“The witch wants your slippers. If you give her your slippers, maybe we can all go home.”
At the mention of home, she sniffs, licks her lips. She takes a step forward. “Do you think so?”
Is that it then? That’s what she wants? To go home?
I haven’t had a home in a decade. Not since Gabriel and I left. Home no longer felt like a place where we belonged. It was shortly after that our brother cursed us both. And without a heart, the concept of home no longer meant anything at all.
“Yes,” I tell her and when the word makes it past my teeth, I almost believe it.
“All right.” She bends down and removes the left slipper, then the right. “Here.”
She stretches out her arm, the slippers dangling from her fingers.
I hesitate.
Nothing is ever easy.
This shouldn’t be easy either.
I reach out, wrap my hand around them, and—
They disappear.
“What the fuck?” I say.
The firelight catches the shine of the slippers back on her feet.
“What is this?”
“I don’t know.” She lets out a breath. “They do this.”
“What do you meanthey do this? They’re fucking slippers.”
“I know what they are!”
“Stop playing games then.”
“I’m not!” She bends down, pulls a slipper off, and throws it at me.
It bounces off my shoulder, hits the stone floor, and literally evaporates.
A second later, it’s back on her foot.
“Do you want us all to be dead?” I whisper. “She’ll kill us!”
“Then why did you bring us here?”
“I had no choice!”
“We always have a choice and—”
“Hey, asshole.”
We both turn. Gabriel is back at the iron bars. “Maybe they have to be given, not taken. Just like your axe.”
“What about your axe?” The girl comes back into the light. “You said something earlier… you asked how I took it.”
I don’t have time for this.
