Devourer of Men: A Captain Hook, Crocodile, and Wendy Darling Reimagining

There is only cold and darkness.

And everywhere I look, there is nothing but more of it.

Slowly it closes in, threatening to swallow me whole.

Then I’m sobbing and shivering as I’m escorted to the gallows where a rope is tied around my neck.

They pull the lever. The trapdoor drops. I’m weightless for one second and then the rope snaps.

I lurch awake covered in a cold sweat.

I don’t recognize my surroundings but at least I’m not in the prison cell.

“What was the dream?”

Roc’s voice finds me from the shadows. The drapes are closed, the lights turned down. An oil lantern flickers on the dresser casting deep shadows over his silhouette.

I pull myself against the headboard and kick off the sheet. I’m in my nightgown, but it’s twisted around my legs and damp around my chest.

The discomfort of being sticky, exhausted, and disoriented is something I’m used to by now, but I still hate it.

“What was the dream?” Roc asks again.

I scrub at my face. “The usual stuff.”

He sits forward, elbows on his knees, and the light catches him, washing him in sharp gold.

The effect of him emerging from the shadows, all of his pale and dark beauty, startles me and a hard breath zings down my throat.

When I was on Neverland, I would have done anything for his attention. I was obsessed with him. I had never met anyone like him. At times, he is so casual, so easygoing, that it’s easy to drop your guard, forgetting that beneath the charm and good looks, he is an immortal monster who has killed more men than one can count.

Something has changed in him though. It’s not that his edges have softened. Or that his power has diminished. If anything I think it’s grown.

I think the difference in him has everything to do with James Hook.

“What is the ‘usual stuff’?” he asks, and it takes me a minute to recall that we were talking about my nightmares.

I sigh. “Oh you know. Kidnappings. Prison. Hanging from a noose and the inevitable loneliness that comes when even Death forsakes you.” I glance at him, hoping I’ve shocked him. But of course not. Can anything shock the Devourer of Men? He has heard and seen it all.

He gets up and crosses the room. He stops at the end of the bed and leans a shoulder against the far post, arms crossed over his chest. He’s dressed himself, thank god. I don’t think I could have a lucid conversation with him right now if he was shirtless, or worse, naked. “When did you first notice you couldn’t be killed?”

I shrug. “It’s not like one is faced with certain death on a regular basis.”

“Speak for yourself,” he says.

“Okay, well maybe you are. The first time I realized something was different about me was when I was sentenced to death and hung for treason. That was nearly a year after Pan left me here.”

“And before then? Did you mysteriously avoid all illness? Did you heal quickly?”

I think over my childhood. “No, nothing like that. I nearly died from influenza when I was nine. I broke my wrist when I was twelve jumping over rocks in a nearby creek. My arm was in a cast for weeks and weeks.”

“Did anything odd happen to you on Neverland? Or while in prison? Did anyone cut you? Did they give you a gift? Did you ever wake up having no recollection of how you got there?”

I frown at him. “No, why? What are you getting at?”

His gaze goes far away. “Well, I have a theory.”

I sit up straighter. “About me?”

“Yes. And your abilities.”

I wrap my arms around my knees. “What is it?”

He smiles at me, delighted to be asked, because there is nothing Roc loves more than unraveling secrets. “Well, I suspect that⁠—”

The sound of clanging bells cuts him off, chiming through the castle and the surrounding grounds. A loud, discordant sound that sends a chill down my spine.

“Oh no.” I climb up to my knees, them shimmy off the bed. “No. No. No.”

Roc is at the window in an instant, yanking open the drapes. “No one is storming the castle. Which leaves—” He glances at me over his shoulder. I’m standing frozen in the center of the room. I’ve gone completely cold.

“The king is dead,” I breathe out.