The door at the top of the tower lay open and I stepped inside.
Klaus stood in the middle of the room, beside the great unmoving Wheel, eyes glassy and body strangely slack. A golden glow hovered above the surface of his skin, just as it had around my hand that day the Witch had bound us. It was his life being drawn from him, the raw stuff of time ready for the Witch to spin through her wheel.
But the distaff was empty. No new thread had been spun.
On the spindle, only the barest suggestion of something: dandelion haze, smoke from a snuffed candle. Insubstantial. All but gone.
I wondered how long I had before time stopped completely.
I found my Witch curled on the floor under the window, as I had seen her that day she had been cursed, arms wrapped around her knees and expression desolate. It took me a moment to realise she wasn’t wearing black, but white. I recognised it as one of my shifts, perhaps the one she had lifted over my head in the dark of her room, the last moment that we were close.
Time had stripped her back to the girl she had been, lost and frightened and trapped.
I saw her, and I knew what I was going to do was right.
Travel stained and sweaty and trembling from lack of sleep, I went to her, crouched beside her and took her face in my hands.
‘Hello, Witch.’
When she saw me, she didn’t move at first, blinking her large dark eyes slowly. ‘Are you real?’
‘Yes.’
‘Liar.’ A tear splashed on the front of her shift. ‘My Mina wouldn’t be that stupid.’
I stroked a tangled lock of hair behind her ear, brushed my thumb over her temple. ‘You think too highly of me. I am a fool for you.’
I kissed her softly and she leaned up into my lips like I was water in the desert. We hung there, consumed in the nearness of each other, the flutter of her pulse under my fingers, the blazing heat of her skin, the soft give of her flesh as she drew me close.
Then, like thunder breaking in a summer sky, she pushed me away with enough force I fell back on my elbows.
She rose, wraithlike. ‘You should not have come here. You cannot stop me from doing what I must.’
I felt suddenly too aware of Klaus standing by the wheel, the golden shimmer of his life ready to be shorn from him like fleece.
‘I didn’t come here to stop you.’
She arched a brow, and I felt a shiver of familiar anticipation; I knew that look so well. She could be scathing and brilliant at once, her tongue cutting in one breath and kissing me so softly in the next. I wanted it. I wanted all of it.
For all that the fate of the world lay on my shoulders, some simple part of me was glad just to be with her again.
‘Then tell me, what did you think you could do here?’ she said. ‘You see I have the boy. I have no need of you now.’
I stood, a little shaky from my days of travelling, and steadied myself on the window frame. ‘Perhaps I need you.’
She snorted. ‘You think to save me with love? You come too late. There is nothing left in me to save.’
I smiled at that. ‘We can never truly see ourselves,’ I said, moving myself between Klaus and the Witch. ‘Because I see in you someone who deserves saving. Someone who should have been saved countless times over. I see someone who has endured so much hardship, and stayed human through it.’
‘Stop it,’ she snapped. ‘Stop lying to me.’
I saw her resolve tremble, the bud of hope that maybe she could let herself believe what I said was true. That she deserved more than what she had been condemned to.
‘You are no monster. You take no pleasure in what you do. You have lived an impossible situation and many would have dealt with it far worse.’
‘Don’t.’ She covered her face with her hands, drew shuddering breaths.
‘You have been through centuries of hurt, and yet you still let me in. You opened yourself to me, let me share your life. You gave me somewhere to belong. Somewhere to love and be loved.Yougave all that to me.’
