Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Caspian
Within a half hour, all three of us were at Lumina Glade.
The cathedral sat in the middle of the clearing, roof gone soft, rose window blown out — black and empty, the lead still holding the shape of what used to be there. No sound in the whole Glade. No wind, no birds, none of the frogs you get out this way.
Whatever they’d opened here, it had taken something out of the ground with it.
The mud in front of the cathedral was still churned from where they’d landed. Bare footprints going one way, small and fast and dug in at the toes, and then a long smear where somebody had gone down on her back and been dragged.
I walked to the line where her scent stopped and stood on it. There it was. Soot and copper and that green lightning smell, thick enough to put my hand in, and then a hand’s width farther on — gone. Not thinned. Gone, like a page torn out.
I stood there and breathed her in and stepped forward and lost her. Back a step and had her. Forward and lost her.
I did it four or five times before I made myself stop. Like a dog at a door.
That was the whole of what I had left of her. Six inches of dirt in a dead clearing, and I’d been an hour late for it.
“This is where her scent ended.”
Alice came up beside me with the box under her arm. Something knocked against the inside of it. Once, then again, harder.
I’d been a smuggler for a long time and I’ve carried cargo that moved.
This was different. That thing had gone quiet the second she put it in the box back at the townhome, and it had stayed quiet the whole way out here, and now we were standing on the last place Tinker Bell had been and the shard was throwing itself at the lid.
It knew. Whatever a piece of a star knows, it knew she’d stood right here.
Alice glanced up at me and gave me a slight smile—a smile a teacher would give a student. “The shard can sense the trail of her magic.”
Her magic. Not her scent, not her blood — the thing in her that Pan hadn’t taken.
I’d stood in this clearing an hour ago with nothing. Nothing to smell, nothing to follow, nothing to hit. And a piece of glass in a box was going to do what I couldn’t.
I didn’t care. Let it. Whatever gets me to her.
I gestured toward the box. “Can that piece of star bring us to her?”
“I think so.” Her hand went flat on top of the lid. “The shard will want to reunite with her and wherever she is, it will bring us there.” Her voice quieted as if she was afraid the shard was listening and didn’t like what she was saying.
“That could lead us into danger.” Darius stayed back at the treeline with his back to us, watching the dark the way a man watches it when he’s been somewhere worse.
As much as I wanted to go straight to Tinker Bell, I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.
I had no knowledge of this place, especially of Neverland.
This was Pan’s world. I’d been a captain and smuggler long enough to know that you didn’t just burst in on your enemies.
That could get us killed and it wouldn’t help Tinker Bell or my sister.
No, I had to be patient. Come up with a plan. And then attack.
I gave it a second. “Wait. What if you ask it to follow the same path she took? Not straight to her—where she went.”
Alice looked down at the jiggling box. She didn’t touch it, and she was holding it the way you hold something you’d rather set down. “I can try.”
I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, me or herself. She looked at the box and then past it, at nothing, working something out she didn’t say out loud.
“But it could still be dangerous.”
Everything about tonight had been do or die. Standing here talking about it was too.
Five minutes ago I’d told myself not to be rash. Make a plan. Don’t burst in on a man in his own world.
Then I thought about a white aura burning brighter around her while I stood in a dead clearing being careful.
It didn’t give me any confidence. We were going anyway. Tinker Bell’s life depended on it, and so did my sister’s, and I wasn’t going to stand in this clearing and be careful about it.
I clasped her shoulder. Stiff as a plank under my hand. “Then try. We’re going now.”
Darius was there before I finished the sentence. I never heard him cross the clearing. He put his arm around Alice’s waist and looked at me over the top of her head, and he didn’t say a word about it.
Fair enough. I took my hand back.
One woman. That’s what got a man moving that fast — one woman, out of all of them, and he’d built his whole life around standing next to her. I’d had more women than I could put a number to and not one of them had ever made me cross a clearing like that.
I wondered what that was like. Then I stopped wondering, because we had somewhere to be.
Darius kissed the top of her head, and for a second his jaw set and he looked past both of us at the dark where the treeline stopped.
“Last place I want to go back to. Even though Alanna’s asleep.” He frowned down at the box. “Would this shard have the power to wake her?”
“It’s only supposed to be used for good,” Alice said. Her mouth went tight and she looked at the ground before she looked back at him. “But I can’t promise that. I’m sorry.”
Darius sighed. “Just don’t let her put me back down in her dungeon again.”
“That bad, huh?”
His jaw went hard and he didn’t look at me. He looked at the cathedral instead, and whatever he was seeing wasn’t out there.
I’ve been down in a room I don’t talk about either. I let it go.
Wonderful. A queen on that side who kept a man in a hole, sleeping through all of this, and the only thing we had to find Tinker Bell might be the thing that opened her eyes.
Nothing to be done about it. The box was how we found her, and we were going.
“Let’s go,” I said, and I meant right now.
“Find her.” Alice opened the lid.
White light came out of that box and hit the clearing like something spilled. It caught the mud, the broken glass in front of the cathedral, all of it, and then it went out of her hands in a line and struck the air where Tinker Bell had been standing.
The air turned. Slow at first, then faster, a wheel of it spinning in on itself — white at the outside edge and green going through it, deep and wet, the green you see in water over a reef.
Gold cut through the middle in threads that came and went.
And dead center, where you’d want to look, there was nothing.
Black. No stars in it, no shapes, nothing to tell you how far back it went.
The air coming off it was hot and wet and smelled green. December in Louisiana, and it was summer on the other side of that hole.
This wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d rather be undressing the twins and being a naughty boy, kissing every inch of them. But that wasn’t happening.
I was about to enter the unknown. I’ve walked into rooms where men were waiting to kill me and I always knew the room. Knew the doors, knew the water, knew which way I’d go out. There was no knowing anything about this.
Pan was in there. Somewhere past that light, in his own world, with his own crew and his own rules and every advantage a man can have.
And her.
She’d gone through here. Barefoot, in her pajamas. She’d have fought him the whole way — I’d have bet my ship on it — and it hadn’t mattered.
Wendy was in there too.
That was the one I couldn’t get my hands around. Pan I could kill. I’d been planning how since Angelo’s office. But my sister was going to come at me with that thing behind her eyes and her own face on, and I had no idea what I’d do when she did.
I’d been telling myself for years that if I ever got her back I’d know what to do.
I don’t scare easy. I was scared.
I jumped through the portal after her.