Page 28 of Darling

“Same,” she replied, just as quiet. “See you around.”

CHAPTER 8

Wendy didn’t recognize the area she was in at all when they got downstairs. It made sense, because she’d had a T-shirt over her head, but it was disconcerting to realize that she really and truly did not know where she was. Nibs and Curly had changed quickly before they’d left. Curly had braided red ribbon into his pigtails and was wearing a pair of torn black jeans that looked suspiciously like they were Peter’s. He was also wearing a blue denim jacket with some patches sewn to it and what appeared to be hand-stitched embroidery.

Nibs had thrown on a leather jacket that had white bones painted on the arms. He’d pulled his chin-length red hair into a half ponytail and was wearing a bandanna over his mouth to obscure his face.

Now that they were in the street, Wendy noticed that Nibs and Curly liked to be shoulder to shoulder and walked in lockstep with each other. She wondered how the two boys had met, and if they had been friends—or “brothers”—for long.

Peter was walking in front. He’d put on sunglasses, even though it was night, and wore the black messenger bag she’d seen him messing with in the kitchen. Wendy watched the backs of the three boys in front of her and thought about how Tinkerbelle said they roamed the streets watching out for her, and understood how that would make her feel safe.

In the house, in the comfort of family, they had looked young and a bit playful. But lit only by streetlights and the moon, Peter, Nibs, and Curly looked strong, coordinated, and threatening.

They turned at the end of the block, and the neighborhood started to look more familiar to Wendy. They actually weren’t far from the train station. They were coming at it from behind and from the opposite direction that she’d left it, but she had an extremely rough idea of where she was now. Not enough to run off on her own, but maybe enough to consider trying.

As they drew closer to the train station, police sirens got louder and louder.

Wendy hadn’t exactly expected that whole ordeal to be over, but she figured things should have calmed down at least a little bit, and it was kind of alarming to be wrong.

They turned down the street, and Curly glanced over his shoulder at Tinkerbelle and Wendy. “You guys should get in between us and Peter,” he said. “That way we can guard your backs.” He reached over to curl his arm around Tinkerbelle’s shoulders and gently guide her forward.

Nibs moved aside to let Wendy get ahead of him, then he slung his arm over her and squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “I’ve got you,” he said, hoarse like smoke.

Wendy’s heart ached at the gesture in a way that she couldn’t describe, and she silently forgave him, too, for the incidental kidnapping. When they turned the corner, out of the residential area and onto the main street, they were plunged back into the chaos Wendy had gratefully left earlier.

There were fewer police, but there was much more activity: The train station doors had orange cones around them and signs about redirection were posted to the door. All the station attendees had left the area, and there were only police now. Wendy couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but she did see a few people lying on the ground with their arms behind their backs as an officer stood over them, barking questions. There were a few other people being detained, and the whole thing seemed like it was escalating terribly. Wendy assumed Peter would turn at the sight of the police and take them all in another direction. She was surprised to hear him swear and start jogging toward the scene. She was just about to ask what was going on when Tinkerbelle made a noise that sounded like a cross between a gasp and a scream.

She pushed past Peter and started running at a full sprint toward a car at the edge of the commotion. Curly and Nibs started running, too, so Wendy followed their lead. Peter wasn’t far ahead of them, and she watched him pull his scarf up over his face and take what looked like a firework out of his messenger bag.

“Omi! Omi!” Tinkerbelle shrieked, smacking at a police car window. Immediately the nearest police officer shouted at her to get away from the car, but she refused to stop screaming and banging on the window. Behind the glass was a dark-skinned girl with long black hair. She looked exhausted and significantly less hysterical than Tinkerbelle, but she had her palms pressed against the window from the inside.

Peter whooped, so high and loud that Wendy flinched and almost stopped running entirely. Peter twisted, deadly fast, and snatched something else out of his bag and chucked it at Nibs. The metal pinwheeled through the air like a boomerang, but Nibs leaped up and caught it squarely. It looked like the mixture of a crowbar and doorstop, with a wedge on one end.

Peter whistled sharply and with a rhythm that made Wendy realize he was communicating with the boys wordlessly. At the noise, everyone looked up—cops and people being arrested, alike. The other kids on the ground began curling their legs underneath them as if preparing to get up and run, despite the angry shouting from the officer who had been handling them. The officer dealing with Tinkerbelle gave up on talking her away from the car and decided to bodily haul her off. He had barely lifted her up from the ground when his head snapped back violently, and he fell like a stone. Wendy looked over, terrified, and saw sweet baker Curly with a bandanna over his face and what looked like a military grade slingshot in his hand.

Peter whistled again, and Nibs tossed the metal bar to Curly and picked up speed, leaving Curly and Wendy behind, following Peter in the opposite direction of the police car.

“There he is!” one of the officers shouted.

Immediately all their attention was on Peter and Nibs. Peter had duct-taped the firework, which was now lit, to what looked to Wendy like a crudely constructed Molotov cocktail—if the war films she’d watched had any accuracy to them. Peter threw it directly into a car window.

A lot of things happened at once.

Curly pushed Wendy violently forward, hard enough that she ran even faster, stumbling into Tinkerbelle, who was still clawing at the police car door. Then Curly yanked both girls down to the ground at once and covered them with his body.

Wendy made eye contact with the girl in the police car, Tinkerbelle’s “Omi,” and saw her brown eyes widen with terror as she turned in slow motion to what Curly was protecting Tinkerbelle and Wendy from.

The car exploded in the brightest red Wendy had ever seen. The Molotov cocktail provided ten times the incendiary a firework needed, so what should have been a slowly burning display in the sky instead filled the area with a light so bright that it looked almost like dawn as it went off all at once. As well as a noise so loud, it made her eardrums ache. Thousands of brilliant sparkles went in every direction, and burned significantly longer than Wendy assumed they would.

Curly leaped off Wendy and Tinkerbelle the instant the noise faded, then spun the crowbar-type thing in his hand expertly, jammed it in the crack between the cop car and its door, and began wrenching at it.

Wendy spared a moment from watching Curly try to break into the car to witness the aftermath of the most dramatic act of crime she’d seen in real life. All the law enforcement that had previously been focused on detaining the kids on the ground had adjusted their level of alarm to calling for backup, screaming into their walkie talkies, and peeling off in their cars or running toward the explosion on foot. As curious people began making their way over to see what was making all the light and noise, only to start screaming and coughing from the smoke, the remaining police began to focus on crowd control.

Wendy realized that Curly was tugging on her sleeve.

“Cut their zip ties off,” he said.

“What?” Wendy asked dazedly. She realized the people who had been lying on the ground in the throes of being arrested were crouched on the same side of the cop car as they were. They were about high school–aged and looked as terrified as Wendy felt.