eyes on her.
It burned just as she’d imagined it would. Her eyes felt like they were spinning in their sockets.
“Begging your pardon, Cap’n,” she heard someone say as she staggered a bit, still trying to collect herself. “But we’re back in our proper seas now, Cap’n. And on course for Never Land.”
“Thank you, but right now we have more serious things to clear up here,” Hook growled. He looked over the crew, into each and every man’s eyes. The muzzle of his gun followed closely.
“This is how you treat her?” he demanded, his voice carrying across the deck although he didn’t shout. “I bring you someone to be your mother, and this is how you treat her?”
“Oh,” Wendy said, apologies coming to her lips far too easily, the deadly niceties of social convention, the stupidity of being raised by the Darlings. Or maybe it was just the drink. “Most of them were gentlemen. They didn’t all treat me badly. It was just that one fellow and—I’m sorry, what?”
She blinked as his words caught up with her brain.
Captain Hook put his arm protectively around her shoulders, careful not to burn her with the cigars. He addressed the men with a tone of great disappointment.
“I bring you a lady and a gentlewoman to take care of all of you, and this is what you do?”
“We would never!” one pirate called out piteously.
“Valentine is a villain, everyone knowed it, he’s the worst!” another called out.
“We wuz nice to her! I gave her me own bowl for lunch!”
“She fixed my pants up real good—I’d never harm a hair on her head!”
“WELL, YOU ALMOST LET THIS HAPPEN!” Hook roared, firing his pistol in the air.
Wendy winced at the repetition of the loud sound, the ringing in her ears. But it didn’t stop her from speaking.
“Excuse me? I’m sorry, I don’t believe I quite understand what you’re saying,” she pressed. “I’m glad to have helped out here and there while aboard, but as someone just said—we’re not far from Never Land now. My journey aboard your lovely ship is nearly over. It will soon be time to disembark. I’m not here to be a mother to anyone. I’m here to have adventures.”
“And adventures you shall have,” Hook promised. “After we leave these cursed waters of Never Land, we shall travel the high seas, plundering and looting along the way, and you shall fix our pants, do our laundry, mend our wounds, and generally take care of us. And probably do a much better job than Mr. Smee.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort!” Wendy protested, almost stamping her foot. “We had a deal. I bought passage to Never Land for Peter’s shadow.”
“Yes. And here we are, almost arrived.” Captain Hook said this politely, but a nasty grin stretched across his face. He indicated the horizon with his gun: far off in the distance was indeed a pale bright line, a glowing golden beach. “That was what you bargained for—and that was all you bargained for.
“I never promised to put you ashore.”
The way to London was not unknown to fairies; it was just rarely used anymore. Smog was bad for wings and the new machines made for strange dreams in children; fewer and fewer were of the sunny meadows and hidden vales that once captured their imagination.
When Tink appeared in the sky above, it was as if a shy star had worked up the courage to appear among its brighter cousins. She glimmered golden and faint at first…and then brighter and nearer…but never any larger.
The sound she made as she descended, however, was not the music of the spheres or anything so celestial. It fell somewhere between angry hornet and angry percussionist shaking a rack of bells for the worst ever Christmas concert.
Below her all of London was gray and rolling and endless and eternally the same. If she squinted, the little fairy could almost pretend that, instead of houses, the streets were lined with the hives of meerrabbits. Maybe from the wrong side of the savanna, but friendly nonetheless.
The thing was…Tinker Bell never actually paid attention when Peter took her on these jaunts. She loved hearing about Peter’s babyhood; she loved revisiting his lost home. But she hated going to Ugly Wendy’s house. She had no idea how Peter had even found the girl and her stupid, snotty little brothers. Somehow the stories that Wendy told of his exploits ad nauseam had reached his pixie ears in a way that was just quintessentially Pan-ish.
It was near