One of the Lost Boys screamed as one of Hook’s pirates cut his stomach open. He staggered backwards, trying to hold his guts in place. But there wasn’t anything he could do.
Long ago as a little kid, Sasha had been reading a comic book—she couldn’t even remember which one—and had read the phrase “like holding back the tide with a teacup.” It'd stuck with her all her life.
And that’s what the teenage boy, maybe no older than thirteen, was trying to do to his body as he clutched his stomach. He collapsed to his knees, weeping in pain, as the gore spilled onto the sand and dried grass at his feet with a wetsplorp.
Sasha covered her mouth with her hands.
That hadn’t been in her picture book.
She expected the pirate to stop. He’d just killed a child! But instead, the pirate laughed. With a lift of a boot, he kicked the dyingteenager onto his back. Crouching, he picked up the boy by the hair a few inches, raised his saber high, and…
Sasha knew that it was possible to cut off a human head with a sword in one swing.
But she also knew it took a very specific kind of sword, and a very clean swing to do it. This was…not that. This was a meat cleaver. This was a man hacking at a teenager who wasstill alive. His body jerked at first from pain, then went limp in shock, and then finally the mercy of death set in as the pirate removed the teenager’s head from his shoulders.
The pirate looked up and locked eyes with her. “One for the display, Mr. Smee! Make sure the Captain knows who got it for ‘em.” He threw the head at her.
It rolled to a stop at her feet, still oozing blood from the bloody stump of a neck.
Sasha turned, made it three feet, and threw up in a bush, leaning heavily on a palm tree to keep from collapsing. Breaking out in a cold sweat, she struggled to breathe for a moment.
“None of this is real,” she murmured to herself. “You’re okay. You’re all right. None of this isreal.”It was either a drug-induced hallucination or just…part of a weird, magical fictional world. That kid wasn’t real. That didn’t just happen. Words on a page. Fake emotions, brought on by a story, nothing more.
There was no head. Nobody wasreallydead.
“Good point. Whydohumans get so upset over stories?”?*
Vile.
She whirled, but he wasn’t there. She’d heard his voice, that British accent and the sharp, deadly tone.
“Enough!” Someone called from the fight. The Lost Boys had been losing, but the pirates hadn’t been spared, either. While she had been busy retching in the shrub and trying totalk herself out of an existential crisis, a few more maybe-probably-not-real people had died.
A man strode onto the field. And there was no doubt in her mind that it was Peter Pan himself. He was older than the others—maybe eighteen or nineteen. He was taller, broad-shouldered, had a jawline that could cut glass, and yet he hadn’t lost the boyish innocence in his face. His hair was a mop of roughly-cut blond hair that dangled in front of his eyes.
He was wearing more formal clothes than his Lost Boys. Or, rather, items that would have been more formally considered tobeclothes, and not just “whatever washed ashore.” He looked more like one of the pirates than one of his peers, though what set him apart was that he lacked any of the gaudy adornments or any of the baubles that the pirates obviously prized.
Peter Pan pulled a rapier from his belt, and held it in front of him. “Who dares challenge me?”
The pirates all immediately backed away from him. No one wanted a piece of Peter Pan. The remaining Lost Boys picked themselves up and ran into the jungle behind their leader, disappearing into the overgrowth.
The hero smiled triumphantly. “Cowards. If you won’t stand and fight, then run back to your ship and tell your Captain?—”
“And what,precisely,would you have them tell me?”
Sasha had seen plenty of depictions of Captain Hook over the years. Most of the time, he was shown as a cheesy, foppish, ridiculous character. Sometimes, they might play him as handsome or even misunderstood.
But never in her life had she ever read or seen a version of the man that seemed to make the air in the jungle gocold.
From first glance, it was obvious who he was. He had long, wavy black hair that was kept back in a red ribbon at the base of his neck. A black goatee and eyes like coals offset sharp features. He wore a long, crimson coat, detailed in black and silver with lace draping from the cuffs. Black leather pants were tucked into knee-high bootsthat were stitched in such a way that the tops folded down. There was even a large plume of a black feather that stuck out from the back of the tricorn hat he wore.
And there, for a right hand, was the famous crooked, sharpened piece of metal.
From that description alone, he might have been any normal Captain Hook. It was in the details that everything seemed to go wrong. The bottom of his coat was blackened with char and what she suspected was dried blood, turning it a strange kind of gradient from bottom to top. The lace was ripped and sepia-stained. The silver buttons on his coat were tarnished and chipped.
And the hook—the hook wasn’t a curved, smooth and shining thing. It wasn’t something that was polished and pampered and kept with a cork over the point in some lavish velvet box. No, it was a jagged, angry, wicked looking thing.
It was hammered flat and sharpened like a blade. Its steel was oiled to a dark color, rusted in some places and scratched to hell in others—this was a thing for killing, and it was usedoften.
