Alias Hook (41 page)

I tremble to imagine any force in the universe stern enough to turn BellaAeola from her pursuit of pleasure. To what sort of perverse deity might the fairies submit? Surely more terrible than the angry god of mortals, of whose blood and body Stella and I make such free speech, who sacrificed his own son so men would know to fear him. That god would have smote me centuries ago for my crimes, might yet, should I dare to venture beyond this enchanted place. But the glistening cascade of BellaAeola’s laughter scatters my thoughts like seafoam.

“Your angry god has no power here,” she scoffs, as if she heard my thoughts. “But he might find you, Captain, your thunderous god, out in the world. Are you not afraid?”

Stella’s fingers twine through mine again. “No, Majesty.” My words slide out with ease this time, without hesitation. “Because I have loved.” Whatever else might be said against me, and there are volumes, at least, at last, I have loved.

“The Neverland doesn’t want us,” Stella appeals to the imp queen. “We ask for your blessing to leave this place.”

“My guidance, my pardon, my blessing,” BellaAeola chants impudently. “Those are three favors you ask of me, yet you have nothing to give me.”

“Majesty, what can you possibly desire that is not already yours to command?” I temporize.

“Flatterer!” she snaps back, but with more sauce than rebuke. She even preens a little, tossing her silvery hair with a dazzling tremor of her wings. “You are so fond of the truth, Captain, perhaps you will confess there is something else you hold dear in the Neverland. A prize you would seek to keep from me.”

“Never,” I protest, my poor wits racing to keep apace of hers.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes,” she chants merrily. “Deny me if you dare.”

A broad swag of flowers behind the queen drops away to reveal the shimmering surface of one of her perverse mirrors, as high as a palace wall, if indeed her domain has walls. Its misty image resolves into a shape that does indeed clutch my heart with longing and parch my throat for want of it. The clean, strong lines of my sloop,
Le Reve,
appears before me, her sails set, her black paint smart with its green trim. The queen is not yet done pleasuring herself at my expense.

“But … this is a ghost,” I stammer.

“Your pretty ship is as real as you are, Captain,” she taunts me, her eyes keen with her sport. “Do you suppose I would leave it about for the boys to wreck with their games? So many years of your life,” she croons on. “So much labor. So much love.” She sneers the word. “For so entirely futile a project. How deeply you must care for it.”

“Yes.” I can scarcely speak at all.

“But I desire pretty things,” she chirps. “Will you give it to me?”

My insides twist with longing almost beyond bearing. My ship, my
Reve,
safe and whole, my solace, my sanity for so long. All that was ever good in me, the only thing of any worth I ever achieved in this place before Stella came, indeed, ever in my life; it tortures me to imagine her moldering in the queen’s sepulcher for all eternity. But I force down my anguish.
Le Reve
was ever my dream of redemption, but it was only a dream. Life awaits me, a genuine life, safe in Stella’s heart, do I only dare to claim it.

“She is yours, Majesty,” I tell the queen, peeling my gaze away from that beloved image for the last time. “Please accept her with my compliments.”

The vision of
Le Reve
dissolves in a giddy piping of fairy laughter. “What use have I for transport made of mortal hands?” BellaAeola cries gaily, and flutters her incandescent wings, the span of a top royal at her present size. “You had better have it for your journey.”

She says it with such indifference, I scarce believe I heard it.

“Yes, Captain, I will grant the thing you most desire,” BellaAeola murmurs; her glance is keen, despite her drowsy voice. “What you have always desired.”

“Thank you, Majesty,” Stella whispers beside me.

“You owe me more than your thanks, Mortals,” BellaAeola replies placidly.

My wits give up at last; I dare not look at Stella.

“A small matter, a trifle,” the queen assures us with a wave of her delicate hand. “The fee required of all who leave the Neverland. You must forfeit your memories.”

Stella frowns at her. “All of them?”

“Only your memories of the Neverland,” says BelaAeola lightly. “And all that has happened here.”

A tremor of jubilation races through me. To forget the Neverland and all the misery I’ve known here! How marvelous to return to the world a normal man, to pick up the thread of my life exactly where I left it off over two centuries ago. And my fatuous joy turns to ice and vinegar inside me. What a cruel, raging tyrant I was two hundred years ago, at war with all the world, unfit to live. Unfit to love. Before the Neverland taught me the hard lessons of patience and wisdom. Before the healing solace of
Le Reve
. Before Stella. I stare into Stella’s stricken face and read my same despairing thoughts in her beautiful eyes. I won’t know Stella. I’ll no longer be the man she loves. I will forget her. She will forget me.

“By Christ’s blood, no,” I stammer.

“It’s too much to ask, Majesty,” Stella pleads.

“I do not ask it,” BellaAeola shrugs with a rustling of her haughty wings. “That is the price. It has ever been the price. Tales of the Neverland must not be allowed to spread abroad in your world.”

“But the world already knows of this place!” Stella protests.

“But they don’t believe it,” the imp queen replies. “Only children believe, and they are always welcome here because children forget. And so must you.”

We are speechless. The fairy queen backs away with a shimmer of majestic impatience. “That is the price of what you seek,” she declares. “You have earned the right to go, and but a few mortal hours remain in which you may do so. Do not bore me any longer with your mortal humors. Your fairy will show you the way.”

She sweeps her fantastical wings round her and vanishes as if through a hole in the air. And upon the instant, the enormous garlanded hall with all its dazzling surfaces, dripping with perfumed flowers and heady with the nectar of luxury and indolence, all of it dissolves before our eyes. Stella and I stand again in a green clearing at the edge of the Fairy Dell, an ordinary little grassy burrow just visible in the distance, surrounded by a chiggering of busy insects.

Stella stares at me as if the uncanny alteration in the scenery has not occurred. “I was bitterly unhappy when I came here,” she whispers. “I don’t want to be that person again. I can’t lose you, James.”

“I was less than human,” I mutter, wrapping my arms round her, struggling to regain my shattered wits. How could Stella ever love the man I was?

“Then we must stay here!” Stella urges me. “Why can’t we stay here forever?”

“It will astonish you how short a time that is.”

“I don’t care!” she insists.

Oh, but I do. By God’s poisonous blood, how desperately I want to keep Stella safe. But her safety carries an enormous price tag. How much longer before we are made to pay it?

Even now, a tiny firefly light comes shivering toward us out of the green mist. Has the charm already begun? How many more heartbeats before I see the loathing creep into Stella’s eyes, before I know she’s forgotten James and sees only Hook in all his deformities?

3

We’ve regained our usual proportions, for the imp is scarcely more than a speck of lavender-blue against the vale of green, trailing a scent of smoky allspice. Piper.

“We need more time,” I beg her. “We’re not ready.”

The little thing shivers with laughter, shaking the preposterous coils and loops of her black hair into a Maenad dance. “More time? I thought you’d had enough of time, Captain! But I am your escort, nothing more. You won’t forget the Neverland until you leave it.”

“And when must that be?” Stella asks sadly.

The imp regards us quizzically. “Whenever you wish, of course.” She peers at us with more concern. “It cannot be that you fear it? It causes no pain. You will be delivered into the world as if reborn. Beyond the borders of this place, you will have no more memory of it than an infant has of the womb it leaves behind.”

We must not look convinced, because the little creature sighs and entreats us further. “You now both desire something more than childhood can provide. You must go where your dreaming takes you. As soon as they begin to long for something far beyond their lives here, Lost Boys, girls, all of them, when their longing is too volatile, they must go. As you must go, and soon.”

Stella’s fingers lace through mine. “May we have a minute to discuss it?” she asks the fairy.

“Talk, talk, talk,” Piper chants, sounding chillingly like the imp queen. “Do not talk away the time you have left,” she warns us. The spell has been broken, Captain; you have regained your mortality, which means you are now vulnerable to Peter as you have never been before. As you are,” the imp adds, nodding to Stella. “Peter dislikes change. He fears any dream, any desire more powerful than he is. He will do anything he can to crush it.”

She fades into the mists while Stella and I ponder the enormity of the decision we must make. How long before the boys come to hunt us down like the outlaws we are? We must pay for our memories with our lives unless we forfeit our memories to live.

“We’re in an awful damned fix here, Maestro,” Stella sighs.

“It must be obvious even to you that we can’t think of staying here,” I counter. “Don’t condemn me to watch you die,
ma rose.”

That silences her. She folds her arms round herself, stalks off a few steps, staring into the distance, absently chewing her lower lip in that gesture I will miss so much. How I will miss all her gestures. How can I ever look upon her, even as a stranger, and not be as moved by all her little quirks and habits as I am now?

“We don’t know for a fact that we will never love each other again,” I fence cautiously. “Out in the world.”

Her face turns slowly back toward me. “No,” she murmurs.

“We may not know each other,” I go on, ignoring the pain that claws at my vitals at the very thought, “but we might be drawn to each other again. It happened before.”

“I came from another world to find you,” Stella agrees.

“Perhaps, whatever it is between us now will pull us together again,” I hazard. “The Scotch boy retained something of this place, some buried memory, however fragmented, even if only in dreams.” What did Proserpina say of her ancestor, Zwonde? The spirit does not forget love.

“If we are … destined,” Stella chimes in, more eagerly, “what should it matter where we are? Or … who?”

It’s a very feeble thread of possibility, but the alternative … there is no alternative. We both know it.

Stella marches back to me, still hugging herself, the quaver in her voice at odds with the determination in her eyes. “Then we better have Piper back before we change our minds.”

But Stella scarcely calls to the imp when I turn to see the merest shiver in an evergreen at the edge of the clearing. A figure steps out from behind the tree, a young brave, slender and fleet, stripped down to buckskins with daubs of red and black paint streaked across his cheeks.

I move toward him, raise my hand in salute. He does the same.

“Chief Eagle Heart sends a message to Captain Hook,” he says. “Little Chief Pan is on the warpath. He calls for a war party of braves to join him and his boys to attack the ship in the bay.”

“The
Rouge?”
I gawp at him. “Why?”

“The Little Chief says, ‘It’s Hook or me this time!’”

“When?” I demand.

“Today. Now,” the young messenger declares. “Chief Eagle Heart says to tell you the Little Chief cannot be held in check for long. We are ordered to burn your ship to the waterline, and everyone in her.”

Stella comes up beside me, Piper fluttering at her shoulder, as the brave evaporates back into the forest. “We’ve very little time,” Stella says tersely. How well she knows my mind only intensifies my dread of the awful moment when she won’t know me at all.

“I won’t let them pay for my crime,” I mutter. “It doesn’t always have to be like this. I can help them now.”

“But—”

“I can’t abandon them to be slaughtered, drowned, burned alive—”

Stella’s mouth flattens into a tight line, but she argues no more, clutching at my arm. But her stricken face reflects my thoughts. Is there some trick the boy can still use against us, some spell of fire that might yet prevent our escape?

Chapter Thirty-two

THE BLOODY PLANK

“Mortal humors! So long as I live they will mystify me,” huffs Piper, once we’ve descended the trail to our boat at the bottom of the gorgeous ravine. “Do not while away too much time. When the moon reaches her zenith in the sky this evening, the pathway between the two worlds will close to you for the last time, Captain. Summon me when you are ready. Sound a bell to call a fairy,” she reminds us. “Time was, every mortal knew it.”

In a twinkling, her sorcery propels us as far as the mouth of Kidd Creek. But our skiff cannot be seen to simply coalesce out of the ether alongside the
Rouge,
although it should scarcely give my men any more of a fright than Stella’s presence inside it. Was she not believed drowned in the Mermaid Lagoon all this time? Until Pan taunted me about losing her, last time I was aboard. What will the men think now? But there is no more chance than ever that Stella will listen to reason, take herself off somewhere safe with Piper while I attempt to prevent this massacre.

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” she tells me fiercely. “Our bond is our strength; we are weak and foolish apart.”

Even if ours is a journey into death, we will take it together.

“If we have a plan, Maestro, now is the time to tell me,” Stella suggests, as we row within hailing distance of the
Rouge’s
starboard quarter. I hear brisk activity on deck—hammering, a rattling of buckets, light chatter, even some laughter popping sporadically like grapeshot over the water. But there’s no sign yet of flames, nor flying boys, nor war canoes.