It was surprisingly easy to kill someone, Mercy thought to herself when her blade entered the man's chest. It was the one from before, the knife thrower. She had lunged forward with such force, expecting to encounter some kind of resistance, but finding her blade penetrated flesh like butter.
She drew it out of his chest, dripping with blood, and let the lifeless body collapse to the ground in a thud. Crazy eyes wide open stared at nothing in particular, and Mercy had to tear her gaze away from the corpse lying at her feet to focus back on the fight. The most difficult part was over now, she had had her first kill, and had found it oddly effortless. You would expect humans to be less easy to kill, but they were.
She wiped the blood off of her sword on the dead man's pants, and went back to work. There were many more to try her blade on. The pirates outnumbered them five to one, and many of the Lost Boys were still young – and would forever remain so – and not in any way built to hold their ground against a full-grown belligerent adult with a penchant for the bottle.
When she told Peter she wanted to participate, she hadn't realized just how much of a difference her presence would make, but seeing how many throats she saved from a pirate blade so far, it made all the difference. Where was Peter anyway? Had he left his boys to be slaughtered? Mercy knew he wasn't like that – as much as she hated to admit it, he did have a code of conduct and would not abandon his troops.
The edge of her sword slashed another throat, hitting the carotid if the amount of blood gushing out of the wound was any indication. Peter had taught her where to plunge her knife to kill a man, but right now, Mercy wasn't doing much precision work. She relied on sheer force and nearly beheaded them.
"Mercy!" somebody screamed, and she ducked immediately, rolling aside to dodged whatever or whoever was coming for her.
She stood back up behind a tree, looking around to see who had warned her and finding Felix standing atop a boulder, only moving when she gave him a sign she was alive. That cockroach was useful sometimes, what do you know?
"Mercy! Mercy!" someone else screamed.
It did not sound like a warning this time, and Mercy sprung forward in search of whoever called for her help. Most of the younger boys knew she would come to their rescue sooner than Pan, even though they obeyed him and him only. When she reached the source of the cries, she understood.
It was little Jack, sprawled on the ground, disarmed. The wicked grin of the pirate looming over him made him cry out once more.
"Please, mercy! Don't kill me!"
He wasn't called for her, he was begging for mercy. But Mercy was still too far and she didn't reach them in time to stop the inevitable. She heard the stomach-churning gurgles of the poor boy when the sword entered his chest, puncturing his lungs which promptly filled with blood.
The pirate didn't bother finishing the business and let the boy choke on his own blood until death. Mercy's blood boiled with rage, she didn't see straight, she didn't think straight, she didn't think at all and simply jumped out of the shadows, screaming at the child murderer, sword ready to cut off his head and throw it into the Mermaid Lagoon.
"Murderer!" she shouted, seeing red.
His ugly smirk did not disappear, quite the contrary, he seemed delighted that his next victim came to him.
"Well, well, what do we have here? This is new..." he trailed off, slurring and waving around his sword.
A little voice at the back of Mercy's brain – that sounded an awful lot like Peter's – went on about how this wasn't the proper way to handle a sharp blade, and he didn't adopt the right stance if he wanted to defend himself. Did he mean to attack first? He didn't look like it, Mercy couldn't pick up any visual clues as to what he was going to do next. Those damn pirates! Couldn't they ever do something the right way?
"Pan doesn't take no girl! How'd you end up 'ere lassie?" he asked, as if it was any of his business.
Mercy scoffed and showed him her teeth, like an angry snake whose tail he had stepped on.
"Oh, no need for that kinda behavior!" he laughed, obviously not taking her seriously.
She would make him regret that in a minute, no need to waste her time and spit on him in trying to tell him wrong.
"He was only a child! How could you?! Do you have no honor?!" she snapped, trying to understand the reason behind his action, though she knew it was pointless task. Pirate were reputed for having no honor after all.
"Kid or no, he was on the wrong side," the pirate said with a toothless grin, rolling his 'r' and slurring slightly.
This was a huge waste of time. She should get on with it. Still, she didn't like how confident this man seemed, even though she already assessed that he was no threat to her.
She dived forward, dodging his blade and swiping him off his feet. He wasn't fast enough to react in time and simply fell heavily on the ground, briefly loosening his hold on the handle of his sword. It was enough for Mercy to stand up and kick it out of his hand. She towered over him, the tip of her blade poking into his cheek until the first drop of blood oozed.
"Any last words, coward?" she seethed, hissing the words instead of speaking normally.
Jack... he was the youngest, the most innocent. He was also the one she had saved from imminent death once upon a time, when he had been touched by Dreamshade. In the end, he left Neverland the only way he could... in death. It was the ugliest thought Mercy had had in a long while and she quickly shook it away.
"Do you?"
Mercy raised a brow, then something hit her at the back of the head and everything went dark.
000
The moment Mercy left him alone in that clearing, Peter was so distraught that he didn't even think about the loop spell that prevented her from walking away, and so she ran off into the forest. Their reunion went about as well as he thought it would, but that was to be expected after everything that happened between them. They had a lot of baggage, a confrontation such as the one that took place tonight was bound to happen, and bound to be a hideous one.
Still, he wished he could have told her what he came to say before she ran off, called by her trusted Dorothy. Something must have happened. He would do well and go back to his camp to see if it was anything worth his attention. Whatever caused trouble on Neverland was his business, after all.
000
"What did you just say?" Sybil seethed between her teeth, standing taller than she was.
A hush fell over the Lost Girls' camp right as Winnie whispered out what trouble her so. All day she had been shaking, unable to focus, slowly losing her inner battle against herself. Please, let Felix forgive me for what I'll do.
"The Lost Boys have captured a girl. She's their prisoner now," she repeated what she had just confessed to one of her friends, unable to keep this secret to herself any longer. A life was a stake. Winnie could keep a secret as long as it didn't harm anyone, but this was too important to keep silent.
"How do you know that?" Sybil questioned, standing right beside her.
Winnie was much taller than Sybil but her cowered form sitting on a rock looked small and weak in comparison to her feisty friend. Sybil's hand held tight onto her dagger, rage boiling in her veins.
"Please, don't ask me that," Winnie whined, begging now. "I know I should have told you sooner, but I couldn't- I couldn't tell anyone. Even now, I shouldn't be telling you."
"How can you possibly know this, Winnie?" Sybil insisted. "We're all dying to know, c'mon now. There's no secret between us, you know that."
If her voice was sweet and honeyed it wasn't the outward reflection of her heart. Sybil's anger brewed in her stomach, sending shockwaves of fire and ire throughout her body. Her fingers prickled with pent-up rage.
"Sybil, please…"
"Are you begging now? That's unworthy of you, have you learned nothing? Only the weak beg! Are you weak, Winnie? Weak enough to fool around with Lost Boys?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Sybil, just please, believe me. And believe me when I say that I had a reason not to come clean sooner," the young girl continued to plead her friend, under the conflicted gazed of all the girls in the camp.
Betrayal. That word was written all over their faces. She had betrayed them by not disclosing this information as soon as she found out, no matter how. Sybil was rightfully angry, though maybe excessively so, and against the wrong person.
"Mercy knows about it too, then. There's nothing on this island she doesn't know about, and certainly nothing of this importance," Dorothy spoke up, walking forth to stand next to Winnie and place a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
Immediately, Winnie leaned against her friend, her hand grasping onto her arm.
"You trust me, right? You know I wouldn't betray any of you!"
Dorothy only gave her a tight-lipped smile and a little nod, not convinced but willing to give Winnie a chance to explain herself later.
"Then Mercy has betrayed us too!" Sybil spat on the ground, causing a few shocked whispers to erupt in the crowd around them. "All girls on this island belong with us. It's the rule. Pan has no right to keep one of us prisoner!"
"There must be another explanation," Dorothy intervene to try to simmer down her friend's bout of anger. "If Mercy knows, she has got to have a solid reason for not doing anything about it. There's too much we don't know about this-"
"We know enough!" she cut her off. Some girls around them voiced their agreement, nodding along with what Sybil said. "We know that there is a girl in the Lost Boys' camp, that's she's been thrown in cage like an animal and she's scared and needs saving!"
"What if she's dangerous?" Dorothy asked. "What if there's a good reason for her to be in a cage? Pan has honored our agreement for decades now, why would he break our truce for one girl?"
"You would attach the word 'honor' to Pan's name?" Sybil full-on mocked her, a few laughs from other girls joining her. "He doesn't know its meaning. Today he proved it by showing his face right here!" She gestured around her. "He disregarded our mutual understanding that each should stay within their own territory, and came to our camp as if he owned the place!"
"You've heard the same stories about him as I have, Sybil, don't you forget that! We all know what he's capable of, if he wanted to act against us, he wouldn't have come all this way, or bothered to parlay with Mercy!"
"And you forget who he is! He stole us from our homes, he brought us here to our doom!"
"I hadn't forgotten. I know very well who and what he is. But I still advise caution. We should wait until Mercy comes back, she'll tell us what he wanted."
"No, she won't! She doesn't tell us anything anymore," someone else said.
Sybil pointed her dagger in the direction of the girl who spoke.
"See? I'm not the only one who noticed that Mercy has gone soft. She doesn't have our best interest at heart anymore; hasn't for a long time."
"You don't mean that."
"But I do! We all saw her take his hand! She chose to leave with him instead of fight with us! We could have taken him!"
"Now you are just deluding yourself. He's been here for longer than any of us can imagine, growing stronger and stronger. None of us can take him, save perhaps for Mercy if she deigned use her magic."
"So you admit that we had a chance if she had stayed… ?"
"No, I-" Dorothy was going to rip Sybil's throat out. She forced herself to breathe in and out to calm down before speaking again. "We need to bring this to Mercy's attention, ask her what she knows."
"You said it yourself: she already knows. She has to!" Sybil barked back, gaining another round of approval from the other girls. Dorothy didn't like the turn of events. Winnie still clung to her, just as worried about the quick escalation of this already bad situation. "Besides, she's been out of it for a while now. The Mercy I know and love has withered away with each passing year since the moment I arrived. What help could she be to this poor girl that we can't?"
There was a long list of things that came to mind when Dorothy thought about Sybil's rhetorical question, but it wasn't the right time or context to bring it up. There was truth behind her words too, Mercy had been terribly absent lately, in every sense of the term. Something weight heavy on her mind and she had to resolve her own problems before attending to any newly arisen one.
"Watch what you say," Dorothy growled now, having sensed that she needed to step up and hold her ground against Sybil if she didn't want the situation to seriously degenerate. "You don't know what you're talking about or what she has to deal with. You're not the leader here, Sybil, remember your place."
"Oh, and here we go. Miss second in command finally shows her face. Why bother acting like you take this role to heart now? You never do. We don't need your help either. This is merely a rescue mission. If we do it now, while Mercy hold's Pan's attention, we can be back in no time."
"There is no mission!" Dorothy snapped, making sure to meet the other girls' stares too. "Only Mercy decides when there's a mission."
"She's not in the right mindset to make any decision right now. I'm making the decision for her. No girl should be left behind. We should go get her before she comes back."
"It's not your call to make! No one's leaving the camp until she returns and I talk to her."
"You talk to her?" Another girl now spoke up, before Sybil could say anything though she had already taken a step towards Dorothy to challenge her. "Why is it always you, Dorothy? We want to hear it too. This concerns all of us."
"This is mutiny," Winnie whispered to herself – only Dorothy heard her, and her heartbeat picked up at those words.
She didn't have any control over this situation and Sybil was taking advantage of it. She has always been a hot head and a stubborn one at that, but this was taking it a notch too far. This was a betrayal that ran deeper than Winnie's retention of information.
Part of her thought Sybil was using this girl, the prisoner, as an excuse to wage war against the Lost Boys and defy Mercy's authority. It was in her nature, her temper. She was belligerent and restless, she wanted to fight. And this poor girl imprisoner in Pan's camp was her Helen of Troy.
As much as she hated to admit it, Dorothy couldn't hardly deny Sybil's talent to galvanize the girls. They were more than ready to follow her right into the lion's den at this point, and she wasn't even done playing her cards.
"We can all talk to her, this isn't the point," Dorothy spoke again to try and settle everybody's worries. "I promise you, she would never leave a girl to fend for herself without a solid reason. Either that or… she doesn't know."
"Okay, okay," Sybil conceded, her condescending tone making Dorothy's hairs stand on end. She would need to teach the girl a lesson next time they sparred together – such insubordination was on the verge of treason. "Let's say she doesn't know. Then what? She's still a mess. She's still holed up somewhere. Who knows how long this will last? She's disappeared for days on end before."
The girls all voiced their agreement again.
"I say we take matters into our own hands," Sybil declared, rather smugly.
"Yes!" the girls shouted in unison.
"I say we leave her out of that and march to the Lost Boys' camp to free the girl they captured, and take back what's ours!"
"Yes!" The clamor gained in volume, the girls threw their fists in the air, showing their support.
"And I say we have waited long enough already," Sybil added more quietly, looking down on Winnie who cried silent tears of guilt and fear of what she provoked. "We gather arms and leave as soon as we a re ready. Who's with me?"
Cheers and screams of support answered her question. Winnie let go of Dorothy's hand at long last and broke into loud sobs, while her friend remained put, her heart hammering in her chest, head pounding – she needed to stop the inevitable. She needed to find Mercy before it was too late.