Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Caspian
I wrapped the glowing shard in the strip of my pant leg. White light came through the cloth like the cloth wasn’t there.
The moment I touched it, it did something. I wasn’t sure what. Not yet anyway.
I turned my head. A lifetime of walking dark holds and reading manifests by nothing at all, and I couldn’t look straight at a piece of glass in my own hand.
The heat came through next. Steady. Pulsing. It was as if the shard was alive and it was threatening to burn me the way it had burned her.
I didn’t care about that.
Her hand was still open at her side, palm up.
Blisters across the pads of three fingers and one along the heel of her thumb, already going white at the edges.
Her heartbeat was running fast and shallow, and it hadn’t slowed since she’d cried out.
She’d made that noise and then acted like she hadn’t.
“We need to attend to that burn.”
But that wasn’t the only thing I noticed. For a moment, I thought stars had flashed in her eyes and then quickly disappeared. I’d never seen anything like that. But she didn’t act like anything was wrong. I wasn’t sure if that was something different due to the shard or if that was normal.
Either way, she was going to say she was fine. She’d say it in about four seconds and she’d mean for me to believe it.
“I can take care of it. I have a salve at home. Just give me the shard.”
Four seconds. I could set a watch by her.
The last woman who’d put her hands on me had been wearing enough perfume to hide a body, and I’d liked it fine at the time.
Tinker Bell didn’t smell like anything but Tinker Bell — soot from the church, the copper off her own blood, and under it the green, dry, lightning-before-rain smell that came off every witch I’d ever stood close to, except hers was the only one I could pick out of a crowd.
She’d told me she was off limits. Twice, unprompted, which meant she’d been thinking about it too.
“So you can burn yourself again?”
Her heartbeat was still running fast and shallow and she was telling me she was fine. Her body had been arguing with her mouth since the second she’d cried out, and she had no idea I could hear both.
She gave me a cool get-lost glare. Her blue eyes narrowed like a cat ready to pounce. “I told you I don’t need your protection.”
I always wondered what it would be like to hear the woman purr rather than threatening to scratch me.
“Yeah. Yeah. You told me.” I closed my fist around the shard. “Walk.”
She didn’t move. Then she did, and she went past me with her chin up and her burned hand curled against her side where she thought I couldn’t see it.
Whatever had stacked those bricks was still unaccounted for.
Most likely a demon. The last demons here had been Balthazar and Vex.
Both powerful. Both cunning. Both vengeful.
I put myself between her and the dark end of the church and followed her out.
I wouldn’t allow anything to happen to her.
She was the one person who might be able to help my sister.
The shard got hotter in my hand. I had to switch hands and shook my hot hand. My palm was red.
Tinker Bell stopped at a little red RAV4 and opened the car door. “You walked me to my car.” She held out her hand. “Now give me the shard and leave.”
“Tinker Bell, I’m here to protect you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need protection.”
Damn it. One frustrating woman. I’d have better odds getting a barracuda to release a shiny object than getting her to accept my help.
But I wasn’t backing down. Angelo hadn’t asked me to guard her — he’d told me — and a man doesn’t come back to Angelo Santi with she said no thanks. Enzo would be the one to explain it to me.
She snapped her fingers and stretched out her palm, the burned one. “Caspian—the shard.”
I looked at the blisters. White at the edges now, and she was holding the hand open like it didn’t hurt, waiting me out.
I gave it to her. I don’t know why. She’d asked with a snap of her fingers and I handed over the one thing keeping her tethered to me, and by the time I understood what I’d done it was already in her palm.
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.
They went higher. Farther. Smaller.
Her eyes begged me to do something. She held them on me the whole way up, and I gave her nothing.
Fuck. He was going to open the portal.
Why did Pan need Tinker Bell when he had Wendy?
Then it came to me and everything in me went cold. He was going to do to her what he’d done to Wendy. I’d never forgive myself for this.
Not the job. Not the debt. Not my sister.
Her.