Page 31 of Tick Tock, Darling

All I could see was the bottom of the boat and their boots and pants. Someone wrapped a rope around my waist. I was hauled up inch by inch. I finally could see my captors below. There were six of them, maybe in their late twenties. Scruffy looking. Rough beards, matted hair, and stained shirts from sweat and the salt air.

Streams of water trickled down from my hair, pants, and boots. I reached the ship’s rail and I was rolled over. I dropped down like a dead fish. My hair covered my eyes but through the strands I could see him.

Peter Pan.

And next to him my twin sister, Wendy.

I hadn’t been this close to my sister since the night he took her. Not once. I’d have given my ship and everything in it for five minutes of this, and here it was, and I was lying at her feet in a puddle of seawater with my mouth open and my hair in my eyes.

She looked down at me.

Gray. Her gray, the one she was born with, the same as the girl who used to count the strikes on the hall clock.

Wendy. It’s me.

She blinked.

Black. All of it, corner to corner, and whatever was behind it looked at me the way you’d look at something the net brought up.

I couldn’t say her name. Couldn’t move my jaw, couldn’t lift a hand, couldn’t do the one thing I’d been trying to do since he took her — get in front of her and make her look at me.

She looked at me and nothing came back. No recognition. Not a flicker of the woman who used to know my mood off my walk.

She just wasn’t the one looking anymore.

Pan knelt next to me. “Can’t move, can you? I have someone who wants to see you. I can’t hurt her. But you—that’s another story.”

Can’t hurt her.

Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Something was stopping him, and it wasn’t mercy, and it wasn’t Angelo, and there was only one thing in this world she was carrying that he didn’t put there.

The Star was holding him off.

For about half a second that was the best news I’d had since the Bywater. She was alive and something was standing between her and him.

Then the rest of it came around.

He’d tried. That’s how a man learns he can’t. Whatever he’d done to find that out, he’d already done it to her, and I’d been sailing a leaky sloop across an ocean while he did.

And now he had me. A vampire he could hurt, in front of a woman he couldn’t, and he’d said it out loud like he was pleased with the arrangement.

That’s what I was for.

Chapter Twelve

Tinker Bell

Pan had let me off the bed. I wasn’t much better off. Chained to a chair, and once again I couldn’t reach my magic.

The one good thing was that he couldn’t hurt me. The Star wouldn’t let him.

It couldn’t protect me from everything, though.

Somebody had put me in a long off-the-shoulder red dress. My hair was combed out loose. Pink eye shadow. Mascara. Red lipstick. I’ve never worn makeup in my life and somebody’s hands had been on my face while I couldn’t stop them, and I kept catching the smell of whatever they’d used and I couldn’t wipe any of it off.

A plastic doll. That’s what he’d made me.