Further along, they heard a man and woman shouting to each other. Neither Peter nor Gwen could pinpoint what direction the voices came from, even as they drew nearer. Playing it safe, they buried themselves in the heavy foliage of the closest tree and waited for the adults to pass by.
The man came stumbling by, sweating through his uniform. His frenzied eyes searched everywhere but the treetops where Peter and Gwen were hidden. “Stacey? Where are you, Stacey?”
“I'm over here! Is it really you, Thomas?” the woman called.
The man jerked his head around, as if he suspected her voice came from somewhere behind him now. “Yes, it's me! Stay put, Stacey, I'm coming for you!”
He tromped off, almost retracing his footsteps. Gwen and Peter watched, and saw a flash of glitter pass by before they heard a tiny voice in their ears, “Were it sport, t'would be too easy a game,” Puck chuckled, his laughter almost human.
The hobgoblin ducked back down and, affecting a feminine American voice, called to the man, “I'm over here! Please don't leave me here, Thomas.”
The man, already half-crazy from chasing the illusion of his sweetheart, allowed Puck to lead him even further away. Peter and Gwen leapt out of the tree as soon as he vanished deeper into the woods, and hurried even faster to make up for lost time. They didn't run much farther before they began to hear the staunch, flat sound of a legal team in humorless discussion.
“Peter,” Gwen whispered, “how are we going to fight them? What's the plan?”
“What plan?” Peter asked.
“What are we going to do?” Gwen asked. “We can't just charge in and hope we get lucky.”
“Of course we can,” Peter replied. “Luck is just what happens when you're clever and magic.”
Gwen wanted to argue the point, but Peter crept forward and didn't seem to mind whether she came with him. Rolling her eyes at his unbounded confidence, her eyes fell on something else altogether.
In the distance, a faint, green spark floated above the brush. At first, she thought a fairy had strayed from one of their bunkers, but fairies' lights did not have such a fluid look. Like liquid mercury, the light seemed to sway and pool with life of its own. She wanted to get a better look at it, and took a single step closer. She heard a branch snap behind her and a hand come down on her shoulder.
Peter had backtracked in a flash, and held her back. “Don't take a step toward that. It's the will-o-the-wisp, and it'll turn you around worse than a hobgoblin.” The lights danced off, guiling Gwen in a direction she would not go. Peter's voice stayed somber. “People who chase Will don't ever come back.”
She nodded, and when she glanced back, the eerie green light had moved on altogether.
They stalked through the woods, light on their feet and as quiet as their breath. As they neared, Peter handed her his flashlight. “You be backup. When we get there, stay out of sight and watch for shadows.”
Gwen didn't know how they could confront the special unit with any hope of victory. This instruction to hang back from the fray almost relieved her. “What do I do if they capture you?”
Peter cast her an incredulous and endearing smile. “Will you ever stop asking absurd questions, Gwenny?”
With little alternative, Gwen slipped into the trees, flying after Peter. Above the natural line of sight, they trekked closer to the team and started to overhear their discussion.
“We should invoke Clause Ten of Cardinal Direction. If we establish where magnetic north is from here, we'll be able to make use of compasses.”
“I disagree. Trying to establish magnetic north would create more loopholes than it closes. Clause Fourteen is more applicable—we should establish directions by the sun's position. The sun is already present and relevant to the case. We can argue directions onto it with less trouble.”
“Solar orientation is less accurate than electromagnetic positioning.”
“It will serve our purposes.”
“That plant shouldn't exist,” another remarked, watching the mythical flower wither away into nothing as soon as he passed judgment on it.
The men and women's monotone voices all bled together, each sounding like the other. Gwen imagined it would take an especially dull and pedantic lawyer to agree to unravel the magical paradise of Neverland.
Peter waved Gwen back, signaling her to stay put a few yards away from the collection of lawyers below. She pulled the contract with reality out of her purse and started scrambling to find the sections they were discussing. She looked back up and saw as Peter took a big, happy breath and a screaming leap out of the tree, down into the thick of a dozen lawyers in heated discussion.
35
Peter must have startled the lawyers, but they didn't show it. The unimpressed men and women didn't so much as flinch in their stiff suits and slender ties.
“You've wandered too deep into Neverland, you ruddy old grown-ups,” Peter told them, his dagger drawn. No one ventured near him while he had the weapon in hand. “Your noses in your stupid contract… you haven't even noticed you've wandered into a grove of MAN-EATING TREES!”
As Peter bellowed this, the thick gray trunks of the surrounding trees began to croak and groan. The sluggish, thick vines of their branches animated with predatory immediacy. As if awoken by Peter's cry, the calm trees transformed into fearsome, carnivorous creatures, each reaching out for one of the lawyers. The slick vines threw themselves around the limbs of whatever lawyer they could reach, and began to pull them toward their trunks. As the massive trees shifted in the ground, small and cavernous holes appeared underneath their exposed roots, like an earthy mouth leading beneath the tree.
The most immediate reaction to this came from the man who
