Christina Henry - Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook

S ometimes I dreamed of blood. The blood on my hands and the empty eyes in a white-and-grey face. It wasnt my blood, or blood Id spilledthough there was plenty of that to go around. It was her blood, and I didnt know who she was.

Her eyes were dead and blue and her hands were thrown out, like she was reaching for someone, like she was reaching for me before that great slash was put in her throat. I didnt know why. I didnt even rightly know whether it was a dream, or something that happened in the Other Place, before I went away with Peter.

If that girl was real it must have happened there, because there were no girls on the island except the mermaids, and they didnt really count, being half fish.

Still, every night I dreamed of flashing silver and flowing red, and sometimes it startled me out of sleep and sometimes it didnt. That night I had the dream same as usual, but something else woke me.

Id heard a sound, a sound that was maybe a cry or moan or a bird squawking out in the night of the forest. It was hard to tell when you heard something while you were sleeping. It was like the noise came from a far-off mountain.

I wasnt sorry to leave the dream. No matter how many times Peter told me to forget it, my mind returned over and over again to the same place: to the place where she was dead and her eyes asked something of me, though I didnt know what that something might be.

I came awake all at once the way I usually did, for if you dont sleep light in the forest you might open your eyes to find something sharp-jawed biting your legs off. Our tree was hidden and protected, but that didnt mean there wasnt danger. There was always danger on the island.

The piles of sleeping boys huddled under their animal skins on the dirt floor. Light filtered in from the moon through the holes wed cut like windows in the tree hollowme and Peter had done it, long ago. Outside there was a steady buzz, the hum of the Many-Eyed in the plains carrying across the forest.

Its just Charlie, Peter said dismissively from above.

He was curved into one of the holes, his body loose-limbed and careless, looking out over the forest. In his hands he held a small knife and a piece of wood that he was whittling. The blade flashed in the moonlight, dancing over the surface of the wood. His skin was all silver in that light and his eyes deep pools of shadow, and he seemed to be part of the tree and the moon and the wind that whispered through the tall grass outside.