So how the hells was this possible?
“He wants to see me?” I asked her softly. “He remembers me?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “It appears that way. But, Elle, I feel it prudent to warn you, I did not arrange this meeting so that you two could reconnect. Hook is still responsible for his part in the attack of Midas’s gala and many others besides. In truth, he will likely wind up in chains next to Whiskers soon. I am sorry, but I had to call this in. Transport should be arriving soon.”
I massaged my forehead. “What else has he done?”
She merely shook her head sadly, asking me with her eyes whether I really wanted to know. And though I did, I also didn’t.
Sighing, Bo said, “I’ve brought you here in the hopes that you might be able to interrogate him further. Learn if there could be more. Why he was even at the gala? Who sent him? And how is any of this even possible? He spoke of his deeds, but when we asked him those questions, he’d merely freeze up and say, ‘I want Arielle,’ then he’d clam up completely.”
“If, as you say, he’s been under an enchantment, isn’t it possible he might not remember any of that?”
“It is possible, yes. But we’re hoping that your shared histories means something.” She shrugged. “We’re running incredibly low on any good, solid leads, Elle. I don’t think I need to tell you that. After what’s happened to the Lost Boys, the commissioner is antsier than ever to find the gang and lock them up in the pit. We know he was fighting alongside the Slashers. But why? That’s the real question.”
Biting my front teeth together, I nodded slowly.
She glanced at the door, a determined look upon her face. “Before we go in there, did you learn anything of value from Whiskers?”
“Has Ichabod told you of the golden grains found at Midas’s gala?”
“He’s mentioned it. Has he finally figured out what it was?”
“Yes, I believe so. The golden grains appear to be laced with powerful forgetting magick. Once the magick is consumed, they turn back to their familiar sandy color. Whiskers says that right before his memory was completely wiped from him, he recalled coming across piles of golden sands. Then nothing until he awoke hours later, the slaughter already complete.”
Worry pinched and lined her forehead. “This is distressing news indeed. I’ll send a witch over to Crane’s to help him further analyze his finds. If there is a way to reduce the charges on the beast, I vow to you, Detective, that we will do it. Was there anything else?”
I almost said no. In all the fuss, I’d forgotten about my detour to the fae stronghold. But I twitched so hard that I shoved off the wall and rose up on my tiptoes. In a hurried rush, I whispered, “I was asked by the queen of the sprites to check in on her stronghold in Never the other day.”
“Why?” Bo shook her head.
I shrugged. “She wasn’t ever completely clear about it. She claimed it was because of the dragon skulking about, but I didn’t really feel that was completely the truth, either. Her request was that I drop by and check in. I promised I would, but then I got roped into Midas’s ball and had forgotten all about that until today, when I realized, in talking to Whiskers, that he lived close to the faery mound. Captain, I have reason to believe that the slaughter that occurred might have actually been a diversion meant to keep us too preoccupied to figure out the Slashers’ real motives. And that was whatever was hidden in the stronghold.”
Shoving her fists into her jacket pocket, she gave me a stiff shrug. “What are you saying, Detective?”
“The fae stronghold was attacked at the exact same time by a murder of shifter crows, as stated by an eyewitness.”
“Who?” She frowned.
“A guardian.”
“Mm , that’s problematic considering the ancient ones aren’t given to embellishments.”
I nodded. “Aye. It was a slaughter. All dead, save for it. It was gravely wounded, which leads me to believe its tale.”
“And that was?”
“That the shifters swooped in, killed them all, and took off. All of it done in minutes.”
“But why? Did they steal something? To what end did they attack that faery mound?”
“The guardian wasn’t certain, but it remarked on seeing a glint of crystal in the sunlight.”
She pulled her upper lip between her teeth and chewed worriedly on it before saying, “We have no jurisdiction on fae lands. But if what you’re saying is true, Elle, this is worrisome indeed. The fae have some of the most powerful relics in all of the hundred realms in their archives. Do you think that Titiana might be persuaded to share Intel with you?”
I tossed my hands up. “I don’t know. And the fact that I arrived days after she’d requested my intervention could make her less than inclined to ever help me again.”
I clenched my back teeth. I was completely not looking forward to that prospect.
“Three high-profile crimes in mere days. Slashers linked to all of them. What does this mean?” she asked. “What the hells am I to put in my report to Draven?”
I shook my head, not envying her job at all. I’d rather gouge my eye out with a rusted spoon than have to deal with that bastard.
“There was one other thing, Captain,” I said slowly.
“What is it?” she sighed, sounding exhausted by what she’d learned already.
I frowned and shrugged. “It might not be anything. But the guardian dropped a sliver of its bark on faery soil. I picked it up and took it to Ichabod. He’s analyzing it now.”
She pursed her lips. “Did you have a guard?”
I grimaced.
Air released in a long steady stream from between her lips, the noise pure aggravation. “Gods, Elle. Why? By the books… did I not say that? And it was just bark. Why risk it?”
Sighing deeply, I shook my head. “I don’t know. It was just… a gut feeling. But I wasn’t caught, and maybe it’ll be nothing, but I figured I’d give you the heads-up. Anyhow, I gathered what I could and took it to Ich.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s all you could do. I’ll follow up with Ichabod later and see if maybe your hunch was correct.”
She looked frustrated for a second longer, but then she straightened her shoulders and gave me a firm nod, and as though she’d been spelled, all the emotion she’d so freely shown me just moments earlier vanished, replaced by the hardened and steely resolve of a captain who’d seen and heard it all and still managed to remain cool under pressure.
“You ready now?”
She’d managed to take my mind off of the fact that Hook, my dead lover, sat waiting for me behind her closed door. I was calm once more and centered. Bo swore she had no magick, but I knew she did.
I nodded. “I’m ready.”
“All that you say and do will be monitored,” she warned me.
Then there was no more talking after that. She quickly opened the door. A blast of cold air hit me square in the face, breaking me out in a wash of electrified goose skin.
I walked in, and the door creaked shut behind me. The echo of its closing sounded like a gun blast in my ears. And there he was, sitting on Bo’s ratty old love seat.
I’d not paid nearly as much attention to him at the gala as I would have if I’d honestly believed that the man sitting and looking at me so was the same one who’d whispered his undying devotion to me with his very last breath just a few years earlier.
I planted my hand against my throat, my finger tapping rhythmically against the hollow of it.
He was dressed in orange prison overalls with a black-stenciled number stamped upon his left chest. There were silver chains tied to his ankles and wrists. His hook had been taken off of him. No doubt it had been impounded at his in-processing. His sleeve hung limply over his amputated arm.
His body was big, strong looking, his chest broad and gently moving in and out as he took deep, steady breaths. He was so alive, when the last time I’d seen him, he’d been anything but.
&nb
sp; I shivered and flicked my eyes to his face and saw the same black-whiskered cheeks I’d seen back at the ball, but I looked at him through different eyes now. Absorbing every nuance, every scar I’d known intimately, like the tiny one above his lip that he’d earned from a nick of the Pan’s blade many years ago, or the little burn mark at his right temple from musket powder that had backfired into his face when he was a child. Things I’d not noticed at the ball because my brain had fritzed from the shock of seeing him again.
His eyes were deep brown and his lashes so long and black that he’d always looked as though he’d shaded his eyes in kohl.
His skin looked smooth, tanned, strong. My mouth opened, but no words came out.
He clenched his jaw, his hand flexing tight by his side as he watched me as surely as I’d studied him. His heated and intense look made me feel breathless and sick to my stomach.
Then I heard my name upon his tongue. Not the one the rest of the world knew me as, but the one only he’d ever dared to call me.
“Ellie?”
Hearing that was like taking a fist to my gut. I bit down on my tongue hard, hard enough to feel my incisors just begin to cut through the nerve-rich meat, hard enough to taste the tang of metal.
Having a full body spasm, I had to count slowly to three in my head before I felt able to actually speak. “How?”
I knew that if he was really Hook, really my Hook, he wouldn’t need to ask me to explain what I meant. I prayed that he would ask so that I could place him where he belonged—in the past, tucked away, forever.
He shook his head. His hair had grown a little shaggier than I remembered it being before. He’d never liked it long. Hook had always been fastidious with his appearance.
Sighing, he looked at me for the longest time with those same brown eyes of his that had once been my entire world. “I’m not entirely sure, Arielle.”
My lashes fluttered. He rolled my name with his pirate’s brogue just as I remembered, caressed the vowels just as he’d once done. I twitched, feeling as though I’d been sucker punched by him.
“That is not my name,” I hissed, voice squeezing tight, my airway feeling cut off and pinched.
A muscle in his jaw flexed. “So I heard. You changed it. You’ve changed a lot of things since we were last together.”
A strangled, high-pitched laugh slipped off my tongue. “What are you trying to do? This walk down memory lane, it’s not—”I growled. “This isn’t happening.” I backed up a step.
He shot to his feet, and I felt my body vibrate and my heartbeat quicken, felt my limbs growing loose and soft. I didn’t think it was lust or even desire, but it was definitely something. The marking on my forehead began to burn, and my eyes issued lambent radiance.
“Gods,” he murmured thickly, “you were always the most beautiful creature I’d ever known.”
Again that high-pitched laugh—this time, it sounded on the verge of crazy, and I snorted as I shook my head, trying desperately to regain my composure. We needed answers, answers he might have.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I wrapped my arms around myself and thought not of Hook or our long and very complicated past, but rather of Maddox. Mad though he appeared to be, he was the picture of calm in the storm. Nothing bothered him. Nothing distracted him. I needed to approach the interrogation as he would, as he had with Alice the previous year—impartial and critically thoughtful.
Forcing a few deep breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth, I decided that the only way to get through it was to simply get through it. Rage, pain, possibly even tears—those were for later. I had a job to do.
“How did you wind up at the gala the other night?” I opened my eyes again, piercing him with my no-nonsense look.
Hurt flashed through his eyes. Hook had been one of the deadliest pirates on all of the Never seas. His exploits had become legend. He had been chaos, fury, and extremely lethal when he’d had a mind to be. His passions so easily matched my own.
So it was bizarre for me to see this man, hear his voice, smell his scent, and while everything was screaming at me that he was somehow and miraculously him, there was a side of me that still couldn’t accept this, accept that the same marauding pirate could be looking at me as he was looking at me—as though my words wounded him, killed off something in him.
My nostrils flared as I thinned my eyes.
“It’s a long story, and parts of it are still missing from my brain.”
I shook my head. “I’m not interested in the minutiae. Give me the bullet points. Midas’s gala. How? Why?”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he sat. Really more of a graceful slump. His big frame curled over on itself as he stared with a faraway look down at the floor, his good hand gliding along the spot where his silver hook should have been.
“I was spelled,” he murmured thickly.
“Matilda said as much,” I said with a quick nod.
Brown eyes met mine, steady but also bottomless with a wellspring of pain I wasn’t prepared to see or to handle.
I dug my nails into my palms.
“It was like seeing my life through fogged lenses. Being constantly outside of myself yet somehow aware enough to know that something terrible had happened to me. Just not fully knowing why.”
“Gala?” I said again.
He snarled. “I’m getting to that, Arielle. Dammit! Do you think that this is fun for me? That any of this is fun for me? Do you think I wanted my soul and body hijacked? Bloody hells, you don’t know me at all if you— ”
I swallowed hard, trying to push down the lump of heat that crawled up my throat even now. “Hijacked?” I whispered, voice broken and stomach scuttling with feelers.
He squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his good hand to rub at his brow. How many times had I seen him just like that? Hook had suffered terrible head pains, usually after one of his thousands of skirmishes with the Pan. The Pan had never fought fairly. Childlike in his simple thinking, he’d usually resort to some form of treachery to escape Hook’s justice.
Hook had been captain of the seas, an authority that held some serious sway in Neverland and especially amongst other pirates. He’d not been a man of Grimm Central law, per se, but he’d brandished his own form of Neverlandian law. He’d ruled fairly, but he’d also had a firm hand and an intractable sense of integrity that had required him to sometimes tap dance outside of Grimm’s code of ethics to see that justice was served. Out there, pirate justice ruled the day.
Hook’s one rule—no harm could ever come to children or women. Ever. Period. It had been a rule that all the Pans had routinely danced over because though most of them were into their fiftieth year—if not longer—of holding the Pan title, in many ways, they were as mentally acute as an immature fifteen-year-old.
Many nights, I’d had to help Hook get through his pains with my singing, quieting his discomfort with my voice.
My mouth flooded with saliva, and my tongue felt thick and inflated with the siren song swelling within me. But I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t sing to him. Because it was too intimate and far too personal.
His tan skin looked pale, even a little gray around his mouth as he said, “Aye. I can’t explain to you what it is to know all that goes on around you in the worlds but to have no autonomy over your actions. Deep inside of me, I knew what I was doing, but I could never stop it, even if the idea of it was abhorrent.”
So the gold dust had not been used on him? It seemed likely, because when Ich had commanded I fetch the tea, I’d had no memory of doing it. Still didn’t.
“Who did this?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth, and I waited, expecting to hear him blurt out the name of the person who’d done it to him. But instead, he simply stared at me.
“Can you not say? If so, Matilda hasn’t broken through your enchantment at all.”
Shaking his head, he scowled down at his feet. “Nay, it’s not that. It’s just that I feel like you’re here to merely interrogat
e me, and this isn’t why I wanted to speak with you, lassie.”
I held up my hand, stopping him right there. “That’s the thing, though, Hook. I am here to interrogate you. Whatever past you thought to exploit, don’t.” I narrowed my eyes as he flinched, but at least he understood matters. “Now. Why did you go after Maddox?”
“Who?” His eyebrows furrowed, and I heard a note of aggravation in his tone.
“At the ball. My partner. Painted in gold. You slashed at him with an envenomed claw. Why? To what end?”
Dropping his hands, he looked at me through eyes that shone wetly. Deep-purple bags attested to his exhaustion. Red veins crisscrossed the whites of them. I clamped down on my front teeth as he slowly shook his head.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there for him.”
I frowned. “So it was about Midas’s wealth?”
“Arielle…” He sighed deeply. “I was there for you.”
My heart fluttered in my chest as if it had suddenly sprouted wings.
“What? Why? Who would want to harm me now? Father’s done all he could. He doesn’t give a rat’s arse what I do now, and I’ve made no other enemies.”
Laying his palm on his knee, he rocked on his seat, his gaze still never wavering from mine. He shook his head. “I’m murky there. All I know is that you’re important somehow.” He said it slowly, voice scratchy but full of hidden inflection.
I scoffed, but my skin felt electrified, and I rocked back on my heels. “Me? There are far brighter than me here who are on the cusp of solving the mysterious grains of sands, which I assume are the means by which the Slashers take control. So what about me exactly is so terrifying that you’d actually go out of your way to rig such an elaborate trap?”
“Only you can stop her.”
I blinked. Her ? We’d all believed that the head of the shifter syndicate was male, because it had been at the start.
“Her? Hook, what in the hells are you saying? Who do you work for? Who hijacked your body and mind?”
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