Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Cannon fire boomed in the distance.
A palm tree near her detonated in a spray of splinters and shrapnel. It creaked as the top half folded over, the fronds snapping as they fell.
Sasha jolted awake while standing on her feet. That was probably the most disorienting thing a person could go through—waking up while standing, eyes already open. She was shaking as she tried to process what was going on.
“Get after them, you scurvy dogs!”
People were running past her. Chaos reigned. Meanwhile, her brain was still attempting to boot up past the load screen.
She had a sword in her hand. A boarding saber, which she recognized from all the dumb documentaries she got sucked into watching in her spare time.
She stared at it. It had notches taken out of the blade—it had seen some shit.
She was dressed in period men’s clothing, in a simple, striped linen vest tied over a muslin shirt.
She had breeches and colonial socks on, and her shoes were faded and scuffed.
A sash around her waist was made up of about twenty different scraps of fabric by the looks of it.
Over it all she was wearing a once expensive looking, but now very battered, 18th century coat in shades of what probably was once crimson.
Now, it was kind of threadbare and salt had stained it blackish-gray in portions.
Something that likely had once been fashionable, but was now very far out of date.
There was no subtle way to put it—she was dressed up in a goddamn pirate costume. It was a good costume, though. Like, an expensive one from a Broadway production or a blockbuster movie. But a cliche pirate costume, nonetheless.
“What the actual f—” She didn’t get any farther than that.
Fa-boooooom.
More cannon fire.
That time, the heavy ball of lead and steel dug into the sandy beach some twenty feet away, sending a spray of particles shooting through the air.
Someone grabbed her arm and started dragging her toward the brush where everyone else was running.
“Move yer feet, Mr. Smee—” A grizzled face turned toward her.
He was missing teeth, and the texture of his skin resembled leather.
“They shootin’ for the Boys, but they hit whatever they hit! Can’t aim cannons!”
Mr. Smee?
What the actual fuck was happening?
Looking down at herself, she had to quickly check to make sure she was still, well, her. With all the nonsense that had been going on that day, there was really a fair shot that she was suddenly a man. No, still a woman, and still very much herself. At least she didn’t have to put up with that.
But the other pirate was still dragging her, and she started to run to keep up. It was that, or trip and eat the sand, sticks, and bits of dry sea debris that had washed up or been blown into the brushy area where the beach ended and the thicker portion of an island jungle began.
If the pirate called her Mr. Smee…
And the pirate had referenced “the Boys.”
Was this…?
They burst into a clearing.
The older pirate dropped her wrist to pull his sword. Letting out a battle cry, he ran forward. Sasha could only stand there, staring, agog, at what was before her.
It was a battle. A straight up sword fight between pirates and…teenage boys who were dressed like they had been raised by wolves.
They were dirty, their hair long and unkempt, each style seemingly worn in a slightly unique fashion, like they belonged to some strange tribe and that was their personal marker. They fought with improvised weapons or what they had clearly stolen from the pirates.
Suddenly, she laughed. She couldn’t help it.
This was Neverland.
She was in Neverland!
And she was watching Hook’s pirates fight Peter Pan’s Lost Boys!
“If this is all a drug trip, this is—this is pretty good. Damn.” Letting out a rush of air, she smiled. It was a front-row seat to one of her favorite childhood stories. She wondered when Peter Pan himself might show up! Or—
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 wet splorp.
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 dying teenager 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 was still 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 is real.
” 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 was really dead.
“Good point. Why do humans 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 to talk 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 to be clothes, 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 go cold.
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 boots that 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 used often.
It was just as fanciful as the hook it was based on, maybe, but it dreamt of very different things.
That’s what he was. If the versions of Captain Hook she had seen before in her life were the versions that lived in a dream, what she saw in front of her was the nightmare.