A Forest of Blackened Trees: Exclusive Teaser
prologue - the enemy

Tiger Lily

I always felt Shimmer’s presence strongest near the southern shore. It wasn’t where he was buried—we laid him to rest in the village graveyard among the other fairies—but it was where he’d died.

Mother said I needed to stop going there. Doing so only fueled the storm cloud that hung over my head since the day I lost him, and only widened the emptiness eating a hole through my chest. I promised her I wouldn’t, but there would have been no fooling her even if she couldn’t literally see the cloud. Aura-readers like her always knew such things, which was why Bright Eyes had started coming to me directly every time Father needed more medicine. Daydream moss favored the humid conditions near the shores, giving me the perfect excuse to visit, and I began anticipating what my sister’s fingers were about to sign even before they formed the shapes. With her help, sneaking out of the village had become easy. Too easy, which probably meant that even the dogs had given up trying to keep me contained.

Good. Better for all of us this way. I would be far more willing to accept that their way of dealing with the fairies’ loss was by pretending they never existed if only they could accept that this was mine.

Having at last reached my destination, I fought to steady my ragged breaths and fluttering heart before setting my sights on a small and otherwise unassuming hawthorn tree. There had never been any need to mark it; not with what happened here so irrevocably seared into my memory. It was near a cliffside that sloped into the nearby beach, perched proudly and sporting fresh white blooms. Kneeling at the tree’s base, I touched my fingertips to the precise spot where Shimmer had laid when his light went out, flinching when a painful jolt shot up my arm and down my spine. I had known it was coming, but didn’t bother to brace myself for it, because it wasn’t just any pain. It was his pain, and as his bonded, it was my duty to feel it in death just as it had been in life.

My voice cracked when I regained control of my trembling lips enough to speak. “Hey, Shim. How have you been?”

Nothing but the roar of distant waves answered me. I expected nothing less, but kept talking anyway.

“Me first? All right, but it’s just been more of the same old shit. Mother worries too much, mostly about me. Bright Eyes is her usual giggly self, but I can’t help but wonder for how long. Father’s pain has only gotten worse. He’s taking twice as much daydream moss as he was at the beginning of his illness, and it makes him sleep a lot. It’s also not enough. He tries to hide his grimaces and thinks we don’t notice, and maybe Bright Eyes doesn’t, but Mother and I certainly do.” I paused to switch positions and turned so my back rested against the hawthorn’s trunk. I was careful both not to disturb Shimmer’s death site or loosen my grip on my bow, and kept my gaze fixated on the surrounding forest. Neverland’s curse may have broken weeks ago, but the monsters certainly hadn’t gone anywhere. “I’m worried about him, and he’s not the only one who’s sick. A third of the village is symptomatic now. A third.”

We called it the black haze. Though it had afflicted my people since before I was born, we still didn’t know what caused it or how it spread, because it had predated even the curse. The disease brought on terrible headaches which only progressed with time, and though the black haze wasn’t deadly in itself, the severity of the symptoms had caused nearly a dozen of our villagers to take their own lives. I’ve been told the pain gets so intense it feels as if an arrow is splitting the forehead. Daydream moss is the only remedy which brings any semblance of relief, but there comes a point where it isn’t enough.

Father had reached that point.

I’d held my tears back for as long as I could, but the stress of the past few weeks combined with my grief were more than enough to yank them from me. A gentle warmth settled over my shoulders as I silently sobbed—Shimmer’s spirit, no doubt—and it made me want to scream my frustrations one by one into the still-decaying forest.

Our chief was in pain and I couldn’t help him. Our forest was dying and I was powerless to stop it. Our fairies were dead, and nothing could bring them back.

If I had my way, I would shriek all that and more at the top of my lungs before cursing the spirits and our elders, and possibly even the white man’s precious gods. I would wail until my throat was raw, if only so I had an excuse not to talk to Mother when she inevitably interrogated me over where I’d been, or better yet, pain that wasn’t this constant, aching grief.

But I couldn’t yell or scream any more than I could afford to snap a twig beneath my feet. The Nightstalkers had always been sensitive to noise, but their hearing seemed to have been amplified ever since the curse had been broken, something I had unfortunately learned firsthand. What should have been a quick and simple trip checking the hunting traps around the perimeter of the village had turned into a near-death experience after Leaping Deer had laughed a little too loudly at one of my jokes.

We didn’t joke anymore.

But I didn’t blame him or even the Nightstalkers that had nearly mauled us; I blamed her.

Wendy fucking Maynard.

I hadn’t thought it possible to hate anyone more than I hated Cedric and Jamie Teach until she came strutting along, sporting that ridiculous mop of blonde hair and acting as if the whole of Neverland bowed to her. I’d heard the whispers of Neverland’s Chosen and we may not have to kill to survive anymore, but so what? And what in hells had she saved us from? The forest was still fucking dying, my people were still diseased, and the monsters were as horrifying and murderous as ever, so as far as I was concerned, Wendy Maynard had done nothing of actual value, and she certainly hadn’t saved us. I may have counted the time she’d plunged a knife into her own gut, but of course she hadn’t possessed the decency to stay dead.

She’d had the decency to leave, though, and we hadn’t seen her or any other pirate in weeks. With any luck, they and their ship had at last been swallowed by the depths, and after nearly two decades of living in secrecy, my people were finally free to reclaim the land that was rightfully ours. If it weren’t for the monsters, we would have already moved back to our ancestral grounds, but especially given how many of us were sick and weak, Father hadn’t thought it wise.

I agreed with him, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

“You’d know what to do, Shim,” I whispered into the salty breeze, though I barely heard my own voice over the agitated ocean behind me; perhaps it, too, wanted to scream. “You always know what to do.” If nothing else, my fairy would have been able to make me smile… but the thought was far from comforting given that I’d never see him again.

I remained at the hawthorn tree until an hour before dusk, which gave me just enough time to gather daydream moss for Father and return to the village before nightfall. My limbs were stiff and my ass had been numb for the better part of the day, so standing was a chore, but I managed to do it without allowing a whimper to escape my lips. It wasn’t the most painful part of leaving, though; that was reserved for my final goodbyes. Swallowing, I addressed Shimmer once more. “I don’t know when, but I promise I’ll be back. Soon.”

At first, there was nothing, but following the crash of a particularly large wave, I heard it.

Fairy bells.

My heart skipped a beat, because I knew immediately I hadn’t imagined it. Losing Shimmer had been hard enough, but the silence that had permeated the forest ever since the fairies had all died had been almost harder. There had been no music, no whispered words in Fairiestongue, and certainly no bells. It had been so long I’d nearly forgotten what they sounded like, but upon hearing these, recognition struck me like a war drum.

The bells weren’t alone, though—they were accompanied by a dog frantically barking as well as voices. Shouts. Human voices, human shouts, spoken in that clumsy English tongue, and by the time I’d darted into a nearby bush for cover, my brain had adjusted to make sense of the language I hadn’t heard in weeks.

“...followed me? What the fuck!”

“What the fuck, yourself! Neverland, Wendy, really?”

“You think that after losing Peter I’d be willing to lose her, too?”

My blood turned to ice.

Wendy?

Surely I’d misheard. Surely my eyes were playing tricks on me, and that wasn’t Wendy Maynard and the Serpent standing drenched on Neverland’s beach.

Surely that wasn’t a fairy cupped in Wendy’s hands.

The possible illusion continued without waiting for me to catch up, and Wendy held out the fairy for the Serpent to see. It was difficult to tell given my current distance, but she almost looked like Tinker Bell, Peter Pan’s bonded fairy. “See? It was worth it. She’s alive.”

The Serpent scoffed. “She looks the damn same to me.”

“But her bells! I haven’t heard those in weeks.”

“I’d have been perfectly happy never to hear them again!”

Their shouts were nearly drowned out by the massive white dog sprinting up and down the coast and barking like mad. Its fur was plastered to its frame in a way that would have been comedic if my mind wasn’t racing with questions: How the fuck had they gotten here, and when? Had I truly been so preoccupied with visiting Shimmer that I’d missed it? If that fairy truly was Tinker Bell, the last known fairy in existence, where in hells was Peter Pan? And most importantly, by making all this noise, did the four of them have a death wish?

The Nightstalkers would be on them within minutes, if not far less. They’d rip the dog to shreds first—for whatever reason, the beasts seemed hellbent on eradicating dogs—before turning on Wendy, the Serpent, and poor Tink. And if I stayed here, I’d be next.

It briefly crossed my mind to help them, or at the very least warn them. But one look at Wendy Maynard, at her flushed cheeks and soaking-wet frame, and I decided against it. With a smirk playing on my lips, I slipped back into the blackened trees, a single glorious thought fueling my silent strides.

Let her die as she should have all those weeks ago.

***

Peter Pan is dead…

…only worse. He’s imprisoned within the Sea of Eternal Woe. Untouchable and unreachable, not even the gods have the power to bring him back to the realm of the living. To save him, we need answers, and Neverland is the only place to get them.

But we’re not alone.

Everything remains as dead as it was the day I first laid eyes on it, and the handful of survivors are desperate and starving. Only this time, they aren’t monsters. They’re people. And they hold me responsible for their suffering.

Any attempt at peace turns to all-out war, and once again, I’m at its center. Long-buried secrets rise from the grave, and the more we learn, the less I understand. What is clear is that to save Neverland, we need Peter. And if he doesn’t die in that Sea?

I’ll happily kill him myself.

A Forest of Blackened Trees arrives on July 25th, 2023.

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