Page 145 of Freeing Hook

Peter takes my hand. “Wendy, you’re in shock. You need time to process—”

“Don’t talk to me about processing,” I snap, anger fueling me. Confusion warps Peter’s face.

I want to laugh at him. To ask him what he expected choosing him to look like in practicality.

I can choose Peter all day long. I can let him hold me. I can kiss him and bed him if that’s what he’s after.

I can choose him and make him miserable at the same time. I wouldn’t be the first.

Peter and I stay locked in a stare-down, but he folds first. It takes me a moment to understand his hesitation is because he can’t stand my pain. “I don’t think you’re going to like the answer that you find.”

“I didn’t like finding my brother’s corpse hanging from the reaping tree,” I say, vaguely noticing how hardened my voice has gone. “Somehow, I doubt the answer to my question of when Victor last saw him will be more painful than that. I don’t think finding his killer will be worse than that.”

“And if there’s not a murderer?” says Victor.

“Victor?” Peter asks as we both turn toward the Lost Boy.

Victor nods, almost ashamed. “John stopped eating the onions a few days ago.”

Peter curses under his breath.

“What does that have to do with how he ended up dead?” I ask.

“Because,” Victor says, “Simon stopped eating the onions too.”

My heart doesn’t have it in me to fear anymore. “And what happened to Simon?”

Later,when we bury John, I have Victor help me remove his coat. I can’t bear to do it myself. Feel the weight of John’s body without any of the resistance that would normally indicate life. Can’t bear to wrestle it off of him. Victor helps by keeping John’s body stable, sitting it upright as I tug the coat off my brother’s arms.

The process makes me sick, but I make myself push through. I want Michael to have John’s coat. Something to wrap around himself that reminds him of his brother.

Still, once John is buried, I find I’m the one who’s wrapping myself in his coat, cowered in the corner of Peter’s bedroom—my bedroom now. It’s a pitiful excuse for John’s embrace, but it’s all I have left of him.

My hands haven’t stopped shaking since I found John’s body strung up in the tree. I’m so tired of seeing my fingers tremble, witnessing my body’s reaction to the agony it’s been through over the past few days, so I hide them in John’s coat pockets.

My fingers brush against something cold. Wooden. I remove my hand to reveal a tile, much like the ones John and I used to make for Michael to help him communicate. My heart aches as I turn it over in my hand. John must have been working on a communication board for Michael to use in Neverland. This one says “PETER” and is inscribed with an icon of wings. I can see Michael now, bringing it to John on one of the nights Peter was out on an errand for the Sister, or out looking for me. His way of asking John where Peter was. John trying to explain that Peter was out. That he’d be back soon.

Michael doesn’t understand either of those concepts.

It’s this thought that breaks me most of all.

EPILOGUE

WENDY

At night, I speak to the shadows. I ask them if that’s why they hid my eyes from John’s body. If it was because they were ashamed of what they did.

They don’t answer back, of course.

They can’t.

Not with the faerie dust flowing through me.

Peter doses me twice a day now. Every time he brings it to my lips, I hear Astor’s voice, his grating condescension mocking me for my weakness. But his words can only reach me for a moment at a time before they’re silenced by the taste of honeysuckle and a whirl of lights.

Even when the first rush dissipates, I can hardly hear him.

But I can still hear John. Sometimes he’s alive, laughing with his morbid sense of humor, making jokes about his death like he did the deaths of our parents. I laugh with him until I cry.

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