Tiger Lily (7 page)

Tiger Lily tried to stand and dizziness brought her down again. She tried to move her hands but they were tied behind her back. He reached for her neck, took her pearl between his fingers, then, with a flash of his dagger, sliced the chain from where it had rested against her collarbone and tied it around his own. I flew back at him and bit him, right at the shoulder. He flicked me off again, barely noticing. I landed in a grapevine, tangled and winded.

He knelt in front of her, slowly and quietly, and from above, I couldn’t tell whether it was to slit her throat. He held her chin and looked at her face.

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

She blinked at him. His face was mud covered, making his eyes glitter in the gritty mask of dirt he wore. His hair was matted to his skull. Suddenly his teeth showed through his lips in a smile.

She didn’t reply. The rain was abating, and dripped loudly on the giant leaves above. She butted her head into his teeth. He let out a deep, guttural moan.

I expected him to kill her then, but he only stared at her and rubbed his lip in surprise. Blood flowed down his chin, but it was the surprise that held him there, staring at her. And then he laughed.

“Boy, I guess.

“You’re sad about that man,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “I’ve seen you, watching over him. I thought you were a girl at first. But you’re too strong. I thought about stopping it sooner. It’s too close to our woods,” he said. “It’s good they took care of him.”

Tiger Lily sucked in her breath. Her chin sank against her chest.

Pan paused, studying her stricken face. He seemed to be thinking over his words, though I couldn’t tell for sure. I’d never tried to listen to someone whose thoughts were so muddled.

Suddenly, he darted off. Tiger Lily tried to stand, and failed. In a moment he was back with a handful of spotted yellow orchids, sloppy and pulled up at the roots, which he laid in a pile. Underneath the mud, around the circles of his eyes, his skin was pale. Soft as velvet to look at. His eyes were blue.

He knelt before the flowers, so suddenly solemn that it appeared he was making a joke. Tiger Lily stared at him, bewildered. He still had the delicateness we had seen at the lagoon, but he must have been deceptively strong, because when he pulled her beside him, she went easily, like a doll. He made her kneel. “We should have a funeral,” he said.

Pan held his hands clasped in a tent on his lap, and he bowed his head.

He seemed to be trying to recall something, and it was a long time before he finally said, “Our Father. Our Father. Our Father. Amen.”

Then he leaned back, and his face was blank again. He smiled, all white teeth. “There.”

A piercing cry rose from somewhere in the woods behind him. Tiger Lily pushed herself back harder against her tree.

“Just the mermaids,” he said. “The moon’s rising.”

He did something curious then. He wiped something off his knife that might have been blood. And then he carved a few words into the tree just behind the flowers. It took several minutes, but he was meticulous about each letter.
IN MEMRY OF THE STRANJER
, it said.
HE LIVD AND DID
. He turned and smiled at her.

Tiger Lily shimmied her wrists. It was the twitching that gave her away.

Peter’s face grew grim and perplexed. He reached for her wrists. It was the wrong thing to do.

For all the time I had watched over Tiger Lily, I still underestimated her. She must have been free for some time, because as he leaned in, she flung all her rage against him with her weight, held him against a tree, her fingers around his neck. Panting, her heart racing, she squeezed until he choked for breath and sank slowly down the tree, half conscious.

She left him dazed and lying in the dirt, and ran.

It wasn’t until the next day that Tiger Lily realized she’d left her necklace behind, hanging around his neck.

P
eter didn’t love Tiger Lily the first time he saw her, or even the second or the third. But Reginald Smee did.

How did I know? Because I didn’t follow Tiger Lily home that night. I followed the pirates instead.

I made the night journey across the island, trailing the clipped leaves and muddy prints that announced the way the pirates had gone. The forest at night is different from the forest in the day. As a faerie, you can’t slip through it unnoticed, because you give off a faint glow that is like a beacon in the dark, deep Neverland nights. But we are equipped with defenses too. Great speed. Excellent eyesight. Sly, secretive natures that lend themselves to seeking the best hiding places. And the pirates, while deadly, were careless enough not to notice me.

They camped about halfway to the cove and ate dinner by a warm fire. I watched them from the cold, gritty shelter of a crevice in a rock nearby. And I learned about Smee, the man Tiger Lily had spared because of his tears.

The other pirates and their captain, I had seen before; they had inhabited the island on and off for years. But Smee was something new. I listened to the cobwebs of his memory. A human might think memories are fainter than present thoughts, but that is not the case. Often, they are easy paths to follow for a faerie, and sometimes they are so loud they drown out everything else in the brain.

Smee had killed his first man at the age of twelve. The product of a privileged and sheltered life, he found the difficulty of murder had appealed to him: he loved doing something so frightening. It wasn’t that Reginald was heartless. Quite the opposite. He sympathized with his victims, wondered about who they would leave behind. He felt deeply the despair of the man’s or woman’s final moments. He never killed without having to wipe a tear or two from his eyes, and that was how Tiger Lily had found him crying, after they’d pushed the pleading, terrified Englishman off the cliffs. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. I listened on, and shivered down to my little faerie bones. Reginald didn’t kill because he had no heart. He killed because he did. He killed to make himself cry, and he only killed the people he admired.

By the time he was sixteen, the trail of violence he’d left was being called a “rash of murders.” In the papers, he was named “the South Bank Strangler.” Reginald walked through the streets during those days, waiting for someone to point the finger. But no one looked at him, except to say “excuse me, sir” if they bumped into him.

This was in the time when spice was no longer king, when ships were crowding the ports with loads of cotton instead of cinnamon. People sat in parlors and talked about the unknowns. And there were so many. Where would expansion end? What was left to be invented? If there had been one symbol to define the minds and hearts of London at that time, it would have been a question mark. Smee had often gravitated to the docks, this question mark pushing him there.

That was where the captain found him. I don’t know how he managed to single him out, or how he managed to be the only person in London who guessed that Reginald and the South Bank Strangler were one and the same.

To Reginald, the captain appeared at first to be an outline in the fog, in a long wig. He looked about as wealthy and refined an English gentleman as Reginald himself. But something made Reginald shiver at the sight of him—perhaps it was that the frills at his throat appeared to be out of place, old and slightly frayed, and his shirtsleeves seemed to be twilling apart at the cuffs, and then, beneath the cuffs, something was uneven, and Reginald finally understood what it was: the missing hand.

There were no pirates anymore. Not like this one—arrayed in Louis XVI garb and with a wig like a barrister, only powdered black with coal. The loss of his hand was recent, the wound crisscrossed with thick, black, crooked stitches. Up close, there was nothing refined about him at all. The many lines in his face were caked with dirt, his lips were crusty, and his flat blue eyes were bloodshot but friendly. He stank of cheap tobacco and whiskey, and clutched a cup of it in his left hand. He looked broken, and deadly.

He said, “Reginald Smee, I can see you’re a born hunter. So I am requesting the pleasure of your company elsewhere.” Then he grasped him around the arm and pulled him forward. He waved the stump at Smee. “Come now. No time to hesitate. We have hunting to do.”

“W-what do you hunt, sir?” Reginald asked.

“Not sir. Just Hook.” The stranger smiled, friendly. “I used to hunt ships. But recently I’ve switched. Now I hunt boys.” He clapped Reginald on the back. “Now we both do.”

It had been a rude awakening for Smee to leave England with a promise of paradise, and to end up in the thick, insect-infested, dirty, hot danger of the jungle. And while he’d been treated to a few amazing sights of creatures different from any in England—clusters of white-lit faeries hovering over a bog, furry beasts with tusks and horns—Neverland was mostly a tangle: of trees, of weeds, of predators, of quick deaths. Not to mention he was now bound to a man turning yellow from drink, not one-tenth so polished as he’d appeared on the docks of London, and half crazy.

The fact was, the captain was two men: one when he was sober, and one when he wasn’t. Sober, Hook was charming, erudite, well-read, sharp, well-spoken, and thoughtful. Hook would be the first one to notice your water was empty, or that you needed another helping on your plate, or to make you feel like his favorite and most honored guest. Drunk, Hook was angry and sloppy. His eyes turned red and glassy almost as soon as spirits touched his lips. He went from rational to illogical, and most of all enraged. It was not hard to imagine that he had once been terrifying. He could still be scary, murderous in fact, but he was a broken man.

Still, a strong desire to please the captain, and be loved by him, was evident in all of the men around him, and Smee was turning out to be no exception. As they ate, he kept a solicitous eye on the captain’s cup, and filled it each time it ran out. He, like the others, laughed loudly at the captain’s jokes, making him smile with smug satisfaction. I guess it was Hook’s rare combination of charm and utter intimidation that won not just fear from the crew, but love. Everyone clearly longed to be the captain’s favored man, partly because it was such a difficult position to hold on to for long. And it was obvious that Smee was currently it. In the moonlight, the captain threw his arm around him from time to time, as he talked about his favorite drunken subjects—his missing hand, and the lost boys.

Sometimes he wore the hook from which he’d gotten his nickname, to substitute for his missing hand so that it was easier for him to grab things, and sometimes he didn’t. It rarely stayed in place, and seemed to chafe and irritate him. He said he liked how it made him look but that it often rendered him more clumsy. Most of the men, he confided, believed he’d lost his hand in a fight, and that it had fallen into the ocean and been eaten by a crocodile.

“But,” he confessed to Smee, “it came off in an assembly line.” He gazed into Smee’s eyes unsteadily. Smee knew he would never admit this while sober. “I worked on shoes, you see, to pay for school. It was my job to insert the leather into the machine, to be cut into the shape of the sole. You see?” He moved his hands in the air to imitate how he had done his work; then he stopped short and leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes glistening and red. “I was staying up nights to study. I thought I could study my way into being a gentleman. Well, I fell asleep. My hand went in instead of the leather.” He grinned, almost as if it were a good joke. “You can see that the cut’s shaped like a heel.” He held up his rounded stump. His eyes seemed to focus. Then he quickly looped his arm around Smee’s neck. Smee felt his breath on his cheek, steady and fast. “You tell anyone, I’ll kill you.”

Smee nodded. Hook licked his lips and sat back, relaxed again. “They think Peter chopped it off. Never. I
named
the lost boys, you know. I lost one, two, three of them. I started asking around, to all the tribes. ‘Have you seen my lost boys?’ And the name stuck.”