Peter’s fist connected with the wall with a loud thud. His knuckles hurt, but the pain mirrored the crushing ache in his heart. She was gone.

Jax had gone after her, and now they were both gone. His tracker in the brace was destroyed, which could only mean one thing. He was dead, since he hadn’t contacted him. And since Jax was the strongest of them, Peter could only assume she was too.

That, or she’d been taken.

Peter turned toward the mirror and lifted up his blue t-shirt. He grimaced at the slice on his upper rib. He’d been able to save the girl on the bike, but not without incident. It was a deep cut and now it was crusted over. The dark bruises that had formed were more worrying to him. It hurt to breathe and lift his arms.

He took a warm washcloth and cleaned the gash, but it started to bleed again. Too quickly, the rag turned red. Using his teeth, he opened a tear-off packet of ointment and globbed it over the wound before bandaging it with gauze and medical tape. He didn’t want to have any of the boys treat him.

It was better if they thought he was invincible.

Oh, if they knew the truth about him, they’d realize he was more a liability than a leader. Peter ran his hands under the hot water and washed the blood away with a bar of soap. If only his feelings and problems could wash away as easily as the blood on his hands.

He needed Dr. Barrie. He couldn’t do this alone. There was so much he didn’t understand about what was happening. Neverland’s monsters were getting stronger. Their attacks more frequent. He knew the lost boys couldn’t keep going like they had been.

The boys would have to take the fight to Neverland if they could find their base, and he was scared. Scared that they’d lose boys, that he’d lose Tink, just like he lost Wendy.

Peter reached for a clean shirt and pulled it over his head before heading down the hall. He didn’t know where he was going, but he found himself outside Wendy’s empty room. “I’m so sorry,” Peter mumbled softly.

Tink opened her door, grabbed his arm, and yanked him into her pigsty of a room.

“Look at this,” she said excitedly, spinning her laptop on the desk to face him. He didn’t know what he was looking at—just a news report showing a massive car wreck ablaze. Fire trucks were working to contain the fire.

Tink couldn’t stop fidgeting, so there had to be something in the telecast he was missing. It was dark out and hard to make out the models of the cars, but then he noticed a familiar grill.

“It’s the Red Skulls,” Tink spoke up, practically bouncing in her chair. “That is what’s left of their Hummers.” She paused the screen and rewound the footage to play it again. Something moved—just the slightest shift—in the background.

“Is that a—” He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, since shadows didn’t always appear on recordings, but you’d get a faint hint of them sometimes.

“Shadow,” Tink finished for him. “Didn’t even need the goggles to see that. And this has been playing for the last hour. There’s no reason for a shadow to still be in the vicinity unless…” She trailed off and glanced out her open door to Wendy’s empty room.

“Wendy’s gone, Tink. We don’t know that a presence of a shadow means she’s there, and I’m not sure that I can risk losing you, too.”

“Relax, I’ll wait till morning, when everything’s chill and quiet, and I’ll go snoop around.”

“No!” Peter cried out in anguish. “I forbid you to leave.”

He stormed out of her room and went to check on the boy they had recovered earlier. He was crying out in his sleep, and he didn’t look good. Sweat covered his brow.

Peter knew the signs. They were going to lose him if he didn’t turn the corner soon. Slightly was keeping an eye on the newcomer, and there was nothing Peter could do but wait. He sat by the boy’s bed for most of the night, releasing Slightly for a few hours. It was almost morning before he did the final round of the night by heading to the control room.

Peter looked over his shoulder even though he knew no one was in the room with him. He pulled up the same newscast Tink had previously shown him and watched the screen for signs…and there it was…again. A shadow. And it was hanging around in the background, quite a distance from the wreckage.

Maybe Tink was right.

He pulled up the screen and watched for a dead zone to pop up. Sure enough, there was one in the vicinity of the wreck, just moving in circles. What shadow moved in circles? Could it be her? What were the chances? He was about to go investigate it himself when a green dot popped up in the area.

“Tink!” Peter growled.