Page 4 of Little Witch

Chapter Two

There was a particular feeling that hit me every time I came back to a place I'd spent years trying to forget — nostalgia gone warped with unease, like stepping into a memory that had rotted at the edges. That's what it felt like the moment I climbed off my motorbike and crossed the invisible boundary into Autumn's Hollow.

When I returned to my hometown, not from my own violition.

The shift in the air was subtle, but unmistakable. A shiver down the back of my spine. A static in my bones. The magic here was thick as early morning mist, clinging to everything — the cobblestone streets, the ivy-choked houses.

The town hadn't changed. And yet something was different.

Something felt wrong.

It always did, at first. The Hollow had a talent for lulling people into a false sense of safety with its small-town charm and its permanent autumn. Crimson and gold leaves that never rotted lined the streets, pumpkins sat on every porch, and the air smelled of wood smoke, spiced cider, and something sweeter underneath — something that didn't belong to this world. Most people never noticed. I could feel the magic threaded through everything like something alive.

Old.

Wild.

Dangerous in ways most humans couldn't understand.

I wasn't most humans. I wasn't even human, not all the way through. Half-demon, from my father. A man who's name I couldn't even recall most days.

I pulled off my helmet and tied my dark hair back, forcing my shoulders to relax as I walked down the main road, trying to shake the feeling of being watched. Even in daylight, the town sat too still. Beautiful, yes. But unsettling — a painting too perfect, too pristine. Designed. The people who lived here had gone numb to it, going about their lives like sharing a street with vampires and witches and ghosts was nothing at all. For them the magic was background noise. For me, it was deafening.

One foot in, one foot out. Half human, drawn toward the softness of a life untouched by magic. Half demon, with the itch for power that came with it, the pull toward things I tried hard not to want.

I'd never belonged fully to either side. I never would.

I'd been gone for years, trying to bury my ties to the power running through this town's veins. Most of that time I'd spent in the human world, where the rules made a different kind of sense — twisted, rigged for the few at the top, but at least they held still. The Hollow didn't hold still. It was a liminal place, where the line between magic and mundane wore thin enough to see through. The only place I'd ever belonged. The only place I'd ever wanted to leave behind.

And yet here I was again. A moth flying back into the flame that had already burned me once.

Not for me.

For Amber.

The whispers had started months ago. At first I told myself it was residue — the last dregs of a childhood spent breathing this town's magic in through my skin. A small thread of power calling out whenever I got weak enough to hear it. But the whispers had grown louder as the weeks passed, more insistent, until ignoring them stopped being an option.

Something was wrong here. Something was broken, and it wanted fixing. I felt it in my bones — in the way the wind moved wrong through the leaves, in the way the shadows stretched further than they should. The balance of magic in Autumn's Hollow was shifting, and it wasn't seasonal.

Darkness lingered. Magic rumbled underfoot. Something wicked was coming.

And it wanted the girl I'd been in love with since school... my damned step-sister.

I stopped at the edge of the street, gaze drifting to the treeline. The Whispering Pines rose in the distance, dark even in the soft light of afternoon.

Some said the forest was a doorway, a place where things clawed their way over from another realm. Others called it cursed. Said the trees whispered secrets to anyone stupid enough to get close.

I didn't believe in curses.

I believed in the whispers. I'd heard them myself as a kid, playing too close to the treeline.

I'd watched my older brother walk into those woods one night and never come back out.

With a sigh I turned off the road, boots crunching over fallen leaves as I walked toward the trees. The air cooled with every step, pine and damp earth filling my lungs. Stepping through the treeline felt like stepping into another world — one where the rules didn't behave the way they should.

The Pines had always been a place of power. Every demon-blooded creature in this town knew it. Even the humans knew it, though they rarely said so out loud. This forest had a reputation for swallowing anyone who wandered too deep. Hikers. Travelers. People who didn't understand what waited beneath the surface. Like my brother, most of them were never found. The ones who did come back came back wrong — changed in ways they couldn't explain.

This wasn't a place you stumbled into by accident. Not unless you were fine with never walking back out.