Chapter 20
BASH
I stare into the giant pantry of the Victorian’s kitchen and frown at the empty shelves.
“Whose job was it to go grocery shopping?” I ask.
Behind me, Darling crunches into a chip. “I think it was yours.”
“Impossible. I don’t grocery shop.”
We have coffee, sugar, chips, a few beef sticks, and enough liquor to sanitize an army. But not a single bag of flour or a grain in sight.
My stomach growls, gnawing at me from the inside out. This is the problem with having multiple houses in two different realms. One is always going to be better stocked than the other.
“Have a chip,” Darling says when I turn back to her. She’s sitting cross-legged on the long worktable, the bag of chips open in her lap. Half of them are gone.
I dig inside and pull out a handful, leaning into the table beside her. “How am I going to feed you if I don’t have the most basic ingredients?”
“Send Kas.”
From the other room, my brother says, “No.”
I roll my eyes. “You love the old ladies at the grocery store, though!”
“I do not!”
“I meant they love you!”
He can’t argue that one. They do love him.
It’s late afternoon, approaching evening. Peter Pan is still sleeping in the basement. Vane is holding watch from the front porch. I don’t think he’s slept at all. I’m not sure Darling has either.
The skin beneath her eyes is not dark, but translucent, as if all the blood has drained from her face. She’s had three cups of coffee just since I’ve been awake. The last one she spiked with a splash of whisky after Vane mentioned the neighbors and the party we were invited to.
I can’t tell if she wants to go or not. We’re still waiting for Kody or Hansel. We’ll probably give them twenty-four hours before we go looking ourselves. So we might as well pass the time.
But Darling keeps getting this distant, lost look on her face like she’s trapped in a memory or a daydream.
Sometimes I forget that she lived half a mortal lifetime in this place, with its loud fucking cars and its polluted air and diluted magic.
There is magic in the mortal realm, but if it were currency, its value is considerably diminished. Some of that is changing. Mostly because of the work of women. But will it ever compare to Neverland? Probably not.
The longer Darling is with us in Neverland, the more I come to think of her as having always been there.
The chips are gone in record time with me eating them and Darling frowns into the empty bag. “I have an idea,” she says.
“All ears.” I lick the salt from my fingertips.
“Let’s order food.”
“Now you’re talking.”
One thing the mortal realm does have over us Neverlanders is a nifty little app that lists any kind of food you could ever want that a person will then deliver straight to your door.
Truly revolutionary. I keep telling Pan we need to devise a similar system back on Neverland.
I love to cook and bake, but sometimes my stomach is impatient, and I need food right now.
We have one phone between the five of us that comes with us when we cross over and Darling lifts it from the counter behind her, tapping in the code. She’s much better at technology than the rest of us, so she’s our designated smart phone operator.
“What do we feel like?” she asks, scrolling through the list. “Mexican. Italian. Chinese. Thai.”
“Mexican!” Kas yells from the living room.
Darling glances up at me. “I could always go for a plate of nachos.”
“Do they deliver margaritas?”
She checks the phone again. “Yes.”
“Sold.”
She inputs her order, then mine. Kas gets a burrito. Vane orders steak fajitas. Peter Pan never eats but we order him a spicy margarita.
“Oh I am looking forward to this,” Darling says once the order is submitted. “It’s been a while since I had a proper margarita. Tequila is the one liquor you guys don’t have on Neverland. Which is the greatest tragedy I’ve ever suffered.”
“We can buy a few bottles,” I tell her, nestling myself in between her thighs. “Take them back with us. But we need…what are those things. The spiny blade thingies?”
Darling laughs. “A blender?”
“Yes, that.”
I lift her off the counter, and she wraps her legs around my waist so I can carry her back to the living room. “I have a new knot for you.”
“Oh?” Her hair hangs in my face, and I bump into the doorway from the kitchen to the living room and Darling laughs. “What kind of knot?”
“It’s called the Naughty Girl hitch.”
“You just made that up.”
“I did.”
A few minutes later, she’s trussed up like a chicken, her wrists bound and tied to her ankles.
“I’m never getting out of this,” she says from her spot on the floor.
“No margaritas until you’re free.”
She scowls up at me. “Diabolical.”
The phone dings with a notification letting us know our order has been picked up by the driver. “It says you have fifteen minutes before it arrives.”
The sense of urgency has her fighting the knot instead of dissecting it. “Slow down,” I coach her.
I’m not sure why I love teaching her knots and how to undo them.
I find a great deal of satisfaction out of knots, and equally, the satisfaction out of watching them come undone.
Most of my life, I felt like I was trapped in a binding I could never escape, and then when I did, I felt like I’d been cut loose with no rope, no knot to hold me steady, and I drifted for too long.
Nani loved to use the simplest things in life as symbolism. I can’t look at a forget-me-not without thinking of how she used the flowers as metaphors for memories, both good and bad.
I’m sure she’d tell me that the ropes and the knots help me work out something buried deep down inside of me.
So maybe that’s why I’ve been sharing the practice with Darling. She seems particularly wound up lately about something and while she won’t come right out and say it’s about our upcoming binding ceremony in front of the entire fae court, and Doren’s opposition, I know that’s a large part of it.
I watch her struggle for a few minutes before walking her through some of the binding. She manages to get her ankles free when the phone dings, letting us know the driver is close.
“If you take that margarita away from me, I will burn this place to the ground,” she says.
Kas laughs behind me. He’s been watching her work while he sketches more in his notebook.
“The app tells me the driver will be here in two minutes,” I tell her.
“Fuck.”
I guide her a bit more and she gets the rope tail through the right loop, and the entire thing comes undone.
“Yes! I won!”
“Boys,” Vane calls through the screen door on the porch. “Get out here.”
I’m expecting it to be our food pulling in the driveway, which it is. But the driver bearing our food is Maisie from The Lost Knife.
That can’t be a coincidence.
She sets several brown paper bags on the porch. “Kody will see you tonight at 2:00 a.m. You will meet him in the parking lot behind the strip mall on Rivertown Street. Don’t be late.”
“You could have just called us!” I tell her as she walks away.
“I’m not even going to dissect how fucked up it is that they somehow infiltrated our food order,” Darling says, plucking the giant margarita from the carrier. “Because I have nachos and a margarita and nothing else matters.”