Page 68 of Night of the Witch
Then—
What was that?
My shoulders tensed, brow furrowing, all the muscles in my body straining against an unspoken threat. Like there were eyes on me I couldn’t see, instincts flaring in a wordless warning that something,something, was wrong.
“The ward should be down now,” I said anyway, still smiling, but it was stiff. “Want to try?”
Dieter took a tentative step forward, then another. No great seizure of pain grabbed him, and after a moment of standing in the middle of the warding wall, he gave me a relieved smirk.
“Good job, Fritzichen.”
I threw my arms around my brother.
He was so much taller than I remembered. More rugged, worn by his time away, and I wanted to ask him all about it, every moment he’d been gone. Where had he been? What was the world outside Birresborn like—I went with Mama occasionally to nearby towns for markets, butbeyondthat, far beyond—
Dieter hugged me back with one arm and spun us in a circle. A bag at his waist bumped against my thigh, and he set me down quickly, but notbefore I felt a shudder run through him, some errant twitch of repressed eagerness. He’d get like that sometimes when we were younger, so fixated on a goal that his whole body would shudder and shake with need.
“Fritzichen,” he said, one hand on my arm, the other reaching into his bag. “You don’t know how I’ve dreamt of this day.”
I smiled. It felt forced, and I couldn’t figure out why. “Me too—”
“No.” His voice was a hard drop, his fingers spasming on my arm.
He held up what he’d drawn out of his bag: a bottle, typically used to store beer.
My frown was question enough. The wild excitement in his eyes didn’t let any words form on my tongue.
“You have to drink this,” he told me. He pressed the bottle to my chest.
I didn’t take it. “What? Why? Dieter—”
“Fritzichen.” Another hard snap, his tone bouncing from eager to unarguable in a heartbeat. “Together, we’ll save the world. The voice has told you, hasn’t it? It’s what we’re meant for.”
My body went cold. A pond freezing slowly in mid-winter, the edges first, then the middle, all of it crystallizing one particle at a time.
“Sever from the Well. Take this bonding potion,” he said, eyes glinting in his lantern’s light. “Bond with me. Together, we’ll be the most unstoppable force of wild magic the world has ever seen.”
Too many things were rushing up on me. Too many realizations. His words, his mania, wild magic, the voice—all of it was coalescing, and I couldn’tbreathe.
That sensation of a threat, an unseen danger, grew and grew, my body shaking with building unease.
And I knew its source now.
It was in front of me.
“It’s our destiny, Fritzichen, sweet Fritzichen.” Dieter released my arm to tuck a curl behind my ear. “You and I. We’ll join our magic and dismantle this whole corrupt system. We’ll burn it all down.”
The bottle sloshed where he pushed it against me again. Still, I didn’t take it, my hands numb at my sides.
My focus caught on the forest behind him.
The trees were moving. Or, no—not the trees.
Soldiers.
Soldiers in the forest, marching toward us, toward Birresborn.
“Dieter.” His name left my lips in a burst of air. “What is—what are you doing? Who did you bring?”
