Thoughts of my family flood my mind. Mikey’s panicked face as he dangled over the crocodile pit. My mother’s surprised expression after being held hostage, waiting for her children to be brought to the palace to save them. The night Joanna was taken from me, and the hurt in her eyes about broken pinkie promises to never grow up. And a final thought for my father, the clinking of his tags reminding me I will never see him again.
“I am not a little girl!” I scream. Lifting the sword over my head, I slam the blade down.
Hook’s guttural scream is drowned out by the crack of thunder and the pouring of rain. I watch as his right arm, the antidote still clenched in his severed hand, one finger adorned with the skull-and-crossbones ring, falls into the crocodile pit. The coppery smell of fresh blood hangs in the air as Captain Hook falls to his knees. He tries to stop the blood with his gloved hand, but to no avail. With his teeth he rips his glove off his remaining hand and holds his bleeding stump to his chest. He stares into the dark chasm as the crunch of bones and broken glass echoes from the pit. In the distance, Big Ben chimes for the first time in a year, its clang announcing midnight in Everland.
The world around me slows. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as the Lost Boys fight off the Marauders beneath a lightning-streaked sky. As the storm rages around me, I drop the sword, sending it clattering to the wet stone. When I lift my eyes, the leader of the Marauders is staring straight at me.
Hook turns his gaze to the sky, his square jaw clenching with a grimace. Pain etches the lines on his face, but I am certain it is from more than just his arm. Trembling in the heavy rain, he turns his dark, glassy gaze toward my sword and then locks eyes with me.
“I came to England to win her for my mother,” he shouts above the roar of the rain. “For once in my life, to prove to her I’m more than just a worthless child. And now …” He scans the smoky clouds and the flames licking toward the night sky.
Hook covers his grief-stricken face with his hand. It is then I see them, the oozing blisters covering his fingers and the blackened fingernails, and I feel as if I’ve been punched in the gut. Why didn’t I see it? Consider that he, too, could be vulnerable?
“You’ve contracted the virus,” I say, hearing the shock in my voice. “All this time … this whole time your soldiers wore the masks, but you … you didn’t.”
Hook grimaces, averting his gaze. “When I discovered what I had done, when I killed nearly everyone in London, it was too late. Even for me.”
Hesitantly, I kneel and place a hand on his shoulder. As if surprised by my touch, he flinches. He stares at me with the single frightened and wide eye of a boy, a Lost Boy. Acquiring the cure to rule the world may have been his goal, but it was never his primary agenda. He was after the cure because he needed it.
He hangs his head, anger twisting his features. “I couldn’t go back to Germany like this,” he says, holding up his infected hand. “I’ve destroyed England and possibly all of humankind. If I returned to my mother infected … she already sees me as a monster, but this …” He stares at his stump. “Now I can never go back.”
The rain washes away my disdain for this boy, sympathy replacing it in the hollows of my heart. My soul shattered when I lost my mother, but I found her, was reunited into her loving arms. Hook, on the other hand, has never known nor will ever know a mother’s love.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, the words catching in my throat as I hold back my tears.
He smiles weakly and crumbles to the ground. “What have I done?” he whispers.
Despite my reluctance and weak stomach, I force myself to look at his stump. I have never purposely hurt another, not until tonight. “What have we done?” I whisper.
An explosion in the distance rocks the ground beneath us, drawing my attention to the wall of fire surrounding us. My pulse races and I search for an escape. Pete’s face appears in my vision and he is shouting, but his voice is lost. He places a hand on each of my arms and shakes me. “Let’s go!” he yells.
“We can’t leave him here,” I shout, gesturing toward Hook, who has curled into a ball around his ruined arm.
Pete glances at the wounded soldier. Hook stares back, unblinking, unmoving. Defeated.
“Come on, Gwen,” Pete says, tugging my arm.
I shake my head, my wet hair clinging to my face. “He’ll die if we leave him.”
“We have to go. Your family is waiting,” he says, wrapping an arm around me. He leads me away, but I don’t take my eyes off the wounded boy.