She would always know that her friends, at their very core, had found someone to take away the darkness when things seemed like they’d never get better.
“What are you doing here?” She asked.
She didn’t say that she was hiding or that she wanted to be alone. She was depressed: not a bitch.
“Came to see if you wanted company,” Pan said.
“We ran into Jessica and Beast,” Tinkerbell told her carefully. “They said you had gone off to your bedroom, but we didn’t find you there.”
“Figured you might be over here,” Pan said.
“You know me well.”
“Probably too well,” he smiled.
The two of them had been together in a play. Hook and Pan had gotten to know each other really well. On some level, their friendship had saved him. Allie, a dark fairy, had known they had a relationship with each other enough to choose to imitate Hook. Allie had used her glamour to completely take the image of Hook. She had pretended to be her and had tricked Peter into being alone with her. Then she’d taken him.
And they’d almost lost him.
“What’s going on?” Tinkerbell asked carefully. She looked at Hook’s hand and then back at her face. Yeah, apparently everyone knew just how upset she was about her powers.
“Nothing.”
“Try again,” Peter said. He walked over to a bench and sat down. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked up at her.
She towered over him.
Peter was such a small person that she wondered how he’d managed to fool everyone for so long. No one had known he was a fairy at all. He had insisted for years that he wasn’t a fairy, that he was a boy, and everyone had believed it.
“Nothing,” Hook shrugged.
She didn’t want to talk about it.
“It’s okay to be pissed off,” Tinkerbell said.
“I’m not.”
“Well, maybe you should be,” Peter said. “She took everything from you, and I’m guessing this isn’t the first time.”
“What makes you say that?” Hook bristled.
“We all heard your fight with Allie,” Tinkerbell said. “You blame her for your parents dying.”
“Because it was her fault!” Hook practically shouted. Then she slapped a hand over her mouth. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have yelled.
“Let’s talk about that,” Tinkerbell said. She hopped onto a large boulder that was sitting in the gardens. It was big and wide and Tinkerbell managed to hop up ridiculously gracefully. It was because she was a fairy, Hook told herself.
Hook had never been as graceful as her friends. Even when she danced more, she never looked like they did.
“Why?” She asked. “What’s the point?”
“Maybe we can help you feel better.”
“I don’t think anyone can make me feel better.”
“Sometimes saying things out loud can help,” Tinkerbell pointed out.
“You sound like my therapist.”
“You have a therapist?”
“I used to.”
It hadn’t helped.
Talking about losing Mom and Dad hadn’t been beneficial in any way.
It probably should have. People always said that talking about loved ones you lost was a good way to start the healing process, but Hook no longer felt like that was true.
“Well, try us,” Tinkerbell said. “We’re magical. Maybe we can help. Who was Allie to you? Let’s start with that, okay?”
Hook eyed Tink suspiciously. For such a tiny fairy, she had a brain, and she was smart. Hook didn’t really want to fill her friend in, though. She didn’t really want to talk about it at all.
“Oh, you’re here!” She heard a new voice and looked over. Beast and Jessica were scurrying up a little path that led to the area.
“Great,” Hook rolled her eyes. She looked past Jessica and Beast. “Anyone else back there? Anyone else want to come see the broken freak who doesn’t have powers?”
Jessica bristled. She looked hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can go, I just...” Then Jessica seemed to steel herself and looked back at Hook. “I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“She’s not okay,” Tinkerbell said. “She was just about to tell us why she hates Allie Gator so much.”
Chapter 5
I looked at Hook carefully. On the outside, she seemed normal. She was tall and lean with dark hair and bright eyes, but there was a sadness to her that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. I knew she’d been through a lot, but I didn’t know exactly what.
“Does this have to do with your parents?” I asked gently.
“Yes.”
“She knew you before they died, right?” I pushed her, and I knew I was pushing her. To the other kids, I was probably kind of awkward and totally weird, but I didn’t really mind. There was a lot to me that people didn’t understand.
After all, I’d grown up in the human world. I’d grown up in a place where the biggest concern I had was whether I’d get to eat that day. I worried about avoiding beatings and getting safely to school and whether or not I was going to make it to see another day.
I didn’t worry about magic.
Potions didn’t concern me.
I didn’t care about spells.
Hook and the others, though, well, they grew up in an entirely magical universe.
“Yeah, look, I’m just going to spit it out. My parents were pirates.”
“Like, lived-on-a-ship pirates?”
“Yeah. They weren’t like, storybook pirates. They were scavengers.”
Tinkerbell and Peter Pan seemed unfazed, so I guess they knew what she was talking about.
“What’s a scavenger?” I asked finally. “I’m not trying to be dumb, but I’ve never heard of this before.”
“It’s someone who goes from place to place and tries to find things to sell,” Hook said. “Sometimes these can be magical items that people have lost, or maybe even enchanted items from shipwrecks. We traveled from place to place basically constantly.”
“So you never had a home.”
Shit.
Maybe Hook and I were more alike than even I thought.
For years, I’d struggled with feeling alone. There was nothing quite as bad as not feeling like you had a place you belonged.
I had still lived in the same city, though.
I’d known the same people.
“Not really. The ship was my home. When we stopped in different ports, I always found ways to have fun.” She pauses for a second, and then she smiles. “I danced a lot. I don’t think anyone at Enchanted Academy knows that about me, but oh, I loved to dance.”
She doesn’t dance anymore.
I don’t even have to ask her about that because I just know. If Hook put on her dancing shoes, I would have known. Nope. Her life revolves around classes and bossing people around. She’s built quite a reputation as a bully even though I don’t really think that she’s that bad.
Life in the magic world is too complicated for bullies, though.
“So what happened? How did you meet Allie?”
“She’s a dark fairy.”
“We know.”
“Well, dark fairies don’t usually live in port cities,” Hook said. “They don’t like water very much because they can’t swim.”
“Fairies can swim,” Tinkerbell muttered.
“Not dark fairies,” Hook said. “It has something to do with their glamour. It makes it too difficult for them to be able to swim, I think. They can’t manage themselves in the water. Either way, her parents took her to a specific port town and we happened to be there.”
I start to feel uneasy as I wonder where this story is going.
If she couldn’t swim, why in the world of dragons would her parents have taken her to a place near the water?
Why would they have even considered bringing her to a space where she could be lost?
“We met playing on the beach o
ne day. We spent every day together for over a month. Her parents shouldn’t have let her out of their sight, but they did. The two of us did everything together. We wandered around town and we explored. We laughed. We ate food together and we played together and everything seemed like it would be perfect forever. We called each other sister. We felt like sisters.”
“But something changed.”
“Allie wasn’t the kind of person who liked to listen to other peoples’ opinions.”
“What do you mean?”
Hook shrugged.
“I just mean that if you told her what to do, she didn’t like it. She’d argue. There were things about her that didn’t always make sense. She’d use her glamour in weird ways. Like one day, she imitated me, and then she wanted to hang out while she was looking like me.”
Hook shivered, and I could feel the tension rolling off of her in waves.
“I hated it,” she said. “I didn’t like that she used her magic like that.”
“No kidding,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t, either.”
“Yeah, nobody wants to hang out with themselves,” Tinkerbell added.
“It wasn’t just that,” she said. “Sometimes Allie would pretend to be me. Other people didn’t know she was a dark fairy. They just thought she was, well, me.”
“What happened?” I found myself totally engrossed in the story. Allie sounded strange and unusual. I’d never encountered fairies at all until I started going to school at Enchanted Academy, but now some of the things Hook said seemed more normal than they should have.”
“One day, Allie was using her glamour to look like me. She went down to the beach. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it at first.”
I look at Hook, but she just bites her lip. She fists her hands and then unclenches them over and over. She’s obviously nervous about this. She doesn’t like reliving the past anymore than I like asking her about it.
“She fell in the water, didn’t she?”
Hook just looks at me.
“I don’t know why she wandered down to the beach, but she did. The tide was strong that day. Nobody was swimming. Nobody. She was playing on some of the boulders near the water, and she slipped. My mom happened to be watching out over the water, and she saw it.”
“What did she see?”
“Allie fell into the water. My mother thought it was me. She didn’t realize I was in the house. I was right behind her.”
“Your mom went to save her, didn’t she?”
“Yes. She was never the type of person who could sit idly by and let someone suffer or get hurt.”
Hook stood up and wrung her hands together. She seemed to be trying to remember as many details as she could, and I hated that she had felt this pain.
How hard must it have been to experience this?
“Your mom was very brave,” Tinkerbell said.
“Most people wouldn’t have had that kind of courage,” Peter Pan added.
“Well, I don’t want a brave mom, you two. I want a mom who isn’t dead.”
Her words hit us all pretty hard, and we sat there. I mean, what was there to say? Nobody could really argue with that? Nobody could say anything at all.
“Anyway, my mom swam out and tried to save her. The water was too strong, though. She got Allie to the rocks again and Allie grabbed on. Then my mom got swept away. My dad went out, but it was too late.”
“And your dad?”
Hook shook her head.
“They were both swept away. I mean, I never knew if my dad actually drowned or if he just couldn’t stand the idea of living without her. Who knew? There was no way to tell.”
“But Allie was fine.”
“Yep. Allie was fine.”
Chapter 6
Hook stared at the dancing shoes. She tugged them on one at a time, turned on her music, and started moving to the song.
Life shouldn’t be so complicated or messy. She missed the freedom she had felt as a kid. She missed the way she’d been able to dance and enjoy the world around her. She missed all of it.
Now, even when she danced, things still felt hard.
Difficult.
The music moved her, though, and she kept twirling and spinning in her bedroom. Nobody was here to look at her or watch her. There was nobody here to judge, tease, or make fun of her. It was just her versus the world here.
It was just her versus the school.
Allie Gator was gone.
Hook hadn’t even realized she’d come to the school until it had been too late. How had she found Enchanted Academy? Why had she chosen this school? Obviously, she knew Hook was a student here. That was why she’d chosen to take on Hook’s appearance.
Again.
It felt...dirty.
Wrong.
Hook felt violated when she thought of the way Allie Gator had taken her appearance. A person’s physical looks were important. That was how most people could identify you. Oh, Hook knew all about witches and wizards who had special skills. She understood that sometimes, people could sense you by your energy or your aura, but this wasn’t a case like that.
When Allie took her appearance, it made people believe that she was Hook, and Jillian Hook couldn’t stand that.
Allie had been the reason her mother died.
Would Mom have gone into the ocean for a random child?
Maybe.
Would she have gone out to rescue her own child?
Of course.
Any parent would have.
Allie’s decision had cost Hook everything. She’d been forced to grow up without a mother, without a father, and without a family. Even though it had been a few years, the pain still hurt just as much as it did that day.
Now sometimes she wondered if she would ever feel whole again.
Would she ever feel “okay”?
Would she ever feel normal?
She spun around and dipped. She moved her arms to the beat of the music. She jumped, spinning around, and tried to lose herself in the song.
The beautiful thing about music was that you could do so much with it.
You could change the world with music.
More importantly, music could change your world.
If you were having a hard day or a hard week or even a hard life, music was something that could make you forget about all of that. It could ease away your pain and help you remember who you were and where you came from.
Music could give you strength and power.
Those were things Hook needed right now.
“Hey, you’re pretty good!” A cheerful voice interrupted the dancing, and Hook stopped immediately. She spun around, embarrassed. Jessica was standing in her doorway.
“What are you doing here?” She asked, exasperated.
“I came to see you.”
“Yeah, I get that, but why?” Hook shook her head. “I feel like you’ve been following me around lately. Are you obsessed with me or something?”
“No. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“I’m fine.”
It was a lie.
Somehow, Jessica seemed to be able to tell. She cocked her head to the side and just looked at Hook.
“What?”
“Do you ever see the way people feel?” Jessica asked.
“Um, no?”
“Really?” Jessica blushed.
“Really. Why, do you?”
“Lately, I’ve been able to see peoples’ emotions. I wasn’t sure if that was normal or not.”
“It’s not.”
Jessica frowned, but Hook was intrigued.
“I thought you weren’t magical.”
“I thought so, too,” she said. “But I never really knew my parents, and I mean, anything can happen, right?”
“I guess.”
“Do you know anything about energy sighting?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all?” Jessica raised an eyebrow.
“What am I, a walking dictionary for you?” Hook sna
pped. She was embarrassed that Jessica, of all people, had caught her dancing. She shouldn’t have been. Jessica was actually a really nice person most of the time. She was annoying and weird, but she was nice.
“I’m sorry,” Jessica said. She crossed her arms over her chest. She might be annoying, but she was also tenacious and persistent: a dangerous combination for a human.
“Was there something else you wanted?”
“You should perform at the ball.”
“No.”
“Why not? You’d be good at it.”
“No, I would not.”
“I saw your moves and they were pretty good.”
“Drop it, Jessica.”
“But I-”
“I said, drop it!” Hook practically shrieked. Damn. She was losing her mind. Why was she yelling at the human? It wasn’t nice of her, and judging by the look of devastation that was suddenly plastered on Jessica’s face, it had been downright cruel.
“I just thought you’d do a nice job,” Jessica whispered.
“I know you’re trying to be encouraging, but I don’t dance in public anymore.”
“Did you dance before?”
She didn’t say before what.
She didn’t have to.
Before her parents died.
Yeah, Hook had danced before Mom and Dad died. She’d been good at dancing. Actually, she’d been better than good. She’d used her energy balls in every dance routine and her mother always said doing so gave her the look of an angel.
She liked that.
She wasn’t sure that “angel” was a label she wanted, but she’d take it.
“Jessica, what do you want?”
The human sighed and shook her head. Jessica’s hair bounced around. It was always so frizzy and wild. Hook wondered how she could stand it, but it was definitely something unique to Jessica.
“I wanted to talk with you about the painting.”
“What about it?”
“The orb is still there.”
“I know.”
“Well, aren’t you curious about it?”
Hook was very curious about it, but she wasn’t so curious that she was going to lose sleep. She had enough things to worry about between classes and managing her dwindling social life. When was the last time she’d even been on a date? She wasn’t sure if she could even remember.
Enchanted Academy Box Set Page 32
