Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,73
Bell (and herself) a reassuring nod, and began marching toward the cliffs. That’s what Englishmen did. They pushed up their sleeves, gritted their teeth, and did what needed to be done. Out in the midday sun, if need be. Like mad dogs.
And so went she.
It was hard going in the strange sand. There were occasional patches of slick white rock, flat as a tabletop and much easier to walk on. But these didn’t always line up the way she was heading; often she had to walk along one until its end and then stumble in the sand until the next one. Any plant she accidentally dragged her legs against left scrapes of both kinds: harmless little white-lined reminders and truly defensive strikes, deep angry red welts.
Wendy was sweating profusely now although it evaporated immediately in the dry air. This caused her some confusion until she finally figured out where the potential rivulets of sweat were disappearing to. Which brought up another worry. In her stories dehydration was much less threatening: “And they couldn’t find water anywhere on the deserted island, not even a coconut palm to climb and crack the fruits thereof and drink the sweet nectar. And so the heroes wandered and thirsted and dreamed of lemonade.…” And of course, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys eventually found something like a washed-up cask of cider or a hidden spring.
Here there were no trees at all, and it seemed very unlikely without Moses to find a spring in the middle of the desert. Lack of water was going to be a real problem, real soon.
Not to mention hunger…
She looked askance at her little friend, who was flying beside her with an equal look of determination. Her teensy brow was a bit dewy and smeared with dust, but it didn’t seem like she was in any real discomfort.
It was hard to tell if time passed at all in that strange land. The cliffs and mesas did seem to grow closer—very slowly—but the light didn’t change at all. Wendy noticed with fascination that the shadows of this land chose their angle and size with no particular logic. A stone might have a long shadow lying to the area she thought of as “east,” as if the sun were setting somewhere to the west, while the bush next to it might have a barely-there black circle clinging to its twiggy skirts like it was high noon. Perhaps that was why Peter was drawn here; the First might have some sort of strange affinity to shadows and shadow magic.
Tinker Bell’s shadow yawned and stretched and pointed here and there, but honestly, the little fairy moved too quickly herself for the difference between them to be that noticeable.
Unlike Wendy’s lack of shadow, which was very noticeable. The ground looked bleak and empty beneath her. She found she missed even the shadow’s not quite appropriate behavior, like when she grew distracted and did something Wendy wasn’t doing. She wondered if the shadow was out looking for Peter. Did she also grow weak without contact with her mistress? Did she need Wendy? And once they found Peter and reunited him with his shadow—would her shadow follow suit?
Or would her shadow prefer to stay in Never Land, where she was free to do as she pleased, rather than return to London and a life of just copying Wendy’s every movement? Would Wendy be able to convince her to go home with her?
She found herself missing deeply the cold and wet weather of that city. It was vastly preferable to the oven they were in now.
Minutes or hours passed. Wendy fretted and swore quietly to herself. Time was ticking away and they were no closer to stopping Hook, his nefarious plans now confirmed by the First.
“What sort of lunatic destroys everything when he can’t win?” she growled. Perhaps it was her fault, as a storyteller. Perhaps recurring villains grew sick of their own recurrence.
Wendy tried not to brush back the hair that wound up in her eyes because then she would get red streaks from the ubiquitous dust in it and all over her face. Tinker Bell had plucked a tiny, thick leaf and tried to hold it as an umbrella above her head—perhaps to keep herself dry in whatever the landscape was doing in her vision. But no matter which way she tilted it she seemed unsatisfed with the results. Eventually she let it drop—but only after taking a tentative bite out of its flesh.