Page 55 of Night of the Witch
And I don’t know what to do with that.
“I know.”
I glance up at the kapitän. He’s looking where I was, at the window with the two faces; he nods at them, smiles softly, and when his eyes drop to mine, my lips part.
“I know much of what has happened has been in His name,” he says. “Faith is…complicated.”
“The right thing isn’t.”
“I know that too. Which is why we’re going to save the innocents.”
“And then what?” The question knocks into my stomach.And then what?
After I get Liesel. After I get us out of this city. I take her, and we run to the Black Forest—and then what?
The threat is still here. Kommandant Kirch is stillhere. And I’m just going to hide away while he grows in power? What else can Ido?
Stop him.
The voice is relentless now, and steady.
Stop him.
This neighborhood aches with that same goal. Everyone who had been here—every person killed or forced to live in exile for decades, centuries even—I can feel all of their desolate souls thrumming at the thought of the lead hexenjäger being brought to justice. Even if they weren’t persecuted by hexenjägers themselves, the evil is the same.
Stop him.
How? How can I stop him? Mama stayed in Birresborn far longer than we should have as she tried to figure out some way to reach him, too, some way to convince him to give up this crusade. But if there is no way to stop him—what do I do?
I’m hit with a sudden image, the memory of Mama tied to her stake.
Instead, though, I see the kommandant, bound in irons, burning alive.
“We don’t kill,”comes Mama’s reprimand from my memory, the lessons all elders taught us.“Witches never kill. It feeds wild magic—and we do nottouchwild magic, Friederike!”
I brace, waiting for the voice to slither in, to push me over into temptation with wanting to see Kommandant Kirch dead.
But nothing comes.
Nothing but my own aching need, buried deep under my grief, and that is somehow worse, that the voice doesn’t evenneedto tempt me. The will is already there.
I wince, black spots across my vision, the street spiraling, shaking—
“Fritzi?” Fingers grab my upper arm. “Fritzi!”
I lurch forward and slam into the kapitän’s hard chest. He catches me, anchoring me as I gasp, shaking, sweat beading down my spine.
“I’m just—” I look up at him.
He’s holding me on the street.
His face is close, so close, pupils blown wide with earnest concern—schiesse, how is a hexenjäger kapitän soearnest?—with a tuft of his dark hair breaking free to swing across his forehead, the edge of his cloak’s hood dipping back, just slightly.
I sigh, for a moment letting him take my weight.
For a moment, just resting.
I waver again, eyes snapping shut.
