Page 125 of Night of the Witch
My brain doesn’t see it at first. It’s a mound of dirt, bits of fuzzy mold.
Only that isn’t mold.
It’s fur.
It’s a cat. One of Mama’s cats. Something jagged has torn right down the side of her body, spilling dark blood across her orange fur.
I drop to my knees across from Dieter. “Oh, no. Ohno. It’s Kleines Mädchen! Mama will be so sad!”
The tiny cat’s stomach quakes still, lungs greedily dragging at a few last breaths. Her front paws twitch in futile kicks at the air.
“She’s alive!” I start to stand. “Mama can save her—”
Dieter grabs my wrist.
I’m grounded in this moment. In staring into my brother’s eyes.
Nothing else exists.
Just him. Those swirling, vicious blue pools that seize every spark offire in my body and hold me captive as Mama’s newest kitten lets out a mournful howl between us.
“It’s too late for Kleines Mädchen, Fritzi,” Dieter tells me. And he grins.
“No, it’s not! Mama can—”
Dieter raises his other hand. He’s holding a knife.
Why does he have that? What’s he going to do?
I pull against his grip. “Dieter! Let mego! I have to tell Mama!”
“Mama, Mama,” Dieter singsongs. “Mama! Hm. I don’t think she can hear us.”
He lifts the knife over the kitten’s head.
And brings it down in a single, powerful swoop.
The blade crunches into the cat’s skull, bone popping, the dirt beneath sucking the knife in with a wet plop. But the noise that comes out of the kitten’s mouth, a warbling squawk—it palpitates in my ears, echoes on every heartbeat.
I scream. Dieter’s grip on me clamps tighter, his knuckles vividly white, the veins in his neck bulging.
He cuts his empty eyes up to me, grinning.
“I needed to lure you out, didn’t I, Fritzichen?” he says, teeth as white as his knuckles. “That’s all I needed to do. Lure you out. And now I’ve won our game.”
The Birresborn forest wavers, trembling at the edges of my vision, a vision quickly blurred by tears. I blink, blink, trying to clear my sight, but the fog of everything coalesces around me, and when I manage to see again, Dieter and I are standing.
Reality crashes through me, and I feel every bit of terror that the memory had repressed—it wasn’t real, just a memory; but ithadbeen real, and we’re back in the pool glade in the Well now, I’msafenow—
Only Dieter isn’t here. He’s a dream still, a figment of memory.
He has to be.
My lungs ache from breathing so fast, that tight pinch in the back of my throat like I’ve been sobbing.
How did I forget that memory? But I feel it, deep in my mind, extracted from where I’d buried it under fear that hardened into scar tissue. Survival, denial, because he was my brother, he was my brother, and I loved him.
Dieter is in front of me now, somehow, holding his hand out to me. Beckoning. An apparition and a dream and—he isn’t real, this isn’treal—
