Wendy lifts her muffler, covering half her face and leaving only her eyes visible. Beneath her coat, her skin prickles, first hot, then cold, a sense of unease dogging her heels as sure as the December wind. She had no intention of coming into the city today. There’s more than enough to do getting the house ready with Jane coming home for the holidays, her brother Michael coming for Christmas, and her other brother John and his wife and daughter coming for New Year’s Day. But something is wrong. There is something here that doesn’t belong.
Wendy had felt it all at once last night, sitting in the parlor before the fire and putting the finishing touches on a skirt she’d sewed to give Jane for Christmas. It was as though a door had opened somewhere far off, and at the same time very close by, and something cold and dark had come rushing through. She’d stood up so suddenly that the fabric had spilled from her lap, the thread unwinding all the way across the floor so that the spool had nearly ended up in the fire.
Neverland.
The name had risen to her tongue, but she’d clamped it tight behind her teeth, refusing to speak it out loud. Still, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from rushing to the window, peering out, looking for a subtle shift in the stars. The night had been brutally cold, brutally clear—no clouds to block the moon or her view of the sky. The only thing she’d seen was the dark, speckled in silver light, nothing amiss, nothing out of place.
No door opening in the sky. No boy who wasn’t a boy come to take her hand and ask her to fly away. Her heart had surged, a complicated mix of hope and fear, and then come crashing down again as she’d stood at the glass, her breath fogging against it, looking and hoping and seeing nothing.
Neverland had given her so much as a child. And it had taken more than she’d realized. Eight years ago, it had taken her daughter, and Wendy had stolen her back, bringing Neverland crashing down around them as they’d escaped home again.
So why had it felt as though the way between worlds had opened again, however briefly? She’d tried to convince herself that it must have been her imagination, she couldn’t have felt what she’d thought she’d felt. But after reclaiming the fallen skirt and trying to resume her work, she’d found herself unable to sew, her fingers grown clumsy, almost shaking. She’d been unable to concentrate, and later that night, unable to sleep. She’d paced her room half the night, and almost the second it was decently light—despite the storm growing across the sky—she’d taken herself to the station and bought a train ticket into London.
The sense is even stronger now as she dodges last-minute shoppers and puddles of slush. Between the thick-falling snow, the air feels rife with ghosts. Something she can almost see, almost feel, something out of place. If she could only find it.
And then—there. It’s as though someone has tugged on a rope tied to her spine. Wendy stops in her tracks like a stone planted in the midst of a river, drawing angry murmurs from the crowd forced to part and flow around her. She ignores them, twisting around to look behind her. But there’s only a sea of faces, indistinct in the gray and wrapped against the cold. There’s nothing to make her feel once again as though a door opened, as though someone on the far side of it called her name.
Perhaps she’s being foolish. Her life has been quiet of late, content and cozy in a way she’d never imagined it could be. At times, though, it feels too quiet, almost stifling. There are times when the urge takes her to simply get on a train without a true destination in mind, or get on a boat and sail as far as she can. As a young girl, she never imagined life as a married woman, as a mother, living in one place and never going off on grand adventures. Last night had she simply let boredom get the better of her, wishing for something, a mystery or an adventure—even a terrible one—to come sweep her away again?
Guilt comes with the thought and Wendy plunges back into the crowd, lowering her head. She’s barely taken two steps when the tug comes again, sharper this time. At almost the same moment, a hand touches her shoulder. Wendy lets out a startled yelp, muffled by the wool across her mouth. She spins, instinct raising her hand to strike whoever has ahold of her. The man ducks, raising an arm against her blow and Wendy catches herself. Stunned, she lets her hand drop, staring.
The hand raised to ward off her blow is made of wood, a warm red-brown that strikes to the heart of her, and she knows instinctively that it doesn’t belong to this world. Elaborate patterns like curls of smoke flow across its surface—silver gleaming dully despite the gray sky. Where the wooden finger joints bend slightly, delicate rods and pins are just barely visible, so finely crafted that for a moment she almost expects them to move on their own. Tiny pellets of ice land on the man’s coat and in his white-gray hair that sticks up from his scalp like shorn wheat stubble.
Despite the weather, he’s bare-headed. Actual stubble roughens his chin and cheeks, and his eyes are like no color Wendy has ever seen before. Except they are. Impossibly, she knows them. She recognizes them and recognizes this man. His eyes are slate and storm and looking at them, Wendy feels a deck canting beneath her. Breath catches in her throat and her heart forgets to beat.
There are no oiled curls, no waxed mustache, and the coat the man wears is navy wool, not blood-red velvet. He is shorter than she remembers, but she was only a child when he held her prisoner at the point of a sword, tied her up to the mast of his ship along with her brothers and waited for Peter Pan to come save her. It cannot be, and yet there is not a single shred of doubt in Wendy’s mind.
“Hook.” She breathes the name, as if it could solidify him in her reality, or banish him. Wendy isn’t certain which she means to do.
“James.” It comes as an automatic response, a barely conscious correction he’s had to make too many times.
He grips a cane, letting it take his weight, and a faint tremor passes through him. Instinct makes Wendy reach to steady him, but she stops just short of touching him. She sees it the moment something shifts in his storm-colored eyes, the recognition that comes into them, and the surprise that isn’t as great as it should be.
“And you are… Wendy Darling.”
She offers no correction to her own name, merely staring at him. The air around them feels electric and magnetic all at once. Wendy imagines London as a map, folded against itself to bring the two points of their lives together at this precise moment in time. But how can Captain Hook be here? Is that what she felt last night, sitting before the fire, the sense of wrongness, the sense of something slipped into this world that doesn’t belong? Or is there something more?
“How…” Too many questions crowd her tongue, leaving her unable to form even one of them.
How did he know her? How is he here and still alive? How did he leave Neverland? How, how, how is he standing before her now in thickening snow?
Hook straightens. Another tremor passes through him, a pained expression following in its wake. Wendy thinks of Michael, her brother, and the way his leg has ached in the cold ever since he returned from the war.
“We…” Her voice falters. What can she say to this man—Peter’s immortal enemy, a pirate captain out of a fairy tale? Laughter threatens her, born of a wild jangling of nerves. He cannot be here. The first time she was in Neverland, she watched him die.
“Miss Darling?”
“Yes?” It isn’t her name anymore, but it is. Despite her marriage, she has always been, will always be, Wendy Darling.
“I feel as though we were intended to meet.” A cough shakes him, and Wendy thinks how frail he looks—gray all the way through, not just his eyes and his hair. “I—”
Before he can say more, it’s as though the world drops away from beneath her. Nothing changes, not perceptibly, and yet Wendy feels a terrible shadow hanging over them, worse than the feeling she had by the fire last night. Worse than anything since the night…
Fear goes to the heart of her, piercing like an arrow.
“Jane.” Her daughter needs her.
The sense in unshakable, a mother’s terrible instinct. Wendy turns, slipping on the icy streets and not caring that she does. Leaving Hook staring behind her, she runs.