Never, Never (30 page)

H
OOK FLIPPED A DOUBLOON OVER AND OVER ACROSS
his hook, staring darkly out the window. In the night, it was difficult to make out the weather. It did not feel especially cold or especially warm, and it simply looked black. No hint of Pan's being, well or otherwise.

If Pan were to die, he'd decided to release the children. No question lingered in Hook's mind on that anymore. Granted, that left a score of children out in the Neverwoods without a Pan to lead them, but it was preferable to death. If the boy were to live, therein lay the problem.

Most of him expected Peter to survive. He doubted the boy could truly be felled by poison, no matter how deadly it was. Something would conspire with some other dreadful thing to save the boy, he was sure of it. And so, though he did not wish to, he was forced to consider what happened when Pan flitted up to his boat.
If
Pan flitted up to his boat.

Perhaps the way to bait him was to threaten the deaths of his Lost Boys. He was sure Pan would know if the boys were in danger. More likely than not, Pan would appear before he had to lay a hook on any of them. Hook bit the inside of his cheek and pondered.

Then, he gazed once again out the window. The air was gloomy, and there was a light coating of ice on the
edges of the glass.
Gloom. Ice
. He leapt up, letting the doubloon fall to the floor.

The cold and the dark outside could only mean one thing.

Pan was dead.

Hook burst out of his cabin, grinning into the biting wind. It stung his face and his hands and every bit of him that was uncovered. He splayed his fingers and threw out his arms, basking in the delicious cold. Tiny grey snowflakes started to fall, swirling around in the wind, resting in his hair, and he laughed out loud.

It was a dark, pained sort of laugh, the kind that makes listeners question whether it is truly a laugh. And in the black of the night, it was even harder to tell. The laughing devolved into something even more insane than it already was, and slowly, each head on the boat turned toward Hook.

“Captain?” Smee said, toddling up to him.

Hook's laughter faded out until it was nothing more than a spark of absurdity in his eyes.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Hook glanced around, at the grey-brown leaves on the trees that had shriveled into themselves, and ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting in the air nothing at all. “Of course I'm all right, Smee. I am marvelous, wonderful, spectacular. You're standing outside with me, aren't you?”

“Well, I, yes. I am,” Smee blustered.

“Then you know. I am quite, quite all right.” He smiled widely with his teeth, little dimples from his boyhood showing.

Smee frowned, cheeks rosy from the cold, and possibly from embarrassment that he somehow
didn't
know. Smee walked off, stopping beside the pile of children, who had the ropes still tied around them to prevent them flying away. The tying, however, was rather abysmal—loose and
drapey and hardly knotted. Hook wondered for a moment how all of them hadn't wriggled out yet. Several had freed most of their body parts.

The smallest one, whom Hook recognized as Tootles, reached out and grabbed Smee's shirttail, and one Hook did not recognize grabbed Smee's spectacles and put them on his own face, magnifying his little eyes. Smee hopped back and nearly fell over, sending the little captives into fits of laughter. Hook shook his head.

The interaction betwixt Smee and the children did pierce Hook in the heart a bit, and gave him a hollow feeling. Smee was flashing his blade about, trying to look menacing. Generally, the children would all shriek and shrink back when he did, but it was in the way children shrink back from frightening stories and beg their parents to tell them again.

Hook felt a great disquiet, watching all of them. When any of them dared to glance his way, it was with the same look on their faces that came over his when he saw the crocodile. Was that was he was now? A predator? When was it, he wondered, that the last piece of childhood had fled from him entirely?

None of the boys, including those he'd once called his friends, would look him in the eye now. With that last little glimmer of innocence snuffed out, he reckoned, there was nothing left for any of the children to love.

“No little children love me,” he said quietly, to himself.

“What was that, Captain?” Starkey asked, approaching him with two rums in hand.

Hook took one from him and brought the glittering goblet to his lips, closing his eyes as the spice warmed his mind.

“Nothing, Starkey. Nothing of any consequence.”

Starkey said nothing. But he watched the captain watching the children, and Hook thought that Starkey
was more perceptive than he let on. It was not so much the play that bothered Hook, or the fact that they seemed to be inexplicably enjoying Smee's company. It was the innocence, that elusive trait he'd lost so long ago. Without an ounce of boyhood left, children were bound to hate him, and he was bound to become the villain, no matter which story he chose to be a part of. He tilted his head back and drained the cup in a single motion, then looked away.

“Smee, ye can't be doin' such things with those children,” Starkey called.

“Doing what?”

“Playin' about. It's not a piratin' way to behave.”

Smee scoffed. “Playing? I've got them shaking in their boots.”

Hook raised an eyebrow. The shaking was from laughter, no doubt. He stole another glance at the group and noted, with curiosity, that Wendy was bound separately and sitting a good deal away from the rest. It reminded him of himself somehow, and he was stirred.

He made his way toward her and pulled up a chair, scraping its worn legs across the deck.

“Good evening, lady.”

“Darling,” she said, and she shivered.

Hook frowned. “What?”

“Lady Darling. Wendy Moira Angela Darling.”

“My apologies.”

She looked at him from the corners of her big eyes then looked away. But because it seemed she could not help herself, she mumbled, “Good evening.”

“Why, my dear, are you sitting so far away from your boys?”

“Because I'm tired. And I'd rather not play in their childish games. I'm not in the mood for them.”

She had a haughty tone of voice, which, if it had come from the mouth of an older woman, would have annoyed Hook greatly. But, because Wendy was a child, he was amused.

He leaned back and crossed his boots. “You don't fancy Smee?”

“Well, it's not that I don't like him. I just don't believe that now is the time for games and laughing and silliness.” She shifted, and Hook could see that behind her back, she'd withdrawn her little fingers into the sleeves of her frilly nightgown.

“And why not?”

“Because, I expect you'll try to kill us soon.” Her mouth was flat, her eyes carefully devoid of expression. She was afraid of him too, perhaps. But Hook noticed that she did not avoid his eyes like the rest.

He feigned shock and drew his hook to his breast. “Heaven forbid James Hook would kill a lady in cold blood.”

“I don't believe that.”

“Why not? You've heard tales of me murdering women and girls for fun?”

Wendy pursed her lips then looked up at him. “Well, no. I suppose I haven't.”

Hook smiled, then glanced briefly over her shoulder, at the sea that was blue-black and raging, waves tipped with ice. The sky was growling and seemed ready to cave in on itself.

“I
have
heard of all the pirates you've killed,” she said, ripping his gaze away from the sea and the sky. “And I know of all the places you've plundered, and I've told Michael and John all about the times you savagely tried to fell Peter Pan.”

Hook's smile widened. Generally, that smile would have been a comforting thing. But the black clouds and
striking lightning and rumbling waves gave it a decidedly different effect.

“Ah. A storyteller, are you?”

She nodded proudly. “I am.”

Hook leaned forward in his chair, exuding villainy, but trying to come off as friendly. It was a tragic endeavor, because it seemed he'd forgotten how. When Tiger Lily had gone, she'd stolen the last childish piece of his heart, and he was left nothing but a knave, trying desperately to bring out something that did not exist anymore.

Wendy, however, gave him a look that cut to his soul. It was a look she should not have given him, not reasonably. It was so out of place with the ice falling from the sky, the terrible roar of the ocean, the frightening, wicked sea, and band of men surrounding her. She stared at him with admiration, not curdled with fear. Just itself, pure and childlike and innocent. He choked and sat back in his chair.

He stared at her as goose bumps rose on his skin and dead, black crackles of the dying trees surrounding the beach fluttered around them. And he noted the brave regality in her face, the blue in her lips, the pure, sweet youth in her eyes. Perhaps Pan was truly dead, and if he was, Hook did not know that he could leave this enchanting little girl to her fate in the Never Woods. Perhaps Neverland would let him go, and he would sail away on the sea, and lead Wendy and the Lost Boys back to London. Then it would be as though none of this fool adventure had ever happened.

He knew enough to know that this was unlikely. Nonetheless, a spark of hope was kindled in him.

“Would you like to know something about your stories, Wendy Darling?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and gave him an appraising look, evaluating him from the tip of his hat down to his boots, and came to rest back on his eyes.

“They call them stories,” Hook said. “They call them pretend. But your make-believe, your games, the little heroes they would drum up for you. Your Peter Pan. They're all false. A story is just another word for a lie.”

Wendy smiled bravely back at him, a little wrinkle in her small, pointed nose, and her eyes were sad, and much too old. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Peter isn't everything I tell him to be in my stories. I know very well.”

Hook narrowed his eyes. “Then why do you tell them?”

Wendy glanced back at the Lost Boys, Slightly who was detaining the redhead by smashing the boy's face into his armpit, the new set of twins, who were both quite small, playing some sort of finger game with each other despite the dark situation. “Little children need things to believe in,” she said, and Hook felt the words like a knife to his throat. His eyelids fluttered for a moment, and he looked away, the thought having only just occurred to him that he'd never had a thing to believe in. Not even Peter Pan.

Wendy's sugar-sweet voice brought him back to her. “What about you, Captain Hook?”

“What about me?” he said, quiet, chilly breeze letting little pieces of his hair rise and fall around his face.

“Are you real? Are my stories about you a lie?”

He looked at her curiously. “
You
, Peter's Wendy, tell stories about me?”

“Yes,” she said, staring right through him, harder and with less fear than any pirate captain he'd ever faced. “When we play pretend, I'm always you.”

He blinked and lay back, staring up at the cold, whirling, twirling sky.

He did not wish to consider her initial query, either. Was he the man she told stories about? The merciless, cold, murderous pirate captain? Dread of the Never Sea?

Without thinking, without allowing himself to convince him otherwise, he whispered, “I am not a lie, Wendy girl.”

“Good,” Wendy said, and Hook looked down from the sky and frowned. “The captain I play at wouldn't murder us. Not like this, in cold blood. No, the very soul of Captain James Hook is composed of good form.”

Hook cocked his head, then, and Wendy gave him a little specter of a smile.

For a stupid moment, he very briefly considered untying her, the lot of them. He even felt himself rise to do it. But just then, the thunder crashed so loudly that all the children but Wendy covered their ears.

Hook jumped up from the chair, eyes dark and angry. “Do not manipulate me, Wendy Darling.”

“I'm not,” she said calmly, but her eyes held a spark of fire. “I'm only saying what you already know. If you do this thing, if you murder us all with our hands tied 'round our backs, then you lose. Peter wins, James Hook.”

He slammed his hook into the chair and yanked it back out, sending splinters flying everywhere.

“I hate to disappoint you, my dear. But that is simply not the case.”

Wendy stared at him, eyes steely, too defiant for a girl her age.

Hook's nostrils flared. “He cannot win if he is dead. Your Pan is dead, Wendy. I killed him myself.”

Wendy shut her eyes and shook her head. Hook rushed over to her, face less than an inch from hers, and set his hook beneath her chin.

“Open your eyes. Look around. Can't you see the storm?”