My arm is throbbing.
My throat is dry.
I can’t fucking sleep.
Back and forth across my office. Again and again and again.
The Crocodile is on Neverland soil.
Every possession within my office has been lined up precisely, every shelf dusted and gleaming. There is nothing else to distract me.
I’m going to kill him.
Just as soon as I figure out how.
“Jas,” Smee says. “Why don’t you try lying down?”
“Lie down?” I turn to face her. “Lie down, Smee?!”
She sighs and pushes a boot off the wall to propel herself forward. She plucks a decanter from the bottle collection on the cart and then fills a glass with scotch.
“Drink,” she orders.
“How are you so fucking calm?”
Nothing rattles Smee.
I envy her unflappable disposition. I particularly envy her unflappable disposition when I feel so fucking flapped.
“Worrying will get you nowhere,” she tells me.
“I’m not worried!”
She cants her head and a thick loc slides over her shoulder. “What would you call it?”
I upend the glass. I’m already three in. I can’t be drunk when the Crocodile is on the island. But three glasses have barely touched the knot between my shoulder blades or the constant churning in my gut.
I’m going to kill him.
Strategize a plan and then find him and then kill him.
“Jas,” Smee says again.
“What?”
“He’s not here for you.”
“But he’ll make a pit stop, I’m sure of it.” I start pacing again. “Just to terrorize me. Remind me I touched what was his. As if he owned her.”
Smee returns to the open balcony door and leans against the frame, hands in her pockets.
“You did kidnap Wendy Darling,” she reminds me.
“Smee!”
She lifts a shoulder.
I grumble and turn away. “You’re not here to point out my dubious past.”
“Am I not?” She laughs. “I must have misunderstood my job duties.”
I reach the far end of the room and stop.
Hearing Wendy’s name conjures an image of her in my head.
When I look back on the memories, I am never quite sure if I remember them right, because sometimes I get the distinct feeling Wendy Darling played me.
Maybe she played the Crocodile too.
Maybe pitting us all against one another was always her plan.
I’ll never know.
Because Peter Pan took her back to her world and though I have no idea how many years have passed in the mortal realm, I’m quite sure it’s too many to live by.
She’s dead now.
The memories need to die with her.
A flare of pain races from the end of my arm clear up to my bicep.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there was a storm coming.
“How do we kill him, Smee?” I ask over my shoulder. She’s the magical expert, the traveler of the Isles.
“The hard part will be getting close enough to him and—”
Something pounds on the front door.
Smee and I look at one another. “You expecting anyone?” I ask her and she shakes her head.
I leave my office and follow the hall to the foyer. I have the pirates scouting the hills and several more near the bay. You can never be sure which way a Crocodile might come.
The pounding gets more desperate.
“I’m coming!”
I pull the door open and a body spills inside and slumps to the floor with a loud thud.
Blood splatters over my freshly polished boots and then pools on the hardwood.
“For Christ’s sake!”
The man rolls to his back and my indignation dries up.
If it’s possible for all of the blood to leave a man without a single cut, I suspect it’s happened just now.
I can’t feel my legs.
There is a needling across my shoulder blades, like a thousand pinpricks all at once.
I pull my pistol with a shaky hand.
The Crocodile looks up at me from the floor of my fucking foyer.
“Captain,” he says with a devilish smirk, despite the fact he looks to be on Death’s door. There’s shredded white fabric wrapped several times around his throat, but it’s mostly soaked in blood. More blood has covered the front of him and has run down his arms, coating his fingertips.
“The fuck are you doing here?”
He laughs but it dissolves into a cough and he struggles to his knees, sucking in air.
I cast a glance at Smee. Both her pistols are trained on him. She’s never been trigger happy, but I know she won’t hesitate to pull.
“Funny you should ask,” the Crocodile says and then collapses to the floor again as his eyes roll back in his head.
I kick him. He snaps to.
“What. Are. You. Doing. Here?”
“Would you believe me…if…I said…I missed you?”
I stomp him in the fucking dick.
All of the air rushes out of him and he rolls into a fetal position and laughs and chokes and coughs and laughs.
“Alright,” he wheezes out after several long minutes. “Nowhere…else…to go.”
“Surely you have a ship—”
“Peter Pan and his Darling…just killed half the Remaldi royal family.” He rolls to his back again and blinks up at the wrought iron chandelier. “Tried to kill me. But Holt is going to think I set him up.” Another coughing fit takes over and he loses consciousness.
“What do you think?” I ask Smee.
She uncocks the hammers on her twin pistols and returns them to her holster. “Shoot him.”
I retrain the pistol on his head. He’s so close.
I’ve dreamed about this moment for ages.
He is a spider I lost sight of, a beast who slipped through the cracks.
I’ve been waiting for the moment he popped back up so I could squash him beneath the heel of my boot.
He’s practically dead already.
But if I put a bullet between his eyes right now, he will never know who bested him.
Killing a man when he’s already down? Poor form indeed.
“Jas?” Smee says.
I can barely hear her over the loud thumping of my heart.
My hand is shaking and my residual limb is a phantom ache at my side. I bring the hook up and watch it gleam in the light.
The anger returns.
Anger at what he did and what he had no right to take.
I can’t kill him.
I can’t let him get away with it so easily.
“Get him up.” I return the pistol to my hip.
Smee gives me a look.
“We might need him,” I tell her.
“Doubtful.”
“I know what I’m doing! I’m no amateur, Smee.”
“Then stop acting like one,” she says.
“Fine. I’ll get him up.” I go around to his head and look down at him.
Some odd feeling comes across my chest. It’s the same feeling I get when I spot land from the bow of my ship.
Excitement.
Excitement to murder him, no doubt.
I hook him beneath the arms and drag him back leaving a trail of blood.
Smee follows and watches me struggle with his weight. He’s all solid muscle, corded with it from shoulder to bicep to forearms. Thick veins run over his tattooed hands.
I imagine what he must look like shirtless and immediately regret the thought.
Shirtless with my blade protruding from his ribs.
That’s more like it.
I drag him to one of the spare rooms at the end of the hall and kick the door in. There’s a single bed shoved into the corner, a desk and a dresser. When I built this house, I included several spare rooms despite having no plans for guests.
The room smells stale and dust swirls in the faint ray of moonlight.
Smee lets me struggle with him a little more before she finally grabs him by the legs and helps me hoist him into the bed. The mattress dips, the springs creak.
The Crocodile is in my home, in my bed.
I swallow bile and my eye starts twitching.
“Now what?” Smee asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“We really tending to him?”
Why did he come here?
Why to me of all people? Is this another game? Arrive on my doorstep pretending to be injured so he can slither into the shadows and ambush me when I least expect it?
The Crocodile may be ruthless, but he has no qualms about being brutal in the daylight.
No, I think if he wanted to kill me, he would do it out in the open.
“Find out how badly he’s injured,” I tell Smee.
“And if it’s fixable?”
I lick my lips, my mouth dry. “We should keep him alive.”
She wraps a hand around her hip and tilts her head, watching me with that deep wariness that only Smee can get away with. “I don’t like this, Jas.”
I stagger back into the wall and slouch against it, sighing loudly. “To be frank, Smee, I don’t either.”
She nods at me and then gets to work.
