Tiger Lily (29 page)

S
he met the pirates at the edge of the lagoon. Maeryn was there, sunning herself on a rock in the middle of the water. The Never bird, perched on its enormous nest, watched them nervously and then lifted off, its giant wings flapping loudly. It perched itself on one of the low limbs hanging over the lagoon.

Hook was sitting on the beach. He stood when he saw her, holding his back and wincing, then smiled. It was a painful smile, with so few teeth. He looked desperate and wounded—like someone should be looking after him. She narrowed her eyes as she studied him. She seemed to doubt, for a moment, that he could really be the Hook Peter was so afraid of. But then, there was the unhinged quality to his eyes. As a hunter, she must have been reassured. His eyes hinted that he could be deadly in the same way a rabid possum could. He made no reference to her strange haircut, so uncharacteristic for a girl. He barely seemed to notice.

“It’s simple, really,” he explained. “We’re just using the tides. We’ll put you on the rock.” He gestured to the rock where Maeryn now perched. “Peter will come to retrieve you. We’ll ensure he’ll be able to get out there, but not get back. The girl will be easy to grab.” Hook was happy with the plan. It was simple, and clean. He would never even have to touch Peter. No matter what some of the men believed, he didn’t long to feel his hands around the boy’s neck. He just wanted him gone.

Hook had sent Mullins to lure Peter away from the new burrow. The men had all argued over who would have to do it. He was to allow himself to be caught, and confess—seemingly as a random aside—that Tiger Lily had been captured. The men, Hook explained, had drawn straws to determine who would have to go, because there was always the likelihood that Pan would kill the man immediately. But in the end Hook had picked the best liar.

They sat down on the beach side by side, Tiger Lily with her hand on her dagger, Hook propped up awkwardly with his hand rubbing at his lower back, and waited. I sat on the ground, my legs on the cool dirt, shivering. Tiger Lily observed, looking sideways, the swollen lump where his hand used to be. She noticed that his feet jerked back and forth with habitual tension, as if he were tapping them on the floor. This was a man who needed to crawl out of his own skin.

“Well, it should be soon, if they’re coming,” he said, almost resigned. He handed her a coil of rope. “Better be off.”

Tiger Lily’s heart kept a slow, steady pace, though mine began to race. She stood and walked into the murky lagoon water. Maeryn had promised her safety, but there was always the chance she would break her word and try to drown Tiger Lily on her swim. Tiger Lily was beyond caring. She swam out to the rock in the middle of the water with no incident, and scrambled onto it, sitting cross-legged. She shivered as she pulled the ropes around herself to make them look like they bound her arms and legs.

She waited.

I alighted on a craggy tooth of the rock and watched the woods like she did, hoping no one would come. The trees were silent for what seemed like forever, except for the usual sounds of birds and ground creatures. I wondered if Mullins was, indeed, dead. And then there was the quietest shuffle in the brush. Another moment, and a flash of brown. And then two hands parting the green of the bushes, and Peter, staring at Tiger Lily across the water, and moments later, the whiteness of Wendy behind him.

A canoe had been left on the opposite shore, meant to look as if the pirates had beached it there after they’d tied Tiger Lily. Peter’s instinct must have told him that it was too obvious, but he didn’t hesitate. He crouched his way along the tree line, quietly trying to push Wendy back to safety every few feet, with Wendy quietly insisting on following. She didn’t know she was making things harder for him rather than easier. She was caught up in her own bravery.

I looked back at Tiger Lily, then skimmed just inches above the water to the shore. I stung Peter’s hands as he handled the boat. Wendy swatted me away. “She hates me,” she whispered, seeming to think that the focus of my entire life was trained on her.

I knew too well by now that they wouldn’t listen to me, and it paralyzed me with sadness. I landed on the bow of the boat, exhausted, and watched helplessly as they paddled out, Peter signaling to Tiger Lily with his hands and looking around for signs of the pirates who, by all appearances, seemed to have abandoned her to the rising tide.

They reached the rock, and Peter climbed out to untie her. For a moment he met her eyes. But quickly, he swiveled to help Wendy out of the boat so that she wouldn’t tip into the water without him to balance her. She crouched on the rock, and he told her to hold on to the boat’s tip as he turned to Tiger Lily. I floated down onto a dead leaf.

It was at that moment that Tiger Lily let her ropes fall. She slid into the water like an eel. At the same moment, the boat seemed to drift out of Wendy’s grasp of its own accord. No one saw the shadow of Maeryn’s body underneath it, towing it away. To Wendy, the tide seemed to be carrying the boat in the opposite direction it was supposed to, out to the mouth of the lagoon and into the ocean beyond. But Peter wasn’t looking. He was watching the place where Tiger Lily had disappeared underwater, trying to understand.

He was not afraid at first. He put his hands to his mouth and yelled for the mermaids.

He waited for a few minutes, and then called for them again. The water carried his voice clear and loud.

And then he waited. “They usually come right away,” he said to Wendy, concerned but not fearful. He yelled again, Maeryn’s name, then those of some of the other mermaids I didn’t know. The water was strikingly silent.

And finally, recognition seemed to settle itself on his face, and a dawning fear. The last emotion to settle in was a sickening hurt. He knew in that one solid moment he had been betrayed.

I watched them from my leaf. There was nothing I could do now, even if they chose to notice me. At the other edge of the lagoon, I saw Tiger Lily emerge from the water and slide into the bushes silently, but Peter was looking in the other direction. He watched the water for several minutes, his face pale. All the life seemed to drain out of him. I began to lose my breath, clutching the leaf I was sitting on, flapping my wings together.

Wendy, up until now confident and unafraid, was studying him.

“Well, someone will come for us,” she said. Because that was the way things always ended for people who were charmed. But Peter’s silence said otherwise.

Peter didn’t say that in an hour the tide would be in and the water would be over their heads, but she was reading it on his face. He looked from shore to shore, as if something might appear to help, though neither of them could imagine what. And Wendy, who was not stupid after all, began to shake, her breath becoming shallow.

“I can’t die,” she said. “I can’t die.”

Peter put his arm around her. “We won’t die.”

Tears threaded out of Wendy’s eyes, though she was deathly silent.

I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t leave. The minutes passed. The water rose. The pirates had faded into the woods, maybe to watch in secret, as if Peter could still get at them even from where he was.

The water crept up the rock slowly but inevitably.

Peter was white as a ghost. It was the first time, outside of his dreams, I’d seen terror on his face. He held her arms to steady her, but his hands trembled violently. He studied the shore for Tiger Lily, or any sign of anyone, but other than me, they’d all vanished. His eyes lingered on me for only a second. I wondered if he realized then that I’d tried to warn him. But he finally just turned back to Wendy, and put his arms around her. He straightened himself up and seemed to try to grow to be more like a man.

She was silent. The tide seemed to move faster now. They shivered as it made its way up their bodies. Wendy lost her balance under the water for a moment and slid off the rock, but Peter managed to grab her and pull her upright.

She began to gasp, unable to calm herself enough to breathe.

The leaf I was sitting on became waterlogged enough to sink. I flew to shore, and perched on a berry bush. I thought I might be sick.

The sun was setting, obscured from view by the cliffs but sending slices of orange and purple into the sky at the horizon, though the darkness of the water swallowed the colors rather than reflecting them.

From where I sat, Peter and Wendy were the two loneliest figures in the world. But Peter was somehow the lonelier of the two.

I
t was soon dark enough that only the greens were glowing. And then they, too, dimmed as the darkness thickened.

I didn’t hear her come up behind me. She was on her belly. I had given up on her. It didn’t even occur to me to try to spur her into action. Whoever Tiger Lily was, she wasn’t the person I knew anymore. For all I knew, she had sidled up beside me because she couldn’t resist watching the spectacle of a drowning.

Across the water, Wendy seemed to be having some kind of choking fit. Peter was holding her hand, and his feet kept slipping. He was clumsy and dismantled, hunched over and desperate.

Tiger Lily moved so quietly I barely noticed until she was already in the water.

She surfaced under the Never bird nest. From where I perched, I could just see her eyes glinting, and that her nostrils were above the water’s dark surface.

From anywhere else, the nest would have looked to be simply floating. It seemed to move back and forth with the ripples of the water, so subtly that it was hard to tell that it was drifting toward the rock where Peter and Wendy were losing their footholds. I held my hands to my mouth, unsure what was happening, but hoping. Was this part of the plan she had negotiated with the pirates? It didn’t seem like it could be.

The evening was so dark that Peter and Wendy were just shadows, and almost indistinguishable from the black water, but alert. Peter had seen the nest drifting toward him. I didn’t dare go near, for fear of illuminating them with my glow and allowing any still lurking pirates to see.

Tiger Lily was halfway across the lagoon when I became certain she had changed her mind and that she was, indeed, going to save them.

I saw a fin just break the surface to her left, and I flew.

Before I was even close, Tiger Lily was yanked under the water.

There were three or four of them. Mermaids hunt their prey in circles, like sharks do. A wide round current marked where they circled below. Tiger Lily surfaced once, choked, and went under again.

I landed on the floating nest, skidding to a stop with one of my wings slapping against the water. It stuck, and I clung to a twig, half submerged. Touching the water, I could feel a swirl of thoughts under the surface—the muddy, half-fish thoughts of the mermaids, enraged at her betrayal, and then, clearer and more familiar, Tiger Lily. But it was like there were two of her. There was a Tiger Lily who wanted to follow Tik Tok underwater, and was unwilling to fight the mermaids off. And there was a Tiger Lily I knew from when she was a child. This Tiger Lily flailed out with both hands. She pulled her dagger from her waist and sliced out in an arc, and kicked her way up to the surface. An unearthly scream rose from under the water: one of the mermaids, mortally injured. Tiger Lily lunged at the nest, and pushed it farther, then pushed again. She saw it slam against the rock at Peter’s feet as he leaned out as far as he could. Then she swam in the opposite direction. It was almost like a water ballet—the way the mermaids circled her, how they disappeared and resurfaced in the churning water, again and again as I fluttered above. Mermaid blood floated on the surface of the lagoon in buckets, iridescent and oily.

Still, I didn’t believe she had a chance of making it across until she was there, scrambling up onto the muddy shore and pulling herself to safety in the dry bushes. She choked out water onto the ground, then crawled farther into the brush.