Page 144 of Night of the Witch
Dieter whirls around, the bottle still in his hand. “I said,‘Down, dog,” he growls, a cough choking his words. He swipes his hand at me—
Nothing happens.
Dieter’s eyes widen. A rush of noise swooshes over us, and people spill across the invisible barrier that had kept them out. At the same time, the flames around the pyre swoop up, stronger than ever.
“Save Fritzi!” I hear Cornelia call. More forest folk run forward. Dieter curses, twisting his arm, his fingers bent grotesquely—
Nothing happens.
“What did you do?” Dieter screams at the fire, even as Fritzi throws her head back, trying and failing to escape the flames.
“What didIdo, you mean,” I growl.
His head whips around to me. His eyes are wild, his skin sallow. The bottle drops from his fingers, this time smashing on the cobblestones, the remains of the liquid spilling out. He buckles over in pain.
“Fritzi didn’t make the potion,” I say. “I did.” And without Fritzi’s spelling the liquid as it brewed, it was poison. It won’t kill him—but it will kill his magic.
Which was, of course, my plan all along.
45
FRITZI
The space between Dieter and I deepens into a vacuum, an echoing tug of absence that I feel as strongly as his rip in the Well’s barrier.
Something is…gone. Like a light flaring on to show that what was once monsters and lurking beasts is now just an empty room.
Otto severed my brother’s connection to magic.Allmagic.
Dieter is realizing that now, too, and as forest folk pour toward him, he turns on Otto, still on the ground at his feet. The look on Dieter’s face is the most chilling he’s ever shown, violation and malice unrestrained, and seeing it aimed at Otto sculpts everything in me to the finest of points, the sharpest of intentions.
The cedar tree’s branches twist for my manacles, now free of Dieter’s enchantment, even as forest folk guards start scrambling up the flames, fighting to snuff them with waves of their hands and muttered spells. Brigitta is an arm’s length from me, shouting, but I scream and double forward, and the cedar tree snaps the irons like they’re nothing more than another piece of dry kindling.
My hands flare in front of me. I am action only. Instinct pure and stripped.
Vines creep out of the ground, shattering cobblestones, slithering across the town square from the Forest. They come and come at my command, and in a heartbeat, Dieter is knotted up in dozens of thick green snakelike vines that lock his arms to his chest and ensnare his legs and keep himthere, immobile, helpless.
He writhes and turns that withering glare onto me. “Friederike!”
I feel Brigitta’s fingers on my arm. I hear the snap and crunch of footsteps on the kindling, smothering the flames easily now that Dieter’s magic isn’t keeping them lit. I hear townspeople wailing in the falling down of his magic, and hexenjägers, too, their weapons clattering from their hands as they are released from my brother’s sway.
The kindling shifts beneath my bare, scorched feet, and my body is still a chaos of pain, but all I see, truly, is my brother.
The vines tighten on him.Tighten.
His fury holds, but his face begins to go red, his lips sputtering, spittle dripping.
I could kill him. So easily. There is no fear in it now, is there? No need to worry about feeding wild magic with a cruel act, because wild magic is only as evil as the intent behind it.
And right now, I embrace that evil, if it means seeing the light go out of his eyes.
“Fritzi! Fritzi—look at me!”
Otto pulls at my face, trying to get me to look at him, but my hands are still outstretched, and Dieter’s eyes are on mine, and if I don’t kill him, if he doesn’tsuffer—
“You have him,” Otto says. “He’s done, Fritzi. Stop. You can stop now.”
He’s done, echoes Holda.Look, Fritzi. Look at the hexenjägers.
