Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Tinker Bell
I pulled on the chains that strapped me to the bed. The metal scraped my flesh and trapped my magic — even the shard’s. I felt for it anyway. Reached down into myself the way I’d done ten thousand times, and hit iron.
This wasn’t just anyone’s bed. It was Pan’s. If he thought he was going to have me, fuck him. Not happening.
The boat rocked. Outside the cabin, men laughed and shouted at each other, and somebody dropped something heavy on the deck above my head. Ordinary noise. Men working. It could have been any ship anywhere and I’d have found it comforting on a different night.
Caspian had a ship. He’d stood on a deck like this one a thousand times, giving orders in that easy voice of his.
Wrong ship. Wrong man giving the orders.
I’d wanted to see where we were going. Get my bearings, count the turns, learn something. Pan handled that with four words to Smee about his bed.
Ankles strapped wide at the bottom corners. Arms over my head. Nothing I could cover and nowhere to turn.
Tears came up hot behind my eyes and I blinked them back down.
I hadn’t felt like this since I was eighteen at Salem Academy, sitting on the floor of the practice room with my hands shaking, unable to make the smallest thing happen.
They’d all gone on to lunch. I’d stayed and cried where nobody could see me and then I’d learned.
That’s what I did. I got up off the floor and I learned.
There was nothing here to learn. The iron didn’t care how good I’d gotten.
I thought about Caspian and I hated myself for it.
Twice I’d told him I didn’t need his protection. Snapped my fingers at him for that shard like he was hired help. And the last thing I did before Pan took me over the rooftops was look down at that man on the sidewalk and plead with him with my eyes.
He couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. That was how we left it.
Nobody knew where I was. Not him, not Alice, not anybody. I could want him all night and it wouldn’t put him one foot closer.
Footsteps approached the door and it opened. Peter Pan looked down at me. He had on his green tights, tunic, and shirt. The perpetual young man.
No, not a man. A fucking demon.
His gaze crawled from my ankles to my face. “Tink, how inviting you look.”
Nonononono
I pressed my body into the bed, trying to disappear. There was nowhere to go. That was the whole point of the position and he’d chosen it on purpose.
I yanked on the chains and twisted my body. The metal bit into my flesh even harder. “Stay away from me, you bastard.”
I was powerless. He could do whatever he wanted and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
He smiled like a spider speaking to a fly. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of raping you.” His voice was smooth and there was something ugly under it. Pan only acted nice when he wanted something.
I gritted my teeth. “What do you want?”
He sat on the bed and ran his hand over my leg. Too possessive. Too intimate. Too much like he already owned it, and I wanted to scrub the skin off where he’d touched me.
“Don’t touch me.” I wrenched my leg hard, trying to knock his hand loose.
“All right.” He took his hand back. “But I want you to do something for me.”
There it was.
He’d told me on the path. You can find my shadow, and you’ll be able to mend us back together. That was what all of this was. The chains, the hand on my leg, the not-raping-me — he’d wanted me soft first, or scared first, or grateful first, and now here it came.
Every part of me said no before my mouth did.
“I’m not doing anything.”
He narrowed his eyes and his mouth tightened. But then he blinked and the tension left his face except for his eyes.
“Very well.” He shrugged and headed for the door. “I can send Wendy in here.”
Everything in me dropped. My ribs, my hands, my breath. She’d put her boot in me and held my face in the water and smiled while the thing behind her eyes watched, and she’d done all of it without being asked.
He had his hand on the latch, waiting.
“What do you want?”
Like I didn’t know. Helping him become a living nightmare wasn’t what I wanted to do.
“You know, beautiful. My shadow.” He met my gaze and held it, waiting. Watching to see if the price landed. Then he gestured toward the chains. “That metal binds your power—”
So patronizing.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Yes. Well. I want to loosen those chains.” He said it kindly. Like a cop doing me a favor. “All you have to do is locate my shadow.”
And there it was, sitting right in front of me.
I could have my hands back. I could sit up.
I could put my legs together and cover myself and stop being a thing arranged on a bed for whoever walked in.
And somewhere under all of that, further down, the part that mattered — I could reach my magic.
It was in there. I’d been feeling for it all night and hitting iron, and this man could give it back to me with one word to his men.
Locate his shadow. That was all. Just find it. Finding wasn’t mending.
I let myself have that thought for about two seconds.
Then I put it down, because I knew exactly where it went. Find it, and then it’s just over there, and then what’s the harm in getting closer, and then his hand on my leg again and Wendy at the door and the chains coming off a little at a time for every good thing I did for him.
That was the trap. He wasn’t offering me my hands. He was offering me the first step.
“No.”
He headed over to me and clasped my cheeks hard. “Oh, you will. I just have the right thing to motivate you.” He released my cheeks. “Let’s start with… pain.”
I tensed, praying I would pass out. My rib still throbbed.
He tapped on the door. “Wendy.”
Just pass out. Just pass out.
She sauntered in wearing a long black dress and a hooded cape. She looked more like a vampire than a witch. Her eyes were black. The thing was back. No reasoning. No mercy. Nothing.
“She won’t help?”
Her voice didn’t sound like a woman. It was more guttural, more of a growl. God, what was inside her?
“No.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll leave you two alone. Let me know when she agrees to find my shadow.”
He shut the door quietly.
“You’re going to do this the hard way?”
Obviously. Unlike her, I had morals. I never used my magic for evil.
She slowly approached the bed. I trembled waiting for her to beat the living crap out of me. Maybe I could fake passing out.
Wendy studied me. Her head tipped a little to one side and she didn’t blink. She’d been watching my face the whole time. “You think I’m going to beat you?”
I wet my trembling lips. “You’re not?”
“No. Beatings can be unreliable.” She reached into the pocket of her cape and pulled out a black velvet box.
I cringed. Something was inside that box. Then it moved. Oh, God. Something alive was inside it.
“You’ve never been to the Elder Dimension, have you?”
I swallowed back my dread. I couldn’t take my eyes off that box. “No.”
She came toward the bed and the box tilted in her hands, back and forth, like something inside was throwing itself at the walls.
She flicked it open.
Two white worms, fat as grubs. They had red eyes. They lifted the front halves of their bodies and turned them toward me, and they knew where I was.
My whole body tried to get away from them at once and the chains held me exactly where I was. I heard a noise come out of me. It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever made before.
“Scrivens.” Wendy tilted the box so I could see them better. She smiled, and there were more teeth in it than a woman ought to have. “They eat flesh. They’re white now. Once they feed, they go red.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see them. Didn’t want to watch them turn red.
“No. Never.”
“You say that now, little witch. But I think you’ll change your mind.”
Something crawled onto my stomach.
Then teeth. Not like a spider. Not like a mosquito. Something with jaws opened me up and kept going.
My eyes came open. I couldn’t help it — the pain took them open, and there it was, two white bodies working at my stomach and the blood running down my sides into the sheets.
I arched off the bed and screamed. I threw my body sideways as hard as the chains would let me and they dug in harder for it, chewing deeper, working.
“Stop!” I screamed.
Bitch!
“Not until you agree to help us.”
Us. She said it like she’d earned a place in it.
They bit down together, both of them at once, deeper than anything had gone into me in my life. Something tore. The scream that came out of me wasn’t a word and it didn’t sound like me and it went on until there was no air left behind it.
And somewhere in the middle of it I saw Caspian tearing that strip off his own jeans. Standing in the rubble with his shirt off, ripping up his own pants so I wouldn't have to hold that shard in my bare hand.
He'd done that for me. A man I'd been rude to since the second I turned and found him in that doorway.
“Never.”