Alias Hook (30 page)

“They never came back before?” Stella interrupts. “The old Lost Boys?”

“Well, before I came, I cannot say, but I never saw evidence of any other grown men, save the braves, until after all my original crew were killed. And why would there be? If Pan so despises men, why would he ever bring them back?”

Her expression is all the answer I require. To fight and kill, of course. So they might join my crew, die under his blade, hundreds of them, thousands, so he might have his revenge on the grown-up world and spend his sorrow. And I am his accomplice, his high priest, his bawd, leading his victims to their ritual slaughter, over and over again.
How many more must die?
“By Christ, I will never go back,” I whisper. “I am irredeemable.”

“No,” Stella says firmly, twining her fingers through mine. “You’ve done all that was asked of you. Peter and the Neverland thrive! There are other men to take up the battle now, and there always will be.”

“Yet more pointless deaths.” I sigh. “That can’t be what she wanted.”

“Perhaps not,” Stella agrees, considering. “But nothing turned out the way she planned, did it? You’ve had two centuries to pay for all your wrongdoing, James. That’s long enough. And now the signs are in play.”

I sit back, my wits harrying her notion for its hidden flaw. There must be one. “The shaman spoke of three signs,” I remind her.

“There hasn’t been a third sign, in the sky, yet,” Stella agrees. She gazes up the hatchway, out to where the first of the stars are winking to life. The moon is waxing now, the merest sliver of light in the evening sky, everything the same as it always is.

“There’s something we haven’t said or done yet to get you out of here, James. We must find out what it is.”

We,
she says. We’re on this journey together.

“But what?” I sigh. “Some offering, perhaps? Incense? Animal bones? You’ve already been purified. What do your books have to say on the matter?”

“Well, curses are broken all the time in the old tales. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Beauty and the Beast—”

“How?”

Her mouth quirks up. “True love’s kiss.”

I lean across the table obligingly and kiss her piquant mouth. But no thunderclap, nor tidal wave, nor volcanic eruption from the bowels of the earth disturbs the placid Neverland evening. “Well?”

“It can’t happen just like that.” Then her expression brightens. “Your witch! Didn’t you see her in the Fairy Dell? We must go back to the fairies, find her again!”

I do not dignify this hare-brained suggestion with a reply.

How can it be true, any part of it? Yet Stella so ardently embroiders this fantasy of escape, I cannot help but be buoyed up with each new stitch; her hope is as contagious as the pox.

“Where will we go, when we are free?” I prompt her that night as we prepare for bed. I so want to believe her.

“Trescoe Island in Scilly,” Stella replies eagerly. “My aunt’s cottage – well, it’s mine now. Such a fine prospect, a thousand isles, gilded by the western sun. A huge panorama of stars that change with the seasons, tumbles of rock and stone like ancient castles, a wild, abandoned, beautiful place, James. You will love it so much.”

How I crave to hear the pounding of restless, living surf, the scree of gulls; the Bay of Neverland is so eerily calm. “I wish I could believe it will be as rapturous as you make it sound.”

“Well, it won’t be all that rapturous. The cottage is half ruin inside, and we’ll have to hack it out of the overgrowth. The islands are battered by fierce winter storms. And there are all sorts of … modern conveniences … to contend with,” she adds with asperity. “Automobiles. Airplanes. Telephones. You may find them a very great nuisance, as I do.”

“Since I’ve no notion what any of those things are, I’ll reserve my judgment,” I promise her. “What are we to do there?”

She regards me, chewing on her lower lip. “You’ll laugh.” I gaze back at her with my gravest cardplayer’s face. “Well, the great age of smuggling and murder is long past,” she says wistfully. “Now the islanders are mostly devoted to flowers.”

“Flowers?” I laugh.

“See?” she reproves me, but her eyes are merry. “Yes, flowers, growing them, tending them, harvesting, packaging, hauling them to the mainland. That’s their industry. That’s how they all live.”

“So the ferocious Hook will finish his days gamboling among the posies,” I muse.

“A skilled carpenter is employable anywhere,” she nods at me. “You’ll be able to get work in Hugh Town on St. Mary’s, the big island.”

How easy she makes it sound. “When I left, I was a wanted man on three continents,” I sigh. She’s scooted up beside me on the edge of our bed, and begins unhitching the little buckles of my harness. “Suppose your world won’t have me back?”

“It’s a very different place now,” she replies, peeling the straps off my arm. “Everyone you wronged, or who ever wronged you, they’re all long gone.” She slides the apparatus gently off the end of my truncated arm, sits gazing for a moment at my hook in her hand. “Your crimes are mere trifles next to what the world has seen since.”

“The world war you spoke of.”

She nods. “One man, full of hate, he was the start of it all.” She sets my hook on the shelf beneath the window, straps dripping over the board. “He had to be stopped. The good war, they called it.”

“Wars of aggression will always meet with passionate defense,” I reason.

She glances at me. “If leaders were made to fight their own battles, wars would cease.”

“Bugger witchcraft, my dear, they would hang you for sedition,” say I. “My men do not guess where they are, or why, when they come here. But no sooner do they spy a fighting ship in the bay, hear the first tattoo of war drums, than something primal stirs inside them. They surrender completely to this place, this war, crave battle above all things.”

“If men gave birth, they would understand how precious every life is,” she says softly. “And how fleeting.”

She has slid back among the bedclothes, taken up a pillow which she cradles to herself absently, her expression suddenly bereft. I pretend to fiddle with my harness, coil it away.

“I did kill him,” comes her soft, desolate voice. “My son.”

I would speak, but her face silences me.

“Damaged, they said. Unresponsive. Unfinished.” She gazes at her pillow. “It happened so fast. They had to get everything ready, tubes, wires, machines. They let me hold him. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure of it.” Her eyes are dry, her expression unbearable. “He was so beautiful, my tiny, damaged boy. He never even cried. All those months I carried him under my heart.” She draws a quavering breath. “I must have known in that moment he was leaving me. How could I not see it?”

“You couldn’t know that.”

“As surely as if we still shared the same heartbeat.” Her voice is empty. “It happened so fast. I should have screamed for the nurse sooner, made more of a fuss. They might have saved him.”

“Or there might have been nothing at all they could do,” I tell her. “You might have only prolonged his misery. You can’t know, Stella; you can’t say for sure what might have been.”

Her stark gaze meets mine. “I let him go.”

“You were merciful,” I say carefully. “He died in the arms of someone who loved him. A good death. Better than most of us will ever know.”

She gazes down at her twisted pillow. “I couldn’t keep either of them,” she whispers. “I couldn’t love them enough.”

I reach for her, but she shrugs away, hugging the pillow closer to her ribs. So I blow out the light, curl up nearby. It’s a long, long time before she lets me hold her.

We search the skies, day and night, for any unusual activity, but see nothing out of the ordinary: sun, blue sky, the occasional wispy cloud, a full complement of Neverland stars, and a nearly quarter moon, cracking on for her next full phase. But neither do the boys trouble us. Stella is more restive than ever, but I’ve hit upon a plan to test my theory: if the Neverland has forgotten us, surely it will begin with my men. Perhaps they are already addressing another man as captain in my stead.

I am in the skiff, rounding the last bend in Kidd Creek, near the fertile place where we keep our garden, before I feel the first internal pang of dread.

“Hook!” caws the Pan triumphantly, vaulting up out of the foliage. “I knew it!”

Chapter Twenty-five

A PARLEY WITH PAN

He emerges from a giant overhang of leafy ferns, sails out over my boat, malicious fairy glitter humming at his shoulder. He has obviously not forgotten me.

“Pan,” I nod, and still my oars.

“I call for a parley!” he cries.

What choice have I? He descends into the stern and perches on the after thwart, facing me, but out of my reach. His imp sparks warningly between us, throwing off powdery bursts of light in iridescent shades of green and rust. At this range, I glimpse a flash of her golden hair.

“I know the rules,” I sigh, and spread wide my hand and hook, still gripping the oars. The fairy springs for the hilt of my sword, magicks it out of its scabbard in another volley of scintilescent light, drops it on the empty thwart between us. I don’t bother to ask for his blade; it wouldn’t be fair for him to draw against me unarmed.

“They tried to trick me, you know. Your men,” he sallies, sitting himself cross-legged in the stern, patting out his motley of leaves. “They said you were dead.”

“Perhaps they thought I was.”

“But I knew it was a trick!” he crows, thumping his scrawny chest. “I knew you were alive. I can always tell.” He leans closer to me, his gray eyes bright. “And so is she!”

I dare not betray any flicker of feeling at all, now that Stella is alone and unprotected. “Well, what of it?” I reply easily, pulling my oars inboard.

He sits back, frowning. He wants me to defy him, wants a new game to begin. “She’s an outlaw!” he challenges me.

“There’s nothing she can do to hurt you,” I say reasonably. “You are master here.”

“She is condemned to death!” he insists.

I don’t remind him that his sentence was carried out to the letter with results that were beyond his control. I decide instead to turn the conversation in another direction. “Do you never tire of being captain?” I ask him.

The question surprises him, but he furrows his brow in elaborate rumination. “Well, it’s hard work sometimes,” he concedes loftily. “They take a lot of looking after. But when they get to be too much trouble, I kill ’em!”

“Your own Lost Boys?” This shocks even me. “How?”

His gray eyes glisten. “I send ’em back! Make ’em go back and grow up.”

Blood pounds like a blacksmith in my head. “Then why not send her back too?” I hear myself say calmly; send her back, my bully, and show old Hooky how it’s done. The fluttering of the fairy grows more agitated, as if she can hear the din in my head.

“She’s grown up already,” Pan declares. “She has to die here.”

I will my hammering heart to silence. “You might pardon her, you know,” I say evenly. “It would be very grand of you.”

“She doesn’t belong here!” He folds his arms in defiance. “Everything’s changing, can’t you feel it?” He leans toward me again. “You have changed!”

I gaze at him impassively. The water of Kidd Creek babbles happily round the boat, sunlight glows a hundred shades of green in the rustling trees, shrubs, ferns and reeds. How can I argue, with the memory of Stella still so sweet inside me? Pan scowls, studying me.

“Of course,
my
mother was prettier and cleverer and so much more fun!” he proclaims with the absolute confidence of ignorant youth; I know he has no more notion of who his mother was than an egg in a henhouse.

“She’s not my mother,” I say simply.

He peers at me, his eyes suddenly rounding in pity and horrified delight. “You like her!” he squawks. “Hook likes a lady!”

Let the boy jeer. Let him be the one left out of the game for once. And as soon as he sees my indifference, the glee leeches out of his expression.

“She can’t have you, you know,” he says more darkly. “You belong to me.”

A riot of fairy light pulses between us. My mind closes instinctively to the shrill grapeshot of the imp’s language, yet from her tone and movements, I might almost think she’s upbraiding him.

“Stop it, you silly thing!” Pan cries in real irritation. “We’re talking! If you can’t behave, you go home!” He dismisses the creature with a wave of his hand, yet she sparks in the air beside him, gabbling in protest. “I mean it! Go on!” the boy shouts. Then her glittery trail speeds away.

Pan peers at me again. “That lady can’t win against me.”

“She is stronger than both of us,” I reply.

“You, maybe,” he protests. “You are old and weak and stupid.”

“True,” I agree mildly. “I’m no use to you any more.”

He scowls again. My mildness enflames him more than my wrath ever did. How did I never notice before? Watching him, I try another tack. “I propose a new game,” I suggest. “Pretend battles between your men and mine, like you wage with the tribes. It will be just as much fun,” I promise, thinking of the ferocity with which my men throw themselves into football.

But he screws up his face in disgust. “That’s stupid!” he cries. “How can I win if it’s all pretend? I want to win!”

By God’s blood, that part of Stella’s theory must be true. Beating me is all that matters to him, all that ever will. Look at the predator’s glint in his gray eyes, peering at me. There is no appeasing him, no cajoling him. There is no compromise, not for me. He’s like the most savage hunting dog; he smells me by my fear. Soon, very soon, he will make me pay for my foolish dreaming in the coin I can least afford.

His expression intensifies. “She’ll make a fool of you, Hook,” he needles.

Where does he get such talk? From one of the more forward Wendys? I gaze out at the water without responding, but he has the instincts of a shark when it comes to drawing blood.

“My best hunting knife says she will leave you all alone,” he presses on. “What will you wager?”

Only my heart, although I do not say it. His little animal face flushes with cunning, even as I resist his game. “She doesn’t really care for you, you know,” he says airily. “There are probably a hundred men out there, a thousand, that she’d like better. It’s only because she’s stuck here with you.”