Pan's Revenge (2 page)

Peter holds my challenging stare for a couple
of seconds then flies around me and stands behind the wheel,
swaying it gently and correcting our course toward the island. “Do
I need a reason?”

He doesn’t
look at me. So much trust is tempting. I could skewer him from the
back. Or behead him. My fingers close around the handle of the
sword attached to my belt. It only takes a swipe of my
arm—

The devil
knows why I don’t do it. My teeth clenched, I loosen my grip on the
sword and shove Peter away from the helm to take over, keeping the
Jolly Roger parallel to the shore a little outside the port. Brant
Skyler drops anchor and, together with Fin Flannigan, he extends
the gangplank.

In search of
my first mate, my glance skates across the decks. Jack sits across
from Gurglin’ Doug, a barrel placed between them. Their elbows
propped on top of the barrel and their faces red like cooked crabs,
they arm wrestle. The crew is surrounding them and barks their
supports.

“Smee!” I shout across the length of the
ship, dragging his attention away from Gurglin’ Doug who, in that
moment, wins the battle. At my beckoning, he rises from the low
stool and meets me by the gangplank.

“Because of you, I lost my dinner to Doug in
a wager,” he snarls at my face. “So this better be important.”

“It is. I need your help with something.”

“Not the fairies!” He lifts his hands, palms
up and takes a defensive step backward.

How those wood women turn my men into whining
wimps makes me chuckle. “No. It’s not them. Not yet. I need to get
something first.”

I can’t go to the fairies empty-handed. It
was a full moon last night and I still owe them the bathwater of a
toddler for the answers they gave me last time—the ones we needed
to send Angel home. What the hell are they brewing with bathwater?
Their list of ingredients for their crazy potions gets weirder by
the day.

“Fine.” Appeased, Smee lets go of a sigh
through one side of his mouth. “But just so you know, I’ll eat your
ration of food tonight.”

I roll my eyes but don’t contradict.

“Where are you going?” Peter asks, still
gliding above my head like a freaking seagull as I fetch my cape
from where it hangs over the railing.

“Running an errand,” I growl. “And since I
can’t seem to get rid of you, you may as well come with us. Be
useful, for once.”

Smee’s footsteps sound behind me on the
gangplank as we walk down to land. Peter of course prefers to fly.
As we near the evening buzz on Main Street, I stop and tilt my head
up. “By Davie Jones’ locker, would you get your feet down on the
ground, Peter Pan! I’m not walking to town with you hovering above
us like a fuckin’ bird!”

He scowls but
sinks to the street and falls in step next to Jack and me. “So what
exactly is it you need?” he wants to know. “A new frock for the
vain captain?”

Ignoring his
taunt, I tell them about the bathwater for the fairies and my plan
to get some. “Women tend to bath their children in the evening,
right? It’s almost dark so it’s the best chance we have. One
distracts the mother, the others get the water.”

Smee casts me a wry look. “And how are we to
take the water away? Cup it with our hands and carry it all the way
through the forest?”

“
Good
questions.” I stop and pivot, searching for a jar. Down by the pub,
several men dressed in tatters laugh and sing outside. Loaded to
the gunwales, they are leaning against each other for support. One
of them carries an almost empty rum bottle. That’s all I
need.

Heading toward them with my first mate and
Peter following me, I slow down and join in their laughter. I lean
my arm on the booze buddy’s shoulder and say in an equally slurred
speech, “What ye got goin’, men?”

“
Jus’ a li’l
celebratin’ with me friends,” the man answers. “Me wife kick’ me
out like a mangy dog las’ nigh’!” His breath is foul and thick with
rum, his shirt torn and stained with the rests of a greasy meal.
Any good woman would kick him out at first chance.

When he
squeezes his blood-shot eyes closed and lifts the rum bottle in
salute, I take it from him and slip it under my cape. He doesn’t
even notice, so I suppose there’s no need for excuses either and
head on with Jack and Peter who were waiting a few steps
away.

As we turn into an alley a little later, we
all spy through the windows lining the street. Some of them have
drawn curtains and it’s impossible to tell what’s going on behind.
They aren’t the kinds of houses we’re going to enter.

Peter is the first to call, “Here’s what we
need!”

Smee and I
join him by a two-story house with crumbling yellow plaster. It has
a Venetian balcony on the second floor, and the door stands ajar.
In a rundown kitchen on the ground floor, a slim woman with braided
black hair and wrapped in a simple gray dress bathes a toddler in a
small metal tub that stands on the kitchen table.

“All right. Here’s what we do,” I inform
them. “Peter, you fly up to the balcony. Get inside and make some
noise to draw the woman’s attention. Smee, you and I are climbing
through the kitchen window and scoop some water once she’s
gone.”

“Aye,” Smee replies and Peter nods. While he
flies up, I take the cork of the bottle between my teeth and pull.
It comes out with a squeak. Spitting it to the side, I wash down
the mouthful of rum that was still in the bottle. “You couldn’t
have shared that bit, could you?” Smee scoffs.

Sharing isn’t in me. I answer with the parody
of a smile and down the last drop. My first mate rolls his eyes.
Then we hear the sound of glass breaking inside the house.

“Melina?” the woman shouts over her
shoulder.

“That wasn’t me, mother!” a girl’s voice
replies. “It came from upstairs!”

“Come in here and watch your brother while I
take a look.”

When a girl,
seven years old or less, walks into the kitchen, the woman dries
her hands on her apron and hurries out of the room. That wasn’t
part of my plan, but there shouldn’t be any trouble in dealing with
a child. The moment she turns her back on the window, I crack it
open and cautiously move it up until Smee and I can duck through.
We’re standing right behind her, when the boy’s attention focuses
on us and, of course, the girl notices. She spins around. Her face
turns pale like the tiled stone floor.

Damn.
Holding her stare, I place
my forefinger over my lips. “Shh.”

Yeah, like she really would… The child sucks
in a lungful of air then screams like I used my sword to threaten
her. On second thought, it might have been the better way to go
about this. It only takes a couple of seconds for the mother to
rush back downstairs and into the kitchen. The room gets
uncomfortably crowded.

It’s my hat she seems to focus on first, then
her gaze lands on Jack next to me. Horror flashes in her eyes.
“Melina! Run!” she shouts to the kid who then turns on the spot and
dashes out of the room. “Get help!”

Smee steps in front of me, placating the
woman with his palms up. “Please, be quiet, lass! We only need a
little of the water.”

Now her jaw drops. But she recovers in the
blink of an eye. “The hell you get from my house!” She grabs a vase
from the counter and throws it at Smee who dodges it, putting me in
the line of fire. I catch the vase and place it on the end of the
counter.

“Listen,” I start, but that’s all I get out
before she fetches a broom out of nowhere and smacks Jack hard on
the head. His yelp echoes in the room as he covers his head from a
second hit. Jumping out of the wench’s reach, I circle the table
and hold the empty rum bottle into the tub, trying to fill a little
of the bathwater into it. The boy starts crying.

No more than an inch of water flowed through
the bottles mouth before I feel the hard knock of the broom across
my back. Whirling about with the bottle in my hand, I curse. “Damn,
lady! That hurts!”

“I show you what hurts, you drunken
bastards!” She comes after us with her broom once more, chasing us
around the kitchen. My hat tears off my head as I run. There is no
time to find it.

Ducking her blows, Smee and I fight our way
to the window and jump outside. Peter hovers in the street, eyes
wide. “What the hell did you two do?”

“Move!” I shout at him as I drop from the
windowsill and land on Jack Smee. Getting to my feet, I try to run,
but my cape nearly chokes me. The mad woman holds a fistful of the
fabric in her bony hand.

She leans out
of the window, her black braid dangling from her nape. “Take that,
you bloody bastard!” Pain explodes in my head as the broom comes
down on me again. Fighting against the dizziness, I pull at the
strings of my collar until they come loose and I can flee, leaving
the cape behind.

An odd adrenaline rush makes me laugh as Smee
grabs my sleeve and hauls me down the street with him. I cut a
glance over my shoulder. A potted plant comes flying at us. I duck
and it crashes in the alley, pieces of the scattered pot exploding
all around us.

The window is forcefully pulled down and
behind it the curtains ride together. At the corner, we stop and I
stoop over, bracing my hands on my knees, panting, the bottle still
in one hand. “Sink me, that was more of an adventure than I thought
we’d get.”

Still gliding above our heads, Peter laughs.
“You two want to be pirates? You don’t even stand a chance against
a woman with a broom!”

Smee grimaces. “He does have a point.”

I don’t know
what’s riding me, when I grab Peter’s ankle, pull him down to my
side, wrap my arm with the bottle in my hand around his neck and
rub my knuckles on his scalp. “We wouldn’t have had to fight a
wench with broom, if you’d done a better job of distracting her in
the first place, little brother.” This is the first time in our
lives, that Peter and I actually share a laugh. It’s weird. But a
comfortable kind of weird.

“Let go, Hook! You smell like a codfish,” he
yells at me between hiccups of laughter, but when I ease my hold on
him, he accepts my arm on his shoulders for another brotherly
moment.

Averted from Peter’s view, Smee lifts an
amused brow at me. I let go of my brother and adjust my collar. A
moment later, noise to my left draws my attention as a door opens.
It comes from the house with the crumbled yellow plaster. The slim
lady’s unholy curses drift to us as my hat and cape soar out and
land on the cobblestoned alley. The door bangs shut.

We wait
another minute at the corner until we’re sure the coast is clear,
then I hurry to pick up my things.

“So, are you going to bring this to the
fairies tonight?” Peter asks.

“No, it can wait until the morning. Who knows
what they will turn me into if I knock at their door after
midnight?” I shudder at the thought.

“And you think they will tell you how to find
Angel, if you bring them the bathwater?”

“The bathwater is for an old debt. They
probably won’t tell me shit. Not until I bring them a damn
rainbow.”

Peter stops and stares at me. “A rainbow?
From Neverland’s volcano?”

“That’s what Bre’Shun said she wants,
yes.”

After a stunned second, a hearty laugh burst
from Pan’s chest. “Now, good luck with that one, brother.” With the
fake salute of a sailor, he lifts in the air and zooms away across
the star-dotted night sky.

It didn’t escape me, that he called me
brother. A first.

IT’S ALMOST
MIDNIGHT and I still can’t sleep. My fingers keep finding the red
glass heart I’m wearing on a necklace. A secret gift from Paulina,
my five-year-old sister. She swears she didn’t slip the chain
around my neck at night when she came crawling into my bed because
of nightmares
a few weeks ago, but I’m
sure it’s a piece of the treasure she keeps hidden in a small chest
under her bed. Every free gift from her many Disney Princess
magazines goes in there—if it’s not stamped, tattooed, clipped or
hung on me, that is.

There’s really nothing special about the
glass heart. And still, it has me thinking far too much, far too
late into the night. The strawberry blond twins, Paulina and
Brittney Renae, told me I fell off the balcony one night in late
February—the evening before I found it around my neck. I must have
hit my head pretty hard, because I don’t remember anything of that
night. Thank God, I didn’t end up with broken bones. The snow down
in the garden and the sodden ground beneath must have cushioned my
fall.

Restless, I
push back my covers and swing my legs out of bed, turning on the
light on my nightstand. The floor is cold. A shiver races through
me. Smoothing my nightdress, I pad barefoot to the mirror on my
door. Do I look different? My hair is still raven-black and the
tips tickle my jaw when I tilt my head. My eyes, too big and round
for my face, flash the same hazel color as always. My appetite is
usually meager, so my collar bones still stand out just enough to
notice I don’t care much for the exquisite meals served in this
huge house. It’s been five weeks since the alleged fall. Nothing
obvious has changed about me.

But I can feel it all the same.

Something is different.

Deep within
me anchors a longing I can’t place. Like I’m somewhere far away and
feeling homesick. But that’s complete rubbish,
beca
use I’m in my room, in my house in
London. I
am
home. Yet the longing gets worse each time I
look at the heart pendant. Like right now.

My throat tightens. This is so weird. My lips
start to tremble. I can’t stop it. My vision turns misty. I blink.
And a lonely tear trails down my cheek.