Chapter 19
CHAPTER
JOHN FOUND ME in the hallway, standing in front of the family portraits. Mother and Father, so young before any of us existed. Then the three of us as children, John in his top hat, Michael clutching his teddy, and me in the center, hair ribboned, eyes bright with something I no longer recognized.
Hope, perhaps. Or ignorance. It was hard to tell the difference anymore.
“Wendy.” His voice was careful. The barrister tone stripped away, leaving only my brother. “We don’t have to do this.”
“Yes. We do.”
“Hook is dead. We have no guide. No map. No way to know if we can even find her once we’re there.” He stepped closer. I saw his reflection in the glass. “And your shadow …”
“I know.”
His hand closed on my shoulder, turning me to face him. “If we go, if we cross over, and we can’t find Agnes quickly enough …”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
“Three days,” I said. “That’s what Hook told us. Three days without my shadow and then … We have just a few hours left.”
I looked down at my feet. My shadow was barely there now. Thin. In the portrait behind me, the girl I used to be cast a shadow whole and complete. That girl had never made promises in ash rings. Had never loved a monster. Had never left boys behind to die in a world that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“If I go,” I said slowly, “I may never come back. I’ll just … disintegrate until there’s nothing left of me. I’ll forget I never was Wendy Darling.”
John nodded. His jaw tight.
“If I don’t go, Agnes dies. She fades into that place, while Peter takes another child. And another. For the next twelve years until he sleeps again.”
I met my brother’s eyes.
“Then I spend the rest of my life knowing I could have stopped it and didn’t.”
I focused on the portrait of young me. That Wendy’s smile didn’t look forced.
“She looks happy,” John said quietly.
“Because she didn’t know what was to come.”
Michael appeared at the end of the hallway. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. I could see it on his face. He already knew the choice I’d made.
“It’s not really a choice, is it?” John said.
My life had belonged to Peter since I was twelve years old. To the ash ring. To the promise. To the guilt of leaving those boys behind. I had spent years making myself small, weighted by guilt, and protecting the children at Marigold House because I couldn’t protect those I’d lost.
“No,” I said. “It’s not a choice.”
I touched the glass. My fingers left no smudge. The young Wendy remained untouched. Unburdened. Forever.
“We need to leave,” I said. “Now. Before Peter gathers himself again.”
Michael nodded. John didn’t argue.
At Father’s old desk, now my desk, I grabbed the key. The one he’d left here years ago. I curled my fingers around it and met my brothers at the nursery room door.
For a moment I wondered what if I just ran away. Left. Went to Marigold House. Hid from all of this. Hid from myself. But I knew there was no running from this threat of destruction. It would follow me.
I turned the key and opened the door.
Inside the room held itself perfectly still.
Everything stood untouched. A museum of our childhood. As if time decided to stop here and never explain where it’d gone.
Toy soldiers held their formation on the shelf, their tin faces lifted in permanent obedient vigilance.
Picture books lay open where we’d left them. Animals smiled in their colored ink.
The curtains hung the same, faded by the sun. And then, on the window ledge our initials.
W M J
A trinity carved by small hands. Children who once believed in flight. In stories. In a boy who promised us that we’d never grow up.
Michael’s breath hitched. John touched the back of a chair. When the old wood groaned beneath his hand, he flinched. As though he’d awoken something that should have stayed asleep.
“We were happy here,” John murmured.
I laid my hand on the window latch. It felt like a flock of birds were beating their wings behind my rib cage.
Michael stood at my left. John at my right.
For a moment, we were the children we’d once been. Older now, but still, we were here. Together.
I pushed the window open. Cold night air rushed in. And beneath it, something sharp and sweet that didn’t belong to London but to a land very far away.
“Ready?” I whispered.
They nodded.
I took Michael’s left hand, John’s right. Our fingers interlaced together, trembling.
“Wait,” Michael said. “I thought only Peter could do this.”
Bound. Together. One. Just like my shadow was merging into Peter’s, his was merging into mine. What he could do, so could I.
“Trust me,” I said, and I closed my eyes. I felt the pull. That tug. And I focused on it, the world around me and the world where I wanted to be. Gravity shifted. My stomach dropped. My feet left the floor.
For a moment, it returned, joy. That same joy I’d felt at twelve years old, when a boy told me I could fly and I believed him.
That was at least one truth he told me.
Stars winked out, one by one. In their place, jagged shapes coiled against black.
I glanced down and my shadow was thinner than just moments before. Still, it followed obediently as shadows should. Pulling toward the second star as if something on the other side was reeling it in.
Behind my eyes I felt something sharp, nails clawing.
That was him. I knew it.
Somewhere, a crow screamed. Then another. They came from nowhere, black specks rising from chimneys, falling from eaves. Their wings beat in the air.
They didn’t attack.
They followed.
We were pulled forward. London tearing away beneath our feet and now crows flanking us on either side. Wind roared. The world blurred. I tasted copper and salt on my tongue, and something else, the familiar rush of falling upward.
Then, we landed.
The world around us had spoiled.
Trees hunched inward. Their trunks warped and their bark split into long vertical seams.
Ferns curled away as we passed. Fungi swelled beneath our steps, soft, wet, pulsing. Even the grass seemed to bleed when we stepped on it.
The crows landed in the branches above. They were silent now, but still, they were watching. Their heads tilted in unison as we moved, tracking us with an intelligence that didn’t belong to birds.
My shadow continued to tug. Pulling me toward the heart of the island. Toward him.
Michael led. John kept close behind me, his breath shallow and quick. “We didn’t bring anything to fight with,” he muttered.
Michael looked over his shoulder. “Wendy?”
I reached into my pocket and drew the dagger. The rubies caught what little light remained. “Hook gave it to me.”
John nodded. “Hold on to it tight. That’s all we’ve got.”
Michael stopped. “You hear that?”
Screaming. The sounds of children screaming or what sounded like children. Voices pitched high, stretched thin.
It all warped until the sound barely resembled anything human.
Vines lashed at our legs, whipping from the brush with a wet snap.
The path beneath us writhed, no longer a spiral but a labyrinth rearranging itself with every step, folding back on itself like intestines trying to digest us whole.
The pull strengthened.
I gasped.
My knees buckled.
The sensation wrenched through me, hot and sick, like a hand had reached inside my chest and tugged. Toward the treehouse. Toward him.
My shadow screamed without sound. I felt it. I felt her, straining ahead of me, pulling so hard my skin burned where she was still attached.
The edges of my vision blurred. My blood beat wrong, too fast in some places, too slow in others, as if my body were being returned to a frequency I didn’t recognize.
Come home, something whispered.
Not a voice. A feeling.
Come home, come home, come home.
Somewhere behind me, Michael shouted my name, but his voice came through waterlogged. Drowned.
“Wendy!” John’s voice behind me, ragged. “Can you continue?”
I nodded, catching my breath.
His hand found my shoulder, steadied me. “Where to now?”
“The treehouse,” I managed. My tongue tasted like rust. “Agnes must be there.”
The forest tightened around us. Each step felt heavier than the last, and the pull more painful.
I doubled over, bile rising in my throat.
“Wendy …” Michael’s voice shook with fear.
“Keep moving,” I gasped. “If we stop, I don’t think I can start again.”
The light changed. Colorless. Suspended.
Ahead, the trees split open, their bark peeling back in curling in shreds.
The ground beneath us turned pale. Grass gave way to splinters that jutted upward like broken bones.
And then … silence.
Not the absence of sound but more like a pressure. It settled over us. It pressed into my skull.
My heartbeat slowed.
I staggered sideways, tried to right myself again. Keep going. You have to keep going. She needs you.
But the pain … my insides were on fire.
I wanted to scream, if only to prove I still existed, but I could not. My breath came in haggard gasps, Michael followed close by, and up ahead John stopped.
What does he see?
I kept moving, closer to him. My eyes fixed on the space where he was facing. Where the trees disappeared and … there.
The treehouse rose before us.
It hadn’t collapsed. It had caved in on itself and surrendered to its surroundings.
Timber ribs jutted through the gray sky like bones. The boards were split wide, not rotted but ruptured, as though something had forced its way out from the inside.
The pull yanked again, so hard I tasted blood.
Home, it said. You’re home.
A rotted rope ladder dangled from a beam above, swaying though there was no wind. The entire treehouse breathed. Wooden boards swayed.
“Agnes!” I shouted. Listened, but there was nothing. We walked the ruins, searching.
Ivy crawled over the beams. Bramble punched through the floorboards. The wood had gone soft with rot, sagging under its own weight.
But still, I could see what had been done.
A wooden sword lay half buried in the fire pit, its handle carved with initials I couldn’t read anymore.