Page 26 of Tick Tock, Darling

Wonderful. Now he knew we had it and didn't know what it was worth.

Alice folded her arms. "You tell me what you want."

"Five gold coins."

"Show us first," I said.

He shrugged and motioned. "Follow me."

He took us down to the last slip, where a little sloop sat low in the water. Weathered to gray, orange paint peeling off her in strips. But her lines were right. I stepped down into her and put my weight around while he watched me do it, and she took it without complaining. Sound hull. Oars stowed. Rigging was old but it was rigging.

I put my hand on the mast. It'd been a long time since I'd stood on something that moved under me.

"She'll do," I said. “Give him four.”

The man whistled and shook his head, but took the money. I wasn’t sure if I had been had. But I didn’t have time to barter more. Tinker Bell was out there and we needed to find her now.

Chapter Ten

Tinker Bell

Pain. There wasn't anything else left in the world.

I screamed until there was nothing behind it and then I screamed again, and my head went back against the mattress and my hands hauled at the chains and the metal scraped my skin on both wrists and I didn't care.

Make it stop. Please. Please, somebody. Anybody.

Something stirred.

Not my magic. My magic was still behind the iron where I'd left it, and this came up somewhere else — low, under my ribs, deep in the place the shard had gone into me back at St. Christopher's. It turned over once like something waking up.

Then heat. Not the worms. This started at my center and went out through me to my hands and my feet, and it kept going, and it got past warm and kept going, and for one second I thought this was how I died.

The scrivens quit.

Both of them stopped chewing at the same instant and lifted their heads. Then they came off me fast, dropped to the floor with two wet sounds, and went for the dark under the bunk like they'd been called home.

I lay there breathing. My stomach was on fire and the blood cooled on my sides. I shook hard enough to rattle the chains. I glanced down. My gut looked like someone had run a lawnmower over it.

But I didn't do that.

Something else did. It had heard me and it had answered. I hadn't had one thing to do with it.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not from the worms — this was something else, a fine hard tremor that ran from my fingers down through my arms and into my chest and wouldn't quit. My teeth were going. I couldn't make them stop.

I'd never experienced anything like it in my life.

Wendy backed away from the bed, staring at me, and she kept backing until she hit the door. “What's happening? You’re…you’re glowing.”

I thought I detected a hint of fear in her voice. The darkness fled as if it couldn’t stand to look at me.

Good. Let her wonder. I hoped whatever it was crawled up her dress and ripped her apart.

I slowly looked down at my mangled gut. Deep gaping holes. It was awful. It looked like someone had used a jackhammer on me.

Then I saw the light. It was coming through the holes and then it spilled over my body. I was glowing like a candle.

Magic. It came out of my stomach through the holes those things had chewed, brighter where I was torn open, moving under the skin of my thighs like something with a current.