Page 12 of The Last Lost Girl

The vulnerability, the sisterly love in her eyes, makes a knot form in my throat.

“How long has it been since you left?”

Her eyes shift uncomfortably. “I left Neverland the night –”

Belle suddenly crumples. Her inner light winks out and she begins to heave. The home screen of my phone’s cool glow illuminates the sweat glistening on her skin. I reach for her.

“Don’t touch me!” she warns, coughing and gagging.

I watch as a wisp of darkness dips into her mouth and chokes her until she can’t even gasp for breath.

My phone rings and the ringtone’s blare startles the shadow. It retreats enough for her to gulp in thirsty lungfuls of air.

“Tell me how to help you! If I can’t touch you, what can I do?”

“Beach,” she croaks. “I have to get to the beach.”

“You’re in no shape…” I start to argue, but my words evaporate as the shadows move behind Belle, forming viscous, inky wings shaped exactly like the ones in the illustration, the ones she mourns.

Belle’s frame shudders and she relaxes as she sinks onto her hip. “Neverland insists.”

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When she reaches out a hand, I help her up. “We have to go,” she pants before pushing past me. “I have no choice now,” she says. “I can feel what’s left of me dying, Ava. I have to go home.”

Home. Neverland.

My heart cracks. Because I thought this was home. It has been to me, but not to Belle.

“What will happen to you when we reach the shore?” I ask.

Belle doesn’t answer. On tired legs, she moves toward the door, disengages the lock, and steps outside.

Mrs. Jennings stands in her doorway holding Garfield, who hisses at Belle until my sister’s head swivels in its direction. Then the feline goes feral, screeching and clawing her way out of her owner’s arms and over her shoulders before darting back into their apartment. Mrs. Jennings rights her robe, her mouth gaping as she takes us in. Blood blooms in the angry trenches Garfield carved into her forearms and neck.

Belle’s shadowy wings angrily buzz behind her as she crosses the landing. “Please go inside,” I tell her as calmly as I can. And Mrs. Jennings, for once in her life, does not argue or snip. She follows her cat’s lead and retreats. The sharp snicks of her three deadbolts are the only sounds until Belle moves to the staircase.

Not that she needs the steps. Her feet hover a few inches above them, and I understand she’s doing this for my benefit. So I can stay with her a little while longer. For as long as she can bear it.

And I know… I know when we reach the sea, Belle will tell me goodbye, if she’s able, and it will be the last time I see my sister again.

Too many emotions to name race through me. I awkwardly try to process and grasp that this is real – that she, Neverland, and even Peter Pan is real.

The closer we get to the beach, the faster Belle flies. Though I race to keep up, I’m failing miserably. Suddenly, she swoops around behind me and tells me to raise my arms.

“What? Why?”

“Just do it,” she gripes.

I raise them and she hooks her arms beneath mine and begins to lift me. My heels peel away from the sidewalk next to the neon signs glowing in the windows of a tattoo parlor. A man with a dark goatee watches as we pass his shop, forgetting the buzzing tattoo gun in his latex-gloved hand.

I hear a clatter from his direction and turn to see him rush outside. “He’s got his phone out,” I tell her.

Belle growls and the shadows on her back grow. I know that if he snaps a picture or tries to record us, all he will see is darkness.

We fly across Ocean Drive where she drops me into a powdery dune without warning.

I spit grains of sand out of my mouth. “A heads up would’ve been nice.”

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