She’s muttering, her voice low, frantic. Her body moves spasmodically, like…
Like a puppet on a string.
My blood turns to ice.
“Fritzi,” I say, my voice flat. The same tone I would use for a rabid dog.
Her body stiffens.
The low laugh that emits from her lips stutters, jarringly unnatural.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She stands, throwing back the chair so violently that it flies at me. I swat it away, and it hits a shelf and knocks over more books. Fritzi whirls around, her head lolling a fraction behind the rest of her body. Her hair dangles in front of her face, stringy. Her skin is sallow, slicked with sweat.
“Otto,” she says in a singsong voice. “Hello, Otto.”
She takes a step closer.
My hand grips the dagger.
“Fritzi?” I ask. Tentative. Hopeful.
Her head tilts, and she makes a clucking sound with her tongue. “No-o,” she teases. “No, Fritzi’s not here right now, mein kapitän.”
Her gaze flicks to the blade I hold, and that’s when I notice that her eyes are entirely black, no color, no white, just empty, hollow black.
My body washes over with cold, the ghost of all the terror of the last years rising up and strangling my very soul.
“Hello, Dieter,” I say, my voice cracking. Shock roots me to the floor.
Fritzi’s giggle is high-pitched and manic, and she cuts it off quickly, as if the erratic sound had burst from a whistling kettle that had been whipped away from the stove. “Ot-to, Ot-to,” she says, padding forward a single step with each syllable of my name. “Ot-toe.” That giggle again.
“Let her go,” I demand.
Fritzi’s body stops. Her head swivels from the left to the right side, eyes on me, hair falling over her face. “Cut me out of her,” Dieter snarls fiercely in her voice. A sharp snort. “Oh, but youcan’t, can you, Kapitän?”
One more step closer.
I fumble back, nearly slipping on a book, the spine breaking under my bare foot.
Fritzi’s lips twitch in a smile that doesn’t quite take hold.
“What if I told you, Otto,friend, what if I told you that if you kill her now, if you slide that pretty little dagger through her breast, it would kill me too? What if I told you that I am at my most vulnerable now, sharing a body with my beloved sister, that my life, in this moment, is tied with hers?” His speech is quicker now, so rushed that the words flow together. Fritzi’s eyes widen, her lips widen, as if the words are boiling out of her, overflowing. “What if you knew that this,this, now, this was the only way to kill me? You tried before. You tried with that poison. It didn’t kill me, Otto. It didn’tstopme, Kapitän. But right now,right now,RIGHT NOW”—Dieter screams the words, specks of spittle flying at me—“right nowif you kill her, you’d kill me too. So do it,do it, you verdammt coward, you traitor; stab her heart and kill us both, if you can.”
He—she—they are so close that I can feel the heat of Fritzi’s breath, can smell the sweet lebkuchen she ate, one last cookie before going to bed. I shove her body away, and Dieter makes Fritzi skitter back, dancing over broken books and cold stone.
“You can’t do it!” Dieter cackles. “You could stop it all now; you could end me, but you won’t!”
He’s right. I won’t.
I can’t.
I can’t kill her even if it would kill him.
I can’t even hurt her.
Because even if Dieter is possessing her, it’s Fritzi’s body. The only one she has. She’ll come back to it when he leaves—I pray—but…
