6. Roc
CHAPTER SIX
ROC
He’s in the ballroom of Maddred Manor.
There is music in the distance. A violinist playing a new arrangement of Madame la Mort . The notes are haunting. It reminds him of his mother.
There were two versions of Anjelaka Maddred: melancholy or manic.
If there was a third version of her, one that smiled or told secrets or danced or felt joy, he had never met her.
By the time he was born, she was a woman with glassy eyes and a heart of ash.
The tempo of the arrangement intensifies. It’s the inner battle of Madame la Mort.
To live or to die? To love or be loved? To give a life for that love?
He follows the music.
Down the hall and past the gilded frames of past nobility. Past the library where his sister’s piano sits, past the smoking room, the parlor.
The double doors are open to the garden beyond.
A shadow is in the middle of the boxwoods where the low-cut hedges form a Bone knot.
“Mother?” he calls.
She keeps playing, the moving bowstring catching a slant of waxing moonlight.
There is stillness in the garden. The air is misty, and it swirls around her willowy frame.
He crosses the garden to her and reaches out…
And she disintegrates into ash.
Someone laughs behind him.
He turns to find the witch.
“So pathetic.” She claps slowly. Deliberately. “I never would have taken you for a mommy’s boy.”
He steels himself.
The music continues in the dark, now too far from his reach.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I need you to come here.”
“To my childhood home?”
She stares at him and says nothing.
Trapped in his body, in his mind, the witch is somehow sharper, more demon than woman. Her fingers are capped in black ink, her teeth stained red. She wears a black dress that has no silhouette, just shadow edges.
Her eyes are bright, though. Full of something he can only describe as hunger .
“I will not take you to Darkland,” he tells her.
“Then I will make you devour everything you love.”
She hangs her head back and laughs.
I am suddenly, achingly awake.
I hear his breathing first.
The Captain shifts in the wingback chair. A scrape of fabric. A rattle of a watch chain.
Has he been keeping time for me? The man terrified of a ticking clock?
The flicker of candlelight gilds the Captain in gold, but it does nothing to hide the swollen underside of his eyes, the shadows that darken his skin.
I’m only vaguely aware of the destruction I have caused him, but I already know the price has been too high.
There is a sudden sinking feeling in my gut and I know right away what it is: guilt .
I quickly bury it.
The witch is always there ready to exploit a weakness and guilt is an emotion I cannot abide by. Not now. Not ever.
The Captain’s eyes trail up my body and then settle on my face. There is a distance to his gaze, like he is lost in thought, and it takes him several seconds to realize I’m staring back.
He lurches out of his chair, pulls his pistol from its holster. His hand trembles a little. His breathing is shallow.
The ship sways, and the Captain stumbles. Proof that he is not himself. No one is more adept at the whims of the sea than Captain James Hook.
“Is it really you?” he asks, his voice thin, trembling.
It does not escape me, the fact he already has the pistol arm cocked, ready to shoot.
I don’t tell him that a bullet will not stop me. I don’t tell him that there is only one weapon in the Seven Isles capable of killing me and he doesn’t have it. I think Smee does, though. How else would she have wounded Vane?
Did she ever tell the Captain?
“It’s me.” I close my eyes and take a breath. My heart is racing. My stomach is in knots.
I’m finding it difficult to tell the difference between dreams and nightmares and waking hours.
I never dream of my mother. Not anymore. But the accuracy of the dream…
My mother loved Madame la Mort. Madame Death.
My aunt Roan often told me that my mother came out of the womb a “melancholy child, obsessed with the darkness, always flirting with monsters.”
Did she know Aaric Soren Maddred was a monster when she married him? Did she know she would birth monsters too?
“How long have I been out?” I ask the Captain.
“Several days.”
The pistol still hangs mid-air between us.
The ship sways again, but it has the directionless sway of a harbor, not the sea.
“Neverland?” I ask.
“Yes.” He finally uncocks the pistol. “We’re docked. Asha has gone to the treehouse.”
I sigh and scrub at my burning eyes. It feels like I’ve not slept at all. “What do you have to drink?”
The Captain holsters the pistol and turns a circle, then decides on a direction and goes to a half-drank bottle of rum. He pours me several fingers in a cut crystal glass and brings it back. His hand is still trembling. The dark liquor sloshes inside.
I meet his eyes.
“Did I hurt you?”
He blinks rapidly. “No.”
“Wendy?”
“No.”
I breathe out. Thank fucking god.
“Your crew?” I ask next.
His jaw clenches, and he says nothing.
“Anyone you care about?”
“Take the drink, Roc.”
I don’t often take his orders, but I make an exception now, aware that I am on thin ice.
I take the glass and pull myself into a sitting position, slinging it back in one gulp.
Ahhh yes. That’s better.
The alcohol warms my throat and drives away some of the gnawing, never-ending hunger.
He returns to the wingback, some of the tension fading from his body.
He looks impossibly tired.
“How many?”
With his head leaning against the flared wing of the chair, he closes his eyes, inhales through his nose. “Six. We barely made it to the harbor. We’re operating on a skeleton crew and half of those who remain want to throw me and you overboard.”
I laugh.
The Captain sits upright. “It’s not funny!”
“Well, it’s a little funny. Do you even know how to swim?”
He glowers at me. “Of course I know how to swim!”
“Don’t worry, Captain, I’ll keep you afloat.”
He stands abruptly, causing the chair to rock on its wooden legs. “Not even conscious five minutes and already you’re harassing me.”
“Five minutes? So you have been keeping time.”
He goes still.
I meant it as another joke, but the anguish on his face says I’ve gone too far.
He is distressed and he has been distressed.
All because of me.
Rarely am I serious. Not anymore. Not since Lainey died.
But that look…
Like he could cry.
“How long?” I ask him.
His jaw clenches again and he takes a breath. “You’ve been…devouring every ten hours.”
I curse beneath my breath.
“So it is bad?”
“We are not meant to shift multiple times in one day. One shift, one meal, should put me out for at least a day, usually two and we are warned not to devour again for weeks at the very least. Months would be better.”
I glance up at him. “You once asked me why I kept time, why I didn’t just shift and devour at my discretion.”
“I remember.” He swallows. “You told me there was a cost.”
“Yes. It’s not just the recovery period, the vulnerability in being unconscious. Too many shifts and…” I sink back against the headboard and close my eyes. “Too many shifts and a day will come when I can no longer shift back.”
Silence grows thin between us. I have never told anyone this secret. What I am, what Vane is, we are not from this realm. No one in the Seven Isles has had to suffer the consequences of a permanent shift. Of a monster who cannot be stopped.
I open my eyes to find the Captain staring at me.
The anguish has returned, but it’s different now, shadowed by fear.
“I won’t let that happen,” he says, his voice unwavering. “How do we fix it?”
I pull the tangled sheets away from my legs and put my feet to the ship’s floor. I’m naked, apparently. Just as well.
“Clothes?” I ask. The Captain nods at a cabinet and I go to it, finding trousers, a button-up shirt. I start pulling on the pants when the room sways.
I didn’t drink that much. I shouldn’t be drunk already.
My stomach rolls and a shiver crawls up my spine.
“Bloody hell,” the Captain says and staggers back.
I catch my reflection in the mirror over the washbasin.
My edges are fraying to purest black.