"Sllliiiip. Slllllliiiiip. Slllllllliiip." Wendy awoke slowly, evil dreams of pirate ships and far-off lands evaporating from her head. As she awoke, she could have sworn she heard a strange, wet noise, but as her eyes slowly fluttered open it ceased. As she gazed about her room, she saw her two younger brothers lying in perfect, still sleep. At the foot of her bed stood a boy.

The boy was fairly young, about her age, and his skin was quite fair. He had matted brown hair and wore forest green clothes of weaved grass and animal hide. His appearance was primitive, but not savage. He had a sort of barbaric, kingly beauty about him. His animal magnetism reminded Wendy of a tiger, deadly but strangely hypnotic.

"Hello?" She said carefully, not out of fear but out of respect. The boy's regal brown eyes seemed to demand worship. He looked down at her and peered most curiously, as if she were a puzzle he was trying to work out.

"Hello." He said, seemingly entranced. His voice had a light, but powerful quality that Wendy was not quite accustomed to. Listening to it felt much like the beating of the wings of a Chinese butterfly that was currently starting a tornado in Texas. It was soft, but its every vowel and constinent could knock you over if it dared choose.

"My name's Wendy." She said. The boy continued to peer at her, and she felt decidedly nervous. Like a small animal that had just fallen beneath the shadow of a hawk overhead. Unlike a small animal, however, her first instinct was not to freeze. "What's yours?" She pressed, realizing that the boy had not taken the hint.

"My name's Peter. Peter Pan." He replied. And then, unexpectedly "Is this your house?" He was examining a few of the small statues on her nightstand, brushing his fingers over them carefully as if he were trying to remember their every contour and crevice.

"N-no, it's my parents'." Wendy replied, startled by a sudden chill that had gone through her. She looked past Peter's shoulder, and saw that their large window was wide open. She wondered for a moment if he had climbed through it.

"Hmph. Parents." Peter grunted viciously.

"Don't you have parents?" Wendy asked. Peter shook his head. "You're not an orphan, are you? Oh dear, Peter, that's terribly sad if you are, I'm sorry I-"

"I'm not an orphan." Peter said simply. "I was lost."

"Oh." There was a silence that seemed to fill an eternity, as the two stared each other in the eye. Wendy felt another chill, this time not from the wind. Now that the boy was by her nightstand she could actually smell him. He smelled of death. "Well Peter, if you don't have any parents... Where do you come from?"

Peter smiled, a huge ecstatic smile that looked out of place on his up until then stoic face. Wendy noted that his mouth was red, and feral, like that of a predator that had just ripped the throat out of its favored meal. "A place... A very, very far away place where nothing ever changes and no one gets any older, or grows up, or dies. A place with joy." He said, almost laughing thinking about it, as he leapt into the air and hovered there, feet above Wendy's bed, twisting every law of what Wendy took to be sane and true and twisting it into something hauntingly wrong yet wonderful at the same time. Wendy suppressed a scream as she witnessed this. After a few moments, she breathed out in awe.

"Peter, how do you do that???" Peter's grin widened as she asked, and he touched down to the ground, a bright light fluttering out of his hand. As it did so, Wendy noticed that he didn't seem to cast a shadow.

"Would you like to know?" He asked, as the light fluttered in front of Wendy. It seemed to resemble a giant, golden insect, glistening with a thin sheen of amber and speckled with sparkling silver dust. Wendy tried to suppress her revulsion at the creature's presence, as it shook itself violently, peppering her with the shimmering powder. She blinked for a few moments.

"Is that it?" She asked. "Is that all there is to it? I can fly now?"

"There's one more thing." Peter told her. "But you have to promise me that you really, really want to fly."

Wendy gazed into his eyes for a moment, not sure whether to be afraid or elated, and as she did so she felt her will sapped out of her. Numbly, she nodded that she did, indeed, want to fly. As she nodded, she glanced over at her younger brother Michael. She felt her stomach squirm as she realized how quite pale he seemed, and how completely, perfectly, horrifyingly still he lay.

She tried to run away, or to scream, but it was too late. As she looked up at the horror before her, she saw as Peter's canines elongated into needle-sharp fangs. She felt her head grow light and her world grow black, as he lunged them into her neck and began to suck powerfully. She fell to the ground with a loud thump, and she was dead.

A few minutes later, the creature that now inhabited Wendy's body stood up, and smiled. It looked around at the world around it with new eyes, and it smiled wickedly, its sharp teeth gleaming brightly in the moonlight. It looked at Peter, who smiled back, and the two walked over to the window, and they flew.