It isn’t enough.
But Liesel sways, eyes fluttering in a dizzy rush, and when I support her again, Otto puts a hand on my arm.
“We won’t make it ten yards if you have to carry her,” he tells me, and then he crouches down to Liesel’s level. “I know you don’t trust me. But please, let me help you.”
He holds out his arms to her.
Liesel stares at Otto for a long moment. “I can scorch you to your bones,” she says placidly.
Otto swallows, the muscles in his throat working. “I believe you.”
She nods and takes a step toward him. He lifts her, cradling her gently in his arms, and she wilts into him, her eyelids fluttering shut. It’s a further mark of how exhausted she is, that she so easily manages to relax with him, and my heart fully knots in my throat.
“Back out through the tunnels,” Otto says to me. “For as long as we can. If we have to cut up to the surface, we should still have chaos on our side, but it’ll be easier if we get all the way to the river. I have a boat waiting.”
I nod, nod again, throat too thick, the lingering stench of the smoke starting to sting my nose and lungs.
Every blink, I see Mama on her stake.
Birresborn.
Stop him, the voice pleads.You can use me to find out more about what he’s after. Use me! Stop him!
The way the voice is speaking to me now…I don’t even respond. Something in it has changed. It no longer feels evil; it feels human, desperate and weak, and I ball my hands into fists at my side with a shivering flinch.
I’m falling for it, aren’t I? This is another step toward losing myself in wild magic: thinking that itdoesn’tsound evil, that itisn’ttrying to trick me.
Otto starts back into the hall. I trail him, watching Liesel’s snarled blond hair bounce over his shoulder. Her eyes are closed, so she doesn’t see Bertram’s body still lying in the hall, but I do. I glare at his corpse as I step over it—
I have one leg on either side of his thighs when his head snaps up.
I shriek and flail back into the opposite wall. Otto wheels around, eyes going from my face to my focus, and when he does, he goes absolutely immobile. Liesel, in his arms, moans, but exhaustion has taken her utterly.
The lids peel back slowly over Bertram’s eyes, his pupils spinning wildly until they fixate on me.
“Fritzichen,” sings a voice that isn’t his. His lips move in wet, bloody smacks, jaw clicking on each puppeteered motion. “Where are you going, meine Schwester? Are you stealing my toy, just like you used to? Naughty, naughty Fritzichen.”
“Dieter,” I gasp, hands splayed on the wall, fingers gripping the bricks like I’ll find a weapon there. But I have nothing, I havenothing—no more potions, no more herbs, not even a knife.
You have me,the voice whispers.Use me!
“Go ahead and run,” Dieter croons through Bertram. Blood leaks down his lips and out of the gaping hole in his neck in twin trickles. “Just like we used to play when we were children, do you remember? Run and hide, Fritzichen. I’ll come find you. I’ll find you and your hexenjäger whore.” Bertram’s head lolls to the side, rights itself, lolls again, fighting the slice in his neck incrementally until the corpse fixes a blank look up at Otto. “Tsk tsk, Kapitän—”
I slam the sole of my boot into Bertram’s face.
A sickening crunch echoes down the hall as his nose caves in, coagulated blood squishing out along the wall. But it silences Dieter’s ravings, and I push a fist into my stomach to fight the pulse of nausea at the smear of gore that now coats my boot.
Otto stares and stares at Bertram’s defiled corpse.
I grab Otto’s arm. “We have to go,” I’m the one to say now. “We have to—”
“He used magic,” Otto says, flat. His eyes slide to mine, wide still, and I see pieces connecting in him, holes filling. “The kommandant…I thought perhaps he had no power, and that was why he was so angry at witches, but…heisa witch. Like you.”
“No,” I counter immediately, and Otto flinches. “Not like me.”
Disbelief flashes in his eyes, but it breaks, and he gives me a hard look. “We’re going to have that talk as soon as possible, and you’re going to tell meexactlywhat is going on.”
“Yes,” I agree, breathless. It’s all I have to give him right now.
