Page 53 of Night of the Witch
As though he needs to remind me.
I have a chance to save people from the fate of my coven, so of course I’ll take it, and I have a chance to save Liesel too.
But he says it as if he’s remindinghimself, as if he never gets a chance to say his truths out loud, and now that he’s told me everything, he can’t help but to say it again, and again, speaking the forbidden words into the air.
I can’t even fathom the weight he’s carried all these years. The people he’s watched die, the lies he’s had to tell, the walls he’s built around himself—
But he aided death too. He’s part of the dark wave that has choked this country and destroyed my people, and even if he’s tried not to be directly complicit, he’s stillguilty.
Isn’t he? What if his words are true—what if he has, from the very beginning, worked against the murderers?
I turn away from him. I can’t look into his eyes with these thoughts banging around my head.
“Well,” I start, clear my throat, and stand up straighter. “If I don’t get supplies, I can’t guarantee the safety of all those prisoners, and I’m not going in that prison without my own guarantee.”
“Fine.” His agreement comes gruff. “But I’m coming with you.”
“Fine,” I relent. “I need you to pay, anyway. Unless you’re all right with me using my wits and wiles to obtain what I need.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. Is that a smile? The Three save me.
“No need to steal,” he says. “I’ll pay.”
I turn for the door, but his fingers on my shoulder stop me cold. It’s not just that he’s grabbing the bruise his elbow left there yesterday; it’s that his touch shocks through me, gentle now, such a stark contrast that my body can’t decide what to do with it.
“At least—can you conjure some sort of disguise?” His voice is thin.
I stare at him for a full breath.
He really has no fear of my magic. Our whole conversation about his plans and his truths, he hadn’t once flinched at any mention of magic, and he doesn’t now. He speaks of it as any other skill or tool.
I fight a smile. “That’s not how magic works. Besides, I don’t have any herbs here—I used what few you did have.” I press my finger to his shirt and swipe up a bit of the powder still coated on him.
His chest is just as firm as when he’d held me against him in the aqueducts.
He sighs and crosses the room. From under the cot, he pulls out a box I’d missed, a small trunk—from it, he draws out a thick cloak. “Wear this, then.”
It’s brown, not the black of his hexenjäger robes, but my body goes stiff. It’shis, and something about dressing in his clothes sends a shiver through me.
It isn’t a bad shiver.
Which is why I jerk back from him. “No.”
“It has a hood.” He nods at my head. “They’re looking for a witch with yellow hair.”
“I have a hat,” I say. I pull it off—the Three, it’s absolutelywreckedwith grime now—and flip my head upside down to twist my matted, equally filthy hair up inside the hat. What I wouldn’t give for a bath.
The desire squeezes the breath from me, and when I straighten, I’m winded, shaken.
A bath.
Helping Mama fill our tub, laughing over some stupid joke.
Her fingers pulling the tangles out of my hair. Her voice, airy and light, singing—
I straighten my own cloak, holding it tighter to my chest, and stare at the closed shutters, hoping the hexenjäger doesn’t see the tears in my eyes.
If he does, he says nothing. Once he’s dressed in his own sort of disguise—that simple brown cloak, the hood pulled low over his face—he turns to the door.
