Night of the Witch (Witch and Hunter #1)

by Sara Raasch

The broom is a sign all the women in the diocese use—putting one outside the door indicates that the brewer has surplus to sell. Most people can’t read, but the signal is common enough, an invitation to come up to the house and buy homemade goods.

The witchy descriptions are everything 🥹

Abnoba, the Crone, wise and ageless and bright, protector of our forests, and prime guardian of life. Perchta, the Mother, goddess of rules and traditions, of the hunt and beasts. Holda, the Maid, guardian of the afterlife, of winter, of duality and coming together.

I have seen evil. But until this moment with Bertram, I had not realized how often it wore the face of apathy.

“There is a difference,” I say quietly, “between someone who holds a personal belief and someone willing to kill anyone who doesn’t share that belief.”

I thought I knew stubborn. I thought I was stubborn. This man makes it a religion.

“Normalcy has a way of breeding acceptance—when darkness is all people know, they forget to ask for the light.”

Fritzi shoots me an affronted look. “I like pretty things.” So do I, I think immediately, and praise Christ Almighty the words didn’t slip past my lips by accident.

I would have dumped all my coins on the table to make you smile, I think.

I can already see the sarcastic comeback forming on her lips, but I speak before she can: “You deserve a bit of magic.”

I twist my fingers into his sleeves, holding my forehead to his chest, keeping him here with me, however selfish.

The darkness is consuming again. It is delirious and hypnotic and dangerous, spinning a web of perceived absence, a dreamlike void, as though nothing that happens here really exists. So the way our lips suddenly rest against each other.

It’s that heat that melts through the frozen part of my brain, the numbed echoes of me, and I yank down, curving into his chest, holding my head into the space between our bodies.

I can feel his heartbeat thundering. It matches the pulse I feel in my throat. Rapid, clawing thuds.

We were born to kill each other. And yet she tucks her body close to mine. I can feel her heart beating. Her soft breaths coming in little huffs. Her delicate eyelids closed in slumber, the long line of her bare white neck centimeters from my lips. Heat flushes my body at the thought of how close we are. How close we were. She pulled back last night, but a part of me—most of me—longs for her to look up at me now, to tip her lips to mine, to cross that bridge we did not cross in the dark.

When I turn around, we are no longer Fritzi and Otto. We are witch and hunter.

We are not born into our nature; we choose it. And although the people and places around us may influence our lives, our decisions seal our fate.

“You make it easy.”

“I’m thinking,” I start, moving my lips down the side of his head, to his temple, to his cheek, until our noses align, and his mouth is so close I can taste the spice on him, “that I want you to throw me against the wall of this castle and make me see that god of yours.”

Despite being asleep on the dirty stones of an abandoned castle, my entire body is relaxed because she lies beside me. The rightness of it, of this woman in my arms as I awake—it leaves me breathless.

“But fortunately for you, Fritzi does not need a protector. She needs a warrior.”

“Lie to me, and I will slit your stomach and stuff you full of straw,” she tells me, voice like honey.

Wtf 😳

“I need you to know, this is not some illicit tryst I ask of you,” I say, searching her eyes. “When I say I want you, I mean all of you, for all of time. I do not want your body alone, Friederike; I want you, and I give myself to you, all of me that you desire.”

“No buts. No corollaries or exceptions. Love is not a sin. It never has been, and it never will be. Anyone who tries to twist that simple truth is the one who sins.”

She is the sun, and I am not even a moon worthy enough to reflect her light.