The small rowboat battled against the waves, occasionally churning in a circle as swirling crests around them roared with unchecked fury. The boat finally pitched and rocked forward, striving out to sea as if the waves themselves were carrying it. Wendy felt her arms clench as she drove the paddle into the water again and again, her hard determination inching them forward, her teeth grinding against each other. Michael was sobbing beside her, clutching the boat with one hand and her dress in the other. Finally, the boat seemed to pass some sort of barrier; the angry waves determined to hurtle themselves against the rock turned into waves that rose only to disappear again without the resulting foamy splash.
The paddle went in again and again. Wendy, soaked to the bone, her hands bloodied and splintered, began to hope. A full white moon rose over Neverland, and even through the pouring rain, she could make out its pocked surface. At first, it brought her comfort, this moon with all its history, the moon that she had watched out of her nursery window, just a girl gazing at the stars. Then she remembered that this wasn’t the same moon, and that these weren’t the same stars. She was a world away from her parents in the most devastating of ways. A prayer fell from her lips into the open ocean, out over the waves, into the pouring rain.
Her paddling slowed but kept its soothing rhythm: splash, pull, pivot, rise. Pan Island rose up behind them, fading now into the misty shroud that wrapped the island, barely discernible through the fat raindrops that were filling the boat. There was a moment of quiet before Michael began screaming. Wendy looked up to see a figure plunging toward them through the air, hurtling down toward the boat with unthinkable speed. Wendy stood up and held the oar out, trying to keep her feet steady as the boat pitched underneath her. Thunder crackled across the sky as gray clouds swirled in a tumult of stormy air, the sea and the sky becoming one. Wendy braced herself, the oar across her chest.
“Leave us alone!” she screamed into the wind. “If you love me, then you will leave us alone!”
Peter’s voice swirled down from above, moving so fast, Wendy couldn’t be sure exactly where it was coming from. “You know I can’t do that.” There was laughter, rising into hysterics. “You thought . . . you thought that you could escape me?”
A funnel of air pushed past her face. He was close. “Michael, lie down in the boat and cover your eyes. Do as I say,” she whispered. The waves around the boat were growing larger now, each one more powerful than the next, coming from some unknown shift in their pattern. They began spilling over the side, sloshing the hull, filling the bottom. The boat was pitching from side to side, pitiless gravity taking its toll, the small boat lingering on each pitch before violently bursting upward. Wendy stumbled, falling to her knees before righting herself and pushing her soaked hair out of her eyes.
“COME ON!” she screamed into the air, tired of waiting, tired of being afraid, anger rolling off her with beads of rain. “I’m RIGHT HERE!”
But there wasn’t a sound, except for the rain, which finally slowed to a drizzle.
“COME AND GET ME, PETER PAN!” she screamed, her legs straddling her little brother, who was curled at her feet, the water lapping at his face as he cried with his hands covering his eyes. She waited a moment, watching as the waves grew larger, engulfing the tip of the boat, unrelenting as they pounded the wood. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might drown. Michael’s sobs were becoming hysterical, and without looking down, she knelt, reaching out one hand to touch his hair.
Lightning flashed, and she saw him, lunging for her, the handsome boy with the emerald eyes. She swung the oar as hard as she could, and it caught him on the side of the head. He tumbled into the water with a roar. Wendy looked over the side, and that’s when the boat overturned, flipping so fast that there was only water, and Wendy knew they were dead.
She could feel the saltwater rushing into her lungs, all around her, salt in her eyes, the callous crashing of the waves pounding and spinning her under the surface. Lightning cracked above and she saw the flash of a fin underneath her, the flick of a sharp tail. She gasped and kicked, her arm,s clawing, her dress all around her, drowning her. With a loud scream, she broke the surface.
“MICHAEL! MICHAEL! MICHAEL!” She couldn’t see anything but she was screaming, screaming his name, hoping that the water would take her before she would see her brother drown. A head slowly rose up in the water before her, dripping red hair, bloodred in the night, wide eyes that streamed navy tears. Terrifying, a monster. Peter stared silently at her for a moment before his hands wrapped around her throat.
“Peter! Please!” She struggled to breathe.
He began sobbing. “I love you! Why are you doing this? Why can’t you love me? It could be . . . so . . . easy.”
Her ragged breaths were being choked out of her as she struggled to free his hands from her throat. “Peter . . . I can’t breathe.”