Chapter 13 #2
John spoke. “I think we’re all afraid to say it.”
“I’m not,” Michael said. “He’s back. We all know it. None of us are sleeping. We’ve got these stupid birds following us everywhere. And the shadows.” He tipped his chin toward the window. “They’re moving wrong. You’ve seen it too. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”
“I’ve seen it,” John said quietly.
“We know what we have to do.” Michael’s jaw tightened. “We go back.”
I had known this moment would come.
“No,” I said. “I go back. Alone.”
John’s jaw tightened. “Wendy …”
“You have Judith. The baby. She’s just weeks old, John. If something happens to you—”
“If something happens to any of us, it happens,” he said. “That’s not a reason to let you face this alone. He’s not going to stop. He’s coming for all of us. We know that.”
I turned to Michael. “And you. You ship out in days. England needs soldiers.”
“The war will still be there when we get back.” His voice was flat. “Or it won’t. Either way, I’m not letting you walk into that place without me.”
“You don’t understand.” I stood, moving to the window. The lamp lights dim. “I’m the one he wants. I’m the one who left. If I go alone, maybe I can—”
“Can what?” John was on his feet now. “Bargain with him? Reason with him? He’s not a person, Wendy. He’s a thing that wears a person’s face.”
“I know what he is.”
“Do you?” John stepped closer. His voice dropped.
“There it is,” I said. The anger. The blame.
“When we were children, you defended him. You made excuses for him. You said he was a child who never had a real mother, that he didn’t understand.”
“I was a child too!” The words tore out of me.
“I was a stupid, lonely girl who wanted to be special, who wanted to be chosen, who believed him when he said I was the only one who understood him!” My hands were shaking.
My whole body was shaking. “And before that my life was spent caring for the two of you!”
John went pale. “Wendy, I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.” My voice cracked. “And you’re right. I did believe him. I did make excuses. I loved him, for a time. And that’s the worst part. That’s the part I can never forgive myself for. I loved the thing that killed Roger. I loved the thing that killed those boys.”
The room went silent.
Michael moved first. He crossed the space between us and pulled me into his arms. “It’s not your fault,” he said into my hair. “None of it was your fault.”
I pressed my face against his shoulder. I could feel John behind me, his hand coming to rest on my back, awkward, uncertain, but there.
“I already got Roger killed,” I whispered. “I can’t get you killed too.”
“Roger made his choice,” Michael said. “He chose to save you. That was his choice, Wendy. Not yours.”
“If I hadn’t been there … wandered off in Kensington Gardens that day …”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Michael held me at arm’s length. His eyes were wet. “You survived. That’s not a crime. That’s not something to be punished for. You lived.”
John cleared his throat. When I turned to look at him, his composure had cracked completely. Tears streaked his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was wrecked. “I’m sorry we let you carry this alone. I’m sorry we didn’t speak up more to Mother and Father before they sent you away. We were cowards.”
“You were children …”
“Twelve years,” John continued. “Twelve years you’ve been fighting this by yourself. Pretending that if we didn’t talk about it, it would stop being true.”
“I hate that you left me,” I said. The words came out small. Broken. “I hate that no one believed me. I hate what he did to me, to those boys, to Roger. I’m so angry that sometimes I freeze up and don’t know what to do with it.”
“You don’t have to make it stop,” Michael said. “You just have to let us help carry it.”
John stepped forward. Took my hand.
“He’ll try to use you against me,” I said. “He’ll find your fears, your weaknesses. He’ll show you things that aren’t real. Make you doubt everything.”
“We know.”
“You might not come back,” I said. “We all might not come back.”
“We know that too,” Michael said. “And we’re still here.”
I looked at them. My brothers. John with his cracked composure and his tears still drying on his cheeks. Michael with his soldier’s shoulders and his boy’s eyes and his arms still ready to catch me if I fell.
“You’re certain,” I said. “Both of you.”
John squeezed my hand. “We finish this together, Wendy. No more running. No more hiding. No more pretending.”
Michael placed his hand over ours. “Together.”
The word felt like a door opening.
Outside, a crow landed on the lamppost. It tilted its head, watching us through the window.
Let it watch. Let it carry our words back. I didn’t care.
“He murdered those children back then,” I whispered, the words clawing their way up my throat. “He made sure to make it hurt. He started with the ones who played with us after we arrived. They all trusted him.”
Michael flinched, as though struck. John’s eyes narrowed on a spot on the wall, thinking.
“You remember them,” I said. “Nibs. The twins. Curly.”
“Jax,” Michael added.
“So many,” John said.
The truth hung between us, fragile, devastating.
Shadows trembled along the walls. The flame on the hearth bent low.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “My shadow … it’s been acting strange. Wrong. Like he’s …” The words stalled in my mouth for a minute. “Like he’s trying to take hold of it.”
John’s head snapped toward me. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Michael stepped closer. “Regardless of what it is … it’s not good.”
I reached into my satchel. The journal waited inside, its leather worn soft from years of being opened in secret, closed in fear, held in the dark like a talisman. “I … I checked and I don’t have anything written about that, about my shadow acting odd.”
“We’ll have to talk to someone,” John said.
I laughed, the sound harsh. “An expert in shadows?”
“No, an expert in—” he waved his hand toward the fire, “whatever this all is, a ghost, a monster …”
Outside, something seemed to brush against the window. A tree branch, but there was no tree close enough to the house.
I opened my journal and flipped through its pages trying to find something, anything to make sense of this all.
I read.
“ ‘We arrived. The trees here hum when the wind passes through them. The boys are kind. Nibs. Curly. Peter says see, this is why I belong here.’ ”
The words drifted through the parlor. The fire flared, then dimmed. Its wavering light brushed across my brothers’ faces: John, drained of color; Michael, lips parted as though hearing names he had buried beneath years.
“ ‘Days have gone by. I’m beginning to miss home. Mother. Father. I think we had a dog, but I can’t quite remember.
I asked Peter when we could go back, but he ignored me.
Instead, he invited John and Michael on an adventure.
When I saw the boys packing things like spears and swords, I told Peter that Michael had to stay back with me.
He’s just too little. I don’t think Peter liked that, but then I said Michael would help me with the pile of mending.
All of those socks with all of those holes. And that seemed to please him.’ ”
My voice fractured. I turned another page. I read the first line to myself and then remembered. My voice fractured. I held back a sob.
“ ‘They returned late this evening. Covered in red and mud, with cuts and scrapes. Peter laughed, said they’d battled pirates. I asked him where the twins were, and he said they’d be along soon. John sat in front of the fire, silent. The twins never returned.’ ”
John stood near the window. His fingers trembled against the fogged glass.
“It was all real,” I said. “We weren’t missing children. We were children who were taken.”
“There are rules, aren’t there?” John asked.
I flipped back through my journal.
“There’s only two.” I think. “Peter said that he can cross back and forth. That all of the children here had agreed to come with him. That not just anyone can fly, just him and whoever on the island is bound to him. Oh …”
“What?”
That word. Bound.
“He said our shadows were linked.” That explains it. Why he’s able to pull at me. Our shadows are linked and he’s getting stronger, calling me back.
“What do we do now?” John asked with that same voice our father had used when things grew too serious.
I stared into the coals. They breathed with a slow, living glow.
“When do we go back …”
Michael’s voice was rough. “How? How do we even get back there?”
“I think …” I spoke slowly. “If I’m thinking about this correctly, if I’m linked with him … then I can take us.”
A knock on the door. And then another, and another.
We fell silent. Stared. Not knowing what to do next.
“I gather you’re not expecting anyone at this late hour?” John asked.
“No.”
Another three knocks, more forceful this time. Urgent.
In the hallway I could make out a figure standing outside the door. Dark hair. Coat. Brass buttons.
“Oh, my goodness …”
“Who is it?” Michael asked.
“I’ll get it,” I said, my feet moving to the door, everything feeling muffled as in a dream.
He stood on the step, a man weathered by years, not myth.
He was tall, gaunt, and wrapped in a captain’s coat worn nearly to threads.
Salt stiffened the seams; one shoulder was patched with mismatched fabric; the collar sagged under the weight of exhaustion.
His black hat, once crisp, was crushed slightly in his hands, the brim damp with evening mist.
He was not the swaggering tyrant from Mr. Barrie’s stories. Nor was he a shadow from our nightmares. He was only a man, older, thinner. Hollowed by grief and miles.
James Hook. The adoptive father of my beloved Roger, himself a stolen child, who died saving me.
“Miss Wendy,” he said quietly.
He inclined his head, not quite a bow, not quite a courtesy, something closer to recognition.
“Forgive the hour.”
“James,” I said, and leaned over and placed a kiss on his cheek. “Please come in out of the rain.”