Page 17 of Little Witch

The room sat mostly dark, just the thin grey edge of pre-dawn bleeding around the curtain, enough to pick out the shape of her against the pillow. Her hair had come loose from its braid at some point, pink strands fanned across the white cotton, and every few minutes the wind outside would gust hard enough to rattle the old window frame, and I'd feel my whole body go tense before I made myself remember that whatever was out there couldn't get through solid walls and warded glass. Not tonight. Not with me lying right here.

She tossed twice in the first hour, dragging the duvet with her, muttering something indistinct into the pillow that might have been a word or might have just been sleep-noise, the kind that meant nothing on its own but still made my chest tighten every time it happened. Her brow creased and smoothed and creased again, some dream working its way through her that I had a bad feeling wasn't peaceful, not with everything currently crawling around the edges of this town, not with whatever she'd walked into out there in those woods this morning.

I felt like a creep. Genuinely, uncomfortably aware of exactly how this would look to anyone who happened to walk in — lying rigid on my own side of the bed, eyes locked on my step-sister's sleeping face, unable to look away no matter how many times I told myself to close my eyes and let her actually rest. But I couldn't stop. Every time I managed to drag my gaze up to the ceiling and hold it there, it crawled back to her within a minute anyway, pulled by something that had nothing to do with any bond sitting a room away in my twin and everything to do with three years of watching her from exactly this kind of careful distance.

She shifted again, closer this time, the duvet rustling as she rolled toward me in her sleep, and before I could brace for it her hand found my chest, palm flattening over my sternum with a small, contented sound that did something violent and completely unhelpful to my heart rate.

"Orias." Barely a whisper. Half-formed, entirely unconscious, the kind of thing that meant absolutely nothing and simultaneously meant everything, and I lay there feeling both at once with no idea how to separate them.

I went completely still. Statue-still, the kind of stillness that used to get me through hours crouched in the dark waiting for something to slip up along the treeline, except this time the thing I was hunting was my own instinct to move — to pull her in properly instead of lying there like a man carved out of stone while she curled herself against my side and mumbled my name like it belonged to her in her sleep the same way it apparently already did when she was awake.

I didn't touch her back. I wanted to, badly enough that my hands actually ached with it, fingers curling slightly against the sheet just to give them something to do that wasn't reaching for her. But I didn't move, because I knew myself well enough to know that the second I gave in and touched her properly, I wasn't sure I'd be able to stop at just holding her. And she deserved better than waking up at six in the morning to find out exactly how far gone I already was, in her own step-brother's bed, after a night that had already asked enough of her.

So I lay there, rigid, breath shallow and careful, memorizing the weight of her hand on my chest and the soft, even rhythm of hers against my collarbone, for the better part of an hour, watching the grey light at the curtain's edge slowly turn gold, until my phone buzzed hard against the nightstand and very nearly gave me a heart attack loud enough to wake the whole street.

Rowan

Coffee.

Two words, no context, and somehow I understood every layer of it anyway — the fact he was already up, the fact he wanted to talk somewhere she couldn't hear, the fact that whatever he'd found or felt overnight had been enough to drag him out of whatever passed for sleep for him these days.

I eased her hand off my chest slower than a bomb disposal technician, easing each finger loose one at a time, and tucked the duvet back around her shoulders once I'd finally slid free. She didn't stir, just sighed and resettled into the space I'd left behind like her body had already accepted the trade. I stood there a second longer than strictly necessary, watching her breathe, before I made myself turn around, grab clothes off the chair without turning on a single light, and get dressed in the dark by feel alone.

I let myself out the front door as quietly as the old hinges would allow, locking it behind me out of habit more than necessity, given what I could do to anything that tried to get past it without an invitation.

Rowan was already outside, leaning against the low stone wall at the end of the path, two takeaway cups steaming faintly in the cold morning air beside him. He looked like hell. Worse than usual, which was saying something given his baseline lately — dark circles carved deep under his eyes, jaw tight, the kind of exhaustion that had nothing to do with a bad night's sleep and everything to do with whatever he'd been doing instead of sleeping at all.

"You could've come in," I said, low, pulling the door shut behind me and crossing the small front garden toward him. "House is still standing. Nothing's tried to eat you in there yet."

He shrugged, one shoulder, and held out one of the cups instead of answering, and I took it without pushing, because pushing Rowan before he was ready to talk had never once worked in either of our lifetimes.

We started walking, no real destination in mind, just the long familiar loop that took us past the shuttered shopfronts on Main Street and back around toward the square, boots quiet against cobblestones still slick with dew, the town holding its breath in that particular way it always did before the day properly started. The streets stayed empty enough that our voices carried further than either of us probably wanted, so we kept them low, heads tilted toward each other the way we used to as kids trading secrets under the covers after our parents thought we were asleep.

"I saw one on her window ledge two nights ago," I said eventually, watching my breath fog in the cold. "Wraith-type, whatever that thing actually was. Half-formed, crouched there watching her sleep through the glass like it had all the time in the world. I took it apart before it decided watching wasn't enough anymore."

His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping under the stubble he clearly hadn't bothered shaving in days. "There's more of them than there used to be. Whatever's coming through, it's coming faster now."

"You find anything in the Pines?"

"Enough to know it's worse than either of us thought." He stared somewhere past my shoulder, out toward the treeline still visible over the rooftops even from here, the way he did when he was choosing his next words with more care than usual, weighing them before he let them out.

We walked another full block in silence, boots falling into the same rhythm they always had, the weight of everything unsaid settling heavier between us with every step.

"I think we need to tell her the truth," Rowan said finally, voice quiet but certain, the kind of certain that meant he'd already spent hours arguing himself into it before he said it out loud to me. "And get her help."

I felt my whole chest go tight at that, some old, ugly instinct rearing up before I could talk myself out of it, some part of me that had spent three years being the only one who got to keep her safe and didn't love the idea of that changing now.

"I'd never hurt her," he said, quieter still, eyes steady and unflinching on mine, like he'd read exactly what had crossed my face in that half second. "You know that. I'm not saying we do any form of help that would... that would take any magic inside of her away. Or do something that she doesn't know about. I just mean we need to find out what's going in, and help her deal with it."

"I know." I did know it, all the way down, which somehow made the tight feeling in my chest worse instead of better, because it meant this had never really been about trusting him with her. It was about something else entirely, something I wasn't ready to look at straight on yet. "Okay. Let her sleep, though. She was up half the night already and she doesn't even know it. We can talk to her later today."

"Okay." He tipped the last of his coffee back and crushed the empty cup slightly in his fist. "I'll go home first. Meet you later."

He turned and walked off down the empty street without another word, hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders set like a man carrying considerably more than he'd said out loud in the last ten minutes. I watched him go until he turned the corner and disappeared past the old clock tower, then stood there a minute longer in the cold, watching my own breath fog and vanish, feeling the whole weight of the morning settle hard into my stomach — the wraith on her window, the bond neither of us had said the actual word for yet, the conversation waiting for us later that had every chance of either fixing everything or breaking it apart for good.

Stressed didn't quite cover it.

I let myself back into the house, locked the door behind me, and climbed the stairs two at a time to go check that she was still exactly where I'd left her.