Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,48
waves to get a closer look at a whale spouting she realized why. The mild breezes that kept her cool on the beach were whipped into much stronger versions of themselves over the ocean. She found herself suddenly pitched out of control by a rogue gust and in danger of being batted out to sea—or of a good dunking.
“A bit too Icarus there,” she chastised herself, using her arms to somewhat un-prettily flap her way back to land.
Tinker Bell wisely only skimmed over the shallowest wavelets that encroached on the beach. She dipped a finger into the surface as she went, throwing up a pretty little spray that made rainbows in the golden sunlight. Fish leapt over her wake, flashing silver. Wendy caught her breath at the thoughtless beauty of it all. The fairy didn’t care how others perceived what she did—she just did. Whatever she wanted. The results were often grace and spectacle.
When Wendy did whatever she wanted, people hated it. Like at parties. Like at Christmas, when she had been so full of the beauty of the season and the festive caroling music that she had made the mistake of enthusiastically telling everyone how a Never Land holiday might be run. Utterly unaware (at first) that not only did the people there not care about the holidays of an imaginary world or its cleverly invented trappings, but also that they were more than a little horrified that these stories came out of the mouth of a sixteen-year-old, and not a child.
(She had also been unaware at the time that her behavior would become the prime topic of jokes and gossip for the next season.)
Back in the reality of Never Land, the dark peaks of the Black Dragon Mountains glowered in the far distance, ominous smoke circling them like a scarf. Gray and brown twists of vapor rolled around each other like serpents, the air so thick it had texture and mass. Everything together fooled the eye into thinking there was an actual dragon—the size of a city—slithering through the landscape.
Maybe after they found Peter Pan and saved Never Land Wendy could explore those mountains and look for real dragons. She wondered how long the fairy dust would last.
It would, of course, be far more fun with someone else along. Even a foul-tempered fairy.
The northern side of the Mermaid Lagoon was a rocky, leisurely half-moon with a strip of jungle clinging to its stony spine. Flickering through green shadows were bright birds in orange, green, and yellow flocks. Here the clean, salty slap of the sea air was replaced by a heavy atmosphere of exotic blooms and ancient, earthy decay.
Tinker Bell headed for a gray ledge studded with palm trees, a hidden platform from which they could survey the water below. She landed silently and then crawled to the edge to peep over the side, keeping her body flat and out of sight from the ground.
Wendy did her best to emulate the fairy but her long skirt kept tangling in her legs. Frustrated and in a huff, she decided it was safe with no one but a girl fairy around to see her and hiked the dress up between her knees. Ignoring Tink’s eye roll at her awkward maneuvers, she leaned over the lip of the rock for a look.
A paradisiacal lagoon lay below them. The water was an unbelievable, unreal turquoise, its surface so still that every feature of the bottom could be admired in magnified detail: colorful pebbles, bright red kelp, fish as pretty and colorful as the jungle birds. A waterfall on the far side fell softly from a height of at least twenty feet. A triple rainbow graced its frothy bottom. Large boulders stuck out of the water at seemingly random intervals, black and sun-warmed and extremely inviting, like they had been placed there on purpose by some ancient giant. And on these were the mermaids.
Wendy gasped at their beauty.
Their tails were all colors of the rainbow, somehow managing not to look tawdry or clownish. Deep royal blue, glittery emerald green, coral red, anemone purple. Slick and wet and as beautifully real as the salmon Wendy’s father had once caught on holiday in Scotland. Shining and voluptuously alive.
The mermaids were rather scandalously naked except for a few who wore carefully placed shells and starfish, although their hair did afford some measure of decorum as it trailed down their torsos. Their locks were long and thick and sinuous and mostly the same shades as their tails.