Page 36 of Tick Tock, Darling

I’d have to be faster than him. That was all.

I sighed and let the tears come, and I didn’t have to work at it.

“Tell Pan I’ll help him find his shadow. If he spares Caspian.”

I hated giving in, but there was nothing I could do. I refused to lose him like I had my parents.

“Fine. Come with me. Any tricks, Caspian dies.”

I stared at Caspian. Was he alive? I thought he exhaled and moved a lock of hair. But for how long? He needed blood. Desperately. Time was running out. I had to move fast.

Wendy stood over me and raised one hand. But it wasn’t her talking. It was the thing.

“Solve sedem. Vincula maneant.”

Release the seat. Let the bonds remain.

Something let go behind me and the chains that held me to that chair came away from it and dropped, and my arms fell forward into my lap for the first time since they’d put me in it.

Then a voice whispered inside me.

I’m inside you.

I went cold all the way down.

Inside me? What are you?

The Christmas Star.

No. I’d held the Star. I’d burned my hand on it in that church and watched it glow on a filthy floor, and the last time I saw it, it was wrapped in a strip of Caspian’s jeans. The Star’s a piece of glass. It’s a shard. Alice has it.

That was a piece of me. I came into you at St. Christopher’s and I never left.

The heat behind my ribs. The healing. The light coming up out of my own stomach through holes that shouldn’t have closed.

Not something I’d absorbed. Something I’d become.

This is your destiny.

That can’t be true.

Trust me. You’re the Star.

Wendy dragged me toward the cabin door, but not before I glanced over my shoulder at Caspian. He still hadn’t moved.

Don’t you dare be dead. I need you.

I’d stood in a room like this before. Christmas Eve, the tree still lit, and my mother’s hand going cold in mine while I ran through everything I knew and not one thing touched it.

The most powerful witch anybody could name, and I watched them go anyway.

But the voice said I was the Christmas Star.

If I got out of these chains, maybe that meant something this time. Maybe it meant enough.

I wouldn’t let him die.

Out on deck, another volley fired. Sulfur and gunpowder and smoke, thick enough to taste, and men running everywhere.