Every plant they passed seemed trampled or tread upon. The underbrush of the forest all felt whacked away and assaulted. Neverland was starting to feel the effects of this invasion and buckling under the pressure to survive it. The land knew something wanted to kill it.
She wished she could whisper to the island that it was only misled intentions assaulting it, that boy captaining this attacking ship wanted nothing more than to rescue her from an imagined captor. She wished she could hand herself over, sating the stars and ending the island's nightmarish dissolution. It wouldn't have been a horrible fate to go home with Jay—she'd often considered it of her own free will—but under these circumstances, she knew she had to work to save something bigger than herself, bigger than the heart that felt torn in two every time she thought about anyone or any world where she wanted to belong.
Peter charged forward without qualms or caution. He felt as invincible as ever, so he was lucky that Gwen was paying attention to their surroundings.
“Shadow!” she shouted. “Peter, look out!”
She sprung into the air as she made the announcement, but the shadow solider caught Peter off his guard, and it sprung at him before he could get off the ground. Grabbing both his ankles, it pulled him down. By that time, Gwen already had a light shining on it. The contract with reality flopped to the ground as she fumbled the flashlight out of her purse, but as soon as she turned it on, the shadow began convulsing.
It let go of Peter and tried to escape Gwen's beam without abandoning the battle. She swung the light all over, losing track of the sentient darkness. She kept it a bay long enough to dig her spare flashlight out of her purse.
“Catch!” she told Peter, tossing him the second weapon.
“What's this!” he exclaimed, full of curious joy.
“It's a weapon of mass illumination,” she told him. “Turn it on and keep watch for that thing.”
Peter found the switch and flicked the light on. “Ah, an electric torch! Very clever.”
Distracted by this novelty, Peter had forgotten to start flying. The shadow made another attempt to bring him down, but didn't get a hold of more than Peter's left foot before it met with the paralyzing glow of both lights. The creature's resilience surprised Gwen, until another shadow swooped down and she realized they were not confronting a single shadow.
The first had jumped at them with the element of surprise, but now that the shadows had compromised that, they all began flooding out of the trees. Peter couldn't break out of their holds fast enough to get off the ground—every time he eluded one grip, another of the dozen black hands grabbed at him and kept him tripping over his feet. Gwen's shadow broke from her side again, lashing out at the offending shadows and battling them back to help Peter gain his footing off ground.
Gwen helped him from where she could in the air, until she heard a rustling noise underneath her and saw a shadow stealing the contract with reality.
“Hey, no!” She flipped her light on the sneaky shadow and burned it back. Dropping down, she tried to sweep the thick packet up before a shadow could charge her, but failed in this effort. Her hands full as it attacked from behind, Gwen swung her flashlight around randomly. She fried the shadow well enough to force it off her, but another continued the assault.
Peter and Gwen struggled together for a minute, neither gaining nor losing ground with their two-dimensional adversaries. This exercise exhausted shadows much faster than people, however, and eventually forced them to retreat. Peter and Gwen chased them a few paces, vindictively giving them a few last slashes of light.
“They'll be back,” Peter predicted, “and with grown-ups, I'd bet. I think one of them already ran off to report us. We need to get away from here.”
“Then let's go.” Gwen shoved the mud-stained contract back in her purse, but she and Peter kept their flashlights drawn as they started leaping through the jungle, half-running and half-flying.
“Do you think those were the lawyer's shadows?” Gwen asked.
“I doubt it,” Peter replied. “I'd bet some of Starkey's prisoners are heading back to the mainland shadow-less.”
“They might be from the team releasing the will-o-the-wisp,” Gwen added, thinking through possibilities. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that legal professionals enforcing a contract with reality would send shadows to do their supernatural bidding. She wondered what else they had to fear in the labyrinthine woods of Neverland. Somewhere, she knew, the will-o-the-wisp crawled through the trees, and Lasiandra had to be lurking somewhere in the jungle.
The route to the Never Tree demanded they follow very particular directions. More than once, Gwen failed to follow Peter exactly and found him insisting that she fly straight between the fork in a tree's trunk, or duck under a specific juniper bush hedge. The special team, Lasiandra, and whatever other invasive forces looked for the Never Tree would surely find a way to bypass these requirements, but every step would take them time. If Peter and Gwen could catch up and stop them, they still stood a chance of saving the Never Tree.
The battle had moved closer to the perimeter the lost children had established around the Never Tree. As they neared it, Gwen and Peter crept past a solider under a merciless attack from the Never Bird. Squawking up a storm, the stunning blue-grey bird beat him senseless
