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Scene 45




Never Land, where Quicksilver and Ariel stand. Of a sudden, in an explosion of light, Kit Marlowe materializes, a dagger through his eye, bleeding profusely—from a certain transparent greyness, it’s clear he’s a ghost. And Will materializes after Kit, looking bewildered.


Where was Will?

At first Will thought he’d emerged onto a foggy shore, with the roar of the ocean in the distance, and sand swirling in the whistling wind.

Then he blinked and he realized that he stood in a vast forest, the trees towering overhead.

He blinked again, and saw himself in a city, with tall, baublelike, half-transparent palaces rising in all directions.

And through these half-perceived, half-seen structures, Will saw Kit—or was it Kit’s ghost?—a pale and wan Ariel and a Quicksilver so transparent, so weak, that he might well be a ghost himself.

“Never Land,” Will whispered to himself, remembering the place where Quicksilver had been sent. “I am in Never Land.” But saying didn’t help his bewildered senses to understand the place.

He stepped, half-dazed, toward Quicksilver while Marlowe, smiling softly despite his horrible, bleeding wound and the blood fast congealing on his blue suit, walked toward Will, his mincing step a fair imitation of his stroll at St. Paul’s.

“Friend Will,” he said. “I must thank you—”

“Will,” Quicksilver said. His voice was very faint, very cold, little more than the whisper of the icy wind. “And Kit. What happened to Kit? What woe is here?”

And Ariel said, “Milord, do not speak. Save your energy.”

Never Land, Will thought. Which meant that Quicksilver was nearly dead as the sun would now be setting in the mortal world.

A flash of light shone behind them, and the wolf materialized. Transparent, but not so much as Quicksilver, not even so much as Marlowe, it looked dark—dark and massive.

“You are my soul’s abhorrence,” the wolf growled. Though in canine form, he spoke with human words, words were shaped and built of growls and malice.

The landscape which, for the moment, had settled to gigantic trees with blowing sheets of moss hanging from them, seemed to become darker, whatever light there was being concentrated, caught by the wolf’s dark form, his dark core.

“You”—it turned to Kit—“have cost me my body, so hard-earned.”

“And you”—the baleful eyes of the beast turned to Will—“it’s the second time you cross me, and it shall be the last.” The wolf’s fur ruffled and his eyes seemed to flash with cold light as his fangs glinted by the pale light of an evanescent palace. “And you . . .” He turned to Quicksilver. “You, traitor spawn of a lowly woodland spirit, you who call yourself my brother, you and your half-changeling woman also shall die. All of you shall die here. All of you at my mercy. For I have more energy than any of you here, and here I shall ensure that you all die.”

Will felt as though fear froze him, terror gripped him, panic stopped his breath.

He’d never see Nan again. He’d die here in this land of half-reality and no one would even know where he had gone.

Or why.

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Framed