She is terrified and free and she’s terrified of being free.
What now?
When the laughter dies, the stillness floods back in like a tide filling rock pools.
The Witch of the East is dead but she’s everywhere in every corner of the castle, haunting it like a ghost.
Cleo gets up. She steals one of Delphine’s overcoats, onemade of black wool with layered lapels of red and white. There’s a deep hood attached and when Cleo pulls it over her head, she feels oddly powerful.
A shiver races across her shoulders.
She ditches her shoes and slips on a pair of Delphine’s silk slippers. Not magical ones, of course. There’s only one pair of those.
“Oh,” she mutters to the quiet upon standing up.
The slippers are thickly padded and fit perfectly. As if they were made for her.
Delphine has a closet full of silk slippers that she hardly ever wore, too afraid to let the magical slippers out of her sight.
The thought that all these comfortable shoes were just gathering dust when Cleo’s shoes were years old and wearing through brings out a rage inside her that makes her eyes burn.
She packs a bag next. Food, an extra layer of clothing, Delphine’s wand, and the one thing Cleo can call her own: a rainbow prism shaped like a cat. It’s the only thing she was given as a child, the one thing she was permitted to keep.
She goes to the castle’s entrance.
She was never allowed to come and go through the front doors unless she was with Delphine.
For one split second, she hesitates, hand hovering over the hammered iron lever, as if waiting for the witch’s shrill voice to shriek from the next room.
But there is nothing. There is no one.
The witch is dead.
Cleo presses the bolt down and the latch thunks open.
She pulls the door open and the fresh air of the East End filters in.
What now?
Now, she is free.
TEN
Witch of the West
The witch had a sister once.
And a name.
Both are gone now and losing them felt like peeling flesh from her bones.
It stung.
It still stings when she gives thought to it, to who she was, to what she had.
Usually, she has only regrets to keep her company.
But today is different.
