Page 5 of Freeing Hook

It’s not long before it covers my thighs, the heavy weight of it pinning me to the cot. I fight at the manacle securing me to the bedpost, but it’s dripping of tar too, melding itself to my wrist.

“Peter,” I call out, beg, but it’s not Peter. Or if it is, he’s too far gone to hear me. “Peter, stop.”

The black sludge is heavy, bearing down on my muscles. It’s as if I’m trapped underneath a pile of cement, the weight of it crushing my bones. Pain presses my ribs as the sludge reaches my chest, my lungs fighting desperately against the pressure for breath.

A moment later, and the sludge has reached my lips. I brace myself for its bitter sting, but it tastes of the dew of honeysuckles.

“I can take away your pain,” a voice whispers from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“You’re hurting me,” I cry.

“You’re mine, Wendy Darling. Mine to hurt,” the voice whispers back.

When the shadows force themselves down my throat and drown me, I let them.

CHAPTER 3

JOHN

If I had it to do over, I’d chop off my left forefinger instead of my pinkie. I’d been uncharacteristically emotional the night Peter brought us to the reaping tree—hadn’t been thinking straight. Watching your parents slit their own throats tends to do that to a person.

I’d gone with the pinkie because I read once that it’s the least utilized finger. Had my parents not been slaughtered in front of me that night, I might have recognized the flaw in this logic. The human body is so much more complex than that.

A fool thinks about which finger is employed the least. A wiser man would have considered the hand as a whole. Would have known that the hand can compensate much more efficiently for a missing forefinger than a missing pinkie.

This mistake has been bothering me for months. Perhaps more than the loss of my finger itself.

As it stands, the grip strength in my left hand is significantly diminished. I can hardly lug a basket of onions back to the Den, much less climb like I used to. The night Michael and I met Wendy at the storehouse on the edge of the cliffs in an attempt to escape Neverland, I’d had to go the long way around. Trek upa path on the sea-facing bluffs that I’d spent weeks clearing of brush. Secretly, of course.

It’s getting more difficult to hold on to Michael, too. It still sets me on edge—thinking about how for the past day, he’s been under the watch of Victor and Benjamin while I’ve been asleep, knocked out cold by Nettle’s somnium oil.

We’d been so close to getting out of here. Wendy had been so close.

I would have left weeks ago, once I cleared the sea-facing path up to the storehouse. I could have taken Michael and run—rather, soared—into the sky and left this horror novel of an island behind.

But that would have meant leaving Wendy behind.

My sister has changed during her time in Neverland, and not for the better. She thinks I don’t notice the bags under her eyes, the way she licks her dry lips when it’s been almost an entire day since her last dose of faerie dust. Peter says it’s to prevent the shadows from torturing her. To keep her from mistaking a nightmare for reality and strangling us like she did to Michael that one night.

But Wendy doesn’t need faerie dust. She needs help.

Wendy’s needed help for a long while now.

I can’t blame her; not really. Having Peter visit her from the shadows as a child messed with her psyche. The alienist my parents hired didn’t help much either. I used to listen in on their discussions from the vent in the library; it was big enough for me to crawl into before their sessions and camp out. I watched as he showed my sister charcoal sketches—dead, mutilated bodies, from what I inferred, though I never saw the depictions. I watched that familiar glassy emptiness wash over her expression.

The alienist had called my sister cold. Unnatural.

That’s because he never stuck around to hear her screams in the middle of the night. When we were older, she used to stuff her sheets into her mouth to muffle the sound. She didn’t wish to wake me.

My sister isn’t cold. She’s broken. Used. Has spent half her life fattened like a heifer, her owners hoping that instead of being led to the slaughter, she’d be bought and caged and paraded.

But my sister isn’t livestock to be bred.

I struggle with whether to fault my parents for their obsession with finding her a husband. To them, optimizing her chances of marriage was the logical decision to make. My parents only failed Wendy by not being clever enough to devise a better alternative.

And perhaps for being too inattentive to realize that a suitor had gotten her alone in the smoking parlor that one night.

I can’t exactly condemn my parents, as I’m guilty of a worse sin than ignorance.

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