Prologue

Beginning of Neverheart

Prologue

“Wendy, aren’t you coming with us?” Michael called out, his tiny feet waving frantically beneath him as he bobbed up and down in the air gripping onto the stuffed arm that belonged to his beloved teddy bear. The soles of her feet pressed against the cold wooden frame of her nursery wind so tightly that her knuckles were white; there was nothing in between her and the cobblestone street thirty feet below her is she let herself get distracted from her happy thoughts.

The air around her buzzed the way it did when there was a thunderstorm coming. Fragments of fairy dust fell around her, they got caught in her hair and brushed across her skin as they drifted and disintegrated into the night. “All you have to do is think a happy thought, the rest will come naturally.” Said the shadow, the shadow whose name was Peter, the shadow who wasn’t a shadow at all.

He was a boy but he could hardly be called something so ordinary.

Stray strands of his autumn coloured hair fell into his eyes as he hovered eagerly a few feet away from the window. Her brothers held onto his arm as they floated unsteadily up in the air, which left his other hand free to offer to her. The boy could see the distrust in her the pretty girl's eyes as she looked up to the sky wondering if it all was true or whether she was just dreaming. She had been so bewitched by the stories he had told her in the nursery, about the lost boys, about Captain Hook and about Neverland but that had been when she hadn’t quite believed them to be real.

“Wendy, can I tell you something?” Peter asked, his hand still held out to her yet she was still reluctant to take it. Cautiously she nodded her head.

“I resented my parents for a long time for letting me go, for not wanting me, but then I realised that they actually did me a favour. Without knowing it, they saved me from a life of grey and the dull darkness of this city. If my short time spent in this land has taught me anything it is that you should never turn down an adventure. You never know what you will find if you just open your heart and jump.”

With that he leapt forward and took hold of her hand. Her vision exploded with colour; a vast green landscape appeared before her eyes, an island surrounded by tropical blue water that was clearer than anything she could have ever imagined. Creatures and monsters swam beneath it’s surface; their scales catching the light of the golden sun that hung high above a rock face standing tall at the center of the island. Suddenly the mysterious shapes of bodies moving under the water scarpered and in their churned up the dusty sand into clouds of white. All was calm until the waves parted allowing the bow made from mahogany to break through the blue. Black flags that rose high into the sky cast shadows down onto a deck full of pirates; rigging and rum barrels surrounded them while their captain dressed in a robin red-breast coat stood proudly above them. The curve of metal where his hand should have been was hooked onto one of the spokes on the wheel. Inky black curls billowed out behind him beneath his hat; two long white feathers dancing with them.

Captivated by his expression, she saw a million memories and secrets etched into the flecks of gold in his whirlpool eyes, it was all she saw when Peter pulled her from the window ledge and into the night. At first she fell, hurtling towards the ground at such a speed all of the air was squeezed out of her lungs, she was almost certain that it was the end. Adrenalin surged through her body like fire had been ignited in her veins. So that’s what an adventure feels like, Wendy thought as she turned her gaze not to the ground but towards the night sky.

Three children and a shadow vanished into the sea of stars that evening, without a sound, without a word to anyone. London awoke the next morning to find three souls missing from their beds with only a scattering of fairy dust and an open nursery window left to explain their disappearance.

Little did one of the Darling children know that eight years later it would happen all over again.