Alias Hook Page 8

  I race up to my quarterdeck, peep astern, but I already know what I’ll find.

  “Gone,” Filcher confirms. “She took it.”

  Well, at least she wasn’t magicked away by the fairies. “Did it not occur to anyone to stop her?” I ask conversationally. This is what happens when I leave the ship to Filcher and a few idlers.

  “Never saw her, Cap’n,” Needles blinks behind his round black spectacles.

  “Gato didn’t even see her until she was already out in the bay,” chimes in Sticks, which my lookout confirms with a guilty shrug from the crow’s nest. “And we couldn’t chase her,” Sticks adds. “You had the other boat.”

  Astonishing, how little pointing out the obvious improves my humor. I pluck off my hat, shove back my hair.

  “What do we need ’er for, anyway?” Filcher grumbles, sotto voce.

  A fair enough question. Despite what Pan said, she must be his creature; where else could she be off to so late in the day, with such impunity? The redskins watch over the bay and the fairies are always in the wind. Only an ally of the boy would risk it. Clearly, her mission to me has failed, whatever it was, and now she’s obliged to report back to him. And when she does, when she enters the boy’s wood and beats a merry path straight to his secret lair, if I have the wit God gave a turnip, I’ll be right behind her.

  “No one defies Hook!” I declare in ringing tones. “’Vast hauling there, men! Put the boat back in the water,” I translate, clamping my hat back on. “I’m going ashore!”

  * * *

  We spied the empty skiff lolling under the rushes in a shallow inlet beyond the northern end of Pirates Beach, near the bluff where we climb to the wood. I’ve changed into my black coat with the silver figures, all the better for stealth, but damnably hot as I claw my way up by the stakes for the second time today, with the sun slanting to westward behind me. The men didn’t like to leave me, but I told them I could always come back in the skiff, should my venture come to naught, and they were eager enough to return to the Rouge before nightfall.

  Gaining the crown of the bluff, I creep into the outer reaches of the wood. Bypassing the neglected thicket where we keep our traps, I stay to the main grassy path, which soon becomes a verdant tunnel into a towering greenwood of firs, pine, and scrub oak, reeking of sweet jasmine, the boy’s favorite, that twines blithely around every trunk. On I press, deeper into the wood where the trees grow more thickly together, their loftiest branches forming a kind of canopy that blots out the last of the daylight. Peering about in the gathering gloom, pierced now by only the most heroic rays of the sun, I spy an unnatural tremor in the green and brown shadows up ahead, as if a shrubbery had uprooted itself to stagger off on its own. That is her plaid. I fall into step some way behind, watching. She doesn’t appear to be in any haste, or perhaps her insubstantial slippers impede her in this unfriendly terrain of rocks and twigs and bristlecones. But she stops often to examine the grasses and flora growing among the trees, some of which she plucks and stuffs in her jacket pockets.

  A chill begins rustling through the trees. The gloom in the wood is total. No more gilded shafts of light pierce the darkness. Drawing my black coat closer, I strain to discern the woman’s form before me, crunching dead leaves and bracken underfoot, yet the black shapes of the nearest trees grow more visble in the gloom, trunks twisting like gibbeted outlaws, limbs curling like predator claws.

  Through an archway of trees, Parrish emerges into a clearing of overwhelming green, as if it were raining emeralds and diamonds. Unnatural light, insane music, and an undertow of pulsing menace assaults all my senses at once, but it’s too late to turn back. The archway of trees has closed behind us, the path disappeared.

  It’s not the boy who calls Parrish so doggedly. It’s the fairies.

  2

  The full moon shines faintly green tonight above the Fairy Dell. All round the clearing, trees thrust up like spikes and jagged teeth, indigo-violet against a tarnished pewter sky, but the center glows green and silver, where the fairies hold their revels. At first glimpse, it’s like a bright silver coin in the distant grass. But it grows larger as I come nearer, until it seems high as a bonfire on May Eve, framing the woman’s dark silhouette before me as she emerges from the shadows into a wall of silver flame that draws us both forward. Every particle of my being hums with dread. But for two hundred years, the fairy world has been closed to me, and now it opens like a chest of riches before Parrish. I must know what power she wields among them, so I shut away the warnings of my creeping flesh and press on.

  The surrounding trees are enormous, scraping the dark sky, while the revels spread out before my eyes, a vast green ocean of brazen activity. The fairies themselves, never any bigger than dragonflies before, are grown to grotesque, obscenely human proportions. I don’t feel shrunken, as if my body were compressed down to imp size; it seems my perception alone has altered, and I’m all the dizzier for it, reeling and disoriented.

  It’s like a scene out of Dante. The screeching of dozens of fairy fiddles pitched higher than human hearing erupts like grapeshot inside my nerves; I feel raw and fragile, licentious and despairing, all at once. Vocalists hover above the fiddlers like hummingbirds, carried aloft on the updraft of their pagan songs, some plaintive in tone, others mocking. A corps of fairies dance raggedly in a wide circle, three steps this way, three steps that, red-faced with drink, laughing and reeling, shiny with sweat to the very tips of their dripping wings. They go by in a haze of color, sparkling, evanescent clothing, skin stained in vegetable hues—saffron yellow, pea green, the violet of beets; some have scored their bodies with tribal designs Bill Jukes would envy. Others stumble off into the shadows, hoisting buttercup wineskins, too besotted to join in. Small wonder the boys are compelled to sleep so deeply at night, lest their precious innocence be defiled.

  My gaze follows one plump and forlorn fellow, his wings doused and dragging behind him, as he passes a hollow between two tree roots. Inside, a sloe-eyed female bares her rump for a grizzled artisan; by rushlight, he etches a lewd design in her skin with a blackberry thorn. In the surrounding shadows, pale, languid bodies, too close together to tell which limbs are whose, sprawl in the grass beneath a drooping poppy blossom, passing the dripping end of its style from mouth to mouth. A pair of young bucks frisk by, arm in arm, while other tangled bodies in confounding combinations fornicate merrily wherever they fall. Harsh, bubbling mirth, husky moans, and raucous cries chime in counterpoint to the manic fiddling, a crescendo of abandon.

  My legs wobble beneath me, the urge to dance overpowering, as is the urge to tear off my clothes and wallow like a beast in mud and moonlight and fairy glamor, the urge to plunge my sex into any warm, yielding thing, the urge to throw myself off a cliff, all are one: wholesale madness without limits, a frenzy of nameless desire.

  A tawny minx spangled in gold like tattered cobwebs flutters by me in the close dark, brushing my cheek suggestively with her downy wing. I’m ripping the lace from my throat, eager for more of her caress, when I spy ahead a singular shadow against the dazzling palace of light the glowing sphere has become. Another human, not a creature of gossamer and moondust, but an unmistakably earthy figure approaches the palace steps unobstructed. She’s going into the fairy palace, the citadel of power in the Neverland, the very heart of enemy country. I grasp hold of my few remaining wits, shove past the lusty fairy, glimpse a flash of indignant golden eyes, and blunder toward the light, caring not where I tread, nor whom nor what I interrupt. But by the time I maneuver around the ring of flailing dancers, elude a pair of chattery young females in heat and the tumescent intentions of a predatory male, I’ve lost sight of the Parrish woman. Yet the fairy palace suddenly shudders up into being before me. The palace steps shimmer and shift like a false vision of water in the desert, yet they support my weight, and I mount them.

  I scarcely climb at all, finding myself suddenly inside, or at least surrounded on all sides by a brilliance of light with no visible
source. There are no torches, no lanterns, not so much as a firefly, yet all is aglow with a light of staggering volatility. The damp, dark, shadow world of the forest seems very far away. Never have I beheld such light before; there are layers of light like shadows, gold, silver, green, violet, concealing gauzy depths within, and I flounder about dazed, certain of nothing but solid ground, slick and shiny as marble beneath my feet. When I glimpse a movement of something more solid than light, I follow it. Parrish. She must know the way.

  Yet around a fold of purplish mist, a different figure emerges, a graceful young woman, small and willowy, golden hair dressed in pearls, one long roll of it hanging down her back. Recognition stabs me to the core. No. It’s not possible. Not Caroline. Not here.

  She halts, grasps up her ice blue skirts in both her little hands, whirls about. Her eyes, as pale and unclouded as the fabric of her gown, peer out beneath her smooth, white forehead. Her face and bosom and arms are powdered moonlight white, deadening the effect of her dewy youth, in the fashion of the day. My day. My Caroline. Rooted to the spot, I’m unable to speak, nor do I believe my worthless eyes. She looks back at me intently, yet her gaze passes over me, as if I were a phantom, and her features droop in anxiety.

  “Where have you gone, Jamie?” she cries.

  A ragged breath catches in my throat; I scarcely remember to breathe at all. “Caroline,” I gurgle, “I’m right here.”

  “They say such horrid things about you,” she goes on. “How can it be true? We are in love, I tell them. He would never, he could not ever—”

  I choke on my next attempt at speech, cannot force the words out. Had she truly been in love, how could she betray me so completely? How could she be so easily persuaded? How could she believe it of me? And familiar anger courses through me as it always has, blotting out whatever desire for Caroline I harbored in my foolish youth. I’d have done my duty by her had she waited for me. Had she only believed in me. Vixen, who is she to come here moping about when it was she who betrayed me?

  “Why did you never come back to me?” Her pretty little voice wavers plaintively.

  “Why didn’t you wait?” I spit back. How could I have ever cared for this duplicitous little chit, with her airs and her grand family name, and her black, faithless heart? Even as I stare at her, daring her to answer me, her image fades like a distant ship lost in a blinding sun. All that’s left is a pitiable voice, soft and sad.

  “I waited all my life.”

  It’s too hot, too bright. Throwing my arm across my eyes, I stagger with hand outstretched for some retreat. My fingers touch bark, and I know I must have stumbled outside again. A salty breeze ruffles my hair, bearing a whiff of thyme and jasmine. Peeking out, I find myself in blessed shadow again, in some underpopulated part of the forest with sand, not grass, underfoot. A giant green lizard lumbers across my path and scrabbles halfway up a bare tree trunk, where it pauses to glare at me. I back off, around another trunk, and a more substantial figure, slow and sensual, rises up out of the shadows. God’s cursed life, I know that languid shape. The most faithless female of them all. Proserpina, the voudon priestess, as alluring and sinister as ever, her body bursting out of its colorful rags, her dark eyes as narrow and pitiless as the reptile’s.

  “Why are you here?” I gape at her.

  “Why are you still here, Capitaine,” she murmurs back. The timbre of her voice alone, so well remembered, so undiminished by time, is enough to rouse every part of me capable of standing, a helpless tide rising to her moon. I so crave her touch, I might fling myself at her like a drowning man upon a spar, until I see the insolence in her black eyes, hear the amusement in her throaty purr.

  “Because you sent me here, Witch,” I seethe, a release hotter and more gratifying than desire surging through my body.

  Her bare, shiny brown shoulders rise in a careless shrug, her black eyes glittery. “La, la, Capitaine,” she croons at me. “As quick as ever to give in to the fire of your rage. You should have chosen more wisely.”

  “I had no choice!”

  “There is always a choice,” she coos. “I offered you peace, but you chose war. I offered you love, but you chose hate.”

  I shut my eyes against the memory of the man I was then, abused by life, commander of a crew of murderers who cared for nothing but blood and revenge against the world. Why didn’t I choose her when I had the chance?

  “You said you loved me,” I whisper.

  “You will never know how much. That is your tragedy, Capitaine.”

  “Enough to curse me to this place because I would not stay with you,” I say bitterly.

  She rounds her eyes at me like a stage ingenue. “You believe I punish you for my poor broken heart? La, la, no wonder you never came back.”

  “Back?” The single syllable, musty with impotence, all but chokes me.

  “I waited for you so long,” she murmurs, toying idly with the strings of coral, turquoise, and ebony beads that decorate her breast. “How could I know it would take you so long?”

  To do what? I can scarcely grasp the notion before she stretches out one brown hand to me. And for all my rage, for all the suffering she has caused me, the dead stump in my chest shudders for an instant and I see my own hand reach for hers. Yet I feel no warmth, no weight, no solid flesh; my fingers clutch at nothing but air, and I stumble in the sand as her teeth shine in a cruel smile.

  “It is too late to choose me,” and she waves me away like a meddlesome fly. “I am dead.”

  Of course she’s dead; they are all dead these two hundred years and more. Dead, the only choice that can never be mine. This is how she loves me. “How long will you torment me?” I demand.

  “Wrong question, Capitaine,” she sighs. “Perhaps you are still not ready. I may regret I gave you this chance.”

  “What chance?” I cry. But Proserpina is evaporating into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but a last, insinuating purr. “Play well.”

  Jezebel, to torture me with phantom hopes and riddles. I will never play again, and she knows it. And as I whirl round and round in the shadows, desperate for escape, the trees and the sand and the night all vanish with Proserpina and I am once again in the midst of blazing light with a solid surface under my feet. I cringe, narrowing my eyes against the sudden brilliance, until the lights mute themselves to a softer glow. Somehow, I’ve strayed into a vast hall. Elegant alabaster columns support an arched ceiling too distant to be seen, mountains of fragrant flowers—lilies, jasmine, narcissus— on huge piles of greenery erupt out of urns and pots and tubs and baskets in every direction, and the surrounding walls shine like glass, mirroring the light. I turn round and round in my dazzlement and terror. The Great Hall of the Fairy Queen.

  * * *

  She enters by nothing so prosaic as a door. Rather, a shifting in the quality of light, as indistinct as the edge of a rainbow, and a rustling among the flowers announces her presence. In any direction I look, there she is, advancing upon me, the dark intruder in her proud domain of light.

  She’s draped in some gauzy stuff, ephemeral as morning mist, all flowing, glittering train with no substance. Her body is entirely visible within, skin so smooth and rounded she gleams in the light, nipples sparkling on creamy breasts, like fine confections tipped in silver dust. Arcane symbols painted in royal purple decorate one exposed shoulder and trail down to swirl suggestively round one breast. Her pale hair is not blonde but bright, waves of it shimmering all around her in a spectrum of colors too brilliant to register on mortal eyes. Her own vivid eyes are shifting echoes of the moonlight, circled in violet and shadowed in green. She’s like an effigy of spun sugar and ice, fragile as breath, but for the primordial power of her presence.

  She needs no throne, no pedestal, to loom before me, nor does she disturb the silken, translucent wings that arch so high above her head and trail their filigree appendages upon the floor. She merely glimmers there, an imposing figure of more than my own height, less than an armspan away, rad
iating unnatural heat, and a dangerous earthiness born of an underworld mortal men are wise to fear. And yet, every part of my traitor’s body, my palm, my sex, my withered ghost of a heart throbs in unison just to behold her, do I will it or not.

  “Welcome to our revels, Captain.” She addresses me not so much in language as in sensation I am powerless to resist, not discordant like the common fairies, but slow, beguiling; her meaning flows inside my head, a shivering of distant chimes on a warm breeze. “To what do we owe this … pleasure?”

  Too late I remember who I am and what business has brought me here. “My Lady—” I stammer.

  “I am Queen BellaAeola, sovereign of this place.”

  “Majesty,” I amend, remembering at last to make a leg and bow. “I mean no harm,” I lie. I can’t confess I’ve come to her forest to ferret out the boys. “I seek … a friend.”

  The fairy monarch flutters closer, her expression lively. “You have found one.”

  My flesh crawls even as my blood boils from her nearness. Her purple tattoos dance about on her skin like living things; lacy patterns twist and unfurl round the fullness of her breast, tongues of liquid flame stretch lewdly toward her swollen silver nipple.

  “Ask of me what you will, “she murmurs with drowsy intimacy. “This is not a night for refusals.”

  I open my mouth, but no sound emerges. My wit has flown with the queen’s arrival, leaving only hungry flesh and gnawing desire, defenseless and exposed. How can she not know me for what I am? She is the queen of all witchery.

  Her fluting merriment sounds again, echoing all around the iridescent walls. I sense her pressing closer, although she does not appear to move, her rich, musky scent, her simmering laughter, the sheer voluptuous power of her person cocooning me, shutting out all else. “I know what you seek, Captain,” she chimes.

  I am not fit to reply.