Page 30 of Tick Tock, Darling

Like he had to tell me that.

“I’ll be back soon.”

I didn’t give him time to argue. I shifted and went up.

Flapping hard, north and east along that gold line. I’m not as fast as Darius. Doesn’t matter. This one was mine.

Not a cloud anywhere. Just blue, top to bottom, and a bat crossing it with nothing to get behind. Every wingbeat I was the only thing in that sky and I knew it.

And I had time to think, up there, which I hadn’t had on that deck.

Open water. Miles of it in every direction, and a pair of pajama bottoms washes up on our course.

Cargo doesn’t find you. I’ve run enough of it to know that.

He’d put them there. He knew somebody was coming and he’d left her blood in the water where it would be found, and I’d looked at it and thought about revenge instead of thinking at all.

Then a clipper came up on the horizon.

I went at her low and fast, looking for a woman on that deck. Looking for a blond head of hair.

Men on the lines. Working, not watching. Nobody turned. Nobody pointed. I got all the way to the mast and put myself in the rigging and had a clean look at the whole deck, and somewhere underneath the wanting to find her, a voice said this was easy.

I didn’t listen to it.

Then something hit me.

It came out of nowhere and went through me and shut me down — no pain, that was the terrible part, just every muscle I own quitting at the same instant. My wings stopped answering. The sky went sideways.

I came out of the shift on the way down and hit the water on my back.

Then I was floating. Face up. Sky, sun, nothing else. I couldn’t move my hands. I couldn’t turn my head. I couldn’t do one thing but lie there and think about how far down that ocean went, and what Darius said lived in it, and how long a man like me can be under before it stops mattering that he can’t drown.

“Bring him aboard,” a male voice called out.

I knew that voice. I’d heard it once before, in my sister’s house, telling me what he was going to do with her while I couldn’t get up off the floor.

My fangs came down and there wasn’t one other part of me that would move.

A splash somewhere off to my left. I couldn’t turn my head to find it. Then oars, working steady, getting closer — three men rowing, by the sound, and none of them in a hurry.

Hands got hold of me. Four of them, maybe six. They took me by the arms and the belt and hauled me over the side like a net coming in, and I couldn’t do one thing about any of it. Not brace. Not fight. Not even close my mouth.

I went face down in the bottom of the rowboat.

Wet boards an inch from my eye. Somebody’s boot beside my head. That was the whole world for a while, and over it I could hear him up on that deck, waiting for me.

One of them kicked me in the side and I groaned. “Don’t move.”

Like I could move. But he probably knew that. Pan’s men were just as cruel as he was.

Splash. The oars dipped into the sea again. I rocked back and forth on the boat, my face smashed against the wood. My neck was crooked and my limbs jumbled. It was definitely a spell.

Wendy? Most probably. Tinker Bell wouldn’t do his dirty work. My sister was a different matter.

The oars stopped sloshing in the water. Rough hands grabbed me again.

“Send down a rope,” one of them said.