Page 18 of Tick Tock, Darling

Not a welcome. It was too loud for that, and too rough — men shouting nothing at all, one of them beating the rail with both hands. A man near the mast sat down where he stood and put his face in his hands.

That wasn’t glad to see him. I didn’t know what it was.

A heavy man ran down the plank, more muscle than fat. He spread out his arms. “Captain, it’s good to see you.”

They embraced, sealing my doom.

I knew what it meant for me. Whatever Pan was to these men, I wasn’t going to find a friend among them.

Chapter Seven

Caspian

Within a half hour, all three of us were at Lumina Glade.

The cathedral sat in the middle of the clearing, roof gone soft, rose window blown out — black and empty, the lead still holding the shape of what used to be there. No sound in the whole Glade. No wind, no birds, none of the frogs you get out this way.

Whatever they’d opened here, it had taken something out of the ground with it.

The mud in front of the cathedral was still churned from where they’d landed. Bare footprints going one way, small and fast and dug in at the toes, and then a long smear where somebody had gone down on her back and been dragged.

I walked to the line where her scent stopped and stood on it. There it was. Soot and copper and that green lightning smell, thick enough to put my hand in, and then a hand’s width farther on — gone. Not thinned. Gone, like a page torn out.

I stood there and breathed her in and stepped forward and lost her. Back a step and had her. Forward and lost her.

I did it four or five times before I made myself stop. Like a dog at a door.

That was the whole of what I had left of her. Six inches of dirt in a dead clearing, and I’d been an hour late for it.

“This is where her scent ended.”

Alice came up beside me with the box under her arm. Something knocked against the inside of it. Once, then again, harder.

I’d been a smuggler for a long time and I’ve carried cargo that moved. This was different. That thing had gone quiet the second she put it in the box back at the townhome, and it had stayed quiet the whole way out here, and now we were standing on the last place Tinker Bell had been and the shard was throwing itself at the lid.

It knew. Whatever a piece of a star knows, it knew she’d stood right here.

Alice glanced up at me and gave me a slight smile—a smile a teacher would give a student. “The shard can sense the trail of her magic.”

Her magic. Not her scent, not her blood — the thing in her that Pan hadn’t taken.

I’d stood in this clearing an hour ago with nothing. Nothing to smell, nothing to follow, nothing to hit. And a piece of glass in a box was going to do what I couldn’t.

I didn’t care. Let it. Whatever gets me to her.

I gestured toward the box. “Can that piece of star bring us to her?”

“I think so.” Her hand went flat on top of the lid. “The shard will want to reunite with her and wherever she is, it will bring us there.” Her voice quieted as if she was afraid the shard was listening and didn’t like what she was saying.

“That could lead us into danger.” Darius stayed back at the treeline with his back to us, watching the dark the way a man watches it when he’s been somewhere worse.

As much as I wanted to go straight to Tinker Bell, I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. I had no knowledge of this place, especially of Neverland. This was Pan’s world. I’d been a captain and smuggler long enough to know that you didn’t just burst in on your enemies. That could get us killed and it wouldn’t help Tinker Bell or my sister.

No, I had to be patient. Come up with a plan. And then attack.

I gave it a second. “Wait. What if you ask it to follow the same path she took? Not straight to her—where she went.”

Alice looked down at the jiggling box. She didn’t touch it, and she was holding it the way you hold something you’d rather set down. “I can try.”