Page 65 of Losing Wendy

“It’s happened again,” Simon says, panic trilling his voice. “We found him over by the cove… His face…” Simon’s eyes go in and out of focus.

“Who?” Peter and I shout at the same time. The plea in his voice is for his Lost Boys.

Mine’s for my brothers.

CHAPTER 26

Simon loses the contents of his stomach twice on the run back to the cove. Normally, I wouldn’t be able to keep pace with a fae, but Simon’s normally tanned face has paled to a ghoulish white, his limbs trembling. His shoulders sag, his limbs kicking through the earth, freshly muddied by the mist that’s overcome the island. It looks as if he might topple over any minute, and he often does, disappearing into the brush to hide the vomit from me.

We don’t say much on the way to the cove. Peter launched into the sky as soon as the boy’s name left Simon’s lips. I can’t bear to think of his name right now, his face, one I only just saw…

My legs ache, pulling me back to the Den. But I have to see for myself, or else I’m afraid I’ll pretend it away like Peter and this poor boy’s memory will be lost to the grim past, just like Thomas’s.

There’s the guilt too, pinching my chest. The gaping hole taken out of my soul when Simon told me who it was, and I rejoiced inwardly that it wasn’t John or Michael.

When we finally reach the edge of the tree line hemming in the cove, Simon props himself against a tree and leans his foreheadagainst it, breathing in the cool isle air. I squeeze his shoulder, and he acknowledges me with a feeble grimace.

Fog duststhe crystalline blue waters of the cove. Minerals drip from the glacier resting between the mountains into the water, giving it its vibrant hue. From a distance, it almost looks like someone dumped a lake’s worth of sky-blue paint into a hole in the ground, the water appears so thick, palpable.

But as I approach the shore, several dark figures cut through the fog—one winged, the others huddled, their figures merging like crowded shadows.

Only one shadow lies parallel with the shoreline, a dash of gray paint. An accident, swept in the wrong direction.

Murmurs bounce across the black-pebbled shoreline, a few quiet sobs joining them. I scan the crowd of Lost Boys but don’t see John and assume he stayed back at the Den, watching over Michael.

I would have done the same. Michael shouldn’t see this.

Only once I reach Peter’s side do I let myself examine the body. You would think my brain would have had time to process it on the way, but seeing him slack-jawed and bloodied steals the wind out of me the same as if I’d happened upon him unsuspecting.

Freckles’s eyes are closed, but there’s no mistaking him for a sleeping boy. Not with the blood that coats the belly of his shirt. Not with the lacerations carved into his face.

Cuts trace his freckles in a meticulous pattern, one that stirs a memory in me I can’t quite place. Still, there’s no mistaking that the pattern is premeditated.

I feel that my stomach should turn over, but it doesn’t. The alienist my mother hired for me when I was a child said I had a tendency of disassociating with my pain.

He was wrong, of course.

I don’t disassociate. I just tuck it away for later. It simply lurks in the shadows of my mind, waiting to assault me when I’m alone, likea lioness waiting for the straggler to become separated from its pack.

A quietness has overcome the boys since I arrived. I sense their stares boring into me, surely wondering when the only girl among them will faint.

Unnatural. That’s the word my mother’s alienist had used for me when he completed his evaluation. He’d shown me pictures, sketches taken from grueling crime scenes. Bodies—usually women—dismembered.

Doesn’t have the womanly instinct for compassion within her, is what he’d told my mother.

I suppose I’d been supposed to cry. Vomit. Shake. Something other than blink. I had, of course, once night fell. But I’m sure the alienist was sound asleep in his own bed by that point.

Part of me must believe the alienist’s accusations, because I make myself examine my memories of Freckles. His bashful, goofy smile. The feel of leather as he tucked his journal into my hands. Our mingled laughter as he taunted me to wrestle him, then picked me off the ground.

I feel nothing.

Victor is the first to speak up. “You going to try to convince us this was an accident, too?”

Peter swivels his stony gaze upon the boy with shadowed eyes. “No, I’m not.”

“As both Thomas and Freckles were found with unnatural wounds, it stands to reason that they were both murdered. Most likely by the same individual,” says Benjamin, his analytical gaze unwavering from Freckles’s wounds.

Fear ripples through me, and it’s visible in the Lost Boys too. The way they shudder and tremble.

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