Page 37 of Tick Tock, Darling

Boots pounding the boards. Somebody shouting numbers I didn’t understand. A man went past me with an armload of shot and a burn up one side of his neck, and he never looked at me once.

They were firing to starboard. All of them, all facing the same rail, and past the smoke I couldn’t see one thing except more smoke.

Alice was out there. Darius. I couldn’t see whether their boat had survived. I looked up in the sky, hunting for Darius’s golden wings and Alice hanging onto him, but I didn’t see them either.

Nothing up there but smoke.

Those wings were gold. In a clear sky you could see them a mile off, and I stood there with my neck craned back and found nothing, and something in me started coming apart.

Everyone. All three of them, all at once. Caspian not moving on that bed. Alice and Darius somewhere under that smoke or under the water, and me on this deck in a red dress somebody put me in, with my hands chained, about to make a deal with the man who did it.

I braced my shoulders, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake. “Yes. I’ll help you find your shadow if you don’t kill Caspian⁠—”

“He’s practically dead now,” the thing in Wendy purred.

Heat rushed over my face and ran down my neck. I clenched my fists. If I could, I would have shoved her overboard and drowned her, but I kept calm.

Pan stepped closer. “If you want to save anyone, you will find my shadow.”

My chest tightened. I was trusting him to keep his word. His word wasn't worth a damn, but I took the deal anyway.

“I promise. I will.” The words tasted bitter.

Pan shouted, “Cease fire.”

The last gun went off and then nothing. No more thunder. The men stopped where they stood and turned around, all of them, and the deck went so quiet I could hear the water against the hull.

Smoke hung over everything and started to drift. It thinned out over the rail and I still couldn’t see past it.

Every man on that ship was looking at me.

Pan’s eyes went wide and stayed that way. He flicked his hand. “Wendy, remove the manacles.”

“Vincula solvantur.” Wendy’s voice was guttural.

Let the bonds be loosed.

The manacles dropped onto the deck with a loud clank.

It came up out of the floor of me all at once.

My whole spine locked. Every hair on my body came up and my back teeth ached and my mouth flooded with anise, so strong my eyes watered. My arms spread out wide. My back arched and I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried.

Not my magic. Mine was in there somewhere, underneath, the way a candle’s still lit when the sun comes up. But this was stronger.

Light came up through my hands and my chest and out of my open mouth. White. So bright I couldn’t see the deck or the men or Pan standing three feet away.

Heat went through me from the inside out and kept climbing. Past warm. Past hot. An aura came off me as if I was on fire.

But I wasn’t.

I was the light.

And it was too much. That’s what nobody tells you. I’d wanted power my whole life and here it was and it was too much for one woman to hold, and it kept coming, and there was no bottom to it and no way to shut it off.

Then I saw it.

Pan’s shadow. Standing right next to him. It had been there the whole time — Pan and Wendy were so dark they couldn’t see it, and only pure light brought it out.