Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Caspian
I steered the sloop north. That’s where Darius said Neverland was.
It felt good to be behind the wheel again. Some things were the same. The salt air. The breeze flapping the sails and spraying my face. Close my eyes and I could have been running the Gulf with a hold full of Santi cargo.
But this wasn’t home.
I’d fought Pan once. On Earth, on my own ground, the night he took Wendy, and he’d walked away with her and left me on the floor of my own sister’s house.
That was with everything I had going for me.
Now I was sailing to his turf, in his water, in a boat I’d bought off a suspicious old man for four gold coins.
And the Kraken was down there somewhere. A hundred feet of it with six clawed hands, and all Pan had to do was call it.
He had Wendy. Now he had Tinker Bell.
I put my hand flat on the wheel and held the course north.
Alice unboxed the shard and it lit a path on the water, but instead of going north, it went east. “You need to follow the path.”
I studied Darius. The puzzlement on his face wasn’t reassuring. “I thought Neverland was north.”
“It is.”
East. Not where Darius said. Which meant the one man aboard who’d been to this world before was as blind as I was.
Alice looked between us. “The shard is leading us to Tinker Bell, not Neverland.”
I didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing. I had no way to gauge this world and had to trust Alice and Darius to show me the way. Not what I wanted. I wished my crew were here. I trusted them.
“You don’t think Pan’s taking her to Neverland?”
“He’s taking her to his shadow,” Darius said.
Of course he was. But I knew Tinker Bell. She had a reputation for being a fighter. She wouldn’t do this willingly. That’s what scared me. Pan was ruthless. He didn’t take kindly to no. Men had ended up dead for defying him.
Alice gasped. “There’s something in the water.” Her voice cracked.
My fangs extended. The Kraken had found us. But when I followed her gaze, there was something floating in the water—a piece of clothing—not just clothing. Pajamas. The bottoms Tinker Bell was wearing when she was kidnapped.
I gripped the wheel tighter and the wood cracked.
Darius reached over and snagged the bottoms. He examined them. “Shit, they’re stained with blood.”
Tears slid down Alice’s cheeks. “He keeps hurting her.”
Every time he hurt her, I’d make him hurt twice as bad. I’d bleed him dry.
I stared at the bloody pajamas.
I knew what he does. I’d had years of knowing it. Every port I went into I heard another piece of what he’d done to my sister, and I’d stand there and take it and say thank you and go back to my ship.
Now it was happening again. Same man. Different woman. And I was on a boat I’d bought for four gold coins, a day behind him, doing exactly what I’d done the last time.
Nothing.
“That’s what Pan does.”
Silence overcame us. Water slapped the sides of the boat. The shard’s golden trail led farther and farther out to sea. Even with my vampire eyes I couldn’t spot the boat.
Darius flapped out his wings. “I could fly and see if I can locate Pan’s boat.”
Alice’s head came up fast. She didn’t say a word. Her hand found his arm and closed on it and she didn’t seem to know she’d done it.
“I should be doing it.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“Because you have somebody on this boat who needs you to come back.”
Alice’s grip on him went loose. She looked at me and her chin came up and her eyes filled, and she pressed her lips together and turned her face toward the water.
Nobody said anything for a minute.
Then Darius folded his wings. “Be careful. Pan’s crafty.”
Like he had to tell me that.
“I’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t give him time to argue. I shifted and went up.
Flapping hard, north and east along that gold line. I’m not as fast as Darius. Doesn’t matter. This one was mine.
Not a cloud anywhere. Just blue, top to bottom, and a bat crossing it with nothing to get behind. Every wingbeat I was the only thing in that sky and I knew it.
And I had time to think, up there, which I hadn’t had on that deck.
Open water. Miles of it in every direction, and a pair of pajama bottoms washes up on our course.
Cargo doesn’t find you. I’ve run enough of it to know that.
He’d put them there. He knew somebody was coming and he’d left her blood in the water where it would be found, and I’d looked at it and thought about revenge instead of thinking at all.
Then a clipper came up on the horizon.
I went at her low and fast, looking for a woman on that deck. Looking for a blond head of hair.
Men on the lines. Working, not watching. Nobody turned. Nobody pointed. I got all the way to the mast and put myself in the rigging and had a clean look at the whole deck, and somewhere underneath the wanting to find her, a voice said this was easy.
I didn’t listen to it.
Then something hit me.
It came out of nowhere and went through me and shut me down — no pain, that was the terrible part, just every muscle I own quitting at the same instant. My wings stopped answering. The sky went sideways.
I came out of the shift on the way down and hit the water on my back.
Then I was floating. Face up. Sky, sun, nothing else.
I couldn’t move my hands. I couldn’t turn my head.
I couldn’t do one thing but lie there and think about how far down that ocean went, and what Darius said lived in it, and how long a man like me can be under before it stops mattering that he can’t drown.
“Bring him aboard,” a male voice called out.
I knew that voice. I’d heard it once before, in my sister’s house, telling me what he was going to do with her while I couldn’t get up off the floor.
My fangs came down and there wasn’t one other part of me that would move.
A splash somewhere off to my left. I couldn’t turn my head to find it. Then oars, working steady, getting closer — three men rowing, by the sound, and none of them in a hurry.
Hands got hold of me. Four of them, maybe six. They took me by the arms and the belt and hauled me over the side like a net coming in, and I couldn’t do one thing about any of it. Not brace. Not fight. Not even close my mouth.
I went face down in the bottom of the rowboat.
Wet boards an inch from my eye. Somebody’s boot beside my head. That was the whole world for a while, and over it I could hear him up on that deck, waiting for me.
One of them kicked me in the side and I groaned. “Don’t move.”
Like I could move. But he probably knew that. Pan’s men were just as cruel as he was.
Splash. The oars dipped into the sea again. I rocked back and forth on the boat, my face smashed against the wood. My neck was crooked and my limbs jumbled. It was definitely a spell.
Wendy? Most probably. Tinker Bell wouldn’t do his dirty work. My sister was a different matter.
The oars stopped sloshing in the water. Rough hands grabbed me again.
“Send down a rope,” one of them said.
All I could see was the bottom of the boat and their boots and pants.
Someone wrapped a rope around my waist. I was hauled up inch by inch.
I finally could see my captors below. There were six of them, maybe in their late twenties.
Scruffy looking. Rough beards, matted hair, and stained shirts from sweat and the salt air.
Streams of water trickled down from my hair, pants, and boots. I reached the ship’s rail and I was rolled over. I dropped down like a dead fish. My hair covered my eyes but through the strands I could see him.
Peter Pan.
And next to him my twin sister, Wendy.
I hadn’t been this close to my sister since the night he took her. Not once. I’d have given my ship and everything in it for five minutes of this, and here it was, and I was lying at her feet in a puddle of seawater with my mouth open and my hair in my eyes.
She looked down at me.
Gray. Her gray, the one she was born with, the same as the girl who used to count the strikes on the hall clock.
Wendy. It’s me.
She blinked.
Black. All of it, corner to corner, and whatever was behind it looked at me the way you’d look at something the net brought up.
I couldn’t say her name. Couldn’t move my jaw, couldn’t lift a hand, couldn’t do the one thing I’d been trying to do since he took her — get in front of her and make her look at me.
She looked at me and nothing came back. No recognition. Not a flicker of the woman who used to know my mood off my walk.
She just wasn’t the one looking anymore.
Pan knelt next to me. “Can’t move, can you? I have someone who wants to see you. I can’t hurt her. But you—that’s another story.”
Can’t hurt her.
Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Something was stopping him, and it wasn’t mercy, and it wasn’t Angelo, and there was only one thing in this world she was carrying that he didn’t put there.
The Star was holding him off.
For about half a second that was the best news I’d had since the Bywater. She was alive and something was standing between her and him.
Then the rest of it came around.
He’d tried. That’s how a man learns he can’t. Whatever he’d done to find that out, he’d already done it to her, and I’d been sailing a leaky sloop across an ocean while he did.
And now he had me. A vampire he could hurt, in front of a woman he couldn’t, and he’d said it out loud like he was pleased with the arrangement.
That’s what I was for.