Page 19 of Tick Tock, Darling

I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, me or herself. She looked at the box and then past it, at nothing, working something out she didn’t say out loud.

“But it could still be dangerous.”

Everything about tonight had been do or die. Standing here talking about it was too.

Five minutes ago I’d told myself not to be rash. Make a plan. Don’t burst in on a man in his own world.

Then I thought about a white aura burning brighter around her while I stood in a dead clearing being careful.

It didn’t give me any confidence. We were going anyway. Tinker Bell’s life depended on it, and so did my sister’s, and I wasn’t going to stand in this clearing and be careful about it.

I clasped her shoulder. Stiff as a plank under my hand. “Then try. We’re going now.”

Darius was there before I finished the sentence. I never heard him cross the clearing. He put his arm around Alice’s waist and looked at me over the top of her head, and he didn’t say a word about it.

Fair enough. I took my hand back.

One woman. That’s what got a man moving that fast — one woman, out of all of them, and he’d built his whole life around standing next to her. I’d had more women than I could put a number to and not one of them had ever made me cross a clearing like that.

I wondered what that was like. Then I stopped wondering, because we had somewhere to be.

Darius kissed the top of her head, and for a second his jaw set and he looked past both of us at the dark where the treeline stopped.

“Last place I want to go back to. Even though Alanna’s asleep.” He frowned down at the box. “Would this shard have the power to wake her?”

“It’s only supposed to be used for good,” Alice said. Her mouth went tight and she looked at the ground before she looked back at him. “But I can’t promise that. I’m sorry.”

Darius sighed. “Just don’t let her put me back down in her dungeon again.”

“That bad, huh?”

His jaw went hard and he didn’t look at me. He looked at the cathedral instead, and whatever he was seeing wasn’t out there.

I’ve been down in a room I don’t talk about either. I let it go.

Wonderful. A queen on that side who kept a man in a hole, sleeping through all of this, and the only thing we had to find Tinker Bell might be the thing that opened her eyes.

Nothing to be done about it. The box was how we found her, and we were going.

“Let’s go,” I said, and I meant right now.

“Find her.” Alice opened the lid.

White light came out of that box and hit the clearing like something spilled. It caught the mud, the broken glass in front of the cathedral, all of it, and then it went out of her hands in a line and struck the air where Tinker Bell had been standing.

The air turned. Slow at first, then faster, a wheel of it spinning in on itself — white at the outside edge and green going through it, deep and wet, the green you see in water over a reef. Gold cut through the middle in threads that came and went. And dead center, where you’d want to look, there was nothing. Black. No stars in it, no shapes, nothing to tell you how far back it went.

The air coming off it was hot and wet and smelled green. December in Louisiana, and it was summer on the other side of that hole.

This wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d rather be undressing the twins and being a naughty boy, kissing every inch of them. But that wasn’t happening.

I was about to enter the unknown. I’ve walked into rooms where men were waiting to kill me and I always knew the room. Knew the doors, knew the water, knew which way I’d go out. There was no knowing anything about this.

Pan was in there. Somewhere past that light, in his own world, with his own crew and his own rules and every advantage a man can have.

And her.

She’d gone through here. Barefoot, in her pajamas. She’d have fought him the whole way — I’d have bet my ship on it — and it hadn’t mattered.