Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Tinker Bell
Pain. There wasn't anything else left in the world.
I screamed until there was nothing behind it and then I screamed again, and my head went back against the mattress and my hands hauled at the chains and the metal scraped my skin on both wrists and I didn't care.
Make it stop. Please. Please, somebody. Anybody.
Something stirred.
Not my magic. My magic was still behind the iron where I'd left it, and this came up somewhere else — low, under my ribs, deep in the place the shard had gone into me back at St. Christopher's. It turned over once like something waking up.
Then heat. Not the worms. This started at my center and went out through me to my hands and my feet, and it kept going, and it got past warm and kept going, and for one second I thought this was how I died.
The scrivens quit.
Both of them stopped chewing at the same instant and lifted their heads. Then they came off me fast, dropped to the floor with two wet sounds, and went for the dark under the bunk like they'd been called home.
I lay there breathing. My stomach was on fire and the blood cooled on my sides. I shook hard enough to rattle the chains. I glanced down. My gut looked like someone had run a lawnmower over it.
But I didn't do that.
Something else did. It had heard me and it had answered. I hadn't had one thing to do with it.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not from the worms — this was something else, a fine hard tremor that ran from my fingers down through my arms and into my chest and wouldn't quit. My teeth were going. I couldn't make them stop.
I'd never experienced anything like it in my life.
Wendy backed away from the bed, staring at me, and she kept backing until she hit the door. “What's happening? You’re…you’re glowing.”
I thought I detected a hint of fear in her voice. The darkness fled as if it couldn’t stand to look at me.
Good. Let her wonder. I hoped whatever it was crawled up her dress and ripped her apart.
I slowly looked down at my mangled gut. Deep gaping holes. It was awful. It looked like someone had used a jackhammer on me.
Then I saw the light. It was coming through the holes and then it spilled over my body. I was glowing like a candle.
Magic. It came out of my stomach through the holes those things had chewed, brighter where I was torn open, moving under the skin of my thighs like something with a current.
It shot through me like an arrow. Under the ribs first, then out along both arms, into my fingers, down into my feet, and everywhere it went my skin came up in gooseflesh and my hair lifted off the pillow. My heart slammed. My mouth tasted like a struck match.
Then it turned around and did it again.
What was it doing? It was different from mine. Not bound like mine. Free. Stronger. Faster.
I had no control over it. This was inside me and all I could do was lie on the bed with arms and legs stretched out wide.
Something changed. The pain backed off. My skin was closing — slow, but closing, the edges of those holes pulling toward each other while I watched.
I'd never done magic that could heal a wound.
Not a bruise. Not a scratch. The Christmas Star?
It had to be. The magic was in my blood, and it had done something to the scrivens.
If it could do this to me, it could do it to somebody else. That was the first thought I had that wasn't about getting loose.
Caspian was flat on that pavement when they took me. He couldn't move. I don't know what Wendy did to him and I don't know if he got up.
And if he did get up, he had to go tell Angelo Santi he'd lost me.
I've been to Crimson Stakes. I know what's in that room, and I know Angelo doesn't use it for strangers. He uses it for his own.
Maybe the magic would burn through the metal.
Please set me free!
I pulled on the chains, but I was still imprisoned. Nothing had changed. Damn it!
Wendy's eyes flashed back to gray.
The thing inside her was hiding. Scared of me, or scared of what was in me, and I didn't know which and I didn't care. For now, she wouldn’t hurt me.
She backed into the door and fumbled for the knob and got it open and slipped out.
I lay there panting. The scrivens hadn't moved from under the bunk and I was too scared to shut my eyes. What if they came back? What if the magic faded?
The door slammed open.
Pan came in and stopped.
His hand was still on the door. He hadn't finished coming through it. Whatever he'd walked in expecting, this wasn't it.
He looked at me for a long moment. Not at the scrivens on the floor, not at the box Wendy had dropped. At me, and at the light coming off me.
His eyes moved over the glow the way you'd read a page — down my legs, across my stomach, back to my face. Nothing on him. No surprise, no anger. His mouth was slightly open and he'd forgotten to close it.
I set my jaw and kept my mouth shut. My whole body wanted to say something — anything, a curse, a threat, one word — and I swallowed it and lay there and let the silence sit between us.
He came closer to the bed and everything in me pulled tight against the chains. He'd sat on this bed once already. He'd put his hand on my stomach, wiping away the blood. “Are you healing?”
Everything in me tried to get away from his hand, but the chains held me right where I was. Once again, I allowed the silence to stretch between us.
He rubbed his fingers together. “The magic within you is even more powerful than I anticipated. That star is protecting you.”
Every muscle I had locked at once and there was nowhere for it to go. I didn’t want to be tortured and healed over and over again.
Pan wiped my blood on his tights. “I think it would be tiring torturing you and I don’t think that would help me find my shadow.” He drummed his hand on his thigh for several long heartbeats, but then he stopped. That worried me more as than if he hadn’t.
“The star protects you. It doesn’t mean it would protect someone you care about.”
Nononononono
The bastard.
I gazed down at the scrivens still hiding under that bunk and my mind went ahead without me. Not Alice. Not Darius. Caspian, chained where I was chained, with that box tilting over his stomach and Pan waiting on me to say a word.
He wouldn't scream. That's what I knew about him. He'd hold my eyes and take it and act like he was fine, the way he did everything else, and I'd have to sit there and watch him do it.
Tears pushed on the back of my eyelids. No. I couldn't.
He stood and patted my trembling leg. “We have to figure out who would motivate you to find my shadow.”
He grinned. “I’ll tell you a secret. Wendy said that someone else came through the portal. Actually three people.”
Excitement and dread shot through me. Three. Alice would be one — she's the only one who could open that portal. Darius wouldn't let her come alone. And Caspian, if Angelo sent him after me. The image of any of them being tortured in front of me would kill me.
I blurted, “How?”
He looked at me like he’d struck gold. Like an idiot I’d given it to him. Let him know what would hurt me.
He bent over and put his hands on either side of my face.
His breath brushed over me —wet earth and something turned, the smell of a jar left shut too long.
I tried to turn my head away, but all I could see was his face an inch from mine, and he was smiling.
Cold sweat broke across my face and my whole head went light.
“Now that’s our little secret, isn’t it?” He kissed me on my pressed lips and he tasted like spoiled peaches. “If you come on my team, I’ll tell you.”
I spat in his face. Fat chance. I’d find a way to save them.
He wiped the spit off his face. “Fine. If that’s the why you want it.” He headed toward the door and looked over his shoulder. “I’m going to let them. Leave breadcrumbs for them to find us.”
Breadcrumbs? What was he going to leave as a trail?
He picked up the box Wendy had dropped and scooped up the hiding scrivens. The box rattled again. “Once I have one of them, we’ll see how willing you are to listen to them scream.”
Why hadn’t the Christmas Star’s magic killed them? I pulled on the chains and the metal scraped my wrists and ankles raw.
He laughed and patted the box. “I suspect soon you’ll come around.” He winked. “And you’ll find my shadow.”
He left. I wanted to scream I'd never help him. But it was useless. It was a lie.
And it was worse than a lie, because I knew which one of them he wanted.
Pan didn't need three. He needed one, and he'd take the one who'd already come at him once and lost. Caspian had history with him. Pan doesn't forget history. He'd been sitting in the Hollows with nothing to do but keep it warm.
So it wasn't a hostage he was fishing for. It was a reunion.
And Caspian would walk right into it. Of course he would. He'd tear up his own clothes for a woman he barely knew — he wasn't going to sit on a beach somewhere and wait for a better plan.
The only thing I could do to help Alice, Darius, and Caspian was escape.