Page 10 of Stalking Wendy Darling

“Ooh, you can call me psycho, I like that.”

“Name,”Hook commanded, his voice a whip-strike but still contained, still level. What would it take to make him shout?

“Wendell, Captain,” I said, and threw up a salute, straightening my back. “The name’s Wendell.”

His mouth thinned. “Report to Sterling from now on. You can put that passion for murder to better use against our enemies.”

“Ooh, we have enemies?” Big fan of the idea of their enemies slaughtering the whole crew. It would serve them right for kidnapping women. “Do tell.”

Hook shook his head and turned away, striding towards the stern of the Banshee.

“Got it, need to know basis only,” I said with a nod, just noticing Barrington’s blood on my hands, flexing them with appreciation.

“Report to Sterling,” Hook barked at me. “And no more trouble.”

I didn’t reply. I certainly didn’t agree to that.

Chapter Six

WENDY

Sneaking around the Death’s Right Hand at night was surprisingly harder than I expected. One, there was always someone on the deck, even with our anchor dropped and the sky pitch black overhead. Two, every time I shifted in my hammock in the crew’s quarters, a light sleeper awoke and glared into the dimness suspiciously. Three, when I finally slid out of my hammock and tiptoed out of the large room to the tight, wooden corridor beyond, a shadow fell over me and I stopped dead..

I lifted my head slowly, and locked eyes with the captain. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked, surly.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice like gravel.

“Taking a piss.” I cocked my chin out. “Unless you’d prefer I’d do it on the floor of this lovely, polished hallway.”

His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Three minutes. I’ll wait here for you to return.”

I gave him a strange look. “That’s weird. You’re being weird.”

“What I am,” he said, stepping closer, looming over me with menace and composure and scary calm, “is wary of a man who just killed one of my crew members and who is now sneaking around in the dead of night.”

Ah. Yeah, he had a point.

“For a piss,” I reminded him.

“You now have two and a half minutes.”

“Fuck,” I muttered and stalked past him, making for the wooden stairs at the end of the hallway. If I was going to be thwarted, I might as well empty my bladder.1

I hadjustenough time to rinse the cup and wash my hands before I made it back down to the crew’s quarters, where the captain waited.

His hand was in the pocket of his brown coat, his mouth thin. “You’re late.”

“You don’t even have a watch; how would you know?”

Everything in his face hardened at once—his eyes, his mouth, his jaw. “Get back in your hammock. If I see you again, I will shoot you on sight.”

My shoulder throbbed pointedly. I got back in my hammock.

Chapter Seven

HOOK

Someone would die for this. I speared a stern look across the chaos of the deck at Anton, and the quartermaster wisely busied himself ordering the crew to jump into action. But there would be no real action when someone had failed to check the ropes. As I ordered them to. Every. Single. Week.

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