The Never King (Vicious Lost Boys #1)
Nikki St. Crowe
To all the girls who had to grow up hard and fast.
BEFORE YOU READ
The Never King is a reimagining of Peter and Wendy, though all characters have been aged up and are 18 and over. This is not a children’s book and the characters are not children.
Some of the content in this book may be triggering for some readers. If you’d like to learn more about CWs in my work, please visit my website here:
https://www.nikkistcrowe.com/content-warnings
"Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life."
- J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy
1
WINNIE DARLING
I haven’t attended a normal high school in over two years, but yet I find myself still hooking up with the star quarterback in the passenger seat of his SUV.
He is bad at sex. Magnificent on the football field.
If only I liked football and hated sex.
Anthony shoves inside of me and I make the porn star face for him because I know he likes it.
I pretend to orgasm with him.
I am not a porn star, but I am the daughter of a prostitute so I think that’s close enough.
“Oh fuck yeah, Winnie. Fuck. Oh baby.” His grip on me is loose and clammy. He’s trembling like the boy he is.
We’re the same age, but decades apart.
“Fuck,” he says and breathes hot air against my naked chest. “That was so good. Was that good?”
The lack of confidence is insufferable. I don’t know that I’ve ever slept with a confident man.
Or maybe that’s wrong.
Maybe they’re only confident in the taking.
“So good, baby. You’re so good at sex.”
And I am so good at lying.
He smiles up at me as I continue to straddle him and then he stretches up and plants a kiss on my mouth.
I feel nothing other than a dull ache in my body and a throbbing headache behind my eyes.
I am dead inside.
And so fucking bored.
And the only thing I have to look forward to is being kidnapped by a myth.
Happy fucking birthday to me.
Anthony zips himself into his jeans and then drives me home.
I stare out the passenger side window as the SUV winds through my neighborhood.
When he pulls up to the curb, I start to open the door but he grabs my arm and leans over for a kiss.
I begrudgingly give it to him.
“You coming to the party this weekend?” he asks, more hopeful than I’d like.
When you’re extremely giving with sex, you are always invited to the parties. So many parties. All of them the same. But I like familiar things. I’ve always been short on familiar.
“Text me,” I tell him, because I’m not sure where I’ll be this weekend.
Today is my 18th birthday and every Darling woman that has come before me has disappeared on this day.
Some are gone a day, others a week or a month.
But they always return broken, with varying degrees of sanity intact.
I don’t want to go mad. I like who I am, for the most part.
When I come in the side door, Mom is suddenly in front of me. “Where have you been, Winnie? I thought he’d already taken you and—” Her attention wanders and then she races to the nearest window and tests its latch.
She’s muttering to herself as she works.
Pirates and Lost Boys and fairies.
And him.
She won’t speak his name when she’s awake, but at night, when she dreams, sometimes she’ll wake up screaming it.
Peter Pan.
Mom has been hospitalized seven times. They say she’s schizophrenic just like grandma and great-grandma and all of the Darling women before her.
A legacy of madness that I stand to inherit.
“Winnie!” Mom rushes up to me, her bone-thin hands wrapping around my wrists. Her eyes are wide. “Winnie, what are you doing? Get in the room!” She shoves me down the hall.
“It’s still daytime. And I’m hungry.”
“I’ll get you—when he—okay, listen.” Her gaze goes faraway and she frowns at herself, her grip loosening and my stomach drops.
Please, for the love of all the gods, I don’t want to end up like my mother.
“He’s coming!” she screams at me.
“I know.” I use my soothing voice on her. “I know he is, but you have the house battened down better than a bomb shelter. I don’t think anyone could get in.”
“Oh, Winnie.” Her voice catches. “He can get in anywhere.”
“If he can get in anywhere, then why lock the windows? Why stay in the room?”
She pushes me over the threshold, ignoring my logic.
The “special room” is a work of art fueled by terror. You can read the frenzy in the rough brush strokes that adorn the wall. Runic symbols, painted like graffiti with more etched into the casing around the door.
There has been a parade of so-called witches and shamans and voodoo priests that have come into our lives and through our houses selling my mom the secrets of protection from him.
We don’t have the money for it, but we spent it just the same.