Page 9 of Little Witch

Main Street thinned out into quieter roads, the shopfronts giving way to old brick terraces with ivy climbing the drainpipes, streetlamps spaced further and further apart until the gaps between them were where I lived now. I trailed her past the Hollow's little stone bridge, past the corner where the bins always overflowed on collection day, past the alley that cut behind the old Fitzgerald house that everyone swore was haunted and wasn't, not really, not compared to what actually haunted this town.

She paused once, at the mouth of her street, and looked back over her shoulder — right through me, right past the shape I wasn't quite letting the world see. My chest did something stupid and hopeful anyway, some pathetic animal part of me hoping she'd somehow felt me there. She didn't. She just tucked a loose pink strand behind her ear and kept walking, and I let out a breath I fucking knew I was holding, and hated myself a little for how much that one glance had done to me.

I watched her let herself into her building, watched the light flick on two floors up, curtains drawn but not quite meeting in the middle, leaving a thin gold seam I could track her shadow through if I concentrated. I stayed at the edge of the street a moment, still half-dissolved, and let myself feel the thing I never let myself feel in front of her.

My heart pounded. Actually pounded, an uneven, traitorous slam against my ribs, like it hadn't gotten the memo years ago that she was off-limits. Step-sister. Family, on paper if nothing else, and the kind of wanting I felt toward her was the kind that got a person disowned by every version of decency I'd ever been taught to care about.

I couldn't have her. I'd made my peace with that a long time ago, or told myself I had often enough that the lie mostly held these days, which wasn't quite the same thing as it being true but got me through most nights.

I was glad, at least, that Mum had been happy while she'd had the chance to be. Whatever else this whole tangled mess had cost me, I couldn't begrudge her that — the way her face used to go soft and easy around Amber's mother in a way I'd never once seen her manage with anyone before. The way she'd laugh at things that weren't even funny, just because Diane had said them. Amber's mum had been lovely too, in fairness. Warm in the specific way mine hadn't always managed, patient in the kind of way that made the whole house feel like it could exhale for the first time in years.

I just wished, God, I wished it hadn't been her mother. Out of every woman in Autumn's Hollow my mum could have fallen for, it had to be the mother of the girl I'd been half in love with since I was twelve years old and sharing a desk with her in Ms. Pemberly's class, dodging flicked ink and stolen pencil shavings every time the teacher's back was turned.

I used to think about her constantly back then. Still did, if I was honest, except now it came with a guilt chaser I hadn't asked for and couldn't return. Not in a dark way. Not like the things I did out here in the trees most nights, hands going through motions that didn't belong anywhere near soft feelings. In a stupid, soft way instead. The way she scrunched her nose when she was concentrating on something, like the world owed her its full attention and she was going to take it by force. The exact, deliberate pink she'd dyed her hair last spring, like she'd known precisely how it would look under streetlight and had done it anyway, knowing exactly what it would do to me every time it caught the glow. The way she still laughed at my worst jokes, every single time, no matter how many times I recycled the same three bits, like she genuinely couldn't help herself around me.

I loved her. Simple as that, and about as inconvenient as anything had ever been to me in my entire, inconveniently long life.

But she didn't know.

So I kept her safe instead. It was the only version of loving her the world had left on the table for me, and I'd take it, because the alternative was not loving her at all, and that had never once been on offer.

I didn't sleep much these days. Hadn't, not properly, since the whispers in the Pines had started climbing in volume, since the balance out there had started tipping in a direction none of us had a name for yet. I spent most nights like this instead — folded into the dark at the edges of town, working the perimeter the way Rowan and I had split it between us without ever really discussing it out loud, the way brothers who trusted each other with their lives didn't need to discuss things like that.

Until he'd left.

Until he'd decided somewhere else was easier than here.

I watched the treeline for anything that had slipped through where it shouldn't have. I'd killed four things in the last three weeks alone. Small ones, mostly. Scouts. The kind of low-level nasty that liked to test a barrier before something worse used the hole it made.

I was good at killing them. It was, if I let myself think about it too hard, the one demon trait I'd actually leaned into on purpose instead of resenting. Rowan got the wind and the brooding and the whole tragic-hero routine that came standard with being the baby of the family and super duper precious. I got this instead — the dark folding itself around me as though I was nothing more than... than nothing.

I crossed the street below Amber's building, still mist-thin, still nothing a normal set of eyes would ever catch, and looked up at her window out of habit as much as worry, the same way I did every night before I let myself settle in for the long watch.

That was when I saw it.

A shape, low and wrong, crouched on the narrow stone ledge just outside her glass. Not human. Not even close — too many joints where joints had no business bending, its outline smudged and uncertain, like something had sketched it in charcoal and then dragged a thumb through the lines before they'd fully set. Its head sat too far forward on whatever passed for its neck, tilted toward the thin gold seam of curtain light, toward the shadow of her moving behind it. Utterly still, in the specific way that only ever meant one thing.

It was watching her. Carefully. Patiently. Like it had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.

Every soft, stupid feeling I'd been sitting with thirty seconds earlier burned off me instantly, replaced by something a lot older and a lot less complicated.

I didn't think. I let the shadows carry me straight up the brick face of the building, faster than anything with a normal body had any right to move. I was on it before it had the chance to turn its ruined excuse for a head my way. My hand closed around what passed for its throat and wrapped tight enough to choke off whatever it used to breathe. It thrashed once, silent even in its panic, claws scrabbling uselessly against the brick, gouging pale lines into the mortar that would still be there tomorrow with no explanation for anyone who noticed.

It got one arm free and swiped at me, catching my forearm, four thin lines opening up and stinging cold before they started to burn. I didn't let go.

"Wrong window," I told it, low enough that Amber wouldn't hear a thing through the glass two feet away, my voice coming out flatter and colder than I meant it to, more demon than human in that moment, more of the thing I tried not to let her see. "Wrong girl. Wrong night to try me."

It didn't get the chance to disagree. I fed the dark into it, let it pour down my arm and into the choking grip until there wasn't enough of the thing left to hold a shape against. And with a woosh it came apart between my fingers like ash, scattering out over the alley below in flecks that dissolved before they hit the ground.

The cold in my arm faded with it.

The wound didn't.

For a second there was nothing on that ledge at all except me, breathing harder than a fight that short should have left me, and the faint, sour smell that always lingered in the air after I did that.

My hands were shaking by the time I dropped back down into the alley below her window, and it wasn't from the fight itself. It was from how close it had gotten. From doing the math on how long I'd stood in the street a minute earlier, feeling sorry for myself about a crush I'd had since I was twelve, while something with claws sat two feet from her glass deciding when to make its move.

I was a fucking moron. That was probably why she didn't want me.