Page 58 of The Witch in the Dead of Night

The strangers slid off their horses, weapons drawn. I nearly jumped out of my skin as a bloodcurdling scream sliced through the silence like a knife. Mr. Farrow clawed at his gut, his insides spilling out of him and onto the earth. He fell to his knees, a meat cleaver sliding from his hand into the street. I hadn’t even seen him draw it, nor had I seen the man with the beady eyes stick him in the gut like a pig. He stood over him now, calmly wiping blood from his blade. A shock of scarlet spilled across the dirt as Mr. Farrow slumped onto the street, unmoving.

“Letlas protect us,” croaked my grandmother, invoking the king of gods. Her gnarled hand was clapped to her mouth.

“Get comfortable, lads,” shouted the man with the shaved head. He turned toward where we stood, rooted to the spot. “You there, you can warm my bed.”

My eyes snapped from Mr. Farrow’s corpse to the stranger as he stalked toward us. Behind him, the townsfolk watched me, transfixed. When the man reached me, he shoved my grandmother to the ground. Her skull hit the stairs with a crack.

Willa screamed.

My breath stoppered in my throat. Blood pooled beneath Gran’s head, leaving a gruesome stain in the earth. Her body curled into itself, like a fawn left behind by its mother. If I allowed myself, I could believe that she would get back up. If not for her eyes. Her unblinking eyes.

My ears buzzed with whispers, but not of the folk who watched us. No, they remained silent and frightened. The whispers were strange. Otherworldly. Their words were garbled, but the sound, the sound would stay with me for years to come.

“Gran!” I croaked. I stumbled toward her, but the man trapped me where I stood, wrapping his fingers around my wrist. He burrowed his fingers into my skin, blood welling beneath his nails.

“Don’t touch me,” I snarled, struggling in his grasp.

“Hear that, lads?” he shouted over his shoulder. “I love it when they put up a fight.” He tugged me close, his breath hot against my cheek as he spewed his rot. “You’ll enjoy being my whore.”

I didn’t have time to react as my ears were flooded with the otherworldly whispers. An unnatural heat spread through my veins, like I had trodden too closely to a burning pyre, and my heartbeat slowed. I raised my hand as if to strike my assailant, but I did not touch him.

Instead, a stream of cobalt-blue light erupted from my palm and hit him square in the face. No, not light, I quickly realized. Fire.

The man howled as his skin blistered and shriveled like vellum that had been tossed into a flaming hearth. The fire encircled him like a viper around its prey, snapping its jaws in a flurry of sparks and horror. The ground beneath our feet shuddered violently as if it were about to erupt. When I glanced down, the sight that met my eyes chilled me to the bone. A fissure had formed in the earth beneath the man’s feet, splitting the dark soil of the high street into a fiery crevasse. A groan reached my ears as if a living creature lurked in its depths.

Our gazes collided for merely a moment before the man was swallowed, still screaming, by whatever demons I had unwittingly summoned to this place.

“Hellfire!” Silas fell to his knees, beseeching the gods to save him and the village, in that order. Had I been able to speak, I would have called him pathetic. Instead, I watched in silence as the flames grew, pouncing on the men who had threatened us and dragging two more of them into the depths of the earth. My nose stung with the putrid scent of burned hair and flesh as the skin melted from their bones. They screamed for their mothers. They screamed for their gods.

Their prayers went unanswered.

My hair whipped around my face as I loosed destruction onto the remaining two men, my grief for my grandmother transformed into a murderous rage. They were overtaken by flames, their skin mere kindling for this godless beast wrought of fire and ash.

Above us, the heavy cloud cover swirled as if the gods themselves were peeling them back to peer down at the chaos ripping through the village. One of the last two bandits howled as he was dragged, backward into the burning crevasse. He stuck his dagger in the ground in a desperate attempt to slow his descent, his bloodshot eyes wide with terror. But it was no use. The flames wrapped around his neck like a noose and pulled him, head over heels, into the bowels of the earth.

Alone now, the beady-eyed man darted toward me, leaping over Silas as he cried prayers into the dirt. The man bared his teeth, flinging his dagger into the air, aiming for me. The flames snapped toward him as if I held a whip, a violent crack splitting the smoke-filled air. The earth beneath him split, cobalt flames spitting into the air as he was swallowed like the others.

But the knife hit its mark.

I yelped, clutching the gash where his blade had grazed my ear. Blood seeped between my fingers as I blinked wildly, fog clearing from my mind as if I had just woken up from a long nap. Around me, the flames sputtered and died in the street, the earth groaning as it knitted itself back together until there was nothing left but a dark scar. Motes of blue ash flitted through the smoke-filled air.

Enhart didn’t need to see what happened next.

The memory shuddered around us and dissipated, along with the faces of my friends and neighbors who had turned on me as if they hadn’t known me my entire life. I wouldn’t let Enhart witness me falling to my knees at Gran’s side, not knowing that I wouldn’t even get the chance to bury her. Or the aftermath of the Ealdorfyre, which burned through me like a fever for days. It had never really left. A lump formed in my throat.

When my eyes fluttered open, the prince’s expression was calm, but he nearly crushed my fingers beneath his own.

“Ealdorfyre,” he whispered.

“What?” I asked, whimpering as his hold on me tightened.

“Ealdorfyre.” He finally relaxed his grip, letting my hands slip out of his. I flexed my fingers as the blood came rushing back. “The blue flame,” he continued. “It’s an ancient magic. Incredibly difficult to bring forth even among masters of the craft.”

“It’s not exactly something I’m proud of,” I said.

“You should be,” he said. “It takes an enormous amount of power to summon.”

“Did you not see what I did to them?” I asked, bewildered.