***
22
***
"C-can I m-m-move c-closer to the f-f-f-fire?" The sparrow had stuck its beak out the gap between Slightly's cap and the floor. "It's c-cold down here!"
Billy frowned, and nudged the hat towards the flame with his foot. The sparrow yelped and tumbled under it as the band knocked him off his feet. After a few moment it gave a muffled "Thank you!" and its toes came out the gap, wiggling in the heat from the fire.
Billy wrapped the vine cord around his hand one more time and gave it an experimental tug, watching it go taught on its path to the ceiling. Mullins was a few feet to his left, leaned on the cavern wall, fiddling with the butt of the dagger nervously. Just waiting for events to happen was infinitely more frustrating then going out and doing them yourself.
"Maybe Hook caught him." Billy muttered darkly, tugging the rope. "It's been too long. Slightly should be back by now."
Mullins frowned. "Have some patience. It hasn't been that long."
"It's been forever!"
"Don't worry. Them Lost Boys are slippery as eels."
Billy fidgeted anyway.
"Umm, hat is burning! HAT IS BURNING!" the sparrow suddenly shrieked, and Slightly's cap started to jump on top of its wings, the bill smoking where it had nudged too close to the fire. Mullins laughed. Billy dropped the rope and quickly patted the cap out.
Jukes carefully positioned the hat outside the danger rage, peeking quickly to make sure the sparrow wasn't singed.
"If Slightly doesn't come back soon, I'm going out after him. Plan or no plan." He said, taking up the rope again.
***
Nibs spotted Slightly first. He recognized that yellow head of hair as easily as he recognized his own feet; the boy was propped against a tree by the shoulder, hands on his thighs and panting faintly. He didn't have his cap, for once. It had been a long time since Slightly hadn't worn his cap outside of bed.
Wendy called down to him. His head snapped up and he stared, ever so much the frightened rabbit.
"Slightly! Oh, you're okay!" Wendy landed first and hugged him around the neck, making him bend his back. "We were afraid the pirates would get you first! Is everything alright?"
He nodded dumbly. Peter landed with the other Lost Boys behind the girl, and Slightly stared determinedly into the dirt, avoiding their eyes.
"Where's Jukes?" was the first thing Peter said.
"Yes, where IS Jukes?" the dove mimicked.
Slightly flashed his eyes up, recognizing the little puff of cream colored feathers and red eyeliner, which Peter held as though it were only a stone.
"He's not here." He said. The dove deflated.
"Your new friends run off and leave you? Or did Captain Codfish already kill them?" Peter asked coldly.
Slightly flinched. "It's slightly none of your business anymore, Peter."
"Oh, stop it, you two!" Wendy said, and put her hands on her hips, standing between Peter and Slightly. "You're both acting childish! Peter, just apologize to Slightly, and Slightly, you apologize to Peter, and we can all go home again one big happy family and let the pirates sort out their own troubles!"
"No!" both boys snapped at the same time. Wendy blinked.
"He's not coming back with us." Peter said.
"I slightly don't WANT to come back with you. Billy needs me." He stepped sideways, bringing his back free of the tree. "A lot more than you ever will."
He disappeared into the forest, the shadows of the trunks swallowing him eagerly. Wendy called out after him, but Peter grabbed the back of her dress and didn't let her go.
"Leave him!" he snapped. "He doesn't want our help."
"Peter, how can you be so heartless towards your own boys!" Wendy cried, and covered her face and ran in the opposite direction Slightly had taken.
"He's not my boy anymore!" Peter shouted after her.
***
"Starkey!" Mason, whipping away the cape the man had tenderly tucked over the mushrooms in the briar patch. "Where are you going!"
Hook scowled at the retreating figure. It had looked as though the pirate had gone catatonic, but then for no reason they could see he'd burst into tears and draped his cloak over the fungal carpet beneath the bushes. At his touch the mushrooms seemed to stretch and strain, rising up beneath the cloak to a suspicious, humanoid mound. It was bad magic.
"Starkey!" Mason bellowed after him again. Hook caught the carpenter roughly by the arm before he could move.
"Capt'n, let go!"
"We're leaving him!" Hook snapped. "Move yourself!"
"Capt'n!"
Hook pressed his iron claw hard into Mason's throat, backing him into a tree until the point pressed in dangerously between vein and tendon. Blood fled from Mason's face.
"We're moving." Hook said slowly, his voice a venomous molasses "And if whatever black magic voodoo in this place steals your sense as well, I'll leave you to it, just the same."
Mason showed his teeth, hands tightening compulsively on their separate burdens; one the collar of the absent Starkey's cape, the other the woolen lip of the cap in which two tiny hearts beat. He swallowed at his sneer.
"Yes, SIR…."
***
The frozen hills went slower under Iggy's feet than they had ever gone before. His breath was white in front of his face and his hands had gone painful, then numb. His face had become too cold to do anything but pant through a slack jaw and swallow vainly at his saliva. The road was close. Maybe someone could pick him up.
Iggy mounted the last hill and fell as the ground dropped beneath him, rolling head over heels down the slope and plowing into a snow bank. The loose white cold slipped down behind him and covered him, enveloping his body like a womb from which he wouldn't be born until spring. The snow shifted down and covered his face. He couldn't breathe.
Nothing cooperated as he struggled upward. His fingers wouldn't move themselves, the snow would not stay put; powder kept falling in on him, and he thought his eyes must be frozen solid because they weren't even cold anymore. When his clawing reached air he couldn't tell, but his face rose up like a new sapling and he gasped and fell forward over the snow. In front of him, mockingly several meters away, sleigh tracks fenced in the prints of draft horses over the roads. If he could get there, he could walk in the tracks. He'd go quicker that way.
Iggy stumbled, half walking and half crawling, till his palms struck the flattened snow of the sleigh tracks and he managed to struggle to his feet. He didn't regret the loss of his coat. Sniffing a nose he couldn't feel, Iggy turned himself towards town. In front of him the road began to waver, like a wall of heat, and he wondered if his eyes were going. His footsteps pushed him through the wall.
The winter world collapsed.
Feeling shot back into Starkey's body with a sudden jolt and his heart skipped over itself, startled to find itself warm. He was on his feet, taller than he ought to be, in a forest that was not his home and warm and calm with summer. His mind caught up with his body in a dull lurch and Starkey stood there a moment, panting outside the boarder of the Heart of Neverland. He abruptly doubled over and threw up.
He remembered that day. He'd woken up wrapped in someone else's cloak, held tightly by a woman he didn't know in the back of a silent wagon. They'd found him in the road. When they reached town he walked home and stuffed a log into the fireplace, and fell asleep on the stones.
It was daylight before The Man came in; he didn't live there. He was frozen, and there were tears on his face. He'd grabbed Iggy up by the ribs and cried into his shirt, begging his forgiveness. Madeline was dead, he said. Madeline was dead and nothing mattered anymore.
Iggy had thought the man had come to kill him where his mother had failed, but the next day he took him to his own home and ordered his maid to clean him and situate him. He'd been made clothes and given a permanent room, but the man never explained the change of heart, only looked at him with sad, terrible eyes, and watched from the doorway when he thought Iggy was asleep. Within a month, the man had sent him off to school.
By his second year at the Sheffield James School for Boys Iggy had shoved all thought of that snowy hillside away until he received a frantic letter that he was to return home, and that the headmaster was to excuse him for at least a week. He'd traveled home in a coach alone, not knowing what was coming, and certainly not expecting what he found.
His mother (his dear, dead mother) sat on the couch before the fire, her clothes made up immaculately, her hair knotted up on top of her head. It was not just habit this time that kept it there, but concealment, for the hair covered the scar where she'd thrown herself down the ravine after Imogene was killed. The man had burst into tears again as he told him how she had not been dead, not dead at all. A traveler had found her and taken her back, and a doctor had saved her life. He said she'd forgotten everything after the fall, and that was why she hadn't come back to them.
She still had not come back. Inside her eyes it was dark and empty, like the loft of an abandoned house. Starkey knew she had never forgotten anything.
When he was fifteen, on holiday from school, he'd walked into his mother's bedchamber unannounced to tell her to come down to dinner. He'd caught her sitting on her bed with her skirt pulled up to her thigh, dragging her husband's shaving razor down the back of her leg. Starkey had thought she was trying to kill herself, and knocked the razor away, but when he tried to staunch the bleeding with the bed linens he realized she'd barely broken the skin. The scar she'd cut open was massive with abuse.
He left her crying on the bed and sat pallid and quiet through dinner with her husband, wondering how The Man hadn't seen the scar, and realizing he probably had.
The next year at school he brought himself to write his mother a letter. She did not reply, so he sent another, and another. Over the course of months it became like he was talking to himself. He told her nightmares and sweet dreams and school boy crushes, and the end of the year, when he returned home again, she smiled at him.
Three months later she wrote him back for the first time. There were no pleasantries and no formalities, just a two page manuscript beginning with the words "Your father left me alone." Starkey read it seven times that night.
His father hadn't just left them when he was a child; he had left with a girl named Ernestine. She was fifteen years old, two years older than Imogene had been, and he had been seeing her since she was twelve. His mother had known about it all along; he had not exactly been discrete.
By the time another man showed interest in her she'd been ready to leave her children in a forest and not come back. She had thought she was more in love with him than she had ever been with anyone, and he had asked her to marry him. However, her husband was not dead, nor were they divorced. She could not marry while she still had this life and these children. She spoke something of desperation and loneliness, and only hoped he was capable of understanding, though she did not even hope for forgiveness.
Starkey hadn't had the will to hate her anymore; she was only a woman, not the omniscient, omnipotent being a mother seems like to her children. It had been too many years without her; time and memory had thrown a veil over that deadly day. By the time the fiasco which ruined his reputation occurred, his mother had seemed almost normal in her letters. She'd even told him she'd cut her hair, and it looked absolutely scandalous.
It had been a very long time since he'd seen her.
Starkey pushed shakily upright and closed his eyes against the pounding in his head. He wasn't even aware anyone was watching him.
"…Do you have nightmares, too?" a young voice asked.
Starkey's head snapped up. There was a boy standing on top of a stone, the fat little Lost Boy in a panda hat. Starkey scowled at him.
"What do you want?"
"Nothing." He knelt down to be a closer level to Starkey. "You were in the Heart, weren't you."
"The what?"
"The Heart. In there." He pointed the direction Starkey had come. "Did you see bad things?"
"I don't see what business that is of yours!" Starkey snapped.
Toodles smiled. "None, I guess. Nobody else ever sees things in the Heart of Neverland. The other boys just see shadows, and they never remember it. Do you remember what you saw?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes you do. Otherwise you wouldn't be sick."
They stared at each other.
"Do you know what I see in the heart?" Toodles asked quietly.
"No. Nor do I care." Starkey sniffed.
Toodles ignored him. "I see my old house before I came here. I can't remember it on my own but I can remember what the heart shows me. I sometimes have nightmares about that house."
Toodles looked at him expectantly.
"Did you have a dream about your old house, Starkey?"
Starkey pushed his chin up. "No. I…" he swallowed. "I-I saw my sister."
"Oh."
Toodles sat down on the stone facing the heart, his legs folded neatly under his belly. Starkey followed his gaze.
"I wonder who's going to come out."
***
When Slightly came tearing blindly through the cavern, the sparrow had been reciting nursery rhymes quietly to itself inside the hat. Billy tensed when he heard the footsteps, tightening his grip on the cord. Mullins ripped the dagger from his belt and balanced it in his hand. Slightly ran down the corridor, with blood sitting at his hairline where he'd cracked his head against a low ceiling, and when he tripped over the entrance to the cavern and nearly face first into the fire, both Billy and Mullins focused their most lethal attention behind him.
No one else came.
After a few second of silence in the caves, Billy dared look away to Slightly. The boy had gone up on his knees and was picking bits of grit from his scraped palms with a nervous attention.
"Where's Hook?"
Slightly shook his head, not looking up. "I slightly don't know. He didn't come."
"He didn't hear you?"
"I don't know!" Slightly snapped. Billy blinked and dropped the cord.
"Are you alright, cully?"
"I'm fine! We just need to come up with a new plan!"
His hands were shaking bad enough to notice now and he quickly knotted them, sweat creeping into the scrapes and making them sting. Billy frowned and knelt.
"Cully, what happened?"
Slightly took a deep breath and pushed his knuckles to his forehead.
"I saw Peter." He said. "I think Wendy talked them into coming after me."
"Did they follow you back?" Mullins asked warily.
Slightly laughed, darkly. "No. Why would they? I'm not a Lost Boy anymore."
"How we gonna get them in here, then?" Mullins asked, hitching his thumbs in his belt.
"I'll think of something." Billy said quietly.
22
***
"C-can I m-m-move c-closer to the f-f-f-fire?" The sparrow had stuck its beak out the gap between Slightly's cap and the floor. "It's c-cold down here!"
Billy frowned, and nudged the hat towards the flame with his foot. The sparrow yelped and tumbled under it as the band knocked him off his feet. After a few moment it gave a muffled "Thank you!" and its toes came out the gap, wiggling in the heat from the fire.
Billy wrapped the vine cord around his hand one more time and gave it an experimental tug, watching it go taught on its path to the ceiling. Mullins was a few feet to his left, leaned on the cavern wall, fiddling with the butt of the dagger nervously. Just waiting for events to happen was infinitely more frustrating then going out and doing them yourself.
"Maybe Hook caught him." Billy muttered darkly, tugging the rope. "It's been too long. Slightly should be back by now."
Mullins frowned. "Have some patience. It hasn't been that long."
"It's been forever!"
"Don't worry. Them Lost Boys are slippery as eels."
Billy fidgeted anyway.
"Umm, hat is burning! HAT IS BURNING!" the sparrow suddenly shrieked, and Slightly's cap started to jump on top of its wings, the bill smoking where it had nudged too close to the fire. Mullins laughed. Billy dropped the rope and quickly patted the cap out.
Jukes carefully positioned the hat outside the danger rage, peeking quickly to make sure the sparrow wasn't singed.
"If Slightly doesn't come back soon, I'm going out after him. Plan or no plan." He said, taking up the rope again.
***
Nibs spotted Slightly first. He recognized that yellow head of hair as easily as he recognized his own feet; the boy was propped against a tree by the shoulder, hands on his thighs and panting faintly. He didn't have his cap, for once. It had been a long time since Slightly hadn't worn his cap outside of bed.
Wendy called down to him. His head snapped up and he stared, ever so much the frightened rabbit.
"Slightly! Oh, you're okay!" Wendy landed first and hugged him around the neck, making him bend his back. "We were afraid the pirates would get you first! Is everything alright?"
He nodded dumbly. Peter landed with the other Lost Boys behind the girl, and Slightly stared determinedly into the dirt, avoiding their eyes.
"Where's Jukes?" was the first thing Peter said.
"Yes, where IS Jukes?" the dove mimicked.
Slightly flashed his eyes up, recognizing the little puff of cream colored feathers and red eyeliner, which Peter held as though it were only a stone.
"He's not here." He said. The dove deflated.
"Your new friends run off and leave you? Or did Captain Codfish already kill them?" Peter asked coldly.
Slightly flinched. "It's slightly none of your business anymore, Peter."
"Oh, stop it, you two!" Wendy said, and put her hands on her hips, standing between Peter and Slightly. "You're both acting childish! Peter, just apologize to Slightly, and Slightly, you apologize to Peter, and we can all go home again one big happy family and let the pirates sort out their own troubles!"
"No!" both boys snapped at the same time. Wendy blinked.
"He's not coming back with us." Peter said.
"I slightly don't WANT to come back with you. Billy needs me." He stepped sideways, bringing his back free of the tree. "A lot more than you ever will."
He disappeared into the forest, the shadows of the trunks swallowing him eagerly. Wendy called out after him, but Peter grabbed the back of her dress and didn't let her go.
"Leave him!" he snapped. "He doesn't want our help."
"Peter, how can you be so heartless towards your own boys!" Wendy cried, and covered her face and ran in the opposite direction Slightly had taken.
"He's not my boy anymore!" Peter shouted after her.
***
"Starkey!" Mason, whipping away the cape the man had tenderly tucked over the mushrooms in the briar patch. "Where are you going!"
Hook scowled at the retreating figure. It had looked as though the pirate had gone catatonic, but then for no reason they could see he'd burst into tears and draped his cloak over the fungal carpet beneath the bushes. At his touch the mushrooms seemed to stretch and strain, rising up beneath the cloak to a suspicious, humanoid mound. It was bad magic.
"Starkey!" Mason bellowed after him again. Hook caught the carpenter roughly by the arm before he could move.
"Capt'n, let go!"
"We're leaving him!" Hook snapped. "Move yourself!"
"Capt'n!"
Hook pressed his iron claw hard into Mason's throat, backing him into a tree until the point pressed in dangerously between vein and tendon. Blood fled from Mason's face.
"We're moving." Hook said slowly, his voice a venomous molasses "And if whatever black magic voodoo in this place steals your sense as well, I'll leave you to it, just the same."
Mason showed his teeth, hands tightening compulsively on their separate burdens; one the collar of the absent Starkey's cape, the other the woolen lip of the cap in which two tiny hearts beat. He swallowed at his sneer.
"Yes, SIR…."
***
The frozen hills went slower under Iggy's feet than they had ever gone before. His breath was white in front of his face and his hands had gone painful, then numb. His face had become too cold to do anything but pant through a slack jaw and swallow vainly at his saliva. The road was close. Maybe someone could pick him up.
Iggy mounted the last hill and fell as the ground dropped beneath him, rolling head over heels down the slope and plowing into a snow bank. The loose white cold slipped down behind him and covered him, enveloping his body like a womb from which he wouldn't be born until spring. The snow shifted down and covered his face. He couldn't breathe.
Nothing cooperated as he struggled upward. His fingers wouldn't move themselves, the snow would not stay put; powder kept falling in on him, and he thought his eyes must be frozen solid because they weren't even cold anymore. When his clawing reached air he couldn't tell, but his face rose up like a new sapling and he gasped and fell forward over the snow. In front of him, mockingly several meters away, sleigh tracks fenced in the prints of draft horses over the roads. If he could get there, he could walk in the tracks. He'd go quicker that way.
Iggy stumbled, half walking and half crawling, till his palms struck the flattened snow of the sleigh tracks and he managed to struggle to his feet. He didn't regret the loss of his coat. Sniffing a nose he couldn't feel, Iggy turned himself towards town. In front of him the road began to waver, like a wall of heat, and he wondered if his eyes were going. His footsteps pushed him through the wall.
The winter world collapsed.
Feeling shot back into Starkey's body with a sudden jolt and his heart skipped over itself, startled to find itself warm. He was on his feet, taller than he ought to be, in a forest that was not his home and warm and calm with summer. His mind caught up with his body in a dull lurch and Starkey stood there a moment, panting outside the boarder of the Heart of Neverland. He abruptly doubled over and threw up.
He remembered that day. He'd woken up wrapped in someone else's cloak, held tightly by a woman he didn't know in the back of a silent wagon. They'd found him in the road. When they reached town he walked home and stuffed a log into the fireplace, and fell asleep on the stones.
It was daylight before The Man came in; he didn't live there. He was frozen, and there were tears on his face. He'd grabbed Iggy up by the ribs and cried into his shirt, begging his forgiveness. Madeline was dead, he said. Madeline was dead and nothing mattered anymore.
Iggy had thought the man had come to kill him where his mother had failed, but the next day he took him to his own home and ordered his maid to clean him and situate him. He'd been made clothes and given a permanent room, but the man never explained the change of heart, only looked at him with sad, terrible eyes, and watched from the doorway when he thought Iggy was asleep. Within a month, the man had sent him off to school.
By his second year at the Sheffield James School for Boys Iggy had shoved all thought of that snowy hillside away until he received a frantic letter that he was to return home, and that the headmaster was to excuse him for at least a week. He'd traveled home in a coach alone, not knowing what was coming, and certainly not expecting what he found.
His mother (his dear, dead mother) sat on the couch before the fire, her clothes made up immaculately, her hair knotted up on top of her head. It was not just habit this time that kept it there, but concealment, for the hair covered the scar where she'd thrown herself down the ravine after Imogene was killed. The man had burst into tears again as he told him how she had not been dead, not dead at all. A traveler had found her and taken her back, and a doctor had saved her life. He said she'd forgotten everything after the fall, and that was why she hadn't come back to them.
She still had not come back. Inside her eyes it was dark and empty, like the loft of an abandoned house. Starkey knew she had never forgotten anything.
When he was fifteen, on holiday from school, he'd walked into his mother's bedchamber unannounced to tell her to come down to dinner. He'd caught her sitting on her bed with her skirt pulled up to her thigh, dragging her husband's shaving razor down the back of her leg. Starkey had thought she was trying to kill herself, and knocked the razor away, but when he tried to staunch the bleeding with the bed linens he realized she'd barely broken the skin. The scar she'd cut open was massive with abuse.
He left her crying on the bed and sat pallid and quiet through dinner with her husband, wondering how The Man hadn't seen the scar, and realizing he probably had.
The next year at school he brought himself to write his mother a letter. She did not reply, so he sent another, and another. Over the course of months it became like he was talking to himself. He told her nightmares and sweet dreams and school boy crushes, and the end of the year, when he returned home again, she smiled at him.
Three months later she wrote him back for the first time. There were no pleasantries and no formalities, just a two page manuscript beginning with the words "Your father left me alone." Starkey read it seven times that night.
His father hadn't just left them when he was a child; he had left with a girl named Ernestine. She was fifteen years old, two years older than Imogene had been, and he had been seeing her since she was twelve. His mother had known about it all along; he had not exactly been discrete.
By the time another man showed interest in her she'd been ready to leave her children in a forest and not come back. She had thought she was more in love with him than she had ever been with anyone, and he had asked her to marry him. However, her husband was not dead, nor were they divorced. She could not marry while she still had this life and these children. She spoke something of desperation and loneliness, and only hoped he was capable of understanding, though she did not even hope for forgiveness.
Starkey hadn't had the will to hate her anymore; she was only a woman, not the omniscient, omnipotent being a mother seems like to her children. It had been too many years without her; time and memory had thrown a veil over that deadly day. By the time the fiasco which ruined his reputation occurred, his mother had seemed almost normal in her letters. She'd even told him she'd cut her hair, and it looked absolutely scandalous.
It had been a very long time since he'd seen her.
Starkey pushed shakily upright and closed his eyes against the pounding in his head. He wasn't even aware anyone was watching him.
"…Do you have nightmares, too?" a young voice asked.
Starkey's head snapped up. There was a boy standing on top of a stone, the fat little Lost Boy in a panda hat. Starkey scowled at him.
"What do you want?"
"Nothing." He knelt down to be a closer level to Starkey. "You were in the Heart, weren't you."
"The what?"
"The Heart. In there." He pointed the direction Starkey had come. "Did you see bad things?"
"I don't see what business that is of yours!" Starkey snapped.
Toodles smiled. "None, I guess. Nobody else ever sees things in the Heart of Neverland. The other boys just see shadows, and they never remember it. Do you remember what you saw?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes you do. Otherwise you wouldn't be sick."
They stared at each other.
"Do you know what I see in the heart?" Toodles asked quietly.
"No. Nor do I care." Starkey sniffed.
Toodles ignored him. "I see my old house before I came here. I can't remember it on my own but I can remember what the heart shows me. I sometimes have nightmares about that house."
Toodles looked at him expectantly.
"Did you have a dream about your old house, Starkey?"
Starkey pushed his chin up. "No. I…" he swallowed. "I-I saw my sister."
"Oh."
Toodles sat down on the stone facing the heart, his legs folded neatly under his belly. Starkey followed his gaze.
"I wonder who's going to come out."
***
When Slightly came tearing blindly through the cavern, the sparrow had been reciting nursery rhymes quietly to itself inside the hat. Billy tensed when he heard the footsteps, tightening his grip on the cord. Mullins ripped the dagger from his belt and balanced it in his hand. Slightly ran down the corridor, with blood sitting at his hairline where he'd cracked his head against a low ceiling, and when he tripped over the entrance to the cavern and nearly face first into the fire, both Billy and Mullins focused their most lethal attention behind him.
No one else came.
After a few second of silence in the caves, Billy dared look away to Slightly. The boy had gone up on his knees and was picking bits of grit from his scraped palms with a nervous attention.
"Where's Hook?"
Slightly shook his head, not looking up. "I slightly don't know. He didn't come."
"He didn't hear you?"
"I don't know!" Slightly snapped. Billy blinked and dropped the cord.
"Are you alright, cully?"
"I'm fine! We just need to come up with a new plan!"
His hands were shaking bad enough to notice now and he quickly knotted them, sweat creeping into the scrapes and making them sting. Billy frowned and knelt.
"Cully, what happened?"
Slightly took a deep breath and pushed his knuckles to his forehead.
"I saw Peter." He said. "I think Wendy talked them into coming after me."
"Did they follow you back?" Mullins asked warily.
Slightly laughed, darkly. "No. Why would they? I'm not a Lost Boy anymore."
"How we gonna get them in here, then?" Mullins asked, hitching his thumbs in his belt.
"I'll think of something." Billy said quietly.