Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen Page A

courses through me as it always has, blotting out whatever desire for Caroline I harbored in my foolish youth. I’d have done my duty by her had she waited for me. Had she only believed in me. Vixen, who is she to come here moping about when it was she who betrayed me?
    “Why did you never come back to me?” Her pretty little voice wavers plaintively.
    “Why didn’t you wait?” I spit back. How could I have ever cared for this duplicitous little chit, with her airs and her grand family name, and her black, faithless heart? Even as I stare at her, daring her to answer me, her image fades like a distant ship lost in a blinding sun. All that’s left is a pitiable voice, soft and sad.
    “I waited all my life.”
    It’s too hot, too bright. Throwing my arm across my eyes, I stagger with hand outstretched for some retreat. My fingers touch bark, and I know I must have stumbled outside again. A salty breeze ruffles my hair, bearing a whiff of thyme and jasmine. Peeking out, I find myself in blessed shadow again, in some underpopulated part of the forest with sand, not grass, underfoot. A giant green lizard lumbers across my path and scrabbles halfway up a bare tree trunk, where it pauses to glare at me. I back off, round another trunk, and a more substantial figure, slow and sensual, rises up out of the shadows. God’s cursed life, I know that languid shape. The most faithless female of them all. Proserpina, the voudon priestess, as alluring and sinister as ever, her body bursting out of its colorful rags, her dark eyes as narrow and pitiless as the reptile’s.
    “Why are you here?” I gape at her.
    “Why are you still here, Capitaine,” she murmurs back. The timbre of her voice alone, so well-remembered, so undiminished by time, is enough to rouse every part of me capable of standing, a helpless tide rising to her moon. I so crave her touch, I might fling myself at her like a drowning man upon a spar, until I see the insolence in her black eyes, hear the amusement in her throaty purr.
    “Because you sent me here, Witch,” I seethe, a release hotter and more gratifying than desire surging through my body.
    Her bare, shiny brown shoulders rise in a careless shrug, her black eyes glittery. “La, la, Capitaine,” she croons at me. “As quick as ever to give in to the fire of your rage. You should have chosen more wisely.”
    “I had no choice!”
    “There is always a choice,” she coos. “I offered you peace, but you chose war. I offered you love, but you chose hate.”
    I shut my eyes against the memory of the man I was then, abused by life, commander of a crew of murderers who cared for nothing by blood and revenge against the world. Why didn’t I choose her when I had the chance?
    “You said you loved me,” I whisper.
    “You will never know how much. That is your tragedy, Capitaine.”
    “Enough to curse me to this place because I would not stay with you,” I say bitterly.
    She rounds her eyes at me like a stage ingenue. “You believe I punish you for my poor broken heart? La, la, no wonder you never came back.”
    “Back?” The single syllable, musty with impotence, all but chokes me.
    “I waited for you so long,” she murmurs, toying idly with the strings of coral, turquoise, and ebony beads that decorate her breast. “How could I know it would take you so long?”
    To do what? I can scarcely grasp the notion before she stretches out one brown hand to me. And for all my rage, for all the suffering she has caused me, the dead stump in my chest shudders for an instant and I see my own hand reach for hers. Yet I feel no warmth, no weight, no solid flesh; my fingers clutch at nothing but air, and I stumble in the sand as her teeth shine in a cruel smile.
    “It is too late to choose me, ” and she waves me away like a meddlesome fly. “I am dead.”
    Of course she’s dead; they are all dead these two hundred years and more. Dead, the only choice that can never be mine. This is how she loves me.