Page 42 of Tick Tock, Darling

“Captain! Intruders.”

Alice and Darius. It had to be.

Caspian grabbed my hand and we raced to the rail.

They were alive. Both of them, standing on the deck below with half of Pan’s crew backed off around them, and every bit of air I’d been holding since those cannons went off came out of me at once.

Alice had the shard up in one hand like a torch. Darius stood in front of her with a sword.

“Stand back,” Alice warned.

“Alice!”

Her eyes widened. “Tinker Bell.” Then she looked me over — the red dress, the hair somebody else had combed, the light coming off my skin — and her sword hand dropped an inch. “What happened?”

I knew how it looked. I’d been taken out of my own bed in my pajamas and here I was standing on Peter Pan’s ship dressed like a doll with Pan alive behind me.

“She’s the Christmas Star,” Caspian said.

He said it before I could. Said it like he’d been waiting for somebody to ask.

I laughed. “I know it sounds crazy.”

Alice shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. You’re the most powerful witch I know. Only you could hold that much.”

Darius scanned the deck. Pan standing there in his own light. Wendy beside him with gray eyes. “So the darkness is out of both of them?”

Caspian held my hand and kissed my wrist. “She did that.”

His lips brushed the same place I’d fed him and heat went straight up my arm.

Alice looked down at the shard in the box. “So this is worthless?”

“Not worthless. It’s a piece.” I stopped. I’d been about to say of me, and it stuck. “It came out of me. Or I came out of it. I’m still working that part out.”

Alice’s eyebrows went up. “You’re holding it very well for someone still working it out.”

“I’m not holding anything.” I looked at my own hands, still lit up. “That’s the trouble.”

Darius sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time to go back home.”

Home.

I’d been telling myself home was a townhome in the Bywater with a tree in the window I’d put up for nobody. Jeans in the closet. My own bed and nobody in it, and I’d called that a life.

Caspian’s hand was still around mine.

That’s when I got it. Home wasn’t a building. It hadn’t been for a while and I’d just been too stubborn to notice. Home was a man who’d crossed two worlds for me and let a whip open his back rather than give me up.

Whatever I’d become, I wasn’t going back to that empty house alone. Not this time.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

Wendy clasped Peter Pan’s hand. “My home is with him.” She looked up at Caspian. “But don’t worry, brother. We’ll come to visit you for New Year’s.”

He grinned. “You’d better.”

Alice reached for the box. “I can open it from here. It’ll take me a minute to⁠—”