Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Caspian
“Drink.”
A loud voice pierced the fog in my mind. Not Enzo. Female. I knew that voice.
Then the pain arrived, all of it at once, like somebody had laid a hot iron the length of my spine and left it there. My back. He’d opened it with a whip made out of his own shadow, and shadow doesn’t let flesh knit.
Someone thrust something into my mouth. I wanted it. God, I wanted it, but I was too weak to do a thing about it. Even breathing was taking too much effort. My heart had slowed. My blood was sluggish.
“I said drink. Now.”
My fangs lengthened, scraping skin. Hunger took over and I bit down.
Blood burst into my mouth. It was mixed with a spice—anise.
Tinker Bell.
I knew it before I knew anything else. I’d tasted her blood off the sand on a beach and I’d have known it in a hundred years.
My eyes fluttered open and I stared into her blue eyes. But there were stars radiating around her and she was so bright, so bright, but it didn’t hurt my eyes.
And I couldn’t stop feeding on her.
Warmth came into me. My heart picked up. My hands came back, then my arms, and somewhere in there the pain in my back showed up again, and I welcomed it because pain meant I was still here.
Then I made myself stop.
Hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
“Heal.”
That command was even more powerful.
Something moved under the skin of my back.
Not pain — worse than pain, and I’d have taken the whip again over it.
The meat of me pulled toward itself. Muscle finding muscle, sliding and gripping and drawing tight, inch by inch from my shoulder down to my hip, and I could feel every bit of it happening and there wasn’t one thing I could do to make it stop.
I heard it. That’s the part I won’t get out of my head. A wet sound, low, under my own skin, like rope being drawn through water.
My spine bowed off the bed and my hands closed on nothing and I made a sound I’d never made in front of anybody.
Then it quit.
I lay there with sweat running off me and my whole back throbbing like a struck bell. I got a hand around behind me and put my fingers where the worst of it had been.
Smooth. Not a mark on me.
I’d lain on that floor knowing that back was mine for good. Some things don’t close and I’d made my peace with it somewhere between the third stroke and the fourth.
Pan had opened me to the bone with a whip made out of his own shadow, and she’d closed it with one word.
I looked down at myself. The blood was gone. All of it — off my chest, off my jeans, off the sheets under me, like none of it had ever happened.
All I could do was stare at her. “How?”
She brushed my hair back. “I’m the Christmas Star.”
Not carrying it. Not holding a piece of it in a box. She said it the way you’d say your own name.
That was what I’d been sent to guard. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt with the thing herself sitting inside her, and Angelo Santi had put me on a dock and told me to keep her alive.
“Pan’s healed,” she said. “So is Wendy.”
I heard the second part and the first part went somewhere I couldn’t reach.
“Say that again.”
She slipped her hand around the back of my neck. “You have your sister back.”
Everything in me went out at once.
I’d looked for that woman across two worlds. I’d taken jobs I shouldn’t have taken and gone to men I shouldn’t have gone to, and I’d stood on a sidewalk in the Bywater and watched her eyes go black with my own sister behind them, and I’d stopped believing it years ago and kept doing it anyway.
My eyes stung and I let them. I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve never once cried in front of a woman.
“You’re sure,” I said. It didn’t come out like a question.
“I’m sure.”
I got my hand over hers on my neck and held it there and couldn’t say one word.
Her lips parted. “And you have my heart.”
She didn’t blink and she didn’t look away. A woman who’d told me twice to go back to my ship, holding my eyes and not moving an inch.
She’d told me love hurts. She’d told me it’s better to be alone, and then she’d watched me bleed out on a chain and given me her own wrist, and now she was sitting on the edge of that bed saying that to me with her chin up like she was daring me to argue.
“Say it again,” I said.
She took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “I’m yours.”
“Meaning?”
She smiled. “Love hurts, but you’re worth it. I love you.”
Her heart was going hard and quick under all of it. I’d spent this whole thing listening to that woman’s body call her mouth a liar, and this time the two of them agreed.
I sat up. My back held. I got my hand into her hair and brought her down to me and kissed her, and she came without one second of hesitating.
Warm. Anise still on my mouth from her wrist. Her hand flat on my bare chest over the heart she’d started up again.
I’d had more women than I could put a number to and not one of them had ever felt like being let in the door.
She pulled back an inch. Just an inch.
“Say it again,” I said.
“I love you.”
I kissed her, my hand finding the back of her neck. She tasted like something I didn’t have a word for yet. Christmas. But something more.
Someone knocked on the door. Hesitant, like they weren’t sure they should.
“Caspian?”
I went still with my hand still in her hair.
I’d have known that voice in the dark at the bottom of the ocean. It was the voice that used to count the strikes on the hall clock. It was the voice I’d been chasing across two worlds, and I hadn’t heard it come out of my sister’s mouth since the night he took her.
Everything else went out of my head. Tinker Bell, the bed, the blood that wasn’t on me anymore. All of it.
“Wendy.”
It came out of me like it had been sitting behind my teeth for years.
Tinker Bell broke off the kiss and stood. She held out her hand and tilted her head.
“Come on. Let’s go see your sister.”
I got my legs under me. My back held and my knees held and I stood up in the cabin, and I took her hand and I could not get to that door fast enough.
I threw open the door.
Wendy stood in the passageway with her gray eyes on me. Wet. The same gray as mine, and staying that gray — I watched for the blink and it came and they didn’t change.
The thing was gone. Not hiding. Gone, and where it had been there was nothing at all, and I hadn’t felt that nothing around my sister in years.
She smelled like fresh cut daisies. She’s smelled like that since we were kids. I hadn’t caught it once since the night he took her.
“Wendy.”
She burst into tears. “Caspian, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—“
“I know.” I picked her up off her feet and held on. “It’s okay. You’re back.”
Something went out of me then. Every year of it at once — every port, every dead end, every night I told myself she was somewhere safe when I knew better. It all came up out of me and I stood there in that doorway holding my sister and shook.
“I love you so much,” she said into my shoulder.
I twirled her around like I used to when we were kids.
She laughed.
Her laugh. Not that thing’s. Hers.
I set her down. Something moved at the edge of my vision.
Peter Pan stood further down the passage, lit up, the only light in it.
I growled and my fangs came down. He was a dead man.
“Caspian, no.” Wendy put her hand on my arm. “Don’t. I love him.”
“He’s had you for years, Wendy. Look what he did to you.”
Tinker Bell stepped in front of me. Right into the space between me and him, close enough that I’d have had to move her to get past.
“I destroyed the thing inside of Wendy.” She gestured down the passage at Pan. “Don’t you think I could heal his heart as well?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
Pan came up the passage and got down on his knees on the boards. He bowed his head. “I’m truly sorry for what I did to your sister. Just know I love her.”
I scoffed. “Love? What do you know about love?”
“I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness.” He raised his head. “But I’ll spend the rest of my days making it up to Wendy.”
Days. He had a lot of those.
I looked down at him kneeling there in his own light, whole, healed, better than he had any right to be. He’d put a whip made of his own shadow across my back. He’d put worms in Tinker Bell. He’d had my sister for years and worn her like a coat.
“No,” I said.
Wendy’s head came up.
But I ignored her and focused on Pan. “I’m not forgiving you.
Not today, not here, and don’t ask me again.
” I stepped past him and put my hand on my sister’s shoulder.
“But she says you’ve changed, and she’s the one who paid for what you were.
If she believes it, that’s her right and I’m not taking it off her. ”
Pan started to speak and I stopped him.
“Hear the rest. I run cargo for Angelo Santi. I know every port on two worlds and I’ve got a ship and a long memory.” I looked down at him. “You hurt her again and there won’t be anywhere on either side of that portal I can’t get to you. I’ll take my time. You’ll have earned it.”
He held my eyes. “Understood.”
Wendy squeezed my hand. “Thank you.”
I smiled at her. “You know I can’t deny you anything. You’re my twin.”
She tilted her head toward Tinker Bell. “I think there’s someone else you’ll do anything for.”
I didn’t answer that.
Wendy laughed. My sister, laughing at me in a passageway in the Elder Dimension, the way she used to when we were kids and she’d caught me at something.
“Oh,” she said. “Look at your face.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ve never seen your face do that.”
Tinker Bell was watching us from a few feet off with her arms crossed and her chin up, and she’d heard every word of it.
Let her.