Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Tinker Bell
“Caspian, answer me.”
He didn’t move.
I never told him what he meant to me. He said all of it out loud with his back torn open, and what I gave him back was love hurts, it’s better to be alone.
That’s what he heard. That’s the last thing he heard out of me.
The thing laughed next to me. “Caspian and your friends will die. Unless you do what Pan wants.”
Darius was a Golden Demon. A runner. He’d throw out those wings and have Alice off that boat before the second volley.
Unless somebody had put a spell on those cannons. Wendy could do that in her sleep. She’d opened the Hollows and she’d bound my magic without breaking a sweat, and if she’d been up on that deck working the guns, then wings wouldn’t help anybody.
So I didn’t know. That was the whole of it. I didn’t know if my friends were alive and I couldn’t see the man on that bed breathing from where I sat.
Fine.
If I couldn’t fight them, I’d give them what they wanted and take something back for it.
Pretend to fold. Get the chains off. Get to Caspian. And a witch with her hands free and the Christmas Star in her blood is a different animal than a woman strapped to a chair.
He’d lie to me. I knew that going in. Pan would promise me anything and mean none of it, and the second I found that shadow he’d have no use for any of us.
I’d have to be faster than him. That was all.
I sighed and let the tears come, and I didn’t have to work at it.
“Tell Pan I’ll help him find his shadow. If he spares Caspian.”
I hated giving in, but there was nothing I could do. I refused to lose him like I had my parents.
“Fine. Come with me. Any tricks, Caspian dies.”
I stared at Caspian. Was he alive? I thought he exhaled and moved a lock of hair. But for how long? He needed blood. Desperately. Time was running out. I had to move fast.
Wendy stood over me and raised one hand. But it wasn’t her talking. It was the thing.
“Solve sedem. Vincula maneant.”
Release the seat. Let the bonds remain.
Something let go behind me and the chains that held me to that chair came away from it and dropped, and my arms fell forward into my lap for the first time since they’d put me in it.
Then a voice whispered inside me.
I’m inside you.
I went cold all the way down.
Inside me? What are you?
The Christmas Star.
No. I’d held the Star. I’d burned my hand on it in that church and watched it glow on a filthy floor, and the last time I saw it, it was wrapped in a strip of Caspian’s jeans. The Star’s a piece of glass. It’s a shard. Alice has it.
That was a piece of me. I came into you at St. Christopher’s and I never left.
The heat behind my ribs. The healing. The light coming up out of my own stomach through holes that shouldn’t have closed.
Not something I’d absorbed. Something I’d become.
This is your destiny.
That can’t be true.
Trust me. You’re the Star.
Wendy dragged me toward the cabin door, but not before I glanced over my shoulder at Caspian. He still hadn’t moved.
Don’t you dare be dead. I need you.
I’d stood in a room like this before. Christmas Eve, the tree still lit, and my mother’s hand going cold in mine while I ran through everything I knew and not one thing touched it.
The most powerful witch anybody could name, and I watched them go anyway.
But the voice said I was the Christmas Star.
If I got out of these chains, maybe that meant something this time. Maybe it meant enough.
I wouldn’t let him die.
Out on deck, another volley fired. Sulfur and gunpowder and smoke, thick enough to taste, and men running everywhere.
Boots pounding the boards. Somebody shouting numbers I didn’t understand. A man went past me with an armload of shot and a burn up one side of his neck, and he never looked at me once.
They were firing to starboard. All of them, all facing the same rail, and past the smoke I couldn’t see one thing except more smoke.
Alice was out there. Darius. I couldn’t see whether their boat had survived. I looked up in the sky, hunting for Darius’s golden wings and Alice hanging onto him, but I didn’t see them either.
Nothing up there but smoke.
Those wings were gold. In a clear sky you could see them a mile off, and I stood there with my neck craned back and found nothing, and something in me started coming apart.
Everyone. All three of them, all at once. Caspian not moving on that bed. Alice and Darius somewhere under that smoke or under the water, and me on this deck in a red dress somebody put me in, with my hands chained, about to make a deal with the man who did it.
I braced my shoulders, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake. “Yes. I’ll help you find your shadow if you don’t kill Caspian—”
“He’s practically dead now,” the thing in Wendy purred.
Heat rushed over my face and ran down my neck. I clenched my fists. If I could, I would have shoved her overboard and drowned her, but I kept calm.
Pan stepped closer. “If you want to save anyone, you will find my shadow.”
My chest tightened. I was trusting him to keep his word. His word wasn't worth a damn, but I took the deal anyway.
“I promise. I will.” The words tasted bitter.
Pan shouted, “Cease fire.”
The last gun went off and then nothing. No more thunder. The men stopped where they stood and turned around, all of them, and the deck went so quiet I could hear the water against the hull.
Smoke hung over everything and started to drift. It thinned out over the rail and I still couldn’t see past it.
Every man on that ship was looking at me.
Pan’s eyes went wide and stayed that way. He flicked his hand. “Wendy, remove the manacles.”
“Vincula solvantur.” Wendy’s voice was guttural.
Let the bonds be loosed.
The manacles dropped onto the deck with a loud clank.
It came up out of the floor of me all at once.
My whole spine locked. Every hair on my body came up and my back teeth ached and my mouth flooded with anise, so strong my eyes watered. My arms spread out wide. My back arched and I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried.
Not my magic. Mine was in there somewhere, underneath, the way a candle’s still lit when the sun comes up. But this was stronger.
Light came up through my hands and my chest and out of my open mouth. White. So bright I couldn’t see the deck or the men or Pan standing three feet away.
Heat went through me from the inside out and kept climbing. Past warm. Past hot. An aura came off me as if I was on fire.
But I wasn’t.
I was the light.
And it was too much. That’s what nobody tells you. I’d wanted power my whole life and here it was and it was too much for one woman to hold, and it kept coming, and there was no bottom to it and no way to shut it off.
Then I saw it.
Pan’s shadow. Standing right next to him. It had been there the whole time — Pan and Wendy were so dark they couldn’t see it, and only pure light brought it out.
No. No, no, no.
I hadn’t found it for him. I’d lit it for him.
Wendy screamed and went down on her knees. She shook so hard the deck rattled under her. Black smoke pushed out of her lips and burst into flame and blew apart on the wind.
Gone. The thing was gone.
She knelt there gasping, her own gray eyes back. A woman I'd hated since the beach, and I'd have gone to her if I could have moved.
Pan grabbed his shadow and it melted into his skin.
“Now, I’m invincible.” He laughed.
Light flashed in his eyes. The black came off him in sheets and white came up underneath it, and he straightened like a man who’d been carrying something heavy for a long time and just set it down.
Whole. That’s what he was. Whatever he’d been missing since they cut it out of him, he had it back, and he stood there on that deck in the middle of my light looking better than any of us.
I did that.
I truly was the Christmas Star.