Page 40 of Tick Tock, Darling

I sat up. My back held. I got my hand into her hair and brought her down to me and kissed her, and she came without one second of hesitating.

Warm. Anise still on my mouth from her wrist. Her hand flat on my bare chest over the heart she’d started up again.

I’d had more women than I could put a number to and not one of them had ever felt like being let in the door.

She pulled back an inch. Just an inch.

“Say it again,” I said.

“I love you.”

I kissed her, my hand finding the back of her neck. She tasted like something I didn’t have a word for yet. Christmas. But something more.

Someone knocked on the door. Hesitant, like they weren’t sure they should.

“Caspian?”

I went still with my hand still in her hair.

I’d have known that voice in the dark at the bottom of the ocean. It was the voice that used to count the strikes on the hall clock. It was the voice I’d been chasing across two worlds, and I hadn’t heard it come out of my sister’s mouth since the night he took her.

Everything else went out of my head. Tinker Bell, the bed, the blood that wasn’t on me anymore. All of it.

“Wendy.”

It came out of me like it had been sitting behind my teeth for years.

Tinker Bell broke off the kiss and stood. She held out her hand and tilted her head.

“Come on. Let’s go see your sister.”

I got my legs under me. My back held and my knees held and I stood up in the cabin, and I took her hand and I could not get to that door fast enough.

I threw open the door.

Wendy stood in the passageway with her gray eyes on me. Wet. The same gray as mine, and staying that gray — I watched for the blink and it came and they didn’t change.

The thing was gone. Not hiding. Gone, and where it had been there was nothing at all, and I hadn’t felt that nothing around my sister in years.

She smelled like fresh cut daisies. She’s smelled like that since we were kids. I hadn’t caught it once since the night he took her.

“Wendy.”

She burst into tears. “Caspian, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean⁠—“

“I know.” I picked her up off her feet and held on. “It’s okay. You’re back.”

Something went out of me then. Every year of it at once — every port, every dead end, every night I told myself she was somewhere safe when I knew better. It all came up out of me and I stood there in that doorway holding my sister and shook.

“I love you so much,” she said into my shoulder.

I twirled her around like I used to when we were kids.

She laughed.

Her laugh. Not that thing’s. Hers.

I set her down. Something moved at the edge of my vision.