Page 38 of Tick Tock, Darling

No. No, no, no.

I hadn’t found it for him. I’d lit it for him.

Wendy screamed and went down on her knees. She shook so hard the deck rattled under her. Black smoke pushed out of her lips and burst into flame and blew apart on the wind.

Gone. The thing was gone.

She knelt there gasping, her own gray eyes back. A woman I'd hated since the beach, and I'd have gone to her if I could have moved.

Pan grabbed his shadow and it melted into his skin.

“Now, I’m invincible.” He laughed.

Light flashed in his eyes. The black came off him in sheets and white came up underneath it, and he straightened like a man who’d been carrying something heavy for a long time and just set it down.

Whole. That’s what he was. Whatever he’d been missing since they cut it out of him, he had it back, and he stood there on that deck in the middle of my light looking better than any of us.

I did that.

I truly was the Christmas Star.

Chapter Fourteen

Caspian

“Drink.”

A loud voice pierced the fog in my mind. Not Enzo. Female. I knew that voice.

Then the pain arrived, all of it at once, like somebody had laid a hot iron the length of my spine and left it there. My back. He’d opened it with a whip made out of his own shadow, and shadow doesn’t let flesh knit.

Someone thrust something into my mouth. I wanted it. God, I wanted it, but I was too weak to do a thing about it. Even breathing was taking too much effort. My heart had slowed. My blood was sluggish.

“I said drink. Now.”

My fangs lengthened, scraping skin. Hunger took over and I bit down.

Blood burst into my mouth. It was mixed with a spice—anise.

Tinker Bell.

I knew it before I knew anything else. I’d tasted her blood off the sand on a beach and I’d have known it in a hundred years.

My eyes fluttered open and I stared into her blue eyes. But there were stars radiating around her and she was so bright, so bright, but it didn’t hurt my eyes.

And I couldn’t stop feeding on her.

Warmth came into me. My heart picked up. My hands came back, then my arms, and somewhere in there the pain in my back showed up again, and I welcomed it because pain meant I was still here.

Then I made myself stop.

Hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

“Heal.”

That command was even more powerful.

Something moved under the skin of my back. Not pain — worse than pain, and I’d have taken the whip again over it. The meat of me pulled toward itself. Muscle finding muscle, sliding and gripping and drawing tight, inch by inch from my shoulder down to my hip, and I could feel every bit of it happening and there wasn’t one thing I could do to make it stop.