it was no longer drowsy but growling and angry.
The swarm turned and dove at her face.
Wendy screamed. She tried to knock them away, now using her dagger like a badminton racquet. But they didn’t bounce away lightly like a shuttlecock. Every time she injured one, it stuck on the dagger—like thick honey—and she had to shake it loose before defending herself from another one.
“Tinker Bell! Are you all right? How are you doing?”
The jingles that came back to her were angry and loud but otherwise unintelligible.
The things were now bludgeoning Wendy’s body hard enough to leave bruises.
“Let’s just push our way through—maybe we can outpace them!”
Wendy covered her face with her arms, and, pointing her dagger before her, flew upward into the thick of the swarm. Hopefully where they least expected her to go.
She burst into the clear night air, shedding bees like ugly raindrops.
Tinker Bell zoomed through the path she had made and appeared by her side, disheveled and a little scratched. But red with anger and ready to go.
“Come on, this way!” Wendy pointed south, because that was the way the pirate ship had been heading. At least she thought it was south—she was turned around from the bees and there were no points of reference from which to take her bearings. Ursa Major didn’t look quite right and there were no moons at all.
The two girls spread their arms and took off into the wind…and then Wendy looked behind her.
The swarm had caught on to their escape plans. Like a strange yellow-and-orange tornado, they crowded together and rushed at the two girls.
“Back this way!” Wendy cried, pointing. Tinker Bell nodded, understanding immediately.
They dove under the swarm.
Momentum—and insect stupidity—continued to carry the bees forward, now the wrong way, away from the two girls.
But it wasn’t very long before they righted themselves and were in pursuit again.
“All right. Hide in the clouds?” Wendy suggested. But there were none now. The storm had finished and it was a perfectly clear night, not a wisp in sight.
I don’t think we can outrun them, Tinker Bell jingled sadly. This is why they’re so dangerous—they’re relentless. Once the colony is on the warpath, they will never let up.
“Surely there must be some escape…” Wendy said, looking around desperately for a mountain or a cave or some other sort of answer to present itself.
This isn’t London. You can’t escape Never Land the way you could escape your life in the city.
“I feel like we should revisit this theme later, and less ironically,” Wendy muttered. “Also: Ouch. All right. I suppose it’s…fisticuffs, then?”
She tried to ready herself for the clash, putting her arms up the way she imagined a boxer might, but with her dagger out.
The bees came, their hum and bodies filling the sky to the horizon.
“They never actually sting,” Wendy reminded herself bravely. They just had numbers and mass.
That didn’t stop it from being utterly terrifying when they hit.
They slammed into her all over her body. She could barely get a breath in between their blows, which came like a massive, fuzzy hailstorm. Their droning drowned all her thoughts.
She tried her badminton strategy again, using the length of her arm and dagger together as one weapon, connecting with as many bees as she could with each blow.
This was moderately successful, at least for knocking them away—if not actually killing them.
Still they kept coming.
One clocked her in the head so badly she saw stars. She fell, spiraling to earth.
Only Tinker Bell’s quick response and tiny hands on hers guided Wendy back into remembering which way was up.
A hundred, a thousand bees were waiting for her when she returned to battle.
Her arm throbbed. Her left eye swelled almost shut. Her stomach ached from the angry purple bruises that now covered it. Without her shadow, Wendy’s reserves were depleted quickly.
And they just kept coming.
Every time she thought they had done enough, that she and Tinker Bell had killed enough of the creatures, they would try to fly away—only to be pursued twice as angrily by the remainders. They never gave up.
Hit, block, hit, drop.
Hit, block, hit, drop.
It was clear: there was no escaping, no flying away, no resting, no stopping for a breath, no doing anything else until the last bee was gone.
Wendy dispatched the thysolits one after another without thought, sending their waning lights and broken bodies down to earth. The whole thing was less like a heroic battle than scullery work: endlessly scrubbing and scrubbing a room of dirt and grime that would, given