37

"Hook!" Peter bellowed at the sparrows. They were a swarm of feathers, a chaos of bone and scale and claws and eyes. "Where is CAPTAIN HOOK?!"

The sagging, skeletonized birch tree they had gathered in was a cage to something Peter's size, the limbs stripped of their skin until only fibrous bones remained. Peter swatted at bits that tried to touch his face. Tiny wooden fingerbones broke off and sailed to the ground.

"You know where he is!" He accused. The sparrows were boiling, screeching back to each other in rapid fire babble as they shot through the dead tree's limbs like paper cannonballs.

"You HAVE to know where he is!" Peter shouted. "Sparrows always know!"

Something near his head warbled "Not here!" and disappeared again.

"Then where!" he asked.

"They were in the Heart!" One bird shouted.

Others were babbling over it. "Aborigine—" "—blood and dirt!—" "—murder!—"

"QUIET!" Peter exploded. The birch tree dropped into sudden, impossible silence as hundreds of tiny black eyes turned to stare at Peter Pan. The boy did not look like the heartless half-way child that pulled their feathers and brought fairies to swoon. His eyes looked deep and red and desperate, and his shoulders hunched with the sudden weight that only comes when ignorance is threatened.

Peter looked at them all, quiet.

"Where is Captain Hook?" he asked again.

One of the sparrows looked away from him. "He's in the caves." It said hesitantly.

"Which caves?"

"The deep caves." It said. "Under the mountains."

Peter blinked. "Why did he go there?"

"He was chasing the ghoul." The bird said. Peter's stomach gave an involuntary twitch.

"Is he still there?"

The sparrow hesitated.

"...Yes."

"Then I'll go there, too."

Peter had dropped from the corpse tree and made a line for the mountains before the little bird, who had been inside that cave for the Captain's final fury, could think of a safe way to confess that the Captain wouldn't exactly be in ship shape when he got there. It was all too aware of the phrase "To kill the messenger", and didn't want to be the one to bear bad tidings.

Though he supposed he'd be even worse off if Peter got to the cave and discovered that the bird hadn't told him the whole truth. Swearing to itself, the sparrow hopped off its branch and followed Peter towards the mountain caves.

There were a lot of things Mullins was willing to tolerate. He could stand participating in a witch's ceremony with crawling, snarling demon beasties all around him, he had gone up against an irate man with a sword who outweighed, outreached, and outclasses him, and he could swallow his moral righteousness as effectively as he could swallow his own foot. He would not, however, under any circumstances, eat those nauseating paper wrapped pastries the Old Witch was calling Pop Tarts.

If there was evil in anything in this house, it was those.

"I didn't poison them, you know." The Old Witch said, nudging the paper packet back across the table towards Mullins. Mullins was sitting on a collapsible wooden chair the Old Witch had pulled out of a hiding place beside the bed. There should have been no room for secret cabinets in this house, since the interior wall and the exterior wall were one in the same, but with everything he'd seen in his days he wasn't going to question a witch's architecture.

Mullins pushed the packet back towards her. "There's evil in 'em." He said firmly. "They can't have come from any natural place, not around here."

The Old Witch squinted at the paperboard box they'd come out of, covered in bright illustrations and printed letters. "You know something, I don't think they ARE from any natural thing. But they're still edible. And I'm not in a mood to cook, so if you're hungry as your growling stomach says you are just eat them!"

The flat biscuits looked like the failed results of Cookson's experiments. Nothing doing.

The Old Witch scowled and took one of the biscuits herself. "Honestly, you men." She said.

Mullins, momentarily devoid of an audience while the Old Witch slaughtered the Pop Tart (he'd never seen a women eat so messily) glanced over his shoulder to where Billy and Slightly were sleeping. Billy, having been deprived of sleep for a few days now, had crashed in the witch's bed again as soon as he'd been let be. The Old Witch had made Slightly leave off Jukes to help her sort her strangled starlings by sex and age, which had been a thoroughly mortifying experience for the boy. Mullins wasn't sure if it was a good thing or bad that Slightly was so completely innocent of what differences there were between a male and a female, though birds were not the best way to learn. Mullins didn't particularly care to have to correct any misconceptions he ended up with from that.

With the birds sorted and tied into separate bundles for rendering, Slightly had sat down at the foot of the bed to wait for Jukes to wake up and fallen prey to sleep himself, his head snapped back against the wall so his throat rattled. Mullins wasn't about to wake him up. It did, however, mean that he was stuck alone in the house with the Old Witch until she either kicked the lot of them out of the building or night fell and she needed use of the bed.

"They're cute, all things considered, aren't they?" he heard the Old Witch mutter around a mouthful of crumbs. Mullins scowled. 'Cute' was not a word to afflict boys with.

"Oh, don't give me that look." She said. "You'd think the same thing if you weren't a man."

"Thank God I am, then." He grumbled.

"Well I won't argue that point." She smirked. "But honestly, you never see a ghoul be friends with anyone but its own clansmen. It's cute that he's made friends with a human. They're such an eat-and-run family, most of the time."

Mullins gave her a look that shot daggers, and she just smiled.

"And I'm surprised you're protecting him." She said offhandedly. "He's everything you've ever been afraid of, Mr. Mullins. Monster, graveyard, mystery....maneater."

The sly intonation of the last word poked a very raw nerve in Mullins and he stood up with clenched fists, then hesitated, and wondered just what it was he planned to do to the woman. From here on out she controlled Jukes' fate and Slightly's future. He couldn't afford to strangle her. Mullins growled and sat back down, hard.

The Old Witch stuffed the rest of the Pop Tart in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully, watching Mullins with her black little eyes.

"You know, I've met a lot of desperate people in my life." She said evenly. "I've helped women who've come to me to have their children brought back from the dead. I've helped old men ensnare pretty young wives, and little children help their parents or kill their older siblings. Warlords have come to me to conquer the enemy army. There aren't many things I can't do, for a price."

Mullins was leveling her with a dark stare. She matched it, and did not pull away. There were times when the bright, cheery woman who seemed so appropriate in striped stockings faded off. Her eyes were becoming cool and flat, like scratched buttons.

"Well?" she asked.

Mullins didn't blink. "Well what?"

The Old Witch smiled, but it didn't touch her eyes. "What else would you like me to do for you, Mullins? Or perhaps, what would you like me to do for Jukes?" She spread her palms flat on the table. The tips of her fingernails were stained with pale blue ink. "I know you don't think he'll ever be happy. He's human now, but he's not normal, is he. He'll never have a wife, a family to continue on that legacy you lost to diphtheria all those years ago."

Mullins growled at her, but she smiled again. "How old would you son be, Robert Mullins, if he hadn't sickened and died? Twelve? Thirteen?"

"Shut your trap." He warned calmly, though sometimes a man is most dangerous when he's not shouting. The Old Witch put up her hands.

"I don't mean to upset you." she said. "I only know you're not happy with the way things are. He's not happy, either. Even with the charm in his chest he's still unnatural, not just because he dreams of blood. He knows he is wrong in his very soul, and he knows it is unforgivable, to God or to you, though the line between the two sometimes becomes blurred in his mind. He could not be normal even in that little way, not even for you. That's terrified him for as long as he's loved you."

"Be QUIET, woman."

She shrugged. "I'm telling you the truth, and you know it. He'll still never be normal, and he'll still be unhappy, even with the charm in his chest. And he'll always be wondering whether or not you were right, if what happened on the Walrus is to blame, in which case it is his own fault he turned out this way because what happened on the Walrus is his own fault. At least, as far as he can tell. You'll never be able to rid him of THAT feeling. But I can fix it, you know." She leaned on the table. "I can fix him. If he wasn't, as he so eloquently phrased it, a 'god damned queer', he might be normal a little bit, wouldn't he. He might be happy a little. And he might go on and have a wife and child, even if it's only with a redskin girl. Wouldn't that be good, Robert? Wouldn't that be lovely? He'd be joyous to find he's normal, at least in this one little respect."

Mullins stood up and paced to the hearth, the fire glowing placidly under the cauldron. "I don't care if he's normal." He said sharply, the lie heavy and obvious even to him. He braced his arms against the mantle to support the weight of it. If he said it enough times, it would be true. Mullins had been alarmed by his fickle mind. For that brief moment, he'd very nearly hated Billy, in that moment before his rational mind pitched in and he realized what he was thinking. And he wasn't sure he'd be able to forgive himself for that moment.

How foolish was it, really? He could forgive the boy for eating a man alive, but not for blushing when his friend got too close?

The Old Witch stood to replace the pastry box in the pantry. "The offer stands." She said. "All you'd have to do is say the word."

Mullins glared at the fire, the yellow slashes of light creeping higher as he silently cursed at them. It wasn't until he heard the Old Witch brightly chatter "Did you have a good nap, dear?" that he realized Slightly had stopped snoring quite some time ago. He glanced over his shoulder at the round eyed boy sitting on the foot of the bed. Billy, fortunately, was still asleep. He was almost afraid to ask how much of that Slightly had heard, but the boy saved him the trouble and asked "What's diphtheria?"

All of it, then. Mullins swore under his breath while the Old Witch brushed off her apron and smiled at them. No one answered Slightly's question.

--

Author's note: I do apologize for the long wait, to whatever few readers I have. This is the last of the revision chapters. After this, I will begin with new chapters (woo!). Please be patient, though; DK may be a little slow writing, as I've got all these evil, uncooperative subplots that need pulled back into the main plot and wrapped up. Endings are difficult for me. But I've spent too much time on this story to let it go unfinished. The fic must end! gets torches and pitchforks dieeee!

Ahem. ;;