Page 72 of Filthy Little Witch
I was the weak link. Maybe I always was. I’d been the one to cause all of this. I was the one who got hurt, who’d been dreaming about the demon pouring out of my mouth and nose.
“I’m already inside you,” it said. “You have no choice. This is your only choice. Come to me, and I’ll leave them alone. Let me have you, only you, and I’ll let them leave this place.”
I had learned early in life that demons lie. They twist the truth and torment the soul until the human feels like they have no choice but to comply. This happened in Biltmore Forest. This happened all over the world all the time. But I was just so tired of being here, and we were so close to home.
“Come to me, or I’ll tear this liminal apart with you in it.”
I made sure Marta and Atlas were safe. I got them in the church where the demon couldn’t go, and as soon as I could, I got away to get some clarity.
We were reading each other’s thoughts now. The flesh-binding ritual had made that permanent, so I didn’t understand how they couldn’t hear the monster in my mind. But I suspected Marta felt it. That shadow. That darkness she’d sensed this morning. It was me.
I told myself this was the only way to keep them safe. I told myself that I would just let it have me, that they could complete the soul binding, use each other’s magic to contact the other side, and slip through the veil at midnight. I told myself they wouldn’t miss me, that once they realized what was happening, it would be too late, and they wouldn’t be able to stop it.
But as I held my hand on the latch to open the door, I paused, listening to the sounds of Atlas’s deep timber.
“I just wanted you to know. I thought my brother was the only person in the world I’d ever care about. And now…Now, I can’t imagine life without you in it.”
I sensed his deep, abiding affection for her, his love and adoration pouring out of him. And as much as it surprised her, she returned it. Somewhere along the line, her heart had started to beat for him.
I should have been jealous. But like everything in the liminal, that seemed too pedantic to put into words. I ached for Marta, and I yearned for Atlas, and I always would.
“Atlas, I don’t know how I would have gotten through this without you…without you both.”
She almost stopped me. She almost made me turn back. But the demon wouldn’t stop coming for us unless I did this.
This is the best way I can protect them.
I turned the latch as quietly as I could and stepped outside, right into the dark spiraling cloud of evil.
“Alright,” I said, closing my eyes. “Take me.”
I thought it would hurt more. I thought I would burn and bristle and set me on fire from the inside out, the way it had to Atlas when he’d merely been touched. But no.
A cool gasp of air flowed down my throat and into my lungs, and then I was back in the woods from my nightmare, standing in the salt circle with candles licking flames all around me. The cricket and frogs sang their nighttime chorus, just as they had the night we’d come here, just as they had in every nightmare since.
“Wesson Colt,” came the soft, feminine voice. “At long last.”
“You wanted me, you’ve got me,” I said, glancing around to see who, or what, I was talking to.
A tall woman wearing a white dress stepped around a tree, her bare feet blackened with soot and undergrowth. Her long blond hair fell in messy waves down to her waist, but her silver eyes cut through me, almost glittering with intensity.
“You’ve answered my summons,” she said, slowly walking around the circle, glancing from my face to my boots and back up again. “Are you willing to pay the price?”
“I want a deal,” I said. “That’s what your kind does, isn’t it? Making deals and condemning souls?”
She laughed, and the sound reminded me of shattering glass, high-pitched, nearly manic.
“What did you have in mind?” She raised an eyebrow and circled the perimeter.
“You want me, you can have me. But you let Atlas and Marta go. You let them leave the liminal. You let them get on with their lives. You and me, we stay here.”
At that, she tilted her head to assess me, staying quiet for far too long as she considered. The silence made me itch, made me want to keep talking if only to fill the desolate void.
“You’ll give me your body?” She licked her lips, almost too hungry at the prospect.
“If that’s what you want. You want to possess me? You want to live inside this skin?”
“Perhaps. It has been a long time since I’ve been invited inside mortal flesh.” She hummed. “And what will we do, you and I? We’re stuck in this cage. If I possess you, what then? What fun can be had when we’re one body, one soul, one mind, but we’re all alone here?”
