13. Never
I’d been wondering the same damned thing. If the shadow could figure out how to make the pendant work, it seemed like a logical choice. I mean, it had hauled four of us from one world to the other all at once. How much harder would it be to bring a demon through with it?
“I think Matty has something to do with that,” I chimed in.
They swiveled to look at me, both with a hungry look in their eyes. It was equal parts exciting and terrifying to have the two of them eyeing me like that.
Hook’s eyebrow winged up the way it did when his interest was piqued. “Please explain.”
“Matty stopped that thing when it came after me. I think it’s a safe bet that he would put up a hell of a fight if it tried to come here.”
Leo nodded, sucking air through his perfect teeth. “That makes sense.”
Hook shot him a look, but whatever meaning it carried was meant for just the two of them. “Let’s say that’s the way of it,” he said, turning his attention back to me. “Why not fight back when the demon was attacking those people yesterday?”
“I’ve given that some thought, too.” When I wasn’t agonizing over what to do about a certain pirate. “What if he’s not strong enough to fight all the time? Petra is wicked powerful, right?”
He tipped his head to the side.
“Okay, she’s powerful in the Nassa, at any rate. But does anyone know what her shadow is really capable of?” I asked.
“No,” Lily said from behind me. I jumped at the sound of her voice and whirled around.
“Not cool.” I damn near added “mutt” to the end of that statement, because it was something I’d called her a thousand times when she refused to listen or tracked mud inside from the park.
Her laugh was a balm to my frustration. How she could look so flipping relaxed, given everything she’d been through, was a mystery to me. “Don’t worry, I said the mutt part in my head for you.”
Heat flooded my neck. “I didn’t know.” I motioned up and down, encompassing her human form.
She shook her head. “Which is why we can laugh about it now, right?”
Except I wasn’t laughing. “Did my mom know? Or grandma?” That would be the icing on a super fucked up cake, wouldn’t it?
Lily stepped up beside me and grabbed my hand, lacing our fingers together. “I don’t think so. Trapping me in that form was Wendy’s trick.”
“Why did you stay with the family?” Leo asked, genuine curiosity glittering in his eyes.
She winced, and her grip tightened. “I didn’t have a choice. That was part of the curse or hex. I’m not sure what it was exactly, but I’ve been tied to the Darlings since the day she yanked me through with her.”
“A curse?” Hook asked. “In this world?”
She squeezed my fingers again before letting go. “There’s coffee, right? I can smell it.”
“You’re not getting off that easily,” I said. I’d always assumed she’d stayed with us by choice. But to be cursed to stay? That changed our history completely.
I felt sick just thinking about it.
“It doesn’t matter. Wendy is long dead, and aside from her, your family always treated me well.”
“It does matter. What broke it?” I asked.
She cut a glance at Leo as she poured herself a cup of coffee in the biggest mug I owned. The thing was basically a soup bowl with a handle. “Family.”
Hook nodded thoughtfully. “That could be. Magic has a balance to it, and nothing lasts forever. For every curse or hex, there’s always a way to break it. The trick is figuring it out.”
Lily took a sip of her coffee, hissed at how hot it was, and went right back in for another taste. “There you have it. Mystery solved. Now, can we get back to our current problem?”
Sometimes it was easy to forget how she cared about Matty, too. Her face might still feel a little new when I looked at it, but she’d been there all along.
“We need to lure the demon to us,” Leo said. “Chasing it through the city isn’t working.”
Hook shook his head. “Not without a plan for getting that thing out of him first.”
“Could we use the pendant for that?” I asked. “Also, if anyone knows where the owner’s manual for it is, that would be super helpful.”
I meant it as a joke, but Leo looked at Hook with his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell her?”
“She knows some of it,” he said, clearly not in the mood for that discussion.
“That’s right.” I settled all my attention on Hook. “You were going to tell me something about it.”
“Until you fled the room in a huff.”
I glared at him because whatever smartass remark I had sitting on the tip on my tongue vanished with the memory of his words. Everything got boring eventually. Translation: he would get bored with me too, assuming I lived long enough to grow uninteresting based on his immortal standards.
And that was a whole other thing.
My eighty-some-odd mortal years, if I was lucky, would be a blip compared to the time he’d already spent living, and he had eternity in front of him.
Which meant what was going on between us was basically a fling for him. Summer lovin’, demigod style.
“Just spit it out. It can’t be any worse than finding out there’s a demon’s shadow walking around in my brother’s skin, or that Lily is shifter, or that you’re a demigod. Hit me with it and let’s move the hell on.”
There. That sounded bitchy enough.
Hook’s eyes took on that dangerous glow again. “I don’t think you really want to know.” He rose from the couch, and the tension in the room rose with him. He crossed over to me, closing the distance in a few long strides, and reached for the pendant.
On instinct, I grabbed it first. “Hands off, pirate. This is mine. You can look, but no touchy-touchy.”
A grunt of bitter laughter rolled out of him. “You are absolutely correct. It is yours, completely.” He grabbed my free hand and brought it to his chest, laying my reluctant palm directly over the scar marring his heavenly skin. “Do you remember how I told you how Anya stole a piece of me all those years ago?”
My nerves went on high alert as something inside me pulled tight. If this was going where I thought it was going...
“That piece belongs to you now,” he whispered.
I stumbled back a step, but he didn’t let go.
“No.” It couldn’t be the truth, could it? Was my necklace—the thing that had hauled me to Hook’s world and back, the thing I hadn’t been able to let out of my sight since I’d returned—was it literally a piece of the man standing in front of me?
“Yes.” The single syllable rumbled low, stealing the air from my lungs even as it lit a fire inside of me.
All I could do was stare at him, at least until the pendant grew warm in my trembling grip. When I opened my hand, light spilled out of it, reflecting off Hook’s amber eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t a reflection. I honestly couldn’t tell.
Easing back another step, I pulled my hand free of his grasp. “I don’t know.” Anything. Everything in my life was upside down. “What the hell am I supposed to do with that information?”
“Whatever you wish. I didn’t tell you the truth for any other reason than to keep you safe.” His gaze dropped to my neck with a longing so deep I felt a tug inside me. “What you hold in your hand and wear around your neck holds the power of a demigod. We should be able to use it to send the shadow back, but if the creature gets its hands on it first...”
“Yeah,” I whispered. My world would be in a heap of trouble.
He dipped his head. “That makes it a very dangerous thing to keep on you right now.”
Disregarding the grudging tone of that statement, I let my hand fall away from the pendant. “You want it back?”
“No.” The force of the word nearly had me backing up another step. Instead, he was the one to put a little more space between us, though from the look on his face that was the last thing he wanted to do. “It’s yours. I will never try to reclaim it.”
“Again,” I added. Because he’d taken it from me once.
A little of the tension lifted from his worried face. “Again.”
We stood there staring at each other for gods only knew how long, but it was Lily who cleared her throat and broke the spell.
“That wasn’t nearly as much fun to watch as I thought it would be.”
I shot her a glare. “I’m sorry it didn’t meet your oh-so-high standards of entertainment.”
She smirked over her mug at me before settling her gaze on Hook and narrowing her eyes. “How do you plan on keeping her safe?”
“Whoa.” I held up a hand. “I can still take care of myself, thank you very much.”
“I’m pretty sure I saved your ass in the alley,” she shot back.
“It was a team effort, thank you very much. How are you feeling, by the way?” I really should have asked earlier, but the day was already turning out to be something else.
She rolled her shoulder without setting her mug down. “A little stiff, but fine otherwise.”
“Good.” I meant it, even if it came out sounding a smidge on the jealous side.
“There are perks to being a shifter.”
“Yeah, you mean like not being laid up in bed for three days after a fight?” I asked.
“Three days? Girl, you should have been laid up for weeks,” she said, doing nothing to hide her amusement.
“You were injured?” Hook asked, moving closer with his hands out like he intended to soothe something.
I gave him a shrug. “A little, when we got back and figured out Matty wasn’t exactly Matty anymore. The shadow went for the pendant that first day, but it didn’t seem like the best idea to let the bastard have it.”
Hook’s attention swiveled to Leo, the tension between them rising as he seemed to grow an inch taller where he stood. “You let her get hurt?”
Leo’s expression was pure defiance. “I fought the shadow off. We all did.”
I laid my hand on Hook’s arm, drawing his attention back to me. “I’m fine.” I motioned to myself. “See, still standing.”
His tongue darted out, wetting his lips. “How bad?”
It was kind of amusing the way he went a little primitive when he was upset. Usually, he was all fancy words and old-world charm, but when he got worked up, he lost a lot of civility.
“It stabbed her in the back with her dagger,” Lily said, so nonchalantly that she might have been telling him the time.
I honestly couldn’t tell if she was trying to help or if her intent was to torture Hook.
“And, like I just said, I’m fine.” I pulled up the hem of my shirt and turned to make my point. “Didn’t even leave a scar.”
“I wonder who she has to thank for that?” Lily mused.
Understanding clicked into place a heartbeat later. I grabbed the pendant and held it away from my chest so I could see it, then I shot a questioning look at Hook. “It was you?” I’d suspected the pendant had something to do with my healing, especially since that first night wasn’t the only night that it woke me up giving off that eerie glow. Now though? “You healed me on your ship, too.”
Jesus. How had I not put any of that together? The healing, the pendant, the high-handed fucking pirate who turned my insides molten. It all tracked. I just needed someone to spell it out for me.
“But you didn’t know, did you?” I asked, now suspicious of, you know, everything.
He shook his head, still giving off that burn-the-world vibe. “All I knew for certain was that you were alive.”
“And how did you know that? Does this thing feed back to you somehow?” What if it was some magical version of a smart watch, reporting that my heart was still beating?
His expression and his stance shifted from possessive to defensive. “No. Nothing like that.”
I waited for more of an explanation, but apparently that was all I was getting. “Cool. Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.” I didn’t know what the hell to do with the information Hook had just given me. “I’m not taking it off.” It might make me more of a target, but letting it out of my sight seemed even riskier.
A satisfied grumble filled the space between me and my broody pirate. “I wouldn’t want you to. You keep it safe.” He motioned to the others. “And we’ll keep you safe.”
“That’s not—”
Leo cut me off. “It’s not up for debate.”
I wheeled on him. “You knew what this was all along. Why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“It wasn’t my place,” he said, sounding moodier than normal.
I could deal with Hook being broody. That was kind of his default. But Leo was my laid back, quippy, relatively light-hearted sidekick. Hearing him sound almost sullen felt a little like a kick in the gut.
“As much as I want to be a pain in the ass right now, I’m going to have to back him up on that one,” Lily added. “I mean, imagine having a piece of your heart carved out only to discover the girl you hooked up with needed that piece of you to return to her world. It’s kind of a big deal.”
No shit.And putting it like that kind of had all the air leaking out of my lungs. He’d given me a piece of himself knowing full well he’d never get it back. There was no way to repay a debt like that. Then the selfless ass had to go and do it without telling me.
What kind of person did that?
Oh right, Hook wasn’t a person. He was a demigod.