Page 141 of Night of the Witch
“Did you find a way to sever from the Well?” Dieter coos.
But there’s a heaviness in his voice. A twist of something dark that his control is usually too riveted to show, and it washes over me, a frigid charge of terror.
“But how are you using magic?” he presses. “You fed it no evil acts. You did not pay the sacrifice of blood it demands. Oh, my pretty sister. My pretty,cleversister. What have you discovered?”
No, no—this was what I feared. That he would realize that all the sacrifices he made, all the burnings, weren’t even needed. He could access the whole of wild magic from the start. On his own. All the people he’s burned to fuel his magic—he onlythoughtthey bolstered his power because we were all told that that was the way.
We were lied to, misled, and he’s seeing that now.
“Oh, Fritzichen!” he purrs. “Youareuseful, aren’t you? How long have you known the extent of the Well’s lies, hm? How long have youkeptthis from me?”
The brand on my stomach flares with pain. Something within it seizes, the twisted, ruined flesh, and I scream, that muffled wail that slivers cracks in my throat.
“Naughty, naughty Fritzichen,” says Dieter’s disembodied voice, and this time, there is nothing controlled about it. He’slivid.
I yank on the manacles and eye the tree, but it is dead, and when I focus again, I’m too frantic, the magic slipping through my fingers, bucking—
“Fritzi!”
My head whips around.
And there is Otto. Bolting over the crackling kindling, elbow thrown over his mouth against the smoke. He climbs the wood, scrambling higher, boots singeing in the embers, the hem of his cloak catching, sparking. He rips it off and fights up, up, and then his hands are on my face, and he’shere, he’shere, and I come apart.
“Liebste, I’m here.” He echoes the thoughts in my head, a promise, his words roughened by the smoke and that coil in his eye, rage barely capped. “What has he done to you? Liebste—”
He touches the gag on my mouth, runs his hands around it to the back. It clicks, then the metal gag falls away, and my jawscreamswith being able to close again, every muscle in my mouth feeling bruised.
“Otto,” I sob. “You can’t—you’ll burn—”
I cough, unable to get a full breath, and I see him fighting a cough, too, his eyes going bloodshot in the smoke.
“I’m not leaving you,” he tells me, and he ducks around me to work at the manacles.
The fire edges closer, the smoke thickens.
“Oh,no,” says Dieter. “She does not get to befree.”
The smoke parts.
He’s standing at the base of the pyre, unadulterated rage contorting his face.
“My dear sister lied to me, Kapitän,” he says. “She knew more about this wild magic I harness—and she kept it to herself! While I tried to share with her what I had found. And not only that.” He cocks his head. “How many innocents did you let me burn, Fritzichen? To keep this information to yourself. That all this time, the only source of magic I needed was me.”
That makes him grin. His rage toward me breaks in an undeniable cackle of glee, triumph ripe and vile.
“All this time,” he gasps, staring at his splayed fingers. “All this time. Killing people was pointless. Well—educational. But notnecessary. Oh, the goddesses are even more demented than I thought. Look what they made me do! Do you see?” He glares into the sky. “Do you see what you let me do?”
Dieter lifts his hands into the air, closes his eyes in something like reverence, something like awe. He whispers, a spell I can’t hear, words weaving as his fingers flex and strain, the muscles bulging in his neck. He’s using it to focus now only, using the words as a conduit to draw on the power we could always tap into.
“Otto,” I beg. “Otto—hurry—”
His fingers fumble behind me. He curses, slips on the wood, tugs on the irons. “It’s not coming off. Verdammt—I can’t break it! It’s like something’s jammed—”
“He bespelled it,” I gasp. “He bespelled the manacles.”
Dieter’s eyes pop open.
And hepulls.
