Page 22 of Stealing Tink

The Nomad narrows his eyes, but he answers all the same. “As I understand it, it was the Middle Sister who stole your voice and used it to bind Neverland. I’m sure you’re aware that the Middle Sister and Eldest Sister have a tenuous relationship. Have had for centuries now. Well, the Middle Sister must have angered the Eldest. Not sure what about, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Long story short, the Eldest Sister stole your voice from the Middle Sister. I suspect she enjoys holding it over the Middle Sister’s head. Can you imagine the joy she derives from holding the key to destroying Neverland?”

My gut twists. Not for a love of Neverland. I wouldn’t mind if that place were wiped from existence. But I can’t say I’m fond of the idea of the Eldest Sister threatening to destroy my voice out of spite for her Sister.

It does, at the very least, make me feel the tiniest bit better about initially refusing to help. If it’s the Eldest Sister’s lair the Nomad wants to break into, then I never really had a shot at helping Captain Astor anyway.

“Your turn to answer me,” says the Nomad.

I pull a single tile from my pocket. Feel the familiar weight of it in my palm before I open it to show him. John.

“John,” says the Nomad. “Wendy Darling’s brother.”

An ache rises in my chest, a longing to hold the tile close, but that feels too intimate a gesture for the Nomad to witness.

“That’s why you did what you did to Peter, isn’t it?” he asks, curious.

You shouldn’t be surprised, I write. You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to punish him.

The Nomad answers, but slowly. “I knew from digging around that he was involved in taking your voice. I figured that would be reason enough for revenge. What I hadn’t realized was that he’d taken someone from you as well.”

Guilt stirs in me, sudden and sharp. He’s twisting the death of my friend against me. Using it to make me confide in him, cause me to trust him.

I did what I did to Peter for me and me alone, I write.

“Now, I believe that almost as much as I believe John was simply a friend,” says the Nomad.

I shove the tile back into my pocket and stand to leave.

“Tink,” he says as I reach the door. “If the boy knew you remembered him so fondly, I’m sure he would have been honored.”

I linger like that, my hand on the door, then turn toward him, where I find us locked in eye contact—some unspoken challenge passing between us, though I’m not sure what game we’re playing or what the rules are. But then the doorknob twists, and as I step back to make room, in enters the servant from before, the smell of mutton pie wafting through the room.

It’s then that I remember to be afraid.

CHAPTER 11

When I was seventeen, I joined a cult.

It didn’t last long.

I’d left home a month before, hoping to protect my parents from the Nomad. I figured that if he was hunting me, I’d rather him be hunting me on the other side of the world.

It was the loneliness that drove me into the arms of the cult. Not because I was looking for the community they offered. It was their belief in reincarnation that drew me in.

I’d first had the thought when I was thirteen. The dreams felt so real, after all. More like memories than dreams. Looking back, I recognize that the theory was my mind’s way of clinging to a hope that the Nomad wouldn’t come for me. That I could live out my simple life in peace.

Still. Alone at seventeen and missing my parents desperately, hope had made me an easy target for Stefan. He’d been sitting by the fireplace of a dingy inn I was staying at, surrounded by a circle of travelers. He’d been asking them about their dreams, ascribing them to memories of past lives.

I’d been skeptical, but I’d followed him back to his farm, nonetheless. I missed my parents so much it ached. I don’t think I was ever quite convinced, but I stayed for a few weeks anyway, hoping something Stefan would say would prove his theory.

One night, he got drunk at a tavern and confessed to the whole place that he’d made it all up, and that he had a bunch of idiots tending his farm and keeping food on his table.

Apparently, cult leadership was much preferred to hard labor.

All of this to say, I might have been wrong about Stefan, but I turn out to be right about Phoenix and Venus.

It takes two days, but they show up at the entrance to the Gathers, rowing a rather beat-up boat that looks as if it did not originally belong to them but that no one will be missing.

Venus complains about not being picked up at the shore.