“No, I mean, I don’t understand it. What do you mean you’re complimenting me on the crocodile? I had nothing to do with him.” She grimaced. “It’s awful.”
“And it’s—” Hook sat back in his chair, watching her as if seeing her in a new light. “I thought you understood—all this—” He gestured at the world around them, then swept his hand-and-hook down at himself. “And myself as I sit here. We are your creations. You dreamt this up. This version of the story belongs to you and Sidney. Not to us.”
Snorting in laughter, she shook her head. “Bullshit. That turbine-o-dile didn’t come out of my goddamn head.”
“Oh, yes it did, my dear. Yours and yours alone. Sidney is to blame for what my brother is wearing and the Lost Boys, but all that you see that is unpleasant comes from you!” Laughing, he raised his goblet to her in a toast. “And what a twisted mind it is! I cannot wait to see where else it takes us. Your sister seems to bring the debauchery and you seem to bring the horror. I don’t believe my brother is prepared for what is about to happen to him. I myself cannotwait.I have been waiting for horror romance to become a thing fordecades.”
“No. You’re lying. We’re not the ones doing this.” She waved a fork at him. “You’re making that up.”
“Therein lies the rub, my sweet Sasha. Don’t you see? I quite literallycannotmake anything up. Not now, not ever.” He stabbed a roll with his hook and picked it up, taking a bite from it before plucking the doughy ball from the jagged piece of metal. “We’re mirrors of humanity’s creation. We didn’t even name ourselves.”
“Who did?”
Captain Hook chewed another piece of bread, letting the moment linger in the air in suspense before answering. “The archangels and their fallen kin voted on it.”
“Thewhat?”She didn’t mean to shout that last bit, but hey. She just suddenly learned that religion might be legit, so she had a reason. “Now I know you’re fucking with me.”
“I am doing no such thing!” He honestly looked offended. “Either you want to hear the story, or you don’t. Make up your mind.”
Sighing, she thought it over. She couldn’t trust him. But she really did want to know the story anyway. “I’m sorry. Please tell me.”
“There you go. Manners will get you far in life.” He hummed, looking off as he clearly went back to a place long ago in his mind. “It was in humanity’s earliest days. You were just beginning to learn how to spin a yarn, grunting tales at each other of death and rebirth, just starting to think about the soul and the afterlife. Whispering about the wolves in the darkness who took the weak and the young and the old, using the flickering shadows of your fires to portray monsters upon the walls of your caves.”
“And that’s when you and Virtue were created?”
“Mmhm. We were fledgling creatures, then. Barely knew what we’d become. Certainly nothing as sexy or as stylish as I am now.” He flashed her a grin and a wink.
She decided to ignore it and take a deep swig of her wine.
“But we were godlings on a planet that was watched by others. And we were there when they arrived. Fourteen of them in all, wayward children of an already missing thing your lot calls God.”
“Already missing g—?” She frowned. “Wait. You’ve met archangels and fallen archangels, but there’s no God?”
“They don’t know if there is or not, or at least that’s what they said. They didn’t stick around long enough to chat.” He shrugged. “We aren’t exactly friends, you see. Though I do have quite a few versions of them rattling around in my brain.”
“I was going to ask about that. The line between religion and story.”
“Let’s use a more modern example to help draw a clearer line. Take a serial killer. Someone with a good amount of mythos and lore scattered around his name—Jack the Ripper. Somewhere, the real killer is long dead and gone. But the storiesof the killer, fantastical and not, all live within me, even if some of them are accidentallytrue. I couldn’t even tell you which ones those are, so don’t bother asking.”
Pondering that for a moment, she nodded. “So, there’s a real Lucifer out there. And he has his facts, and his real history. But you have his stories that people tell about him, even if those intersect with fact?”
“Precisely. And I cannot divine the difference between the two, because to me, they are all the same.”
“But they have to be told as fiction, though. People believe the Bible is literal.”
“Not everyone.” Hook shrugged. His eyes were glowing purple again. He was far more Vile than Hook in that moment. “I don’t need a consensus.”
“Can we skip the Jack the Ripper section on this tour?”
He snapped his fingers in mock disappointment. “You’re no fun. Fine. No Jack the Ripper.”
“And no serial killer stories.”
“And no serial killer stories,” he repeated with a heavy sigh of a kid telling his mother that he’d be home before midnight.
They went back to eating in silence. Her mind was a million miles away, turning over everything that had happened. When dinner was over, other pirates came and cleaned up.
It was time for bed. Hook’s was an expensive, real bed by the wall, with heavy drapes that cut it off from the rest of the room.
