Page 68 of Losing Wendy

I pause, my words thick and slimy, caught there in the stinging pain of the lump forming in my throat.

“You like to think your pain makes you noble, but it doesn’t hold you in the same esteem, Wendy Darling. You care more for it than it cares for you.”

My mouth goes dry. “You’ve lost someone very dear to you,” I whisper. “You need time to heal.”

“What for? To get patched up in time for the next death to occur,the next person to be ripped from my hands? Those who keep their pain close only do so because they’re too weak, too dependent to let it go. They’re incapable of admitting it doesn’t make them any better, any stronger. Too weak to lift their sorry chins up and look to the future.”

I could take away your pain.

I venture a step forward. Peter doesn’t tense. Doesn’t react at all.

“If you’re not hurting, why did you fly up here by yourself?”

Peter doesn’t look at me. He just stares into the sky above. “Thomas liked the stars. Before…before Neverland, he must have pored over books about constellations, because he had all of them memorized. That kind of memory wasn’t taken from him. He knew constellations I’d never heard of, though he could never tell the stories that go along with them.”

Finally, Peter turns to face me. “I came up here because the picture you showed me reminded me of that, and I wanted to remember sitting up here with Thomas as he traced patterns in the sky.”

“Oh,” I say. I can’t help but notice how he doesn’t mention Freckles. Like he can’t stand to even approach a pain that lingers so close. Like it’s easier to ignore it and focus on something more distant.

Peter raises his voice. “Come on, Wendy Darling. No comment about how my way of remembering my friend is somehow inferior to yours?”

There’s no acid in his tone—it’s still flat. Bored, almost.

I shake my head, shame wafting over me, tingeing my cheeks in unpleasant warmth.

“No. No, I’d rather not do that,” I say, though it makes me uncomfortable how right he is to assume judgment on my part.

Peter points, and I follow the line of his finger. I stare up at the sky, remembering the lessons my tutors gave me about the stories written in the sky.

“That one’s the Reaper,” I say, identifying the constellation of a robed figure holding a scythe above us.

“Are you familiar with the tale?”

I think back to the story behind the formidable constellation and nod. “The legend is that, when we die, the Reaper comes with his familiar—a fox, I think—to escort us to the afterlife. Some time ago, the Reaper fell in love with a living woman. But he soon grew lonely, desperate for her company as they could only meet one another during the brief moments surrounding a nearby death. Impatient, the Reaper took the woman’s life, slaughtering her with his sickle. But the Reaper was never supposed to take life, only to lead souls as they transitioned from bodily to spiritual form. By killing her, he’d inadvertently tied her soul to the earth. When she rotted, the ground took her as its own, and in the spot she was buried grew a tree. An oak so great it burst through the headstone her family had used to mark where she lay. They say the branches were barren and formed the shape of a hand—the woman’s spirit reaching above, hoping to grasp hold of her lover, but never able to bridge the gap between the earth and the heavens, the physical and spiritual.”

“And what of the roots?” asks Peter.

I scrunch my brow, confused, until the memory returns. “It’s said that if you see a fox digging at the base of a tree, it’s the Reaper’s familiar seeking the woman’s soul in the roots. But…oh.”

I choke back a sob, recognizing now why the pattern carved into Freckles’s cheek looked so familiar. “It’s a fox.Thefox.” I search the sky, finding the constellation just below the Reaper.

“I gather you see the resemblance now,” Peter says, voice dry.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence?” I ask. “I could see a killer marking his victim with the Reaper’s familiar anyway, but the fact that Thomas, the first victim, adored constellations…”

“You seem to have answered your own question. And the fox was Thomas’s favorite.”

My mind races. On the shore of the cove, I’d wondered if there were two different killers, given the different causes of death. But the murderer practically bragged about killing Thomas by cutting the Reaper’s fox into Freckles’s skin. “Peter, if the killer knew Thomas…”

He cuts me off. “Why exert all that effort climbing up here?”

I’m so taken aback, the rest of my question gets caught in my throat. “You were hurting. I thought you might want some company.” It strikes me how true the words are. How I’d convinced myself I was doing this for John and Michael.

Peter’s face is devoid of emotion as he finally turns to look at me. “I thought I already told you,” he says. “I don’t want you at all.”

CHAPTER 28

“So you think the same person killed Thomas and Freckles?” John asks, tapping his fingers against his knees as he sits at the side of his cot, directly across from me. An hour of trekking down the bluffs and across the forest to reach the Den had left me exhausted, but that had done nothing to deter John from bombarding me with questions about Freckles’s murder.

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