Page 118 of Losing Wendy

I’m going to drown feeling every bit of it.

But then fingers jerk at my collar, dragging me from the water. I expect to find Peter, come to rescue me, but it’s still Tink, her short golden hair darkened from being soaked. Saltwater peppers her face, sticking to her eyelashes.

She stares down at me with lips curved in the shape of malice,eyes the color of ice.

“Why are you doing this? I’ve done nothing to you,” I whisper, though my voice comes out more like a croak as my body expels the saltwater. I spit some of it in her face, and Tink actually smiles. She cranes her head at me, silent as ever.

“You’re not going to answer me?” I ask. “That’s the least you could do.”

I’m shocked by my forwardness. The captain’s right. I’m not brave. Not one to speak my mind or have the right words pop into my head at the perfect moment. But something about my comment seems to land with the faerie. I glimpse it in the way her sternum caves in, ever so slightly, easy to glimpse on her thin frame.

For a moment, I think she’s going to shove me back under, but then the shadows creep up behind her. Panic swells in my chest as they stumble over her thin shoulders and slide down her collarbone until they’re dripping from her hands and all over me.

I can’t breathe, because now they’re slipping into my mouth, drowning me in a crueler fashion than the water, because at least the water couldn’t taunt me as I died.

Tink’s blue eyes shine through the shadows. As she examines them swarming her body on the way to get to mine, a sick pleasure overtakes her pale features.

For a moment, the shadows relent. Just long enough for me to ask, “You can see them too?”

I can’t tell if I’m desperate for them to be real, desperate for them not to be.

Tink’s grin is cruel, vengeful, but she nods ever so slightly.

With one hand still gripping my shirt, she takes the other and allows the shadows to coalesce on her palm. She brings the orb to her mouth, and with envy still glinting in her eyes, forms a circle with her chapped lips, then blows the orb into my face.

It crawls over me like a spider, and I can feel Tink’s shoulders shaking in laughter, though I can’t hear the sound over the splash of the waves. I claw at my face, digging my fingers into my flesh.

Tink drops me, leaving the waves and the shadows to fight over me like hyenas for a corpse.

Water splashes around me, rocks digging into my spine as shadow and water take turns plunging into my nose, washing my throat in scalding fire.

I scream, but they swallow the sound and wait hungrily for more.

Now that the shadows are inside me, they take shape, growing limbs and heads.

No.

In the darkness, I feel for the pebbles beneath my hands, grounding me, mercifully warning me which way is down. I push myself up. As soon as I’m upright, relief swells through me, making room in the haze of the shadows. In the distance, I spot the trees.

And I run.

Feet against pebbles,formed under the weight of waves. Sand spiking through my toes, then pebbles again, this time rounder, more bulbous.

I welcome grass at my heels like water to a parched throat. Like air to drowning lungs.

Groping for my way back to the Den through the shadows, my fingers slam against bark. It’s not much to go off of, but it’s enough.

I run like that, hurtling myself from tree to tree. The shadows are wrapping their fingers over my eyelids like a lover from behind, whispering, “Guess who” into my ears. My stomach is queasy with dread and sloshing brine, the remnants of what didn’t make it into my lungs.

I stumble forward, tree by tree, praying I’m heading in the direction of the Den. But the further I run from the beach, the more the shadows begin to dissipate. Eventually, the last one of their tendrils slips away, leaving me alone in the dark woods.

My entire body shivers with mingled relief and cold. I’m not sure why the shadows stopped following me. Perhaps they’re likethe shadows at the shed, which seem to like to congregate in a single place. Perhaps they’re bound to a specific area.

The relief doesn’t last long. I’m soaked and shivering, and my thin clothes are clinging to my body, sucking away any heat I have left.

That, and I’m lost.

The shadows might have fled, but with the moonlight barely lighting my path, there’s nothing to indicate where I am. Just the tall trees of the forest, all looking the same with their red-tinted bark.