by Anna Katmore
“Melina?” the woman shouts over her shoulder.
“That wasn’t me, mother!” a girl’s voice replies. “It came from upstairs!”
“Come in here and watch your brother while I take a look.”
When a girl, seven years old or less, walks into the kitchen, the woman dries her hands on her apron and hurries out of the room. That wasn’t part of my plan, but there shouldn’t be any trouble in dealing with a child. The moment she turns her back on the window, I crack it open and cautiously move it up until Smee and I can duck through. We’re standing right behind her, when the boy’s attention focuses on us and, of course, the girl notices. She spins around. Her face turns pale like the tiled stone floor.
Damn. Holding her stare, I place my forefinger over my lips. “Shh.”
Yeah, like she really would… The child sucks in a lungful of air then screams like I used my sword to threaten her. On second thought, it might have been the better way to go about this. It only takes a couple of seconds for the mother to rush back downstairs and into the kitchen. The room gets uncomfortably crowded.
It’s my hat she seems to focus on first, then her gaze lands on Jack next to me. Horror flashes in her eyes. “Melina! Run!” she shouts to the kid who then turns on the spot and dashes out of the room. “Get help!”
Smee steps in front of me, placating the woman with his palms up. “Please, be quiet, lass! We only need a little of the water.”
Now her jaw drops. But she recovers in the blink of an eye. “The hell you get from my house!” She grabs a vase from the counter and throws it at Smee who dodges it, putting me in the line of fire. I catch the vase and place it on the end of the counter.
“Listen,” I start, but that’s all I get out before she fetches a broom out of nowhere and smacks Jack hard on the head. His yelp echoes in the room as he covers his head from a second hit. Jumping out of the wench’s reach, I circle the table and hold the empty rum bottle into the tub, trying to fill a little of the bathwater into it. The boy starts crying.
No more than an inch of water flowed through the bottles mouth before I feel the hard knock of the broom across my back. Whirling about with the bottle in my hand, I curse. “Damn, lady! That hurts!”
“I show you what hurts, you drunken bastards!” She comes after us with her broom once more, chasing us around the kitchen. My hat tears off my head as I run. There is no time to find it.
Ducking her blows, Smee and I fight our way to the window and jump outside. Peter hovers in the street, eyes wide. “What the hell did you two do?”
“Move!” I shout at him as I drop from the windowsill and land on Jack Smee. Getting to my feet, I try to run, but my cape nearly chokes me. The mad woman holds a fistful of the fabric in her bony hand.
She leans out of the window, her black braid dangling from her nape. “Take that, you bloody bastard!” Pain explodes in my head as the broom comes down on me again. Fighting against the dizziness, I pull at the strings of my collar until they come loose and I can flee, leaving the cape behind.
An odd adrenaline rush makes me laugh as Smee grabs my sleeve and hauls me down the street with him. I cut a glance over my shoulder. A potted plant comes flying at us. I duck and it crashes in the alley, pieces of the scattered pot exploding all around us.
The window is forcefully pulled down and behind it the curtains ride together. At the corner, we stop and I stoop over, bracing my hands on my knees, panting, the bottle still in one hand. “Sink me, that was more of an adventure than I thought we’d get.”
Still gliding above our heads, Peter laughs. “You two want to be pirates? You don’t even stand a chance against a woman with a broom!”
Smee grimaces. “He does have a point.”
I don’t know what’s riding me, when I grab Peter’s ankle, pull him down to my side, wrap my arm with the bottle in my hand around his neck and rub my knuckles on his scalp. “We wouldn’t have had to fight a wench with broom, if you’d done a better job of distracting her in the first place, little brother.” This is the first time in our lives, that Peter and I actually share a laugh. It’s weird. But a comfortable kind of weird.
“Let go, Hook! You smell like a codfish,” he yells at me between hiccups of laughter, but when I ease my hold on him, he accepts my arm on his shoulders for another brotherly moment.
Averted from Peter’s view, Smee lifts an amused brow at me. I let go of my brother and adjust my collar. A moment later, noise to my left draws my attention as a door opens. It comes from the house with the crumbled yellow plaster. The slim lady’s unholy curses drift to us as my hat and cape soar out and land on the cobblestoned alley. The door bangs shut.
We wait another minute at the corner until we’re sure the coast is clear, then I hurry to pick up my things.
“So, are you going to bring this to the fairies tonight?” Peter asks.
“No, it can wait until the morning. Who knows what they will turn me into if I knock at their door after midnight?” I shudder at the thought.
“And you think they will tell you how to find Angel, if you bring them the bathwater?”
“The bathwater is for an old debt. They probably won’t tell me shit. Not until I bring them a damn rainbow.”
Peter stops and stares at me. “A rainbow? From Neverland’s volcano?”
“That’s what Bre’Shun said she wants, yes.”
After a stunned second, a hearty laugh burst from Pan’s chest. “Now, good luck with that one, brother.” With the fake salute of a sailor, he lifts in the air and zooms away across the star-dotted night sky.
It didn’t escape me, that he called me brother. A first.
Angelina
IT’S ALMOST MIDNIGHT and I still can’t sleep. My fingers keep finding the red glass heart I’m wearing on a necklace. A secret gift from Paulina, my five-year-old sister. She swears she didn’t slip the chain around my neck at night when she came crawling into my bed because of nightmares a few weeks ago, but I’m sure it’s a piece of the treasure she keeps hidden in a small chest under her bed. Every free gift from her many Disney Princess magazines goes in there—if it’s not stamped, tattooed, clipped or hung on me, that is.
There’s really nothing special about the glass heart. And still, it has me thinking far too much, far too late into the night. The strawberry blond twins, Paulina and Brittney Renae, told me I fell off the balcony one night in late February—the evening before I found it around my neck. I must have hit my head pretty hard, because I don’t remember anything of that night. Thank God, I didn’t end up with broken bones. The snow down in the garden and the sodden ground beneath must have cushioned my fall.
Restless, I push back my covers and swing my legs out of bed, turning on the light on my nightstand. The floor is cold. A shiver races through me. Smoothing my nightdress, I pad barefoot to the mirror on my door. Do I look different? My hair is still raven-black and the tips tickle my jaw when I tilt my head. My eyes, too big and round for my face, flash the same hazel color as always. My appetite is usually meager, so my collar bones still stand out just enough to notice I don’t care much for the exquisite meals served in this huge house. It’s been five weeks since the alleged fall. Nothing obvious has changed about me.
But I can feel it all the same.
Something is different.
Deep within me anchors a longing I can’t place. Like I’m somewhere far away and feeling homesick. But that’s complete rubbish, because I’m in my room, in my house in London. I am home. Yet the longing gets worse each time I look at the heart pendant. Like right now.
My throat tightens. This is so weird. My lips start to tremble. I can’t stop it. My vision turns misty. I blink. And a lonely tear trails down my cheek.
Maybe it’s time to take off that necklace. I sniff and wipe my nose with the back of my hand, then I reach behind my neck and open the closure. The moment the glass heart comes off, it feels like a very heavy burden drops off my chest. Breathing doesn’t hurt any longer
and I let go of a deep sigh.
Right then, a cold breeze wafts through the tilted French door leading to my Victorian balcony and blows some sheets of paper from my desk. I spin around. The curtains, which have been dreamily hanging in their usual place all night, now dance in the wind.
This is all too crazy, and I blame it on my lack of sleep. I’ve never done well without enough rest. And rest is what I didn’t get these past few nights. Swallowing hard, I cross to the window and close it, banning the cold and the wind from my room. When I climb back into bed, something hard presses into my palm.
The red glass heart. I’m still holding it tight.
Shaking my head at myself, I scurry to my desk, pull out a drawer and place the necklace to the far back. Then I pick up the papers from the floor, adjust them to a nice pile and drop them on top of the heart. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
I bang the drawer shut and go back to bed. Sleep comes fast this time.
Chapter 2
A SHOCKWAVE rocks the Jolly Roger on the water, pulling me out of my sleep. In the blink of an eye, I sit upright in my bed, staring into darkness. The echo of a low thud sounds outside, one so loud it makes me think a part of Neverland has split off and dropped into the sea.
What the hell—
Getting out of bed, I forgo donning my shirt and boots and walk out on deck only dressed in my rough leather pants. Everything is quiet. We’re still anchored close to the seaport. The sails are curled in, the crew is asleep in their quarters. Nobody so much as peeks outside. I couldn’t possibly be the only one who heard the noise. Could I?
My gaze skates out to the quiet sea. No wind, no waves, no sound whatsoever. Everything is too quiet. The thought that it only happened in my dreams takes up room in my mind. But how, when it felt so real? So final. I still bear the goosebumps from it.
Rubbing the chill from my arms, I walk back into my cabin and light a candle. It’s twenty minutes past midnight. I went to bed less than an hour ago. Ah no... Dragging my hands over my face, I sit on the edge of my bed, then I slump backward and stare at the ceiling. Not another sleepless night. Recently, I really had too many of them. But as expected, the night wears on and sleep stays out.
In the morning, my eyes burn like someone washed them out with rum, my head aches and I’m in no mood to bear up with my crew that started working and shouting on deck with the first sunrays sparkling on the ocean’s surface.
With a stretch that helps my stiff limbs a little, I walk to the small table by the wall and pick up the white shirt that’s hanging over the backrest of the chair. I could wear it today. Or…I could do what I did every morining the past few weeks: breathe in what’s left of Angelina McFarland’s soft scent clinging to the fabric. She wore this shirt at her last night in Neverland. I just don’t find it in my heart to let go if this final bit of keepsake. No, I’m not going to wear and ruin it. Pressing the crumbled shirt to my lips, I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe a kiss into it. Then I drape it over the backrest of the chair once again and find another shirt to wear in my closet.
Black is the color that draws me today. The buttons of this well worn shirt slide easily through the holes. No sweet memories are connected with this garment. All the better. With my hat under my arm and the bottle with the bathwater in my hand, I leave my quarters and head for the gangplank.
Smee falls in step beside me. “Off to see the fairies, Cap’n?”
I nod. “Take command until I’m back.”
“Aye.”
The wooden board jolts under my jogging steps. A briny wind wafts into my face. I may not bring a rainbow this time, but with any luck Bre’Shun is willing to barter more answers for something else.
Bypassing the sleepy town, I take a turn for the forest behind the port. Mushrooms and tiny wild flowers litter the mossy ground left and right to the narrow path leading deeper into the woods. High up in the brittle branches of an oak tree, a raven peeks down at me with beady eyes. It pushes out a single hoarse croak, announcing that I’m about to enter the most bewitching part of Neverland.
Daylight struggles to break through the ever thicker growing trees and bushes. It’s darker here than anywhere else on the island, and cold. But instead of raising the feeling of discomfort in me, like one would expect when walking through a forest that seems to have eyes and ears, a homey sensation fills me. This phenomenon surprises me each time I come here. It’s like the entire forest strives to bribe me to stay. And part of me wants to give in.
But another part of me, and it’s actually a much bigger part too, urges me to hurry, get what I need, and leave again so I can continue searching for a way to get to Angel.
“Captain Hook,” a soft voice coos beside me.
I whirl about and face one of the fairy sisters with hair so fair and smooth it reminds me of silvery waterfalls. “Remona,” I say and acknowledge her with a nod.
“Bre’Shun will be delighted about your visit.” She purses her pale green lips and tilts her head. “Where’s the rainbow?”
“Remona, where are your good manners? He hardly stepped a foot into the forest,” a detached voice echoes gently all around us. “Welcome back to the empire of fairies, James.”
I spin on the spot to find the source, but I’m still alone with Remona. Or so it seems, until a butterfly with silky purple wings lowers to Remona’s open palm. Frowning at the tiny animal, I take a step closer. “Um…Bre?”
“Oh, James Hook, you silly boy.” An ice-cold hand lands on my shoulder and warm laughter chimes in my ear. “I’m many things, but certainly not a shape shifter.”
I pivot to my old friend while, from the corner of my eye, I see Remona closing her fingers around the butterfly, scrunching it in her fist. She lets the dust run through her fingers. From the purple powder raining to the forest floor, another new butterfly is born from each grain of dust and together they flutter away through the specks of light beaming through the leaves and branches. Remona skips after them.
My jaw drops in fascination. Bre’Shun lifts my chin with one of her cold fingers and closes my mouth. Only now, my focus is truly on her and, as always, her beauty and unearthly appearance take my breath away. Her honey golden locks are wound up to the top of her head today, with a few careless strands framing her pale face. Turquoise eyes pierce mine as she smoothes the bodice of her burgundy dress and smiles.
“I can’t smell a rainbow on you,” she says in a soft voice. “You didn’t find the time in your day to collect one for me then?”
Grimacing, I rub the back of my neck. “Well, no. I was—”
“Busy.” She inclines her head, still friendly and in no way looking disappointed. “I understand.”
If I learned one thing from the fairies, it is that time is irrelevant to them. They know where they are going and it doesn’t matter in the least how long it takes them to get there. I wish I could say the same about myself.
Her gaze lowers to the bottle with a rum label in my hand. Quickly, I lift it and tell her with newfound enthusiasm, “I got your bathwater.”
“I can see that.” Her eyes grow bigger with joy. “Hopefully, you washed the rum out of the bottle before you filled in the water. Rum is a nasty addition to any potion. One never knows what side-effects it causes.”
It’s probably best not to answer to that, but a traitorous heat rises to my neck.
Taking the bottle away from me, Bre places one of her cold as heck hands at my back and steers me to the right, sweeping her arm invitingly. There’s nothing in this forest that should really surprise me, and yet I take in a sharp breath when out of thin air her tiny white house with a straw roof and a white picket fence appear.
Together we stroll through the front garden where daisies grow all over the place. The low wooden front door forces me to stoop not to bang my head. From the outside, one would expect to find a room no bigger than a hog house, but entering the home of a fairy is like walking into a palace. A pleasant scent of mint and coriander greets me in the e
ver familiar hall with a chessboard floor of black and white tiles.
Bre’Shun has me sitting down at the big round glass table. It’s the place where bargains are made.
“May I offer you a cup of tea, James Hook?” she says as she lowers into the iron chair with a high back and soft pink upholstery opposite from me, steepling her fingers in front of her smile.
There’s no time to decide if I’m up for her mystic brew that will make me spot another piece of furniture inside her house at each sip, just like last time I came here with Angel. A sophisticated white porcelain cup with tiny flowers on a saucer appears in front of me on the table. Ignoring decency and conventions, I close my eyes and down the whole cup of tea at once. Full of expectations, I open my eyes again and…still, I’m surrounded by cold stone walls and a chessboard tile floor. Where’s the neat and cozy house of a fairy this hall should have turned into? I blink several times, but nothing changes.
“Is there something wrong with the tea?” I ask.
“Why, no. It’s peppermint tea. Known for its refreshing effect. What did you expect to happen when you drank it?” Her brows quirk, but there’s an unmistakable edge of mockery in her voice. “That animals of the forest storm the house and flitter all about in here?” She laughs. And I feel stupid.
Fortunately, she changes the topic. “What can you do for me, James?”
“Obviously, not much. I don’t have the rainbow.” Leaning back in the chair, I fold my arms over my chest. “Still, I need some answers. And urgently.”
“Oh, don’t you say that, James. A rainbow isn’t everything. You have so much more to give.” She rises from her seat and sweeps her arm to the back of the hall, where a high door appears. “Come.”
Never in my life and the many times I have visited here did I ever get to peek into another room of this house. The iron legs of the chair scrape on the tiles as I shove back and stand. The glass table disappears the moment I circle it to follow Bre through the door that opened on its own accord.
