“Good idea.” Wendy nodded. She followed Peter another few yards until they came upon the creek. It was a few feet wide, with water tumbling over rocks and fallen branches. They started to follow it downstream, the ground sloping gradually through a ravine.

“How did you even find me, anyway?” Wendy asked, still thinking about the night before. It had been bugging her, sort of nagging at the back of her mind. There was still so much about him she didn’t know or understand. His ability to find her when she was lost in the middle of the woods was a big one. “I feel like as soon as I called your name, you just magically appeared.” Hearing herself, she frowned. Was that it? “Can you still fly?”

Peter laughed, though his smile wasn’t easy. “No, I don’t have enough magic left in me to fly anymore.” He looked down at his hands and Wendy did, too. Was she expecting to see them spark with light again? For the sword made of pixie dust to appear?

“I need to save it to use against my shadow,” he went on. “I could hear you yelling for Alex like a mile away.” He leapt to the top of a fallen tree covered in moss. He followed it down the river, feet easily stepping over knots and through vines without getting tangled. Peter held his arms out at his sides for balance, moving slowly so Wendy could keep up beside him as she tripped over wet rocks.

“So, I ran after you. It was pretty easy to hear your crashing through the woods.” He frowned, glancing over at Wendy. “They’ve been unnaturally quiet at night. No owls, no crickets. I haven’t even heard any animals scurrying around. Anyway, when I caught up to you at the clearing, I saw that the shadows were trying to take you, so I used the only thing I could think of to try to stop it: pixie dust. But if we have to rely on that in order to stop my shadow, I think we’re in trouble.” Peter’s hands went back to his sides as he hopped to the next rotting tree.

“Like I said, my magic is still getting weaker. The longer I’m here, the faster it fades. These shoes could barely stay on my feet yesterday morning,” he said, balancing on one foot and raising the other as evidence. “Now my toes are crammed into them.”

Wendy tried to look at him more closely as he stood perched on the fallen tree. It was hard to tell exactly how much he was changing day by day.

No one could possibly mistake him for a middle school–aged boy now. Indeed, he looked like he could be one of the senior guys on her swim team: tall, toned, and tanned. This was good news, really. It meant it was far less likely that someone from the emergency room or one of the police officers would recognize him.