Unhooked (36 page)

Rowan's room is silent except for the rhythmic beep of the monitors and the soft shushing whir of his oxygen. He seems shrunken in the narrow bed. Without his ship around him, he looks incredibly ordinary and incredibly young. “When will he wake up?”

“He's been through a lot,” my mom tells me. “You can't expect too much too soon.”

For once I'm thankful to have the mother I do. I'm glad I didn't have to worry about thinking up a lie to explain him or what he is to me now. That will come later, with everyone else. “Would you give me a minute with him?”

I can tell she wants to argue, but she doesn't. Instead, she gives me a kiss on the forehead and tells me I have five minutes.

His breathing is shallow but steady, and I notice he looks better than when he was unconscious in the snow. He isn't exactly well, but he no longer has the bluish tinge to his skin that had me pulling myself out of my own despair and screaming for help.

I reach out and take his hand in mine, stroking the back of it as I watch him sleep amid the blinking monitors and maze of tubes. After a few minutes I start to pull away, but his grip tightens and his eyes flutter open.

“Gwendolyn?”

I lean in closer so he can see me. “How are you feeling?”

“Where am I?”

I'm not sure what to say, but a second later, he notices the fluorescent lights and the strange machines, and I don't have to explain. His gaze darts wildly about the room, trying to take everything in as he struggles to sit up.

“
Shhh
, you have to settle down before the nurse comes.” I place my hands on his shoulders and try to steady him in the bed.

His eyes are still wild with panic. “Why?” he asks in a shaky voice, and I know he isn't asking about the nurse.

“You were dying, and you were the last person I could save.”

He stops struggling then and slumps back against the pillow, looking away from me. “Better to have let me die.”

“Don't”—I cup his face with my hands and force him to face me—“don't you
dare
say that. Not after all we've been through.”

“I told you, lass—”

“I couldn't leave you,” I cut in. “I couldn't leave you to die there. It wouldn't have helped anyone.” Then I explain what happened—how the Queen was killed, how Pan died, how Neverland had started to fall apart.

He hesitates. “Olivia?”

“She saved me. Or maybe she just did it to avenge Pan, but we wouldn't be here without her. I couldn't save her, though.” I shake my head, unsuccessful in my attempt to will away the image of my friend cracked like porcelain doll, her eyes glassy and far away.

He pulls my hand away from his face and places a kiss on the center of my palm before he intertwines my fingers. “I'm not part of this world anymore, Gwendolyn.”

“You are now.”

“I don't belong here. . . .” he protests, his eyes still warily taking in the blinking lights and plastic tubes that surround him.

“You survived in Neverland,” I say with a teary sniff. “The twenty-first century is going to be easy.”

His mouth flattens into an unhappy line, but he doesn't argue. Or agree.

“We'll figure it out. Together,” I promise.

His brow creases, but he doesn't argue. “My arm?” he doesn't look at the empty spot under the covers where his arm should have been.

“I don't know.”

My mom peeks into the room at that moment. “It's time.”

“Do you know what they did with his arm?” I ask her.

He eyes glance between us, appraising our closeness. “I'm not sure.”

“We'll find it,” I assure him. “And then we'll figure out everything else.”

“You need to let him rest,” my mom says. I think she can sense how badly I want to kiss him. If she thinks her presence will be a deterrent, she's wrong. After all we've been through and all I lost, I refuse to wait another moment.

I lean forward and press my lips gently to his. It's not more than a peck, and he doesn't return it.

“Sleep well,” I tell him, backing away. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

I don't need to look at my mom to sense her questions, just like I don't need to look back at Rowan to feel the intensity of his gaze following me out.

•  •  •

It takes a couple of weeks, but we eventually get Rowan out of the hospital. Thanks to the documents our landlord arranged, he becomes a new person—at least on paper. Behind those dark eyes, though, he's the same as ever. Still, there are moments I can't help but worry he's left part of himself behind. That he'll never really forgive me for bringing him back.

For weeks he's mostly silent, watching his new world with wary eyes. I don't blame him one bit. When I finally came to, I'd hoped that I had only lost days, maybe weeks. But I later discovered I'd lost more than a year to Neverland. There were moments in those first days when I was almost as unsettled by the subtle changes to my world as Rowan must have felt. I had a new president, but whole countries had changed and rearranged themselves in the time he was gone, including his own.

As we waited for Rowan to be released from the hospital, I read through the papers my mom and the landlord kept that documented our ordeal. It took less than four days for our kidnapping to go from the front page to the inside of the paper. After a few weeks, we were rarely mentioned at all. To everyone but the few who were close to her, Olivia had already been forgotten.

But I hadn't forgotten, and neither had Olivia's parents.

I once thought the Fey were cruel with their lives built from nothing more than wanting, but after I returned to my own world, I came to understand they're not alone. By our very nature, humans are heartless things. The Fey, at least can be excused—their world, after all, wasn't made from memory. We humans, however, select the memories that suit us to remember and forget the rest—the wars, the tragedies, the lost. Neverland might have helped with the forgetting, but it didn't create it. That we do well enough on our own.

But in the moments that followed, the boy felt himself alive. No longer did he feel as though he were in a waking dream. He began to collect the pieces of his fragile heart, and though some would always be missing, there were enough of who he once was to fight . . . to go on.

I
T'S A BLUSTERY WINTER DAY when we brave the drifting snow of a French cemetery. We find Rowan's brother deep within a field of crosses as white as the snow that drifts around them, and at the sight of Michael's name, Rowan crumples to his knees.

I follow him down more slowly, no longer feeling the blistering wind that bites at my cheeks, or the damp cold that creeps up my legs. I'm not sure he even knows I'm here.

He's been practically silent for weeks, and he's silent now as he stares at the barren stone, his face creased with regret and pain, his shoulders rising and falling with the effort not to cry out. His arm—the one that had once been so alive with Fey enchantment in Neverland—hangs stiff and heavy at his side.

We tried to talk him into wearing a different prosthetic, one that's lighter and more useful, but he wouldn't listen. Once we returned it to him, he refused anything but the heavy piece of dead metal that had been his constant companion for so long. It seems so unfair—with all he'd already lost—for him to lose the magic of that as well. I catch him looking down at the lifeless fist occasionally, but I never know what to do for him. Just as I don't know what to do as we kneel before Michael's grave.

But I want some closure or relief for him—some small thing that will help him knit himself back together and feel whole again. I want it so badly that my chest aches with it.

As we kneel there—he near tears and I wanting so much to help—neither of us notices at first what is happening. It's only when one of his tears finally does break free and he reaches up to wipe it away with what should have been lifeless metal that we know anything has changed.

He looks at me, the wonder in his eyes pushing aside a bit of the grief.

“Did you . . . ?” he asks, his voice barely a whisper.

I lick my chapped lips and watch him open and close the metal fist. “I think I did.”

He blinks, raising his arm and testing it, opening and closing the delicately wrought fingers one at a time. “Well, then.” He looks over at me, the ghost of a grin twitching at the corners of his mouth, the bleakness in his eyes lifting just a bit.

He laces the fingers of his mechanical hand with mine, and then—his eyes never leaving mine—he raises both to place a gentle kiss on the inside of my wrist. I let him pull me to my feet then, and with the snow swirling around us and our fingers still intertwined, we start back to the warmth of the waiting car.

That's when I think that, someday, it might just be okay. Here on the snow-swept field that holds the bodies of so many forgotten lives—a field that might have held his just as easily—I know he'll heal. I believe I'll find a way to forgive. And together we'll remember the lost.

This story has been through a lot since it started back in 2011 as a NaNoWriMo project, so I have more than a few people to thank for it finally making its way into the world:

First and foremost, my heartfelt thanks to my agent, Kathleen Rushall. She loved this story from the beginning and has been its constant champion. I can't imagine having a better partner in this crazy business, and I'm grateful every day that she's in my corner.

My brilliant editor, Sara Sargent—thank you for loving this story enough to make it into a book. I've learned so much working with you, and this story is so much better for it. And many thanks to the entire team at Simon Pulse who got behind this book and made it everything that it is.

Along the way, many people read and gave comments on various versions of this book: Amanda Kin, Stephanie Foote, Hope Cook, and Danielle Ellison. Thank you for your keen insights and thoughtful critiques.

Thanks to all the writers that I've come to count as friends, and who have made this journey a little less lonely: Christina June, Olivia Hinebaugh, Helene Dunbar, Kristen Lippert-Martin, Joy Hensley, Jenny Adams Perinovic, Rachael Allen, Vivi Barnes, and the amazing writers who debuted with me as the Fall Fourteeners.

And I have to thank one writer in particular—Jennifer Echols was one of the first YA writers I met back in 2010 when I decided to try writing a book. At my first meeting of Birmingham's chapter of RWA, she went out of her way to make me feel like I belonged there and to encourage me to keep going in the face of rejection. Four years later, she was assigned a new editor—one who had a pirate book on her wish list—and Jennifer remembered that I'd been writing this one. It's because of her generosity that this book found the home it did. She's the kind of writer—and person—I want to be when I grow up, and you should all go read her books right now.

And last, but never least, to my family—my boys who make every day an adventure, and to J, who makes it all worthwhile.

Also by Lisa Maxwell

Gathering Deep

Sweet Unrest

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.