Finding Tinker Bell #3

by Kiki Thorpe

  Copyright © 2018 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, in conjunction with Disney Enterprises, Inc. Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks and A Stepping Stone Book and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7364-3760-8 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-7364-9020-7 (lib. bdg.) —ISBN 978-0-7364-3761-5 (ebook)

  Ebook ISBN 9780736437615

  rhcbooks.com

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.1

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  For Lael —K.T.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Far away from the world we know, on the distant Sea of Dreams, lies an island called Never Land. It is a place full of magic, where mermaids sing, fairies play, and children never grow up. Adventures happen every day, and anything is possible.

  Though many children have heard of Never Land, only a special few ever find it. The secret, they know, lies not in a set of directions but deep within their hearts, for believing in magic can make extraordinary things happen. It can open doorways you never even knew were there.

  One day, through an accident of magic, four special girls found a portal to Never Land right in their own backyard. The enchanted island became the girls’ secret playground, one they visited every chance they got. With the fairies of Pixie Hollow as their friends and guides, they made many magical discoveries.

  But Never Land isn’t the only island on the Sea of Dreams. When a special friend goes missing, the girls set out across the sea to find her. Beyond the shores of Never Land, they encounter places far stranger than they ever could have imagined….

  This is their story.

  Kate McCrady took a deep breath and sighed. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, she climbed over a rotting log. She ducked under a giant fern. She tiptoed past a bunch of toadstools.

  This is an adventure, Kate reminded herself. Adventures are fun.

  Usually, Kate lived for adventures. She was lucky. At twelve, she’d had more of them than most people did in a lifetime. That was because Kate and her friends had discovered a secret portal to Never Land. On that magical island, Kate had met dozens of fairies. She’d gone swimming in the Mermaid Lagoon. She’d flown through the sky, held up by nothing more than a bit of fairy dust and a breeze.

  Now the girls’ Never Land adventures had led them here, to the mysterious Shadow Island. They were looking for the fairy Tinker Bell, who had vanished a few days before. All clues suggested that Tink’s disappearance had something to do with Shadow Island.

  It should have been the greatest adventure yet. But at the moment, Kate was not having fun. Not even a little.

  Kate was sweaty. She was tired. Worst of all, she was bored. She was starting to have the sneaking suspicion that they were lost.

  Kate shook her long red bangs out of her eyes. She wiped her damp brow with the back of her hand.

  She called to the four fairies, who were leading the way. “Does anyone know where we’re going?”

  Four spots of light paused in the gloom.

  “We’re going to find Tink’s boat,” Fawn, the animal-talent fairy, replied. “I met an osprey who’d spotted it on the shore.”

  “But how do we get to the shore?” Kate asked.

  The fairies looked at one another. “I’m following Iridessa,” said the garden-talent fairy Rosetta.

  “Well, I’m following Silvermist,” Iridessa, the light-talent fairy, replied, pointing ahead.

  “And I’m following Fawn,” Silvermist, the water-talent fairy, said.

  Fawn stared back at them in surprise. “I thought you were leading!”

  “Ugh,” Kate groaned. Her sneaking suspicion had turned into a certainty. “So we’re totally lost.”

  Silvermist looked around. “I wouldn’t say totally….”

  Kate frowned. “What would you say? Because I’d say we’re going in circles in a dark forest on a strange, creepy island. And we have no idea where to find Tink or how to get home.”

  “When you put it that way, it does sound bad,” Silvermist agreed.

  “I need a break.” As Kate sat down to rest on a tree stump, her friends Lainey Winters and Mia and Gabby Vasquez came straggling up. The girls looked as tired as Kate felt. Their shoulders sagged. Their feet scuffed the ground. Even Gabby’s costume fairy wings looked droopy.

  Lainey plopped down next to Kate. “I’m beat.”

  Mia and Gabby sat, too. The fairies flew down and landed on a tree stump.

  Mia took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. “It feels like we’ve walked a hundred miles,” she complained.

  “Your feet wouldn’t hurt if we were flying,” Kate pointed out.

  Mia sighed. “I know. But we need to save the fairy dust we have left. We don’t know how long it will take to find Tink or get back to Never Land.”

  Kate knew Mia was right. When they’d left Pixie Hollow to search for Tinker Bell, they’d brought only a small amount of extra fairy dust. They hadn’t known that they would end up so far away from Never Land.

  Kate ran her fingers over the small bag in her pocket. Split between them, the fairy dust might only last a few days at most.

  Without fairy dust, Kate and her friends couldn’t fly. Without fairy dust, the fairies couldn’t glow or do magic. They needed to find Tink soon.

  “Gabby, do you still have that map?” Kate asked.

  Gabby took the tiny scroll from her pocket and handed it to Kate. Gabby had found the map in Tinker Bell’s workshop the day she’d gone missing. It was the first clue that Tink might be lost somewhere on Shadow Island.

  Kate carefully unrolled the thin parchment and spread it across her knee. The sketched ink drawing showed dense forest and a jagged coastline. But it was hard to tell where they were going when Kate couldn’t even tell where they were.

  Lainey leaned over her shoulder. She touched an area covered in cloud-like swirls. “What’s that?”

  Kate squinted at the tiny words written there. “ ‘Lost Coast.’ That’s funny. I didn’t notice that on the map before.”

  “What good is a magic map if it doesn’t tell you where you are?” Rosetta grumbled.

  Kate rolled up the map and started to hand it back to Gabby. Then she hesitated.

  Gabby is only six. Can she be trusted to keep it safe? Kate wondered. “Maybe I should hold on to the map. For safekeeping,” she suggested.

  “I’m the one who found it,” Gabby protested.

  Kate opened her mouth to reply, then shrugged and handed the map back. It wasn’t worth fighting over.

  She stood and put her hands on her hips. She turned one way, then another. The forest looked the same in every direction.

  “This way,” Kate decided.

  The fairies raised their eyebrows. “How do you know that’s the
right direction?” asked Iridessa.

  “I don’t,” said Kate. “But we can’t get more lost than we already are.”

  She set off. A moment later, she heard the flutter of fairy wings and the girls’ footsteps behind her.

  Gabby caught up with Kate. She had to double her pace to match Kate’s stride. “I bet you guessed right, Kate,” Gabby whispered.

  Kate smiled down at her. She caught the smaller girl’s hand and held it as they walked.

  They hadn’t gone far, when the air seemed to grow cooler. Silvermist’s glow suddenly flared. “Do you smell that?” she asked.

  They all sniffed the air. “I don’t smell anything,” Kate said.

  “Me either,” said Mia.

  But Silvermist inhaled deeply. “It’s salt water! I can smell the sea! Kate, you were right!”

  She darted ahead. The girls scrambled after her. Soon they could hear the shush-shush of rolling surf.

  As they came through the trees, Kate stopped so suddenly that Lainey bumped into her. Together the girls and fairies stared in silence.

  “Where are we?” Gabby asked.

  They were on a beach. Fog lay thick over everything. Kate could hear waves rolling into shore, but she couldn’t see them. The shapes of large rocks were the only things visible through the mist.

  “Is this where we’ll find the boat?” Gabby asked.

  “It might be,” Fawn said. “The osprey said he saw it on a beach.”

  “Let’s look around,” Kate said.

  She took a step and immediately tripped on something. She bent to pick it up. “What the…?”

  It was a lunch box. Cartoon bears beamed at her from its side. They looked out of place in the gloom.

  “What’s a lunch box doing here?” Lainey asked.

  “I don’t know.” Kate noticed other things scattered in the sand. A baseball cap. A ring of keys. A doll’s arm. A pile of colorful socks stretched across the ground like a drift of seaweed.

  Mia wrinkled her nose. “What is all this stuff?”

  “It’s probably just trash that washed ashore,” Kate said. “Let’s spread out. That way we’ll cover more ground.”

  They fanned out along the beach. As Kate picked her way through the stuff, she noticed that it wasn’t garbage of the usual sort. There were no fast-food cartons or plastic bags or busted car tires. Everything seemed like something someone would want. There were eyeglasses, combs, earrings, even a few wallets. But mostly Kate saw toys—teddy bears, toy soldiers, miniature cars, balls, and dolls of all shapes and sizes. The large shapes Kate had mistaken for rocks were actually piles of things. She felt as if she were walking through a yard sale—the strangest one ever.

  Kate examined a kite with a long tail. It didn’t have a single rip or tear. Why would anyone throw this away? she wondered.

  As she set the kite down, Kate spotted a metal jack-in-the-box. Its once-colorful paint was chipped and faded.

  “Hey! I had one like this when I was little.” She grasped the tiny handle and gave it a turn.

  With a musical tinkle, the lid popped open. A leering clown lunged out.

  Kate jerked back, startled. Her foot landed on something that rolled, and she tumbled backward.

  Kate got up, laughing. “Now I remember why I hated that toy.” She looked around to see what she’d stepped on.

  It was an old softball, scuffed and grass-stained. When she picked it up, it fit perfectly in her hand.

  She turned it over, and her heart skipped a beat. There, in wobbly letters, was her own name. Kate McCrady.

  It was her very first softball. She had written her name on it herself when she was five or six years old.

  A memory suddenly came to Kate. She was standing in her backyard on a summer evening. The air smelled like mowed lawns and barbecues. “Hands up, Kate. Keep your eye on the ball,” her father told her. She felt a satisfying thunk as the ball hit her mitt. It had been her first catch.

  But she hadn’t seen the ball in years. How had it ended up here?

  A squeal came a few yards away.

  “Gabby?” Still clutching her softball, Kate hurried toward the sound of the cry.

  She found Gabby kneeling. The little girl’s arms were squeezed tight against her chest. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Kate exclaimed.

  “What happened?” Mia came running, with Lainey right behind her. She knelt down next to her sister. “Gabby, what is it?” she asked.

  “I found my doggy,” Gabby whispered. Kate saw then that she wasn’t doubled over in pain. She was cuddling something.

  Mia’s eyes opened wide. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Gabby held up a bedraggled plush dog. Its matted fur had once been white but was now a dingy gray. It was missing one ear and its tail hung by a thread.

  Mia looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “BowBow? I never thought we’d see him again.”

  “You lost him?” Kate asked.

  “A long time ago,” Mia said. “He was Gabby’s favorite toy. She used to tie a string around his neck and drag him down the sidewalk like he was a real dog. One day, Mami put Gabby in the stroller. We didn’t realize the string had come untied until we got home. We looked everywhere, but we never found him. Mami felt terrible about it.”

  “BowBow, I missed you.” Gabby nuzzled the toy’s grubby fur.

  “I found my first softball,” Kate told her friends. She held it out to show them her name.

  The other girls stared. “What is this place?” Lainey asked.

  “What’s going on? Did you find the boat?” Iridessa darted over to them. Her glow was bright with excitement.

  But when Kate and Gabby showed her their toys, the fairy’s face fell. “I thought you’d found something important.”

  “You don’t understand,” Kate said. “These are important. They’re our things. Things we lost.”

  Iridessa looked at her blankly. She didn’t understand, but it wasn’t her fault. The fairies of Never Land are born full-grown and stay that way their whole lives. They never outgrow their clothes or toys—or, for that matter, their wishes and dreams and silly ideas.

  Simply put, fairies are who they have always been. And if they lose a beloved object, it’s just gone—it doesn’t take part of them with it.

  So Iridessa had no way of seeing that when the girls found their lost toys, they were also finding pieces of their old selves.

  “That’s all fine,” the light-talent fairy said, “but we need to be looking for clues about Tink. We should have a system. Kate, you take the waterline. Mia, you search mid-beach. Lainey and Gabby, look at the high-tide mark….”

  But the girls weren’t listening. They were scanning the beach with new interest. “The Lost Coast,” Mia murmured.

  “What’s that?” Iridessa looked annoyed at being interrupted.

  “The Lost Coast,” Mia repeated. “This must be where lost things go.”

  “In that case,” Iridessa said, “we should find Tink in no time.” She buzzed off, her wings whirring like a hummingbird’s.

  The girls spread out again. This time Kate went slowly. She examined everything—thermos bottles, plastic dinosaurs, wooden buttons, glass marbles.

  In a tangle of socks, Kate spotted a pattern that sent a jolt right through her.

  “Ellie?”

  She fished a little calico elephant out of the pile. It had black button eyes and an embroidered smile. The fabric of its trunk was shiny from where it had been rubbed a thousand times.

  The toy looked older than Kate remembered, but it was still the elephant she had once loved. Her first best friend. Memories flickered through Kate’s mind. Sleeping with Ellie. Reading to Ellie. Tricycle rides with Ellie in her basket. Holding Ellie up to look out the open car window—and the awful moment Ellie had fallen from her hand.


  Kate lifted the toy to her nose and breathed in. Ellie smelled as she always had—like sleep and dust and sunshine. For a moment Kate felt as if she were three years old again, snug under the covers with Ellie by her side.

  Kate tucked the elephant into the crook of her arm next to the softball. Not far away, Mia gasped as she pulled something from a pile. Kate wondered what she’d found. Knowing Mia, it was something pretty—an old doll or a bracelet.

  A dull gleam in the sand caught Kate’s eye. She sifted out a handful of coins and pocketed them. Maybe they were hers. Maybe they weren’t. But she was always losing her lunch money at school.

  Kate hurried hopefully to the next pile. The more she found, the more she wanted to find. It was like being on an endless Easter egg hunt. There were so many treasures to find—she just had to keep looking.

  Silvermist shivered in the fog. She had been searching for some time, but she hadn’t seen any sign of Tinker Bell or the missing boat.

  Even if the boat is here, I doubt we’ll find it in this mess, she thought.

  Silvermist darted down to another pile of junk. She flew past a toy car, a single glove, a polka-dot umbrella, a tennis racket, a whole baby carriage….

  Silvermist paused, then peeped inside. The carriage was empty.

  Phew! She sighed in relief.

  Why did Clumsies need so much stuff? Silvermist didn’t understand it. In Pixie Hollow there was just the right amount of everything—no more, no less. Was having too many things what made people so careless with them?

  Silvermist sighed and moved on. Normally, she loved being near the ocean. But this beach had such a sad, lonely feeling. She hoped they’d find Tinker Bell soon. She didn’t want to spend any more time in this strange place.

  “Nothing over here,” she called to her friends. “Let’s try a little farther down the beach.”