The Second Star

A creak and a shuffle. He's finally come.

It's been over a year since the last time we've met but fury from the last encounter still burns inside, almost forcing me to abandon all plans and just attack. But I must be calm to finally end this one and for all. 

It's been centuries and centuries of us fleeing and fighting but nevertheless we are again.

In the mirror, I could see my eyepatch and the glint of light shining off my right hook. Damn crocodile. 

As Pan inches closer and closer, I could spot his bag he hides under his arms. After all the centuries, the stupid humans still got the story twisted. Pan isn't some savior who comes saves young children but an evil thief who steals the souls of children to quench his ever thirsty need of staying young. 

Ever since I first witnessed him feasting on a children orphanage hundreds of years ago, my crew and I made it our personal mission to stop this bastard at every attempt but have a running tally of constantly failing. 

Smee, my second in command, is across me crouched behind a couch. We both give each other a nod before exploding out of our hiding spots to grab Pan. 

Though we took him by surprise, he's nimble and dodges every grab at him. The child whose room we were fighting in groaned as I accidentally tapped his leg during the scramble. He tossed and turned but didn't wake.

"Ah, it's been quite a while, Hook." Pan gave me a crazy smile. His eyes were red and frantic and his hair was all disheveled while his clothes were moth-eaten and rotting. 

"Pan. I have to admit, it's getting harder to track you. But I have a foot above you today. You can't take his soul. Over my dead body." I glared at him. His necklace filled with souls started shaking and screaming. 

"Gladly." His crazed face instantly turned violent as he whipped out a secret knife and dove at me. I had to use all my strength to keep his knife above me as he pressed his entire weight on top of me.

"To die will be an awfully big adventure, don't ya think? Try it and tell me about it." His eyes went wider and more red as he gave a crazy laugh.

"Pan, you don't know the first thing about adventure. All you do is feed on young souls to live forever. But unfortunately for you, nothing lasts forever and everything has a weakness." I gave him a quick grin right before Smee yanked his head back with his own bag he dropped. His carelessness is going to be the end of him, for good. Smee covered and tied the bag down and gave me a hand.

Pan's necklace was so loud it was trembling as the unified voices of the souls he stole begged to be released. Some were probably older than I am. 

As Smee secured the bag with a nail to the floorboards, I took off my hat and shook a hand through my long hair. Another thing the stupid mortals got wrong was that I, was a woman. Captain Jamey Hook at your service.

I took his knife from his scrambling hands and tucked it in-between the fabrics of my breasts and kneeled down at him. 

"My entire crew is here. Do you really believe that you can escape with us all here?" I said with a smirk. I should really learn not to say such jinx statements. 

A second after my taunt, a bullet-like thing hits me right in the cheek, toppling me backwards. Ugh. It's his little demon pixie. 

With its razor-sharp teeth and beady black eyes, Tinker, as he calls it, hissed at me and bounced all around the room, demolishing everything it touched. It was the size of my finger but had the power of a cannon, so it was safer to get down and out of its way.

While Smee and I were occupied trying not to die, Pan ripped through the fabric and pounced out the window. I groaned and grabbed a jar off the child's table and miraculously scooped the pixie out of the air. I trapped it with a heavy textbook on the desk and leapt out the window.

It was a five-story drop but didn't do much damage other than make the immortal bones in my ankle grind in protest. I saw the rest of my crew on the roof of the building running across from the corner of my eye. 

Though it was midnight, I could still see the dark figure of Pan hopping around like an excited little boy, snapping to some song he could only hear. 

I weaved through a box of produce and hid in an alley, carefully watching as he slowed suspiciously to a stop. He was in the middle of an open market but the quiet emptiness and the mist from the ocean made it eerie and uncanny. 

His head slowly twisted backwards as he heard the rampage my crew made as they ran from the rooftops. He suddenly started tipping his head from side to side rhythmically. Then I heard it. I froze as I heard the very faint tic-toking of a clock that could only mean the arrival of one thing. The mad crocodile that's been chasing me as long as I've been chasing Peter Pan.

I swallowed my curse down and slowly looked around for an upper ground advantage. Even despite my fear, there was no way I was going to let Pan go. 

Cold sweat started breaking out everywhere on my body as the sound got progressively louder, along with Pan's maniacal laughter. I slipped the knife from my chest and took a deep breath. I wasn't good or trained with long distance but I could sure as hell try. 

I spied a ladder to my left and went up a level before leveling my arm. My hook started shaking despite myself and I took aim. He wasn't far but because of the mist, I started to second-guess myself. 

The moment right before I was going to strike, he whipped his head directly back at me. I stumbled a bit in shock and took longer than I'd like to admit to recover. Now he was running at me with every step demanding my death. 

He shook the ladder until it was creaking and shuddering apart. I hooked my hand to the ladder above me last minute and watched as the entire platform I was standing on crumble like morning biscuits. Even when I was fifteen, maybe twenty feet above him, his smiled at my dangling form as if he finally caught me.

It took all of my mental strength to calm myself down and lift the knife back up to aim. 

Fear. For the first time in my life, I saw a sliver of fear slip into his eyes as he saw the perfect opportunity for me to kill him. I didn't even have to aim. 

I hurled the knife at him, and curse his agility, hit him in the leg. I dropped to the floor, and watched as he tried to scramble away even while clutching his leg. I ran and pinned his other leg to the cobblestone. He started squirming and gasping like a fish out of water but I glared him down. 

"All children, except one, grow up. Time to say goodbye and face the consequences." I fished out another dagger from my boot.

"Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.” He whined.

"Goodbye, Peter Pan." The dagger flew from my hand.

I took the locket necklace he had around his neck for centuries and opened it. Thousands of souls whisked up into the sky like shooting stars, all singing in joy as they flowed up.

I could hear my crew, still on the roof, gasp in awe as they watched them shower the sky. I huffed a laugh as Smee was gasping for breath as he ran down the road with the trapped demon pixie in his hands. 

"So...fast... took... stairs.." He gasped. 

The ground shook as the crew from the roof finally made their decent. 

"Where to next, Captain?" Smee asked once we got onboard the Jolly Roger.

I smirked. 

"To the Second Star to the right and straight on ’til morning. Just like always."

 Fate seemed to smile through the sunrise.