First Witch's Tale

His body twitched, one hand reaching for the knife on the ground. I met his eyes, briefly, and saw a conflicting storm of emotions. He didn’t want to kill me, to cross the line, and yet if he didn’t kill me his secret would be revealed. I wondered, briefly, if I could offer my word to keep his secret, if he let me go, but I doubted he’d accept anything I said. The risk was just too high. I could hear the thing talking, urging him on, pushing whatever buttons it had to push to convince Cemburu to kill me. His hands shook as he raised the dagger, tears dripping from his eyes. I would have sorrier for him if he hadn’t been planning to kill me.

“It’s just like one of the animals,” he whispered. He was trying desperately to convince himself of that. “It has to be done …”

He kept rambling. “I could turn her into a mouse, or a bird, or something … you could show me how, couldn’t you?”

Panic ran through me. I didn’t know any spells that could turn someone into an animal, but there were stories of the Awful Folk cursing men into stags or women into birds. I didn’t know what the thing could do, yet if it was one of them it might be able to tell Cemburu how to do it. And then … none of the stories ended happily. Most ended with the animal reverting to human form after being killed, often by his family. If the thing could show him how he could get rid of me without actually killing me … the thought was terrifying. No one would ever see me again.

I gritted my teeth, then bit my lip as hard as I could. The pain startled me out of the trance, but my legs felt as if they had been turned to jelly. I saw surprise in his eyes as I swung wildly, striking him in the jaw. His knife dropped from his hand and I caught it before it hit the ground. He stumbled backwards and crossed the circle, knocking over the candles and crashing into the thing. I heard something laugh as Cemburu put himself and straightened up, his eyes meeting mine. They burned like hot coals …

… and I knew, as the laughter went on and on, that I had made a horrific mistake.

Chapter Eight

Cemburu smiled at me.

I felt utter terror threatening to overwhelm me as his face stretched in inhuman directions. His eyes pulsed in tune with his heartbeat, pulsing with a diabolical power. The thing was inside him, I realised numbly; it was possessing him. He stretched, as if he was slowly getting used to his new body. I swallowed hard as he ran his hands down his body, resting them on his erect member. I saw no mercy in the burning red eyes. He was going to kill me, after he had had his fun. And at that point I feared I would be begging for death. Cemburu was gone. The thing had taken his place.

My nerve broke and I ran, heading into the woods. Magic crackled behind me as the thing started to follow me. I could feel it, a burning presence at the back of my mind, like feeling the sun shining on my back. I cursed Cemburu under my breath as I tried to pick up speed, to reach the castle before the thing caught up with me, but I had the feeling it was useless. The woodland paths were twisting around me, threatening to turn me around and send me walking straight back into its clutches. What the hell had Cemburu been doing? What the hell had he summoned? The thing was powerful, so powerful its mere presence poisoned the air. I hoped Bernard and the other senior magicians could handle it, but I was afraid they couldn’t. It was just too powerful. And yet …

I heard laughter echoing through the trees. The path twisted again and I found myself walking straight towards the thing. Cemburu’s body was glowing with an eerie light, the bloodlines steaming as the thing steered him onwards. I yelped as a hand, stretching in inhuman directions, reached for me, then jumped and fled back into the woods. It was one of the Awful Folk, I was sure. Nothing else could control the land around it. I dared not go back to the castle while it was on the prowl, even if it let me. I didn’t think the other magicians had any way to deal with it. Back home, we knew to avoid the mounds. It was a tacit admittance that walking into their territory meant we might never be seen again. And yet Cemburu had been and gone many times.

It let him go, I thought, as the path twisted again. I was suddenly running on the spot. No matter how hard I ran, I made no progress. I felt the thing behind me, felt its fingers brushing my rear, and forced myself to run harder. The world seemed to twist a third time. I was somehow falling to the ground, as if I had just run over a cliff. It let him go so he could cause trouble elsewhere.