Page 40 of Losing Wendy

The spell over Victor snaps, and his caustic snort sends the butterfly fluttering away. “Trust me. Peter did nothing.”

When I don’t answer, he gives me a grim smile. “Listen. All I meant is that you need to be careful. This island isn’t your friend.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that it was.”

“Good.” Victor cranes his neck, beckoning me deeper into the forest. After his ominous comment, I’m even more reticent to follow him. But we’re already far enough from the Den that no one would hear if he tried to hurt me anyway.

“Victor? Can I ask you something?” I say, my throat going dry.

“Sure.”

“Did you…when you lost your memories…did it happen gradually? Or had you already lost them by the time you got to Neverland?”

Victor furrows his brow, considering. “I can’t remember a time in Neverland when I could recall what my life was like before. But the first several weeks we got here are hazy anyway. I’m not sure I can trust what I remember from that time.”

“So you just woke up one day in Neverland—no memories of who you were?”

Victor’s jaw bulges. “Something like that. Except I remember being feverish when I first got here. Throwing up all the time. Sweating through my sheets. We all were. If I still had my memories at that time, I would have been too ill to care.”

I work my lip, thinking. “How long were you ill?”

Victor wipes his black hair from his brow. “Could have been a week. Could have been a year, for all I knew.”

Dread settles in my stomach. Did Peter take the boys’ memoriesor did the island? I’ve heard of merchants falling terribly ill when first arriving in new lands, their bodies unaccustomed to the illnesses that inhabit specific regions. It’s dreadful, but I’d be more comforted if I knew for sure that the boys lost their memories before they came here. Otherwise, if it really is the work of a strange illness or a devious magic that inhabits the island, what’s to stop the same thing from happening to me? To John and Michael?

For the rest of our trip, I take account of every memory I can muster. The feel of the clock tower bricks, the rust of the ladder. The sound of Michael’s high-pitched screams when he was a baby. Every story Mother ever read me before bed. The face of every tutor I strove to please.

The memories are still there—but for how long?

When we reach the trap, it’s already caught our meal for the day. A hare is snared in its coil, its body hardened in death, its black eyes wide and glassy.

Later, when Simon asks me if I cried, I lie and tell him I did.

CHAPTER 15

Ever since I was a little girl, people have had a tendency to spill their secrets at my feet. Drunk middle-aged women over for dinner at my parents’ manor would tell me that their husbands had never touched them, not even on their wedding night. Men would wander off to the balcony to smoke, find me perched atop the railing, my feet dangling over the edge, and confide in me that they’d never felt successful enough for their titles. Or they’d tell me about the working-class woman they let their aristocratic parents talk them out of marrying. Every one of them had a gaping hole in their soul, one that success and riches had never even begun to fill.

I guess I have one of those faces. Gentle eyes free of judgment. Or perhaps I’ve always seemed the type of girl with too few friends to risk telling their secrets.

Either way, people do not hold their tongues in my presence.

Guilt taps against my soul as I remember the walk earlier today with Simon. He’s a nice boy, one I think might wish to be a friend to me here.

But it had worked.

All it had taken was asking him if he’d ever wanted to escape, and he’d told me exactly where Peter keeps his faerie dust reserves.

Besides, I have to get John and Michael out of here. Something is off about this island, these boys. There’s a grisly truth hiding in the shadows, crawling in the canopy, waiting to strike. I’m not sure what happened here that has Victor so embittered—that has Simon so nervous around Victor—but I keep replaying something he said.

Peter did nothing.

He’d almost told me in the forest, but something had stopped him.

I keep counting up my memories like I’m a vendor in the market numbering my stock to make sure a petty thief hasn’t run off with anything.

There are memories I wouldn’t mind this island taking from me—the feel of velvet underneath my fingernails and hot, greedy breath against my flesh. The last flash of light in my parents’ eyes before their spirits slipped from their bodies through the gashes in their throats.

But I won’t let this island take my brothers’ memories.

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