Chapter 17
CHAPTER
RAIN STREAKED THE windowpanes. The street below had blurred to smears of gaslight and wet stone. Then, footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Heavy. The sound of someone dragging themselves up each step.
I rushed to the door and turned the latch.
James Hook stood there, hat gone, coat torn. His left arm hung at his side, a bloodied scarf wound tight around the forearm, already soaked through. He caught himself on the doorframe.
His hand left a dark smear down the wood.
“Miss Wendy,” he murmured.
“James!”
I was under his good arm. He sagged into me, heavy and cold, smelling of rain and river, and something metallic underneath.
We made it inside to the foyer.
“Sit. Here … lean back.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, though his jaw clenched as I lowered him to a chair. He gestured to the scarf on his forearm. “The demon caught me with an arrow crossing back through the gardens. A graze. I’ve had worse from barnacles.”
But his face was pale, too pale.
“Let me see.”
“Later.” He waved me away with his hook. “There’s no time. I didn’t come here to be nursed.”
“Agnes?” I asked.
His eyes half closed. For a moment I thought he’d lost consciousness.
“I tried,” he said. “Found his treehouse.” He swallowed. “She’s there, Wendy. Alive. But thinning. Fading. Until she forgets she ever was Agnes at all.”
He coughed. When he pulled his hand from his mouth, there was blood on his palm.
“There’s more. I went to the Black Rock.”
I went still. The Black Rock. Where Roger saved me. Where a rhyme was carved. And where words continued on the stone’s surface into the sea in a script Roger could not read.
“The words on the rock tell a story, of those who lived on the island before us,” James said. “They tried to kill him too.” His voice dropped. “They carved their failures into the surface so that others would know. So that others wouldn’t make the same mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
He didn’t answer immediately. His gaze had drifted somewhere past my shoulder, past the walls of this house, past London itself.
“The carvings continue past the tideline,” he said. “Down into the water. I dove to read them. Held my breath until my lungs burned and my vision went dark at the edges.” He stopped. Swallowed. “I had to know how the story ended.”
His eyelids fluttered. He blinked hard, trying to hold on.
“James …”
A feather slid under the door. Black and slick. Another followed. Then a third.
“He’s followed me,” James whispered. “Wendy … your shadow …”
I rose to my feet.
The glass hummed. Feathers shivered. Outside, the fog pulled back from the window.
I filled my lungs and then I said: “Peter Gideon Bell!”
Something screamed. The sound was almost a child’s voice. Almost. The shadows fled to the corners of the room.
“Oh, Wendy.” The voice came from everywhere. From nowhere. “You remembered my name. How sweet. How useless.”
The fog surged forward again, darker than before.
That was his name. That was what his mother told us was his name. “It didn’t work. Why didn’t it work?”
“The name alone isn’t enough. That is what I came to tell you.”
The arrow came before James could finish.
I staggered back. Falling into myself. Into my mind. A similar image. So long ago.
He jerked. Made a small sound. Then blood began to run, dripping onto the floor. The arrow had struck him in the chest.
“James!”
I caught him before he fell out of the chair. His eyes were wide, unfocused, searching for something I couldn’t see.
“Not enough …” he gasped. Blood bubbled at his lips.
“But I said his name. I said it!” Tears blurred my vision. Why didn’t it work?
“Wendy … listen … The name wounds him. Makes him vulnerable.” He drew a shaking breath. “To kill him, you must speak his name as you drive a blade through his heart.”
His hand gripped my arm.
“It must be done in his home. Where he’s real. Here, he’s just a shadow. A shadow can lure children away. A shadow can convince a child to jump. And a shadow … can kill another shadow.”
His breath rattled.
“You must … go back … Use your shadow.” The words came slower now.
“James!”
His fingers pressed something into my palm. I looked down. A hilt set with rubies. “For Roger,” he breathed.
The blood pooled beneath him, dark and still spreading.
I staggered back against the wall and slid down to the floor. His body shuddered. Eyes closed. Chest now still.
I stared at his hand, the one that wasn’t a hand.
He was a myth. A villain in stories told around campfires. The great and vicious sea captain who sailed black waters in search of gold. But his greatest battle had never been with a whale or even a crocodile.
It had been with a boy, not really a boy.
And in this story Captain Hook had lost.
But he had also been a father. A father who buried his son and carried a dagger across worlds and years, waiting for the chance to put it in the hands of the girl his son had loved.
I sat there, the dagger cold in my palm, the blood reaching toward me across the floor.
The feathers under the door lay still, and Peter was gone. For now.
But he had left something behind. I looked down at my shadow.
It was smiling.