Dieter kept her in a closet.
I glance back into it, the stench emanating from it sour and vile.
Liesel shivers against me.
She cannot create fire from nothing, but even so, she usually runs hot, and I would beg her to sleep at my cottage during the winter so the bed would be cozy—but she’s shivering now, and that rocks me into biting clarity.
I scramble for the healing potion and nudge her away, doing a quick sweep of her body for wounds. A few scrapes, a few bruises, but nothing severe—and no brand. Would it even burn her, who controls fire?
Still, I encourage her to drink the healing potion, and she gulps it down and clamps her arms back around me.
He imprisoned her. In a closet worse than a cage. In darkness and foulness and fear.
I hold Liesel to me as I stand, fury draping in a red veil over me.
Stop him, says the voice. This is his office. You have to stop him.
Liesel clings to me like she used to when she was small, arms around my neck, legs knotted around my hips. Her weight makes me stumble, but I survey the room, eyes snapping from the desk, to the shelves, to—
“Fritzi,” Otto says, low at first, then again. “Fritzi. We don’t have time.”
“His office. His secrets are here. We could—”
“He doesn’t store anything of importance here.”
I whip a look at Otto and shift Liesel in my arms, wordlessly saying, Oh, he doesn’t?
Otto holds up his hands. “Nothing he doesn’t want anyone else to find. It’s too public. We won’t get anything else worthwhile here. Trust me—I’ve looked in the past.”
My jaw clamps, lips stiff.
“I want to burn it,” I whisper.
Liesel pushes back to look at me, and I recognize my own rage in her sunken, bloodshot eyes.
“Set me down,” she tells me.
I comply.
Otto’s brows pinch, his gaze flashing between us tentatively, as though he knows he should intervene, but holds himself in restraint.
Good.
Liesel takes a shaky step toward Dieter’s desk. She fumbles in a top drawer and pulls out a tinderbox—she must have seen him use it. Did he taunt her with it? My stomach turns.
My cousin flicks the flint against the steel and cups her hand over it.
Her palm begins to turn red. Scalding, wavering heat palpitates the air over her skin, and a spark flares. She twists her hand to place it palm flat on the desk, and flames start to eat across the top, hungry, tearing fingers of orange and yellow.
“Let’s go,” says Liesel. She snuffs the flame and pockets the tinderbox. When she takes my hand, her palm is still warm.
The two of us are halfway to the door when Otto finally manages to speak. “How far will it spread?”
Liesel blinks up at him. Then looks at me. “Who is he?”
“A…friend,” I say dumbly. “A rogue hexenjäger.”
“He doesn’t want his precious church destroyed, hm?”
Behind us, the desk is a slowly building inferno, the chair catching now too. A few sparks drift off, snag on scrolls stacked on wall shelves; soon, the whole of the room will be engulfed in flames. Then the hall, fire spreading through the grout of the bricks and the wood in the ceiling. Then the floors beneath, the chapel and altar and pews, all of it burning, burning—
“I’ve laid traps of my own for them,” Otto says. His tone is soft, talking reverently, and I know that’s the only reason Liesel doesn’t set her blaze on him. “I falsified records and made a mess of their organization. If you burn it all, they’ll regroup far faster, out of spite.”
Liesel sniffs. When she gives me a probing look, I shrug.
She snaps her fingers and all the flames go out. But her mark is left in Dieter’s office, the lot of his things utterly ruined.
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 it doesn’t sound evil, that it isn’t trying 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 have nothing—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…he is a 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 me exactly what is going on.”
“Yes,” I agree, breathless. It’s all I have to give him right now.
Otto starts to turn, but I hold fast to his arm.
“He isn’t like me,” I say again. Begging.
His face softens. “I know. I know, Fritzi.”
Another too short moment, and then we take off down the hall. I trail him through the Porta Nigra, delving back into the deep, dark tunnels beneath Trier.