“But it is a fight to the death,” I said.
“Oh, Jamie.” He sighed, and there was a strange tenderness in the way he said my name. “Do you think I could ever kill you? Look at all I’ve done for you.”
I lunged at him then, not wanting to talk anymore with this child, this mad child who thought that he was showing his love by killing anyone who took my attention away from him.
But though my new body was strong and fast, I couldn’t fly, and he darted into the air and around behind me before I could blink.
“Not fair play,” I said, in hopes of appealing to his better nature—what little there was of it.
“There are no rules in this Battle,” Peter said, laughing. “You agreed to that yourself.”
It was his laugh that made me want to kill him, made me want to break open his ribs and carve out his heart, the way he’d done to me so many times before.
He flew in circles above me, laughing and laughing. His laughter echoed off the walls and fed my rage and made me wild, wild as him, wild as he’d always wanted me to be.
That wildness, strangely, also made me calm. I saw some rocks in the arena, left there from previous Battles. I found a small smooth one just near my foot, likely one dropped from my sling-bag the day I fought Nip. It was almost as if it was waiting there for me to pick it up.
Peter didn’t notice. He was too busy flying around, feeling so very pleased with his own cleverness.
I watched him carefully for a moment; then I aimed it for his right eye.
I didn’t miss. And I can throw very, very hard.
Peter screamed and tumbled down in shock, and then I was on him.
He was so much smaller than me that it was nothing for me to put my knee in his chest and punch him in the face. Two of his teeth—all baby teeth still, like little white pearls—spilled out of his mouth, and blood spilled out of his nose, and his eye was shot through with red.
He wasn’t laughing anymore.
I’d dropped my dagger so I could hit him in the face with both hands. I picked it up then, holding his jaw in my right hand and the knife in my left, and I slashed toward his throat.
Just like he’d done to Crow.
Just like he’d done to my mother.
I hadn’t noticed that he still had his own knife, and that one of his arms had worked free.
He stabbed the knife into my thigh and ripped it down, tearing open the old wound. Blood ran everywhere, spurted in Peter’s face, and he wriggled away from me as I fell sideways, my own knife slash never touching his throat.
It was only then he seemed to realize that it was not a game to me, that I was in earnest.
I meant to kill him.
My blood poured into the rock of the Battle arena and as always, it disappeared, almost as if it had never been.
I struggled to stand again, panting with the effort. Peter watched me struggle, watched the blood that ran from my thigh, and then he smiled.
All his teeth were there again.
His nose stopped flowing. His eye returned to its normal size.
In a moment he was Peter again, whole, unchanged, eleven years old.
“You can’t kill me, Jamie,” he said. He sounded sorry for me that I would even try.
“The island made me,” he continued. “The island made me, and the island keeps me alive. And every drop of blood spilled here keeps me whole and young forever, just like it did for you, when you believed in me. But when you stopped loving me, when you stopped believing—the island let you go, because the island knows your heart and so do I.”
“It can’t be,” I panted. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t—that all my rage, all my anger would have nowhere to go and no way to end. How could it be that I’d never be able to kill the one person who, above all, deserved it?
I tried to stand, but my leg wouldn’t support me, and the blood was pouring out of me too fast. All that blood that was keeping Peter alive. All my blood had made him whole again.
It was like I’d never touched him in the first place.
I would never be able to kill him. As long as there were boys on the island, as long as blood was spilled here, Peter would live forever.
“That’s why you brought me here?” I asked. “So I could keep you alive? That’s why we all were brought here? For you?”
“Not you, Jamie!” Peter said. “Never you! I wanted to share all this with you, so you could have fun. You were always sad and angry and that mama of yours didn’t do anything to make you happy or make it better. I know, Jamie. I watched you a long time to make sure that you were the right one for me.”
“She kissed me and hugged me and held me so tight,” I said, echoing the words Charlie had said to me long, long ago.
Peter scoffed. “What’s a hug? What’s a kiss? Those things aren’t like running free or swimming in the ocean or laughing and playing all day with your greatest friend in all the world. You were sad, Jamie, and I wanted you to be happy, and me too. I brought you here so I’d have a friend. I brought the others so I could keep that friend forever.”
I laughed then, a horrible angry laugh that sounded nothing like myself.
“Well, I’d say your plan failed, Peter. Because I won’t be your friend forever. I haven’t been your friend for some time now.”
“I know,” Peter said. “But that doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to leave. You know my rules, Jamie. You can’t ever leave the island. And I won’t let you die either. You won’t be able to escape me that way.”
I fell over then, unable to stand on my ripped-up leg, and rolled to my back. There should have been a pool of blood all around me but the rock was absorbing it as fast as it came out of me. Everything was going white, then black, then white again before my eyes.
Then Peter stood over me, and he held the pirate sword.
“I curse you, Jamie. I curse you to live forever on this island, but as a grown-up. You’ll never be a boy again, but you’ll never grow old and die either. If you’re hurt you’ll always survive. The island won’t let you go, and the island will keep you alive because I say so. And so you’ll never forget me and my curse, I leave my mark on you.”
He raised the sword, and then my right hand was gone.
chapter 19
Peter flew away and left me there, bleeding from my leg and my wrist. I was sure that I would die, despite everything Peter said. I blacked out for a while, and when I woke again the moon was lit and the bleeding had stopped.
I sat up and examined my leg, which was too torn to stand on, even if it wasn’t bleeding. White bone protruded from my wrist, and stringy bits of muscle and vein. I didn’t want to look at it. I tore a bit of hide from my pants and wrapped the stump up tight.
Then I crawled out of the arena.
As I crawled I remembered every boy I’d fought there. There were some I’d fought in fun—or, at least, Peter’s idea of fun, for his idea of fun still meant some blood was spilled, even if it was only from a broken nose.
I remembered every boy that I’d killed when it wasn’t for fun. I remembered smashing Nip’s skull in with a rock until I saw the gleam of bone beneath.
I remembered how Peter sat there and watched, when it was in fun and when it was not, and how it pleased him to see us there.
How it must have pleased him to see us feeding our blood to the island, keeping him alive.
And every drop of blood had kept me alive too, though I didn’t know it. Because I’d believed in Peter. Because he’d smiled at me.
I felt sick and ashamed, and sorry that I’d ever lifted a hand against any boy that came here, thinking they would live forever. I was sorry, but they would never hear me say it.
They were all dead. They were all dead, but I would go on and on, and remember all their faces, and remember how I’d hurt them.
And I wou
ld remember the ones who were taken by pirates or crocodiles or sickness or Many-Eyed, and no death would ever bring me relief.
Peter had cursed me, and I would never escape those faces. All the boys and all their bodies were fastened to my heart now, weighing me to the earth.
It took me what seemed like hours just to reach the stream that ran alongside the meadow. I rolled into the cold water and stayed there, letting it wash all over me. The coldness made my leg feel better, and I remained in the water until I started to shiver.
I tried to stand up, and couldn’t. If I didn’t get help, didn’t get the leg sewn up as I’d done before, then it wouldn’t heal properly and I would never walk right on it again.
I found a tall stick to use as a crutch, and managed to prop myself up on it. Then slowly, ever so slowly, I limped across the meadow.
I was halfway there when a figure rose out of the darkness from the trail below. I squinted; then a smaller figure appeared beside the larger one.
Nod and Charlie.
Charlie ran to me, crying, “Jamie! Jamie!”
“You didn’t listen,” I murmured. “You didn’t mind.”
“We came to take care of you,” Charlie said. “The way that you always take care of us.”
“Didn’t you believe that I could beat him?” I asked, but there was no rancor in it. “I was always Battle champion, you know.”
“Yes,” Nod said. “But we knew that Peter would cheat.”
The tears came then, the tears that were for everything I loved and everything I lost, the tears that I’d been unable to cry for Sally, the tears that I’d never known to cry for my mama.
All those boys. All those bodies. All that weight on my heart.
Sally.
My mother.
And the one person I wanted dead that could never, ever die.
“He did cheat,” I sobbed. “He did.”
“He always does,” Nod said. “He would never have let you win.”
• • •
Nod and Charlie looked after me until I was well again. We never saw Peter in those days, nor Tink, nor anyone. Nod showed us the place where he’d buried Fog, and we often found him there just before the sun went down, talking quietly to his brother. I tried not to listen to what he said at those times. It was just between Nod and Fog.
We lived in the meadow until I could walk without the stick. I considered it my punishment to be trapped there near the place where I’d killed so many boys at Peter’s behest, killed them because we’d thought it was fun.
Every day I looked at my wrist, at the place where my hand used to be, at the mark that once was mine to give and now belonged to Peter.
On the day I could walk unencumbered again we went away from that place of blood, that place where Peter’s life was fed by the boys who died in Battle. I’ve never returned there since the day me and Nod and Charlie left it.
We went, of course, to the pirates.
• • •
They don’t call me Jamie anymore. I covered the stump of my hand with a hook, and so that became my name.
It’s all right, really, for Jamie was a boy. A foolish boy, one who thought he could do right, who thought he could escape a monster called Peter.
He brings new boys to the island again, for Peter must have playmates. He flies through the night and past the stars and finds them, and when he finds them he gives them the gift he never gave me, and sprinkles them with fairy dust.
When I see their shadows silhouetted against the moon, my heart burns and my teeth gnash and I want to point the ship’s cannon at them and shoot them out of the sky.
Mostly I don’t, because it’s not those boys I want to kill. I’ve had enough of killing boys. There’s only one person I want to die—the person who never will.
And sometimes, sometimes, he even lets them go home again if they don’t want to stay. And sometimes he doesn’t, and they die up in that mountain so Peter can live.
But that’s a freedom I will never have. Peter’s curse means that though we sail the ship away from the island we will always return again, no matter what direction we sail.
If we head north, with the island behind us, we will soon find it again, peeking over the horizon. If we sail south or east or west, the same will happen. It’s as if we sail upside down and around in a circle, and find ourselves at the top of it over and over and over again.
The other pirates don’t know why they’re cursed to return to the island, though I think Nod suspects. Nod is the only one who truly understands what happened between Peter and me. Even Charlie doesn’t understand it completely.
Peter will never let me go. If I’m not his playmate and friend, then I am to be his playmate and enemy. He brought me to the island and he swore I would never leave and so I haven’t.
It will always be Peter and me, like it was in the beginning, like it will be in the end. Peter, who took everything from me and gave everything too.
Peter, who loved me best of everyone except himself.
He tells the new boys I am a villain, and they call me Captain Hook.
If I am a villain, it’s because Peter made me one, because Peter needs to be the shining sun that all the world turns around. Peter needed to be a hero, so somebody needed to be a villain.
The anger that I carried with me all the days of my childhood is for only one person now, and if I ever catch him again he’ll be sorry.
I know I can find a way. He’s given me so much time, all the time in the world, and there must be a way.
Someday. Someday, he’ll be sorry he crossed me.
When I hear him laughing, out there in the sky and in the night, and that laugh burns me deep down in my heart, I know I’ll find a way to make him sorry.
I will make him so sorry.
I hate Peter Pan.
Photo by Kathryn McCallum Osgood
Christina Henry is the author of the Chronicles of Alice, including Red Queen and Alice, and the national bestselling Black Wings series, featuring Agent of Death Madeline Black and her popcorn-loving gargoyle, Beezle. Christina lives in Chicago with her husband and son. You can visit her on the Web at christinahenry.net, facebook.com/authorChristinaHenry and twitter.com/C_Henry_Author.
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Lost Boy Page 23