Page 8 of Tick Tock, Darling

She cast me a curt smile. “Thank you. Now go back to your ship.”

Like that was happening.

She drove off. I shifted into a bat and went up after her, and the city went small and blue underneath.

The Bywater. Of course it was. Her car turned down a street where the wards on every third house pushed at me as I passed, and I kept my distance and stayed high. Every roofline strung with lights, blue and white and red the length of the block, and every door under them shut.

A white townhome, two stories, a balcony with nothing on it. Not a light on the whole front of it. Her garage door came down.

I found an oak across the street and settled in to watch a woman who’d told me twice she didn’t want me, for a man who’d take my hands if I let anything happen to her, so she could fix a sister who might not want fixing either.

Merry Christmas, Caspian.

A light went on. A Christmas tree stood in the living room window, lit, blocking most of it, and her shape moved behind it and was gone. Then the light went off and the tree was all that was left.

She’d decorated. Inside, where nobody driving past would see it, for a woman who lived alone.

Incense came off the house — cedar, and something under it I couldn’t name. Wendy used to burn the same thing. Our place smelled like that every night for years, and I hadn’t thought about it once until it came out of a stranger’s window in the Bywater.

A light flickered on upstairs.

I looked at the tree instead. A man sitting in an oak outside a woman’s bedroom has one job and it isn’t wondering what she looks like getting out of her jeans.

Not that it mattered. Tinker Bell was a one-man woman. I’d never been one man about anything in my life.

I just needed her to save my sister.

I could hear all of it. The birds, her furnace kicking on, a dog two houses down giving up on the night. And under it, slow and even upstairs, her heartbeat. The only thing on that street I was listening to on purpose.

Glass shattered. Crap, Tinker Bell’s. I flew toward the balcony and shifted back into a man.

I pounded on the patio glass door. “Tinker Bell, let me in.”

Murmured words came through her townhome. Suddenly, a loud wind howled around me. I flew off the balcony as if pushed and landed three stories below hard on the cement.

I went to stand and couldn’t. My wrists and ankles were pinned to the sidewalk like something had driven nails through them, and I couldn’t see a thing holding me.

Dark magic. Not Tinker Bell’s. She practiced white magic.

I knew this magic. I’d known it since I was mortal, and every hair on me came up at once.

Wendy.

She came down out of the dark over the townhome and stopped in the air above me, close enough that I could have touched her boots. My sister. Her hair white, same as mine, loose the way she never used to wear it. Her eyes found me and they were gray — her gray, the one thing about her I’d been holding onto for years.

Then she blinked, and they came back black.

The thing inside her looked down at me and didn’t say anything at all.

Behind her, Peter Pan hung in the air on magic dust. My sister’s spell, holding him up. His ragged red hair was windblown and he had on his typical green shirt and pants that Wendy must have brought. I clenched my fists. I wanted to sink my fangs into his neck and drink and drink and drink until he was nothing but an empty husk.

One arm was around Tinker Bell’s waist. She had on a red pajama shirt and bottoms. Her blonde hair was loose and fell across her shoulders. A bandana across her mouth. Her hands behind her back. She was kicking hard enough that he had to keep adjusting his grip, and she’d have taken his eyes out if she’d had a hand free.

She looked down at me. The kicking stopped. All of it, at once—the fighting, the twisting, everything she’d been doing to make it hard for him—and she went still in his arm and looked at me and didn’t look anywhere else.

She’d told me twice she didn’t need my protection. Snapped her fingers at me for that shard and told me to go back to my ship.

I tore against whatever had me. Wrists, ankles, everything I had. The spell didn't give a quarter inch and my skin split under it and I kept going anyway because stopping meant lying there and watching.