Possessed (Pythonissam Filia #2)

Prologue

Katharina

Wicked, gnarled fingers held my face as I watched my mother burn. The fire had only just caught the hem of her dress, but her face was already contorted in fear. Sweat plastered her golden hair to her forehead and soaked through the thin fabric of her shift as she struggled against her bindings.

I wanted to close my eyes, but even when I did, the light of the flames still glowed red behind them. Nothing I did could block out the screams.

The screams of the crowd.

Her screams.

Hexe. Hexe. Hexe.

The crowd chanted with one voice, one mouth, one bottomless appetite for suffering. I tried to run to her, but those horrible hands held me fast. I was rooted to the cobblestones as surely as she was bound to the stake.

I screamed, my voice joining the horrible choir in the city square of Bamberg, before a finger was shoved into my mouth, gagging me.

The flames climbed her legs, which from a distance almost looked gentle.

Her shift blackened first, and I saw the moment the fire found flesh.

Her skin blistered and split, peeling back like the rind of fruit left too long in the sun.

The fat beneath began to render, dripping in yellow rivulets that hissed and spat where they met the hungry flames.

The stench reached me along with the smoke. Smoke—I prayed for more smoke, to choke her, to take the pain away. I prayed for her to die so it could all be over.

You prayed for this. This is your fault.

The fire reached her belly, and something inside her ruptured. I heard it—a wet, gruesome sound beneath the roar of the flames. Her shift had burned away entirely now, the white gleam of rib bone emerging through charred muscle, opening like a flower blooming in hellfire.

She looked at me.

Through the smoke and shimmering heat and agony that must have been beyond comprehension, she found my face in the crowd and looked at me. Her lips moved, shaping words the fire swallowed before they could reach my ears.

The grip on my arms tightened, and it was no longer hands but ropes. I wasn’t in the crowd anymore but tied to that same stake as they condemned me.

Hexe. Hexe. Hexe.

The flames crept up through the soles of my feet like carnivorous ivy.

The chant rose with the smoke, and I could taste my mother’s name on the wind—Anna Müller, a midwife, a healer, condemned as a witch.

The fire reached my knees, and I tried to scream, but my throat filled with ash.

It always filled with ash. I looked down and watched my own flesh blacken and curl.

The pain was beyond reckoning; it embodied every terrible thing they had promised me since they took her away.

Ten years of swallowing down her death, and still it rose in my dreams, coating my tongue with the memory of that summer morning when I was thirteen and learned that love could burn.

And it was all my fault.