Tootles blinked rapidly and shook his head in wonder. “Well, no doubt! Tiger Lily hasn’t aged a day! I’m sure they expected Peter to do the same!”
“And Wendy, too,” Tink added. “Now, look –” She motioned for Tootles to raise his line of vision to something just behind Tiger Lily. There was an opening in the wall of rock there; a sliver no more than a few feet wide. But it was large enough for a child to crawl through. And certainly large enough for a fairy.
Tootles caught the very slight shimmer of such a fairy hovering at the bottom of the small crevice. “What is it doing?”
Tinkerbell turned to scowl at him. “It?”
Tootles blinked. Then he gave her an exasperated look. “Well, it’s not like I can see whether it’s a boy or girl from here, Tink!”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t say that about a human, would you? What is it doing?” She glared at him. “No! You’d say, ‘what are they doing’!”
Tootles ran a hand over his wet head and puffed out his cheeks. “Fine!” he cried, holding up his other hand in a placating manner. “Fine, okay? What do you think the fairy is doing?”
Tink huffed and whirled back around to look. But when she didn’t answer after a few moments, it was obvious that she couldn’t tell. “I can’t see – I’m going in for a closer look.”
“Wha- wait!” Tootles reached up to stop her, but her tiny, shimmering form whizzed past him with inhuman speed and within a mere half a second, all he could make out of her was the waning sprinkle of her pixie dust trail as she soared toward the Natives and their fairy contact down below.
*****
John Darling couldn’t believe how rapidly a bad situation had gone from dire to positively hopeless. Being stuck with pirates was bad enough. And the storm was worse; it had come up out of nowhere and without warning and he didn’t much like the idea of being trapped on the water during a gale.
But then Wendy had escaped, despite her promise, leaving him and Michael behind to fend for themselves! Not that he could really blame her from wanting to be rid of Captain Hook and his band of miscreants. But did she fear and loathe them so greatly that she would sacrifice her own kin to the monsters in order to get away?
Apparently so.
And now they were out in a storm in a tiny row boat, one of three such boats in their water-logged caravan at that moment. He and Michael both had ropes around their ankles and their hands were free only because Captain Hook had given the strict order to leave them unbound in case the boat capsized.
Wonderful notion, thought John. A capsizing row boat in an angry sea, with ropes knotted around your ankles and only a vague recollection of how to swim.
“This is all Wendy’s fault,” John muttered under his breath. He truly didn’t think Michael would hear him, what with the wind howling the way it was and the waves crashing so steadily against the hull of the small boat.
But Michael was a strange little boy. And he had good hearing.
“No it isn’t.”
John turned to face his little brother. “What do you mean it isn’t? She escaped, didn’t she? And now Hook’s off on a mad rampage to kill both her and Peter in one fell swoop!”
At that, Billy Jukes, who was rowing the boat behind them, threw back his head and roared laughter into the angry sky.
Both brothers turned in their seats to look at the one-eyed pirate, Michael’s gaze narrowing angrily, John’s face blanching even more pale than it had already been.
“It isn’t her fault,” Michael insisted, then, turning back to face John once more. “Well, actually,” he seemed to reconsider, “this storm might be her fault. . . . I don’t really know –”
“What?” John cried, his expression bewildered. “What in the world are you talking about? How can she possibly be responsible for the bloody storm? It’s the one stupid thing she’s not responsible for!”
“All right you two, quit yer belly-aching back there!” Arnold the Black shot them a warning glance over his shoulder and the handsome Cecco looked up from where he sat at the prow of the small ship. He allowed a small smile to curve his lips and his eyes glittered darkly in the stormy light.
John swallowed hard. “We’re gonna die,” he whispered.
“No we’re not,” Michael whispered back, leaning in slightly so that his brother could hear him over the gaining roar of the wind. Both boys were drenched now, as were the other pirates. The wind carried the water from the sea as readily as it did the rain, and salt stung the boys’ eyes. The pirates, however, seemed to be used to it and kept their attention trained on the task at hand. Namely, rowing several small boats out to Skull Rock, where, apparently, Peter Pan and Wendy had run off together.
“You’re insane, Michael, you know that?” John said.
“Hook doesn’t want us dead! He’s gonna use us to get to Wendy. Think about it! That’s why he doesn’t want us falling overboard and drowning!”
“I said cut it, you two!” Arnold roared at them.
Jukes gave John a kick in the back to drive the point home and John lurched forward with the impact. Slowly, he straightened, his gaze shooting daggers at Michael. “Right,” he hissed lowly. “They don’t want us dead.”
Chapter Nineteen
Wendy turned her back on Peter and hugged herself tight. She needed to not see him for a few moments. Just a few precious seconds. Long enough to get her temper back under control and figure out what to do next.
Her brothers were still back on that ship and the storm was getting worse. She’d left them to an evil fate, whether the pirates killed them or not.
And it was Peter’s fault.
She gritted her teeth as Peter tried to grab her upper arm and turn her back around to face him. She yanked out of his grip. “Don’t touch me!” She didn’t want his touch. She didn’t want him near her right now.
It wasn’t just his recent act of defiance that was burning her blood to boiling. It was more than that. More than the fact that he’d brought her to Neverland in the first place. More than the fact that he’d filled her head with magic and then abandoned her for five years to parents and teachers and doctors who didn’t believe her. It was more than the strange, surreal nightmare that he’d once more kidnapped her and made things positively worse for them all.
It was that Wendy knew something about him now that she had never known before – and never would have imagined. Something awful.
“I know what you did to him,” she told him then, her back still to him, her voice miraculously carrying across the space between them due to a lull in the thunder and a brief drop in the wind.
Peter was quiet behind her. She wondered what he must be thinking, what must have been going through his mind and flashing in his weird, unfamiliar eyes.
Finally, he asked, “What are you talking about?” His tone was confused, and more than a touch accusatory.
Now she did turn to face him, and the lightning flashed as she screamed, “You cut off his hand because of his last name, Peter!” In a sudden surge of very real fury, she lunged forward and shoved him hard in the chest. Peter was knocked off balance and only caught himself from falling off of the precipice over the water because of the copious amounts of pixie dust he’d absorbed earlier that day.
“How could you be so heartless? How could you?”
Peter steadied himself on the rock and then glared at Wendy. She glared back.
“I assume you’re talking about Hook,” he spat.
“Well, who the hell else would I be talking about, Peter? Exactly how many hands have you cut off?”
“You don’t know anything!” he yelled, taking a threatening step forward. “He was trying to kill me!”
“Oh, of course he was!” Wendy yelled back. “He’s a pirate, after all! That’s his one purpose in life, right? Kill Peter Pan!”
“YES!” roared Peter, his eyes beginning to glow red once more. Wendy stepped back, suddenly a little less angry and a little more afraid. “It is his one purpose in li
fe, Wendy!” He smiled a nasty smile, the ruby fire in his eyes darkening to blood. “Unfortunately for Hook, he’s a failure and always will be!” He closed the distance between them and Wendy gasped, feeling the ledge of the precipice under the heel of her shoe. “Hook will never beat me! Never!”
“Never is an exceedingly long time, Pan.”
Wendy gasped again and Peter looked up and over her shoulder. She spun around to see Captain Hook and four members of his pirate crew stepping off of a row boat that had just pulled up alongside an old stone plank. The wind and rain had drenched the pirates and turned their faces cold. Hook looked like a phantom, pale and blue eyed, in the sable finery of a man bent on revenge in the dead of night.
Hook’s stark, cobalt gaze sparked with untold emotion as he came to stand on the platform and slowly lowered his left hand over the hilt of his sword.
Peter needed no further urging. Wendy tried to stop him. She felt disaster edging ever closer and wanted, desperately, to prevent it. “No! Peter!”
But Peter was too far gone, too angry, too torn by something inside of him. She recognized that anger, saw it in the fire that flashed in his green eyes, knew all too well the kind of pain that brought it on.
And so he leapt off of the stony outcropping and rushed the infamous pirate captain with a speed and fury that the younger Peter Pan had never known.
The two men in black met once more in battle, the first angry touch of their swords ringing out in the cavern like the lightning that crashed all around them and the thunder that caused the walls to shake and the waves that battered the ancient stones to rubble.
The other pirates were mobile immediately. Gentleman Starkey headed up the rocky crag toward Wendy, as did Smee, one pirate on either side of her. Wendy had no where to go and no dust to help her fly away. And she wasn’t at all certain of their intentions now that she’d unwittingly gone against her word and escaped the Jolly Roger.
So, she backed up against the wall and frantically searched for any sign of hope. Beyond the battling duo, two more boats navigated into the cavern from the choppy waters of the sea. Michael and John were in the middle boat, and both were bound at the ankles.
But several sudden streams of yellow, shimmering light brooked through the cavern, reflecting off of the dark water below, and Wendy looked up.
Pixies!
One of them broke off from the others, reminding Wendy of a Blue Angel, pulling away from formation to fly elsewhere. That fairy winged straight for Wendy and her eyes widened with new optimism.
“Tink!” she cried when the pixie was close enough to recognize. Tinkerbell waved hurriedly and drew closer, gathering her own pixie dust in her hands as if to share it with Wendy.
“Get the pixie!” Starkey yelled at Smee, who happened to have chosen the easier route up the rock face and was closer to Wendy. Smee clumsily reached out as Tinkerbell rushed by him, but was unsuccessful in doing anything but knocking himself off balance. Down below, the doctor of the Jolly Roger, Murphy, cringed as Smee slid a good foot or two down the slippery cliff, dislodging a dozen black pebbles that skitted to the water.
Tinkerbell swooped down toward Wendy and threw two handfulls of pixie dust in her general direction.
Tink managed to get a tiny amount in Wendy’s face before Starkey was suddenly there, his hands much faster than Smee’s, and his grip devilishly tight.
He quickly grabbed the flitting fairy from the air, turned, and hurled her across the cavern. Wendy shrieked at the treatment, hoping Tinkerbell would be all right, but had no further time to react to it, as Starkey was then turning to face her.
“You’ll be coming with me, Miss Wendy,” he told her, lowering his head to gaze at her through the tops of his dark eyes. “The Captain wishes to have a word with you.” He spoke the words in a scolding tone, as would a butler who has caught his mistress sneaking out in the middle of the night, or a headmaster who had just learned his star pupil was, in fact, cheating.
It was also a warning.
Wendy stepped back, acting before she could think. Something inside of her slid into place and locked down with a click. She closed her eyes and began thinking of anything and everything that made her happy.
“Hot chocolate, fuzzy sweaters, burnt marshmallows, Ray Bradbury, cinnamon candles, motorcycles. . . .” She felt her feet disconnect from the ground and gasped. Her eyes flew open and she glanced down.
Starkey looked down as well, and his dark eyes widened.
“Um,” she continued quickly, licking her lips, “honey crisp apples, snow globes, jack-o-lanterns, Labyrinth!”
He reached for her, managing to grasp the sleeve of her hooded jacket before she raised both of her legs and shoved them against his chest, kicking off from him to sail backward, end-over-end in a back flip that rid her of her jacket – and of the pirate.
“No!” Starkey bellowed, spinning to motion to the pirates who were still below. He held her gray sweater in one hand and waved it angrily as he shouted a warning that pixies were in the cavern.
The second boat landed and Cecco yanked John out by the elbow, handing him over to another pirate by the name of William Slank.
Wendy landed on an outcropping on the opposite side of the cave and looked up to see Billy Jukes pulling Michael out of the boat after him. “Michael!” she called, unable to help herself.
Michael turned to peer up at her. “Wendy, get out of here! Go and save yours—” His words of warning were cut off as Jukes slid one grimy hand over his mouth and yanked him around so that he was no longer facing his sister.
Several yards away, Hook knocked Peter’s sword to the side with his hook arm. Peter attempted to pull the sword away as he turned, but the hand-guard was ensnared on the end of the captain’s hook, forcing his arm to jerk taut as he refused to let the sword go.
Hook expertly took the opportunity to knock him in the head with the pommel of his own blade. The blow sent Peter immediately to his knees – which, in turn, ripped a scream of fear from Wendy’s throat.
Hook’s head snapped up, his blue gaze searching for hers. He found her and Wendy froze, caught in the snare of those piercing eyes. For the shortest of moments, she thought she saw something flicker in the depths of those icy orbs. It was slight, but poignantly familiar.
And then it was gone, and his expression was starkly unreadable.
Wendy desperately wanted to talk to them both then. More than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, she wanted to tell Hook that she understood his pain. She wanted to explain that she hadn’t broken her promise at all. She wanted to tell Peter that she forgave him – for everything. He’d been but a child when he’d taken Hook’s hand. She wanted them all to stop fighting, stop hurting each other.
But, of course, such magical moments of resolution didn’t really happen. They existed only in fairy tales. And so, Wendy was disappointed but not surprised when, after a few seconds, Hook’s gaze hardened and the corners of his lips curled into a cruel smile.
A shadow loomed above Wendy from behind. Thinking quickly, she ducked and spun, using her leg to trip the pirate who had crept up at her back.
Mullins, a middle-aged crewman with messy brown hair and amber colored eyes went down hard, landing on his back. The air left his lungs with a whooshing sound that trailed off into a low, pain-filled whine.
Wendy quickly bent and yanked the long sword from the pirate’s scabbard.
“Wendy, behind you!” John warned.
She spun in time to raise her sword and ward off a flying Cecco, who was holding a trapped fairy above him in one tight-fisted grip. In his other hand, he held a length of rope.
The pixie was turning blue from suffocation, but Cecco squeezed him tight, shaking the tiny creature hard, so that he was virtually covered in gold-green pixie dust.
Wendy’s grip around the hilt of the sword was slippery; the rain was beating her body and slickening her grasp. But she clutched it tighter in stubborn desperation and brought her sword a
rm back to swing it in an arc toward the oncoming pirate. Cecco dodged the blade as easily as if he’d known how to fly for as long as Peter had.
Wendy sliced clean air. Cecco released the fairy to send it toppling end over end off of the precipice below. And then the man smiled a hard, wicked smile. The handsome Cecco, thought Wendy. The pirate who carved his name in the murdered body of his warden. . . .
She swallowed hard, trying to get past the dry lump that was forming in her throat. She couldn’t fly away from him. He was bigger than her, and he’d already proven himself a good flyer. He would catch her and bind her and they would probably take her back to the Jolly Roger and make her walk the stupid plank.
Because she broke a promise to a pirate. And not just any pirate – the Captain. Such a thing was surely punishable by death.
Cecco dove for her again, forcing Wendy’s arm back up and around so that the point of her sword was once more aimed at his chest. She could no longer see the fight between Hook and Peter. She had no idea if Peter was okay.
Or if Hook was.
She frowned at that thought, wondering why she cared. But she had no further time to dwell on it, as Cecco then dropped the rope and pulled his own sword from his belt to swing it toward hers. She braced herself for the impact and was not disappointed when their blades crashed noisily against each other, sending shockwaves of pain down her sword and up into her arms.
A new ache settled in around her shoulders and a big part of her wanted to let the sword go. But Hook had taught her how to put that pain from her mind. He’d taught her how to ignore it so that she could keep the sword firmly in her grip.
Hook – the very pirate she was now trying to escape – had taken her aboard his ship and given her food and drink and shelter and even lessons in sword fighting. No other member of his crew had ever received such treatment.
Why had she?
Another bolt of lightning split the sky outside of Skull Rock and thunder vibrated the stone beneath her. The hilt of the sword quaked in her slippery grip; Wendy fought to hold on.
“Give in, girl,” Cecco told her. It was the first time she’d ever heard him speak. His voice was low and heavily accented. “You’ve committed the crime, now you’ll do your time.”
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