Page 12 of Tick Tock, Darling

I made myself look at something else.

Red and white flowers I'd never seen in my life, growing thick under trees that were almost pine and weren't. The air came sweet and heavy and I couldn't name half of what was in it. Under it all, faint and unmistakable — salt. Somewhere past those trees there was water.

“Welcome to the Elder Dimension, love.” Pan spread his arms like he’d built it. “In case you’re wondering, we are in the Forgotten Forest.”

I said nothing.

He almost seemed a little too giddy for me as if he’d downed a bottle of wine. “Soon, I’ll take you to my home—Never Neverland. It’s across the Grand Sea. Tell me, do you sense my shadow?”

“You just made my powers dormant. How could I?”

He laughed. "So true." He started up the pebbled path and pulled me with him. "There'll be a surprise for you when we reach Neverland."

I didn't have to wonder what it was. It was standing three feet off the path, waiting to be told what to do next.

Chapter Five

Caspian

I fought the spell. Fought it until my own bones ground against it, and it held me down like ten demons sitting on my chest.

Then something snapped, thin and high, somewhere behind my ears.

I was off the pavement before I'd finished standing. Shifted, and went up into the dark over the Bywater with Tinker Bell’s scent already in my nose — soot and copper and that green lightning smell, burned into me since the church.

North and west, out past the parish line. Over black water and cypress and nothing anybody had built. She was a thread and I stayed on it.

But it wasn’t just Tinker Bell I was tracking. I was tracking my sister too.

Wendy's hair had been white. Loose, the way our mother used to wear hers.

I put that down and flew.

Lumina Glade came up under me and the old Saint Louis Cathedral stood in the middle of it with the rose window blown out, and the grass in front of it was churned to mud where people had landed and where somebody had run barefoot and been caught.

I dropped and shifted and took the whole clearing in three strides.

Her scent stopped. Not thinned. Not faded off into the trees the way a trail goes when somebody walks away from you. It stopped, in a line, a body's width across, and past that line there was nothing at all — no Tinker Bell, no Pan, no Wendy, no smell of magic.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." I put my fist through a bent oak, splintering the wood again and again until there was nothing left worth hitting.

I'd lost all three of them.

I should have made her let me in. Not asked. Made her. Pan and Wendy had taken her back to the Elder Dimension and I had no way through without magic, and I paced that clearing like the answer was going to come up out of the mud.

He'd taken her out of her own bed. In her pajamas, barefoot, in December.

I shifted and went back to the Bywater.

Her townhome was warded to the frame. I tried the front, the garage, the balcony door, and every one of them pushed back at me like a hand on my chest. Pan had a witch. I didn't.

That was the whole problem, and there was only one fix for it.

I called Enzo. He picked up on the first ring.

"Caspian." Short. Like he already knew it was bad.

"I'm in trouble."