Half-expecting the new speaker to be the cat, Wendy opened her eyes to find Leq hovering at the end of her nose. Her instinctive flinch backward was thwarted by the wood against her hair. “Where have you been?” she demanded.
“Zippin’,” Leq answered blandly.
She let out a breath that pushed him back a bit. That hadn’t been her intention, but as her faeries often failed to understand personal space, she wasn’t upset by the result, either. Leq flickedthe long hair that helped differentiate him from the others over his shoulder. Wendy had long suspected that the sheerie kept it that length because his preference for speed meant the locks flowed behind him dramatically when he was visible.
“Have you seen John and Michael today? Or Shaye and Iniq?”
“Nope.” Leq executed a tidy backflip.
Wendy pinched the bridge of her nose. “I need you to tell them to stay with John and Michael. One of them can come get me if something bad happens.”
“Why?” he asked without concern.
“Because the boys are in danger.”
“Why?”
“Because Peter Pan is a killer.”
“Why?”
She threw her hands in the air, her voice loud with frustration. “I don’t know why he chooses to murder people!”
Realizing she had endangered them with her volume, she placed a gentle finger over Leq’s mouth to prevent the next question. The cat was not impressed with her outburst. Leq let her listen for shouts of discovery, which never came, then pushed her finger aside to demand she tell him a story.
“You want a story? Fine. I’ll tell you the story of how Peter Pan killed a child in cold blood,” Wendy hissed. She paused to order her thoughts into simpler sentences the sheerie was likely to understand.
As soon as she agreed to regale him with a tale, Leq plummeted to her lap and jostled the sleeping Disa. Disa shoved his fellow faery away until Leq said the magic word. When Disa heard “story,” he sat up and wrapped his arms around his legs. Both sheeries stared at Wendy with anticipation.
“This is not a good story,” she warned the pair. She glanced at the cat. “You may not like it, either.”
The cat blinked once.
“Yesterday, I left John and Michael shelling peas at the Home Underground.”
Leq blew a raspberry. Wendy privately agreed, while wondering who had taught whom that rude gesture. She had left her brothers and a couple of the Lost Boys to the dull task while she went exploring. Two months on the island had given her a fairly solid grasp of the general location of everything, but she wanted to see more of the wonders for herself.
“Have you two been to the Singing Rocks?”
“Just mermaids there,” Leq pooh-poohed. Disa made a face.
“True, but I wanted to see them.”
The Singing Rocks weren’t musical in and of themselves. Instead, they were a convenient location for the local mermaid population to practice their songs. Something of a sheltered lagoon, the dark walls that ringed the inlet provided flattering acoustics for the vain water-dwelling faeries who sunned themselves on the protruding boulders.
Wendy had already encountered the mermaids during her short time on Neverland. The exclusively female creatures seemed to view her as a rival for Peter’s affections and had taken exception to her presence. Fortunately, she had survived that encounter with no more than sodden clothes. Peter had laughed off her dire prediction that the wretches would have happily drowned her given the chance.
“I hid near the edge of the cliff that circles theirconcert spaceso I could listen and watch without being seen.” The sheeries missed the sarcasm, but the cat twitched a whisker or two.
“Why not be invisible?” Leq questioned, baffled that she hadn’t utilized the obvious solution.
Disa answered before she could. “Wenny can’t do that.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Wendy bit back the brief smile. For some reason, the sheeries didn’t pronounce the “d” in her name. They could make the sound—no other words suffered from that particular lack—but her name got special treatment.
“Anyway, I was hidden and waiting for the mermaids to start practicing their songs when Peter and Sadiq appeared on the other side of the bushes.” Some instinct had prevented her from calling out to the boys. She hadn’t understood her gut feeling at the time, but she was grateful to have obeyed it.
