Chapter 13 #3
He trailed the sea and mist inside. His eyes were cold as brass. Quick. Restless. Eyes that once watched a boy fly and understood the terror in it long before we ever did.
We moved into the parlor.
John muttered, “Dear God …”
“Hook!” Michael stumbled back, hitting the wall. His eyes wide. Unblinking.
James Hook clasped his hands behind him. The posture of a sea captain measuring the room.
Michael swallowed hard. “How?”
James exhaled. “Because it’s returned. You didn’t kill it. Injured it. Made it mad. Twelve years it sleeps. That’s its cycle. I imagine you all have seen it. So have we. It’s angrier than all the years I’ve known it.”
“I saw you,” I said. “You were outside Marigold House. I was going to go find you, but …”
“I know,” he said. “I saw the doctor arrive. And later, the constables. I thought it wiser to wait so this meeting could be held in private.”
John stepped forward. “How did you find us?”
“I’ve been watching the signs. Crows gathering. Shadows moving on their own. When the patterns started again, I knew he was hunting. And I knew who he’d be hunting for.”
“You came from … that place. How?” Michael said.
“I can come and go. It’s not an easy journey to make. There are paths, if you know how to sail them. If you’re desperate enough to try. One loses a bit of oneself when crossing the black waters between worlds.”
He coughed—a wet, rattling sound—and continued.
“We all thought it died, but it didn’t. It’s back now, and it wants you three, especially you, Miss Darling. And each of us has our own reasons for wanting it dead.”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?” John asked.
James’s jaw tightened. “Because I tried. Three times. And three times I failed.” He held up the iron hook. “The first time, he caused me to lose my hand. The second time, he took most of my crew. The third time …”
He stopped. Swallowed. “The third time, he took my son.”
The room went silent.
Hook’s eyes snapped to mine. For a moment, something raw and terrible passed between us. Two people who had loved the same boy, who had lost him to the same monster.
Outside, the crows gathered on the rooftops. A black cloud rising against the darker sky, carrying word to their master that the game had changed.
James lowered himself into a chair, his face gray with exhaustion. “But first,” he said, “you need to understand what he is. How he works.”
He leaned back, wincing. His eyes went distant, seeing something beyond the walls of my parlor, beyond London itself. “He operates in cycles. Twelve years. That’s how long the door stays closed between his world and yours.”
“Why twelve?” Michael asked.
James shrugged. “I don’t know. Old stories say it’s tied to the stars; the second star to the right only aligns properly once every twelve years.
Others say it’s tied to him, to whatever he is.
The fae have rules they can’t break, no matter how powerful they become.
” He shifted in the chair, wincing. “What I know is this: Every twelve years, he crosses over. He gathers new children. He takes them back. And then the door closes, and London forgets, and the cycle begins again.”
“But time moves differently there,” I said. “We were gone for only three days. There, it was more like weeks.”
James nodded. “Time is his to command on the island. A day here might be a month there. A year here might be a single night. He stretches it, compresses it, plays with it the way a child plays with clay.” His voice hardened.
“That’s how he keeps them. The children don’t realize how long they’ve been gone.
They don’t realize they’re aging in hours what should take years.
By the time they understand, they’re too weak to leave. Too much of them has been … consumed.”
“The boys,” John said slowly. “How long had they actually been there?”
“Some of them? Decades.” James’s eyes went distant. “Curly was taken in 1872. The twins in 1884. They thought they’d been there a few months. They had no idea they’d already outlived their parents, their siblings, everyone who had ever known their names.”
A chill ran through me.
“And Peter?” I asked. “How old is he really?”
James Hook laughed, a bitter sound. “He’s not that old, but the one who made him is older than all of London.”
“How can you help us?” Michael said.
“I can try to get you all back there somehow, but I have to consult with the thing that lives in the hollow in the tree. Humans can’t cross the black waters with me. They can only get to the island with Peter, because he can fly.”
James moved closer to the hearth, extending his hands toward the heat as if trying to thaw the cold from his bones.
“It’s pleased by the war,” he said. “It feeds on the happy ones. The innocent. Little children with big dreams. But war strips children of hope faster than anything else. And there’s nothing that feeds it quite like stealing the hope of a child.
I’m sure it’s there, wandering your battlefields.
Searching for boys playing soldier. Or slipping into the lives of those stuck in the in-between, between life and death. ”
Edward … that’s how he’s able to connect through Edward. He’s not dead, just stuck someplace between the living and the dead.
“It’s time you know its story,” he turned to us, his face half lit by the fire, the other half lost to shadow.