Chapter 25
Katharina
It was easy to find Forner. Like a festering plague, he’d left a trail of rot behind him. I followed it to the residence beside the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. George.
The door was locked. I placed my palm against the wood. Smoke curled from beneath my palm, and the lock glowed red and then white, and the door swung open on a wave of heat that smelled of hellfire.
Forner was in his study, surrounded by papers and ledgers.
In my heart I understood they were the names of the condemned.
Every woman—every life—organized and catalogued like livestock sent to slaughter.
He looked up as I entered, and for one delicious moment I watched understanding dawn across his face.
Then fear.
“Witch,” he breathed, scrambling backward, knocking his chair to the floor. “Guards! Guards!”
“They can’t hear you.” I stepped over the threshold, and the shadows came with me, pooling at my feet like obedient hounds of Hell. “I made sure of that.”
He grabbed a crucifix from his desk and thrust it toward me, his hand shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I command you to—”
I plucked the crucifix from his grip and examined it. Good craftsmanship. Solid silver, probably worth more than some families in Bamberg earned in a year. I closed my fist around it, and when I opened my hand again, it was nothing but a lump of molten slag.
“Your god isn’t the one you should be begging, Forner.” I let the cooling metal drop to the floor.
“Please.” The word came out broken—pathetic. This man, who had shown no mercy to hundreds of women, was begging for his life. “Please, I was only doing my duty. The Church commanded—”
“The Church commanded you to torture children?” I stepped closer, and he stumbled into his bookshelf. Volumes of theology and demonology crashed around him. “The Church commanded you and your men to rape women in your cells and call it interrogation? The Church commanded you to keep trophies?”
I flicked my wrist, and the desk drawer flew open. I could feel their presence, the shadows of pain that lingered in the artifacts. Teeth, locks of hair, small personal items taken from his victims before they burned.
I raised my hand, and an invisible force lifted him from the ground, pinning him against the wall.
“I know you enjoyed it.”
“I was saving souls!” Spittle flew from his lips. Even now, even facing death, he clung to his delusion. “Every witch I burned was a victory against the Devil! The suffering was necessary—purification requires pain—”
“Then let me purify you.”
I started with his hands. Hands that had hurt so many. Fire bloomed beneath his skin, and I watched as his fingers blackened and bubbled.
His screams were pathetic, high and raw, bouncing off the stone walls of his study, swallowed by shadows that would not let them escape. No one would come. No one would save him. He would die as my mother had died—in agony. But the difference was that he was completely alone.
“This is for Anna Müller,” I said as fire crept up his wrists. The flames reached his elbows and the smell of burned flesh filled the room. I savored it.
“This is for Sister Margareta, who took her own life rather than let you break her. Who died with more dignity than you will ever know.”
His robes caught fire now, the holy vestments becoming his pyre. He was still screaming, still begging, still calling on a god who had no interest in saving men like him.
“This is for Greta and every woman whose name I will never know. The hundreds you murdered. The thousands you terrorized. The children who grew up without mothers because you decided that knowledge was witchcraft and kindness was sin.”
I urged the fire to climb higher as it consumed him inch by inch, keeping him alive far longer than should have been possible. My power sustained him even as it destroyed him, ensuring he felt every moment of his purification.
“And this,” I hissed, stepping closer until I could see my reflection in his terror-glazed eyes, “is for me.”
I leaned in close enough to see the moment the light began to leave his eyes.
“I want you to know something before you die, Friedrich. I want you to understand.” I smiled, and I knew it was laced with madness. “You were right about me. I am exactly what you always said I was. And I am the last thing you will ever see.”
The fire roared, and Friedrich Forner—the Witch Bishop’s right hand, the scourge of Bamberg, the murderer of my mother—burned.
The flames consumed him from the inside out, and the sickening grease of him seeped out, but my shadows gripped tighter.
I kept holding on until he was nothing but a smear of congealed flesh beneath me.
Until his screams had faded to silence. Until the shadows released what little remained and let it crumble to the floor.
Then I turned and walked out of his study. Behind me, the building began to burn.
I did not look back.