Page 98 of The Last Lost Girl

“You have feathers stuck to your feet,” is her only reply as she stares daggers at Hudson.

I stop in front of her, blocking her view of him and forcing her to look at me instead. “You seem more like… you. How are you back?” Right now she is more Belle than shadow, and I don’t want her to allow the control to shift back to the darkness again. I pluck a stray piece of thread from the hem of my borrowed shirt. “And where did you even go? What was so important that you left me – on Neverland?”

She peeks at Hudson again and narrows her eyes at him. “I left you in what I thought were capable and trustworthy… hands.”

Hudson crosses his arms and offers a dark laugh at her awful and very intentional insult.

“Appendages that should be kept off my sister!” she quickly adds. The shadows darken around Belle’s entire frame. “I went to get help. I tried to find my family, but they were gone. Where are my people, Hudson?”

He braces his hand and hook on his hips. “I’m sorry, Tinkerbell. I don’t know. But we both know who likely does.”

Pan.

My heart falls, and Hudson’s remorseful tone cleaves it before it hits my feet. “I tried to find them right after you left to give them the message you asked me to deliver, but the entire glade had been abandoned. As had the falls and the cave… everything. I hoped they’d gone into hiding, but none of us have seen them since.”

The mark on my back starts to burn so insistently that my breath catches in my lungs. I can’t find the strength to release it for a long moment. Just as quickly as it came on, the pain ebbs again. I take a calming breath, wondering what that was. The mark hasn’t hurt since Pan gave it to me.

Belle notices that something is off. “Ava?”

I need to tell her what Pan did but I don’t want to, because for the first time I can remember, I’m not sure I entirely trust her. Why hasn’t she given the shadows back? Why doesn’t she help to set things right and get everyone trapped in Neverland back home?

If she thought she could enlist her family, her kind, to help and now they’re gone, there are others who would join her. I’m no prize, but I’ll stand by her side. Hudson and his crew will, too. People from town, and from the islands I haven’t seen. She doesn’t have to face Pan alone. If we band together, none of us do. But she has to do what she came here to do, which is give the shadows back.

Pain flares between my shoulder blades again and I stumble forward.

Belle’s hand darts out, but before she touches me, I see shadowed claws and remember Nyin, pinned as the ship’s figurehead, using her claws to whittle her perch away. Nyin, who by Pan was tainted and twisted into something she was never meant to be.

The siren’s warning resurfaces, and I’m struck with a dark, terrible thought. “Belle – what if your family is here, but you don’t recognize them?” I turn to Hudson. “Like the mermaid…”

My sister pauses, then slowly asks, “What mermaid?”

“Pan used shadow magic to turn them all into monsters. She told me that in the water. That’s what we were talking about,” I pointedly tell Hudson before turning back to Belle. “I used the last of the golden salve to heal one before I knew what she used to be.”

A sharper cut of pain buckles my knees and they hit the floor. It’s hard to breathe or move at all. The shadow pierces my heart again and I arch and scream. Belle falls to her knees in front of me, clutching at my elbows and begging me to tell her what’s wrong while the shadows poisoning me threaten me against doing so.

“Pan,” I pant.

My sister’s fingers tighten around my arms. “What did he do to you?” I can’t answer, so she turns to the captain. “What did he do to my sister?” she demands.

He raises my shirt and shows Belle the shadow mark.

Her gasp is cutting. And when Hudson’s fearful eyes meet mine, I almost see him thinking what he told me that night in the dark… Peter always wins.

Her hands tentatively probe the shadow mark. “I can’t,” she chokes. She holds her palm between my shoulders and closes her eyes. “I can’t heal it. It repels what little magic I have left.” She goes quiet and still. Doesn’t even breathe.

I look up to see her staring into nothing, her eyes unfocused even as they rake back and forth. She’s here, but she’s not with us. “Belle?”

Fear curdles my blood as she suddenly chokes, her back curving as she retches on darkness. In horror, I watch as the ribbons she spews lengthen and stretch out to reach me. No, they skirt over my shoulders and extend toward the middle of my back.

When they touch my skin, the mark thrums. I twist to see what’s happening and my blood goes cold.

I could never see the mark before, but it’s grown. Spread.

Vines made of oily darkness sprawl toward my shoulder. One creeps over its summit…

I want to clip them all. Rip them up from the root. I want to tear the sun from the sky and use it to scorch them from my skin. I want to hurl what brittle shred is left into the sea and watch it flounder, then be swallowed whole.

Hudson is at my side, telling me it’s going to be okay.

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