Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Tinker Bell
Pan had let me off the bed. I wasn’t much better off. Chained to a chair, and once again I couldn’t reach my magic.
The one good thing was that he couldn’t hurt me. The Star wouldn’t let him.
It couldn’t protect me from everything, though.
Somebody had put me in a long off-the-shoulder red dress.
My hair was combed out loose. Pink eye shadow.
Mascara. Red lipstick. I’ve never worn makeup in my life and somebody’s hands had been on my face while I couldn’t stop them, and I kept catching the smell of whatever they’d used and I couldn’t wipe any of it off.
A plastic doll. That’s what he’d made me.
I made myself look at the room instead.
Chains hanging from the ceiling. Four of them, spaced out, hung that morning by men who’d known exactly where to put them.
Nobody hangs chains for a woman who’s already in a chair.
Cold came up through me and settled. This wasn’t a cell. It was a room he’d arranged, and he’d dressed me for it, and he’d sat me down facing the middle of the floor.
I was the audience.
Guards outside the door. I counted the boots. Two of them, maybe three.
“Carry him inside,” Pan called.
Him.
Darius. Or Caspian. My mind wouldn’t pick one and it wouldn’t stop trying, and I sat there in that stupid red dress with my hands chained and watched the door.
The door swung open. I jumped, my heart thundering.
Two men dragged Caspian in, grunting under the weight of him. He was wet and soggy and didn’t look like he was breathing. They chained him up and left him hanging.
Caspian.
Something went out of me. Not relief — I don’t know what to call it. He’d come. All the way through a portal and across that water, for me, and here he was hanging off a chain with his hair wet and his arms over his head.
Pan came in behind him. Wendy after that.
Her eyes were black and staying black, shiny with it, like the thing inside her couldn’t wait for what came next. It looked at me. Not the woman. The thing rotting in her. And it smiled.
Cold went through me and kept going. Whatever they were about to do to him, I was going to have to sit in this chair and watch it.
Somebody had cut his shirt off him. There were scars across his back and a ship inked over his shoulder, and I thought about him standing at a wheel somewhere with all of that under a shirt, doing his job, before any of this.
Pan snagged his hair and snapped his head back.
His eyes found mine. Wide open. He was awake in there — I could see him looking at me, I could see him trying — and he didn’t move, didn’t struggle, didn’t make a sound.
A spell. He was under a spell.
They were both under one, the brother and the sister, and I was powerless to break either spell.
Pan clasped my cheeks. “The Christmas Star won’t let me hurt you. I can’t make you talk and find my shadow, but let’s see how it works when someone suffers for your stubbornness.”
Stubbornness? No. That’s not what it was. It was refusing to walk his dark path. It was having a soul. I didn’t want what was living in Wendy to live in me.
Pan released me. “Bring me the whip.”
One of his men left.
Stay calm. Stay calm.
I wasn’t calm. My breath came out harsh and my heart slammed and my hands went slick on the arms of that chair.
Every stroke was going to be mine. That’s how he’d built it. Pan couldn’t lay a hand on me so he’d put it on Caspian’s back instead, and every time I kept my mouth shut, that whip was coming down.
And then I saw the rest of it.
Caspian couldn’t make a sound. He was spelled quiet, the same as he was spelled still, and he was going to take all of it without one word.
No screaming. No cursing. Nothing.
Just the sound of it landing, and him looking at me while it did.
Wendy came and stood by my chair. Her fingers ran through my hair and I jerked my head away. She laughed if you could call it that. It sounded more guttural than a human laugh.
“Spin him around,” Pan ordered, running his palm down the whip.
His men turned Caspian where he hung. His back was bare. Scarred and broad and nothing over it.
Pan drew the lash through his fist and it moved wrong. Not like leather. It hung off his hand and poured, black and slow, and where it crossed the lamplight the light didn’t land on it — it went in and didn’t come back.
I knew what that was.
Shadow. He’d made a whip out of his own shadow, or a piece of it, and he’d been carrying it this whole time.
Which meant he’d never been fully cut from it. Not all the way. He had a scrap and he’d kept it and he’d braided it into something he could hit a man with.
The Star came up hard behind my ribs. Not to heal anything. It came up the way a dog comes up off the floor — the two of them knew each other, the light in me and the dark in his hand, and neither one liked what it was looking at.
Pan slashed the whip.
It made no sound coming down. That was the worst of it. No crack, no whistle, nothing — it went through the air like it wasn’t there and then it opened Caspian’s back from shoulder to hip.
Blood sprayed.
He didn’t move. Couldn’t. His hands didn’t even close.
I made myself watch and I made myself keep my mouth shut, and the thing beside me chuckled.
The wound stayed open. I waited for the edges to draw and they didn’t, and they weren’t going to. Whatever that lash was made of, it didn’t let flesh knit.
He was going to carry that for the rest of his life.
I inched forward in the chair. The magic inside pushed as if it wanted to get to Caspian.
“Pan,” Wendy said. This time her voice sounded like a woman’s. But not excited—worried.
I glanced up at her face. Her eyes weren’t all black, more gray. But why?
The lash came down. Caspian’s body jerked. More blood trickled down his wound.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
The words echoed through my mind, but Pan showed no mercy. This wasn’t rage. He’d have kept going all night and gone to bed fine.
My chest tightened and my throat ran dry. I pulled on my magic again and again. The Christmas Star surged inside me, burning hot. Sweat trickled down my face and my body shook. But the chains fought back, digging deeper and deeper into my flesh.
Caspian’s back turned into a bloody mess. The blood ran down him, over his jeans, and dripped off the toes of his boots onto the floor.
He hung there like a slab of beef. Never moved. Not once—the whip came down and his body took it and swung a little and that was all, and I had no way to know what was happening to him.
He could be dying and I wouldn’t know until he stopped breathing. He needed blood. He was a vampire, bleeding out at the end of the chain, and Pan wouldn’t allow any of us in this room to give him a single drop.
There’s no worse death for a vampire than thirst. My silence would kill him. I didn’t want Pan to win, but I couldn’t let Caspian die.
I pulled at my wrists. The manacles drew tighter. I pulled harder and they answered, biting down until my hands went cold.
Someone pounded on the door. “Captain. Captain.” The voice was excitable.
Pan lowered the whip. “What?”
The door opened and a man stood in the doorway. “We’ve spotted a ship. Someone is pursuing us.”
Damn it! Alice and Darius. It had to be.
Like Caspian, they’d come for me. Crossed a portal and an ocean and were sailing straight into Pan’s trap. I pulled on the chains and got nothing but metal on raw skin.
“Distractions.” Pan looked Caspian over the way a butcher looks at a carcass. “Cut him down. He’s spent. We may have two more fresh specimens to torture.” He tilted his head. “Tie him to the bed.”
Two men rushed in and took Caspian down.
He headed over to Wendy. “You will stand guard. Don’t let them touch each other.”
Why? Did he know something I didn’t?
“Don’t worry.” Wendy’s eyes flashed back to pure black. “I won’t.”
A shudder ran through me.
Caspian was strapped to the bed. His eyes found mine and stayed there.
Say something. Please say something.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
It came out with the breath. Faint stars, a whole cloud of them, drifting across that room and settling over Caspian—and one of them landed on Wendy.
I hadn’t done that. I didn’t know I could do that.
“No,” the thing whispered and the black went out of her eyes all at once.
Gray. Wendy blinked and looked at me with her own eyes, the same gray as her brother’s, and her whole face was different—younger, somehow, and frightened. “You.” Her voice came out cracked and thin, nothing like the growl. “You’re the Christmas Star.”
The thing was playing with me. What trick was it trying to play? “What are you talking about?”
“Tinker Bell,” Caspian whispered.
Everything I’d been holding onto came apart at once. My chest released, my throat went, and I was shaking so hard the chair moved under me. He was alive. He’d been so quiet hanging from the ceiling, and I’d been forced to sit here unable to do anything except watch him bleed.
A tear rolled down my cheek. “Caspian? You can…talk.”
Thank God! Something worked.
“You broke the spell. I knew you would.” His words were ragged as if it hurt to talk. His chest rose up and down.
His face was so pale. His breath so shallow. But he was still thinking of me.
“I’m so sorry for this. It’s all my fault.”
“No, it’s Pan’s. If something happens—”
I didn’t want to hear it.
Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.
I gritted my teeth and pulled again, but the metal wouldn’t weaken. “Nothing is going to happen.”
“You don’t want to hear it,” he gasped. “But ever since the first time…” He licked his lips. “I saw you. I wanted you. Those other women were distractions so I could forget about the woman I couldn’t have. I’m not a playboy, Tinker Bell.”
I’d seen the women he ran with. Painted and polished and poured into their dresses. I own three pairs of jeans and I don’t own a lipstick.
“What?”
“There’s only been one woman for a long time. I just kept picking others so I wouldn’t have to say so.”
Something gave way in my chest and I couldn’t get it back. My eyes burned. My hands had stopped pulling at the chains without my telling them to.
“I…I—”
“You don’t believe me.” His chest rose and fell. “Have you ever loved anybody?”
“Yes.”
My parents. Christmas Eve, the tree still lit, and a witch’s curse working through them while I stood there with everything I knew and not one thing that touched it. I was the most powerful witch in that room and I watched them die anyway.
“But love hurts,” I said. “It’s better to be alone.”
He laughed and then winced. “Sometimes. But there’s joy too.” He looked at me. “Why do you think it hurts?”
I opened my mouth to answer him and his eyes rolled back.
“Caspian.”
His head went sideways on the mattress and stayed there.
“Caspian!”
Nothing. I watched his chest for the next breath and it took too long coming and then it came, shallow, and I didn’t trust it.
The first cannon boomed and the whole ship shook under me.