Page 39 of Tick Tock, Darling

I heard it. That’s the part I won’t get out of my head. A wet sound, low, under my own skin, like rope being drawn through water.

My spine bowed off the bed and my hands closed on nothing and I made a sound I’d never made in front of anybody.

Then it quit.

I lay there with sweat running off me and my whole back throbbing like a struck bell. I got a hand around behind me and put my fingers where the worst of it had been.

Smooth. Not a mark on me.

I’d lain on that floor knowing that back was mine for good. Some things don’t close and I’d made my peace with it somewhere between the third stroke and the fourth.

Pan had opened me to the bone with a whip made out of his own shadow, and she’d closed it with one word.

I looked down at myself. The blood was gone. All of it — off my chest, off my jeans, off the sheets under me, like none of it had ever happened.

All I could do was stare at her. “How?”

She brushed my hair back. “I’m the Christmas Star.”

Not carrying it. Not holding a piece of it in a box. She said it the way you’d say your own name.

That was what I’d been sent to guard. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt with the thing herself sitting inside her, and Angelo Santi had put me on a dock and told me to keep her alive.

“Pan’s healed,” she said. “So is Wendy.”

I heard the second part and the first part went somewhere I couldn’t reach.

“Say that again.”

She slipped her hand around the back of my neck. “You have your sister back.”

Everything in me went out at once.

I’d looked for that woman across two worlds. I’d taken jobs I shouldn’t have taken and gone to men I shouldn’t have gone to, and I’d stood on a sidewalk in the Bywater and watched her eyes go black with my own sister behind them, and I’d stopped believing it years ago and kept doing it anyway.

My eyes stung and I let them. I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve never once cried in front of a woman.

“You’re sure,” I said. It didn’t come out like a question.

“I’m sure.”

I got my hand over hers on my neck and held it there and couldn’t say one word.

Her lips parted. “And you have my heart.”

She didn’t blink and she didn’t look away. A woman who’d told me twice to go back to my ship, holding my eyes and not moving an inch.

She’d told me love hurts. She’d told me it’s better to be alone, and then she’d watched me bleed out on a chain and given me her own wrist, and now she was sitting on the edge of that bed saying that to me with her chin up like she was daring me to argue.

“Say it again,” I said.

She took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “I’m yours.”

“Meaning?”

She smiled. “Love hurts, but you’re worth it. I love you.”

Her heart was going hard and quick under all of it. I’d spent this whole thing listening to that woman’s body call her mouth a liar, and this time the two of them agreed.