday compiling enough magic to make it there themselves for a real invasion?”

  “Neverland is smart, Gwen-dollie. It knows its own magic. No one can reach Neverland’s horizons unless they have a native inhabitant guiding them… That’s why I keep Holly around.” As soon as he said that, Hollyhock zipped down and pinched his ear. He clapped his hand at his ear to cover it, but she was already out of his way. “One of the many reasons I keep Holly around,” he corrected himself, smiling.

  She considered this information as she felt a fungal patch squish under her foot. She was glad she was wearing shoes… mushrooms in reality were neither colorful nor enchanting, just white and goopy.

  “Is it possible, if one of the drones did capture a fairy…” She didn’t have the heart to finish the thought.

  Foxglove and Hollyhock settled in the hood of Peter’s—Jay’s—sweatshirt. His expression became grim. “We don’t know. That’s certainly what they’re trying to accomplish. Last time drones found Neverland, back before you showed up, they did take some fairies, but the grown-ups never came. It isn’t enough to have a fairy—they would have had to convince them to take them to the island—but things might be different now. Something must have changed that they’re spending their limited magical resources to send drones to catch fairies again.”

  She didn’t want to think about what happened to the poor fairies who refused to cooperate with the Anomalous Activity Department.

  “What could have changed?”

  Peter pi
cked a golden dandelion and went to stuff the bloom in his buttonhole, but he was in strange clothes without buttonholes. He flicked it aside, losing interest in it all together. “They might have some new device or technology they’re working on that they think will bypass the magical laws of Neverland.”

  “What—do they think they are just going to be able to teleport to Neverland?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “That’s why we need Piper. Whatever his price, he’s the only one who can help us reach the kids we need to build a resistance and defend Neverland. With enough kids, Neverland will be able to hide itself for good. Then we’ll be safe, and there’ll be no way to find us or any reason for us to return here ever again.”

  They didn’t talk much for the rest of their trek through the woods. They could still hear the low roar of the thunderstorm in the distance. Soon, they were close enough that the fairies had to hide again. Gwen was afraid for them since they had been out so long, but Peter assured her that the grown-ups wouldn’t be scanning for magic in daylight, especially so far away from suburbia. Even if they were, by the time they tracked it out to Lake Agana, the dust trail would be too scattered by the wind to follow.

  They found the forest’s hiking trail moments before breaking the tree line. “Where are we going, Peter?” He was heading toward a mobile home community next to the state park.

  He continued to walk with confidence. His usual cocky stride looked surprisingly like the swagger of an ordinary teenage boy. “My friend lives here. Don’t worry. Don’t look like such a stranger here.”

  She didn’t want to appear conspicuous, but Gwen was too baffled to help it. The unkempt lawns were boxed in by chain-link fences covered in varying degrees of rust. They passed a lawn littered with bicycles; on the other side of the gravel street, two different cars were parked on the lawn, clearly non-functional. Satellite dishes were on every trailer home. Despite all being painted differently, the track housing still managed to present a uniformity of depressing color.

  Multiple houses had motorcycles out front or a dog milling around their yard. When she and Peter passed a pack of Rottweilers, the dogs ran up to the fence and began snarling until all the other dogs in the neighborhood were barking too. “Ignore it,” Peter advised her.

  She was scared. This was not the sort of place she ever expected to visit with Peter. She didn’t trust his ability to protect her here. This wasn’t his world, but it wasn’t hers either. They were both out of their element. Peter just didn’t have the sense to realize it.

  Winding down the gravel road, Gwen matched Peter’s pace almost step for step. They approached a blue-and-grey house. Like the others, it had wooden latticework around the bottom to help obscure the fact it didn’t have a foundation in the ground. The square house reminded Gwen of how she would take shoeboxes and try to turn them into homes for her dolls by decorating them. It was hard to fathom that she was walking up the plastic steps of the porch to knock on the door.

  She waited, feeling her heartbeat in her throat, her toes, and everywhere besides her chest. Even the predictable noise of the door opening startled her.

  A woman with a long, black braid and beige cardigan stood in the doorway. Gwen looked up at her, and then watched as the sharp features of her dark face dissolved into unadulterated shock.

  “Peter?”

  The startled woman ushered them in. She was just as uncomfortable with their presence in the trailer park as Gwen. Once inside, they stood in a living room full of old furniture, facing a kitchen with old electric appliances. There was no unity or romance to the orange recliner, chipped mixing bowl, off-white blender, dull toaster, and sunken couch. It was a bunch of old stuff that looked like it represented several decades of objects abandoned at Goodwill. The chingadera and bric-a-brac wasn’t any more cohesive: porcelain angles, an antique pot, a vase full of bird feathers, and a stopped clock made the place confusing and strange in the same way her grandmother’s house had been.

  “What are you doing here?” the women hissed, pulling her cardigan close and tossing her thick braid over her shoulder and out of her way. She had a shapeless housedress underneath the beige sweater, and a pair of black leggings insulating her legs as she stomped around, heavy-footed in her leather slippers. She looked comfortable, except for the unexpected guests who were putting her so ill at ease. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I need your help,” Peter said.

  “They’re still keeping tabs on me.”

  “That’s why I came in disguise.”

  “You’re being irresponsible. You’re jeopardizing us both, and Neverland to boot.”

  “I took all the right precautions. This is important.” Hollyhock and Foxglove wrestled their way out of the pixie purse and came twinkling out now that they knew they were safely inside.

  “You brought fairies here?” she exclaimed. She leaned down and grabbed a hold of his arm, forcing him to look her dead in her dark eyes. Gwen wanted to leave. This wasn’t a friend, not anymore. This was a grown-up, and unlike Antoine the aviator, she was not amused with Peter’s wartime antics.

  “What happens if they figure it out and come to question me?”

  Peter scoffed. “You won’t tell them.”

  “What if they threaten to arrest me? They could put me away forever until I told them what they needed to know, and nobody here would stop them.”

  Peter broke free of her hold with ease; she wasn’t actually trying to restrain him. “Preposterous,” he declared. “If they did that, you would sit, stone-faced and silent in your cell until they all died.”

  “What if they beat me?”

  “You’d take the blows as though you were made of rock, and you would not speak.” Peter seemed to disregard the question.

  “What if they tortured me and stuck blades under my nails?” she demanded.

  “Then you would not even scream, but stay silent as a stone!” Peter insisted, hopping up onto a wooden kitchen chair at her dining table, looking down at the woman.

  “What if they bring knives and cut off my fingers, one at a time, until I told them how to find you?”

  Peter yelled right back, “Then you would steal their knives and scalp them all like the redskin princess you are!”

  Her anger slunk off her face and out of her shoulders. She shook her head, frowning as a sad laugh escaped her. She clung to her sweater, blinking back tears, until, at last, she flung her arms around Peter. Still on the chair, he had to bend down to return the embrace.

  “Oh, Peter,” she muttered, unaware of the tears slipping off her smiling face. “Oh, Peter.”

  “It’s good to see you, Tiger Lily.”

  Her smile was wide, but tightly closed-lip. Gwen recognized the feeling that was fighting to get out—that beautiful sense of joy that she was trying not to foolishly indulge in. The shock and excitement had reduced the woman to non-functionality. “I—I’ll make some sandwiches,” she offered.

  Peter and Gwen sat at the kitchen table together while Tiger Lily shuffled around the kitchen to make lunch.

  “How did you get here without anyone seeing you?” she asked, glancing out her blinds as if she thought Anomalous Activity officers would be pulling up to her door at any minute.

  “The thunderstorm that passed through, that was us.”

  She nodded. “I heard the storm earlier, it raged all morning. It reminded me of Storm Sounds…” Gwen wondered how the storm had lasted so long and started so early. The bits of lightning they had witnessed had moved slowly enough to dodge while flying through, so maybe she wasn’t entirely clear on how time behaved in the middle of a hatching thunderstorm.

  “It was the cleverest way to come in daylight.” Peter sat on his chair backward, draping his arms over the arching wooden back.

  A look of mild amusement swept across Tiger Lily’s face as she layered deli meat on sliced bread. “So I suppose you thought of that all by yourself?”

  “Of course!” He seemed to take offe
nse at the implication that anyone else could have.

  She laughed and sliced a tomato. “Peter, you haven’t changed at all.” Gesturing to Gwen with her paring knife, she pointed out, “You haven’t even introduced me to your friend yet.”

  Gwen would have been happy to remain a piece of scenery for this conversation. Something about Tiger Lily intimidated her, even though the woman was much more amiable now than she had been when they first arrived.

  “This is Gwendolyn Lucinda Hoffman.”

  She was taken aback by the introduction. Aside from the night he had swept her off to Neverland, she had never mentioned her middle name. At this point, she assumed Peter had forgotten what her actual name was anyway, what with all the Dollie-Lyn and Gwenny nonsense. Stammering, she told Tiger Lily, “I’m Gwen. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Good to meet you, Gwen,” Tiger Lily answered, getting the peanut butter and jelly out of her refrigerator. The appliance hummed happily as she sorted through its various prepared foods. “What brings you to Neverland—or back home, if that’s the case?”

  Tiger Lily didn’t directly ask what a girl as old as Gwen was doing running around with Peter Pan. Thinking about her own age spurred her to wonder how old Tiger Lily was. She looked to have aged into her thirties, but her face and dark skin retained a youthful glow. The way her hair cascaded into her braid was beautiful too. “Peter found my little sister a few months ago, and when I couldn’t convince her to stay home, I went with her.”

  “That is an admirable loyalty to your little sister.”

  “Gwenny’s our storyteller now,” Peter interjected.

  Gwen fidgeted on the stiff kitchen chair, doubly uncomfortable when she couldn’t think of what to say next. Tiger Lily approached with an assortment of sandwiches and announced, “Any friend of Peter is a friend of mine. Make yourself at home, Gwen.”