Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,31

Michael.

“Now, you listen to me—” Wendy began in her best adult voice, as if she were speaking to Michael.

Bad choice.

“NO MORE LISTENING!” the thing screeched madly, pushing itself as high and far into Wendy’s face as it could. “YOU GO AWAY NOW. FOREVER. TO FOREVER PLACE!”

It reached back its arm to hurl the little spear—

But Luna had had enough.

She threw herself at the horrid thing. Her claws made little tinging noises as they scraped harmlessly against the crystalline surface. Her teeth slipped from the creature’s neck, unable to get a good hold or sink into real flesh.

While the creature was distracted by this Wendy took the opportunity to try to free herself. She rocked back and forth as hard as she could against the vines, pushing her arms and legs out as far as they would go. The tendrils gave just enough for her to be able to slip her right hand out. She immediately reached into her pocket and grabbed the stone she had taken from her hut. Summoning as much boy-chucking-rocks-in-a-fountain as she could, Wendy hurled it full-force at the creature’s bulbous crystalline stomach.

There was a very satisfying crack.

As soon as the tip of the rock hit its “skin,” giant ragged cracks appeared from the impact point. These rapidly winnowed out through the rest of its body, growing like Jack Frost on a windowpane—but much, much faster.

The thing’s mouth hung open and it dropped its spear. As the fractures spread it waved its arms back and forth helplessly, like a puppet or a windup toy.

When the cracks reached its head and became so numerous that its body was almost opaque, the thing exploded.

Its glittering bits hurled themselves every which way through the dappled sunlight in a beautiful wave of tinkles and pings one might expect to hear from baby angels playing harps.

Wendy flinched and covered her face. Where a shard hit her skin it immediately melted, running down to the ground with little droplets of her own blood.

“Well,” she said uncertainly.

Luna jumped back and forth over the thing’s rapidly disappearing body, barking last warnings and triumph.

“Goodness,” Wendy added.

She let herself experience one more moment of shock, then forced herself to focus and work at pulling away the vines. They were unpleasant to touch (and sticky and itchy) but actually not that hard to wrestle out of now that she had one hand free and no distractions. In fact they were strangely like a pair of her mother’s hose the three children had once gotten into massive amounts of trouble for using to tie up Michael when he was “kidnapped by pirates.” Same color, even.

“Hmm…” Wendy said thoughtfully.

Then, a little nervously: “I suppose that’s the last of them?”

Luna barked, and it sounded like an affirmative response, but Wendy couldn’t be certain.

“I think it was really going to kill me,” Wendy murmured, putting her hand out. The wolf immediately came over and leaned against her friend, sensing her need. “Isn’t it funny…”

There were a lot of thoughts in Wendy’s head, and none of them were actually funny at all. They weren’t even clear or formed thoughts; just a mishmash of feelings, misgivings, and the unnamed, fetal beginnings of ideas. Not a situation she was used to: possessing a quiet mess of genesis with no articulation. No pronouncements, aphorisms, or decisions came readily to her tongue.

“Isn’t it funny,” she tried again. “I thought Captain Hook would be the only real villain here. I mean, the only one I would bump into, because of the shadow. And here I have run into a villain I didn’t even know existed…one my brother invented as some sort of protector or savior. It’s not really clear what that thing was, is it? But all of my stories were perfectly clear and straightforward.”

She looked around at the trees and the foliage, the sky and the ground. Things she had brushed by in quick descriptive phrases to the boys—desert island, tropical plants, venomous but beautiful insects—were solid in more detail than she could ever imagine, down to the tiny veins on the leaves. Apparently Never Land got “worked on” when she wasn’t even talking to the boys…they imagined things on their own. Or at least Michael did. To a little child, the idea of No Grown-Ups Allowed, to the point of the death, might seem reasonable. Funny, even.

Time passed for the three siblings in London…but it didn’t in Never Land. Michael’s whims and fancies remained the same here while he grew up in London. And these whims