Page 11 of Tick Tock, Darling

Every hair on my arms came up and my ears popped like I’d dropped a thousand feet.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

The portal was forming.

I gritted my teeth and willed my arms to move. My legs. Anything. Nothing answered. Whatever Pan had put in me had my whole body and I hung there in his fist, awake for every second of it, and that was worse than the flying had been.

Wind came up out of nowhere. The air in front of the cathedral turned and spun and kept going faster, and the pull I'd felt across the grass turned into something with a mouth.

No. No. Not through that.

"Ah." Pan dragged me toward it. "Home."

He said it soft. That was the part that got me — not the grip, not the sparks. He was going home, and he'd been away a long time, and I was the thing he'd stopped to pick up on the way.

Wendy stepped through and was gone.

Pan swung me over his shoulder. My hair fell and all I could see was the ground — mud, leaves, twigs, going by.

Shitshitshitshit

This was my own damn fault. Caspian was pinned to a sidewalk in the Bywater. Angelo didn't know. Keir and Brynn didn't know. Nobody on this side of the world had any idea where I was, and by the time they did I'd be lost in the Elder Dimension.

Then the ground stopped being there.

Brown and blue and red and yellow swam past me, and my stomach turned over and over. I shut my eyes and clenched my fists.

Don’t get sick. Don’t get sick. Don’t get sick.

Everything stopped. I opened my eyes.

Pan put me down on my feet gentler than I thought possible. “We’re here, Tink.”

My legs shook and I swayed. He clasped my arm. I shoved my tangled hair out of my face.

I glanced around. The first thing my gaze locked on was Wendy. She stared at me. There was a blank look on her face as if she were in a trance. Not really seeing me. No emotion. Nothing.

At least her eyes were gray.

My magic stirred inside me—all of it, fast, hot behind my sternum and running down both arms, and for one second I had everything I needed. Thank God, it hadn’t dimmed crossing over. If anything it had woken up.

Pan snapped his fingers. “Wendy.”

She stepped in behind me. I felt her hands come up and I turned as fast as I could, which was not fast at all.

"Vis tua dormiat. Manus ligo. Taceat ignis."

Let your power sleep. I bind the hands. Let the fire be silent.

It went out of me. Not drained — shut, like a door pulled to somewhere behind my ribs, and my magic was still in there, I could feel every bit of it, and I couldn't reach a single thread. I made a sound I'd never made in my life.

Pan pulled me close. “Your powers are just dormant until I need them. Can’t have you escaping, love.”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m not your love.”

“For now,” he whispered in my ear.

I shuddered. Crap, he was going to try to do to me what he had done to Wendy. She was standing three feet off the path with her hands at her sides, watching nothing, waiting. A woman with a spine like that and years of training in her hands, and she'd cast a portal for him tonight and bound another witch for him and now she stood there like a shovel he'd set down.