Chapter 22 #2
I screamed. Grabbed him, pulled him into my lap, held him against my chest. Screamed until my throat tore.
He was cold. So cold and so small. His head lolled against my arm because there was nothing holding it up anymore.
I was rocking him the way you rock a baby.
He wasn’t a baby. He was seven years old.
He used to call me Auntie. Now he was dead on my doorstep, his blood soaking through grandmother’s dress into my skin.
I pushed everything I had toward Dietrich.
The blood. The body. The gray wolf’s teeth.
Thomas’s face. The sound coming out of me that didn’t sound like me.
His shock hit me like a wall. Then his fury.
Then he was running. I could feel his legs tearing through the snow, the wolf in him ripping through the underbrush.
He was coming but he wasn’t here yet. I was alone on the doorstep holding a dead child.
The vision I’d had years ago, before he was even born.
A faceless boy with his neck bent wrong and blood in the dirt.
I’d buried it the way I’d buried the hanging man.
Told myself my sight lied. Told myself it wouldn’t come true because I couldn’t bear to believe it would.
Thomas was born with the same curls and the same face and I’d pushed the knowing down so deep I’d almost convinced myself it wasn’t real.
But it was.
I pressed my face against his hair. It smelled like Emma’s soap. She’d washed it that morning, probably. Combed it and smoothed it and sent him off to play without knowing she was sending him to die.
I looked up. Looked past Thomas’s body to the snow beyond the doorstep.
The blood trail.
It didn’t just lead to my doorstep. It led from the village, through the forest, past every deadfall and ravine, around every obstacle that had kept outsiders lost for decades.
A straight, deliberate line of drag marks where something heavy had been pulled through the snow.
Small boot prints, Thomas’s prints, that cut off abruptly where the dragging began.
Where he’d been grabbed. Where he’d been killed.
Erik hadn’t just left bait. He’d drawn the villagers a map through woods they’d never been able to navigate. Every drop of Thomas’s blood was a breadcrumb leading them straight to me.
A shout carried through the trees. Then another. Men’s voices, harsh and overlapping, the sound of a crowd moving fast through the undergrowth. Through the trees I could see torchlight despite the daylight. The crack of boots on frozen ground. Metal catching the weak winter sun.
I looked down at Thomas in my arms. At the blood soaking my dress. At my hands red from cradling him.
They would see exactly what Erik wanted them to see. A witch with a dead boy in her arms.
The mob burst into the clearing.
Klaus led them — fifteen men or more, faces twisted with the unified fury of a crowd that had already decided guilt.
Jakob at his right side. The same Jakob who’d gotten Anna pregnant and then stood with his arms crossed while she drowned.
Who’d pointed the finger. Who’d watched the water close over her head and gone home to eat his supper.
Behind them. Emma. Running, her face already crumpling, already seeing the shape in my arms. Heinrich beside her, his face carved from granite.
Emma reached me first. Her grief so profound it was killing her as she ran. She saw Thomas in my arms and I watched the last hope die in her eyes. I stood up cradling her son to give him to her.
“You,” she whispered. Then louder, all the rage of a destroyed mother pouring out of her mouth: “YOU!”
Her hand cracked across my face hard enough to snap my head sideways. I tasted blood. Felt my lip split. I didn’t let go of Thomas. Didn’t drop him or push her away or try to defend myself.
“Emma, please. Thomas was ...” I started.
She slapped me again. Harder. Her palm connected with my cheekbone and stars exploded across my vision. “Don’t speak. Don’t you dare speak his name!”
“I didn’t ...”
Another slap. My lip split further, blood running down my chin, dripping onto Thomas’s shirt. I let her hit me. I let her pour it out. What were a few slaps compared to what she was feeling.
Heinrich grabbed Emma’s arm and pulled her back. His eyes devastated. Looking at his son in my arms. At the future that had been stolen.
“I found him like this,” I managed, the words distorted by my split lip. “I swear to you, Heinrich. I found him on the doorstep ...”
“Liar!” Klaus shoved through the crowd, his face red with fury. “Look at her! Covered in the boy’s blood! Caught in the act! Witch’s sacrifice — blood-magic on an innocent child!”
“That’s not true...”
“She killed him for her dark rites!” Klaus jabbed a finger at me. “Just like we warned everyone!”
“No!” The word came out as a sob. “Emma, please. You’ve known me for years. You know I loved Thomas. You know I would never ...”
But Emma wasn’t listening. Couldn’t listen through the grief that had swallowed her whole.
She tore Thomas from my arms with a keening wail that broke something inside me too.
Clutched him to her chest and collapsed in the snow, curling around his small body.
Heinrich dropped beside her, his arms around both of them.
His granite mask cracked as tears spilled down his cheeks.
The mob closed in.
Klaus’s followers grabbed my arms. Rough hands. Angry hands. They yanked me to my feet with enough force that something in my shoulder popped. I stumbled, legs weak from kneeling, from shock, from grief.
Someone kicked my feet out from under me. I went down hard. Tasted snow. Tasted blood.
“Hang her!” Klaus’s voice rose above Emma’s keening, above the angry mutter of men who’d been convinced they were facing a monster. “String the witch up before she can curse us all!”
“Wait ...” I gasped, reaching for my power through the panic. “Please, just listen ...”
A boot caught me in the stomach. All the air rushed out and I curled around the pain, trying to breathe, trying to think. But all I could see was Thomas’s face. All I could hear was Emma’s wails.
I sent Dietrich everything — the terror, the grief, the certainty that I was about to die and felt Dietrich’s answering fury blast through the connection like a wall of fire.
Klaus’s men dragged me across the snow toward the big oak at the clearing’s edge. Klaus had a rope in his hands. He threw one end over a thick branch with practiced ease. The noose dangled at the end.
“Please.” I tried to summon the Forceweaving. But grief and shock had shattered my concentration. There was just emptiness where the force should be. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t ...”
“Save your lies for the devil, witch.” Klaus’s voice came from behind me.
I couldn’t see him. I felt the rope go over the branch above my head and then his hands forced the noose over my face and down around my neck and yanked it tight from behind.
The hemp bit into my skin, rough against the soft flesh under my jaw.
My feet left the ground. Not all the way — just enough that my toes scraped the snow and my weight hung on the rope and I couldn’t get a full breath.
I clawed at the noose with both hands. My fingers dug under the rope but it was too tight and my nails tore and I couldn’t get air.
My legs kicked and Jakob grabbed them and held them still and I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except hang there and choke while the sky went white above me and the trees tilted sideways.
My vision started to gray.
This was it. This was how I died. Hanged as a witch for a crime I didn’t commit. Killed by the people I’d lived among my whole life.
And while I hung there with my toes scraping the snow and my lungs screaming for air I could see their faces.
The men who’d eaten bread I’d baked. The men whose children I’d healed when fever came through the village.
The men whose wives I’d sat with through labor, whose mothers I’d tended when they were too old to feed themselves.
I knew every face in that clearing. I’d helped every single one of them at some point and they were watching me choke and not one of them was moving to stop it.
They’d done the same thing to Anna. Stood on the riverbank while she thrashed in the water. Counted to forty while she drowned. Gone home and eaten supper.
Sophia wrote about bread. She wrote about wildflowers and grandmother’s poultice and she was dead behind those boards and I hadn’t finished reading her letter. She’d written my name. Red. My little Red. And I was going to die on a rope in the snow without knowing what came after.
I cracked.
The way the earth cracks before a volcano.
The way a dam cracks before the flood. Deep and old and furious.
It had been building since the cellar, since Klaus’s hand on my throat, since Anna’s body in the river, since Sophia’s scratches on the door.
Since every woman who’d ever been called witch and burned or drowned or hanged for the crime of being born different.
The Forceweaving didn’t just surge. It detonated.
The blast ripped outward from my body in a wave that flattened everything in the clearing. Raw, uncontrolled. Every thread of power releasing at once.
Jakob flew off my legs. His body sailed through the air and hit the oak behind him with a crack that was definitely bone. He slid to the ground and his arm was bent wrong, elbow joint destroyed, white bone jutting through his sleeve.
The rope went slack. I dropped to the ground on my hands and knees, choking, gasping, tearing the noose from my neck with fingers that felt like someone else’s. The hemp left burns that would scar. Air rushed into my lungs so fast it hurt.