Free Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson Page B

without incident. Peter walked her all the way to an old bridge, about half a mile from the burrow. Flying behind them, I could smell the same scent from Peter that had been in his room, musky, leafy, and boyish. As the two walked ahead of me, there was a rustle above us and one of the twins came rappelling down a tree. For the first time, I noticed ropes hidden up among the limbs, woven carefully through the lushest areas of leaves. Tiger Lily gasped. This, I realized, was how they had spread the rumor that they could fly. It was an elaborate network of ladders and tightropes that they probably retreated to when they didn’t want to leave tracks. And it had all been hidden so well that I hadn’t noticed. “Good-bye, native girl,” the twin said. “It was nice to see you.”
    Then he turned and hurried back toward the burrow.
    The bridge had been hand built, probably before any of them had been born. It was half rotten, and spanned a swampy trickle that came off the lagoon. Several crocodiles lay below, their mouths open and waiting. Peter chewed on his nails.
    “They’re always here because the boys like to feed them. They think I don’t know. But it entertains them. One of the twins once threw a rat in for them, but I had to put an end to that.”
    “Why?” she asked.
    He turned his lashy blue eyes on her; he had the kind of open, disarming gaze that could make people lose their trains of thought, even boys. “Because it’s not fair to the rat. You have to at least have a fighting chance.”
    Tiger Lily took this in silently. I watched the two of them. I liked the way they stood together. They both kept one ear on each other, and one on the forest around them. And yet, there was something almost peaceful about them standing there. Maybe the way he seemed to vibrate made her stillness seem less glaring, and Peter seemed calmer.
    “You don’t say much?” Peter said.
    Tiger Lily shook her head. She was unsure what to say without revealing too much of herself.
    Peter leaned on the railing, which was merely a long crooked stick suspended by two wooden forks. He swayed forward and back against it listlessly, pumping his arms slowly, looking for something else to say. The railing didn’t appear to be sturdy enough to hold his weight for long. There were still parts of him that hadn’t caught up to the rest of him. “We do know girls. It’s not like we’ve never seen a girl. I love girls. I mean, I have loved a lot of them and there are some I love now. We know lots of girls actually.” He leaned in, paused. “They say a lot more than you do. It’s nice when they laugh.”
    Tiger Lily merely stared down at the water below, trying to absorb all of the information. Then suddenly, in a heartbeat, Peter’s eyes turned to me, as if he’d been noticing me all along. He reached out and lifted his hand gently underneath me, studying me. Imagine a human touching a fly this way. Most humans don’t find faeries worth studying and, if they do try to touch them, accidentally smush them or at least break a limb or two. But Peter touched me so carefully and gently that it felt like a whisper. “You’re a pretty little thing,” he said. Then, just as quickly, he set me onto a leaf and turned his attention back to Tiger Lily. He pointed across the thin swath of swamp to a tree just out of reach. A strange ball, trailing ribbons in a kind of tail, perched in the branches.
    “Nibs made that ball for us when we were kids,” he said. “You can twirl it and fling it really high. Too high, I guess. Slightly lost it there ages ago. No one can get it.” He nodded down to the crocs. “I don’t know why we’d want to get it anyway. We wouldn’t play with it anymore. We’ve outgrown that kind of stuff. But still, Tootles wants it back in the worst way. Maybe it’s for the memories.”
    Before he could say more, Tiger Lily was on the trunk of the tree, shinnying her way up. She moved like an eel, wriggling and quick, her