Page 8 of Little Witch

I told myself to keep walking. To go home and stop letting a stupid dream get under my skin.

My feet didn't listen.

I wondered if my dad had ever gone into those woods on purpose.

I wondered if that was why he'd vanished one day and never come home. Because it had not been a choice... he'd just been desperate to do it and couldn't control his brain anymore.

The pull sharpened, a soft tug at the edges of my mind, drawing me toward the trees. The rational part of me screamed to turn around. The other part — the part that had always felt tied to this place, to whatever ran under its skin — pulled harder.

I hesitated. Then I took a step toward the forest anyway.

The air cooled the closer I got, the whisper of leaves growing louder in my ears. I couldn't explain it, but it felt like I was meant to go. Like something in the woods was waiting on me specifically.

Another step. Then another, pulse climbing as I left the bakery's warmth behind. Cobblestone gave way to dirt and fallen leaves as the lamplight thinned out behind me, swallowed by the dark. The trees loomed taller now, branches swaying like they were beckoning me in.

I stopped just short of the treeline, heart slamming, my boots skimming the edge of a leaf-choked puddle. The forest stretched out ahead of me, dark and endless, its depths folded into shadow. The whispers were louder here. Almost words.

This was ridiculous. There was nothing in those woods but stories — old ones, meant to scare kids into staying close to home. Stories I'd grown up on and never once believed.

And yet.

I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more underneath it. The forest had always felt alive to me in a way I couldn't explain, like it knew things, like it was waiting for the right moment to show me what.

I took another step toward the treeline, breath catching. The wind stirred the leaves around me, and for a second I thought I saw something — a shadow slipping between the trees, too fast and too silent to be human. Too wrong to be ordinary magic.

I blinked, and it was gone.

"Amber," a voice whispered, soft and distant, carried on the wind.

I froze, pulse pounding in my ears. The same voice from my dream. The same whisper that had said my name in the dark and refused to let go of it since.

I stepped back from the treeline, hands trembling. This was a mistake. Whatever waited in those woods, whatever had learned my name, wasn't something I wanted to find alone in the dark.

I turned and walked fast, back toward town, putting distance between myself and the trees. The wind followed me anyway, carrying the faintest trace of that voice. That invitation.

I wasn't ready to answer it.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

Chapter Four

I gave her a three minute head start before I let the shadows have me.

It wasn't hard. It never was, not for me — the dark had always fit like something I'd been born wearing rather than something I put on over the top of myself. I stood outside the bakery a moment longer than I needed to, watching the shape of her disappear around the corner of Main Street, that ridiculous faux fur jacket pulled tight around her shoulders, before I stepped off the curb and let myself go thin. Let the streetlight slide off me instead of through me. My edges blurred, dissolved, the neon of my eyes the last thing to go dark, until I was less a person and more a shape the night forgot to bother noticing.

Mist where a man should have been.

I followed her that way, twenty feet back, folding myself into the gaps between the shopfronts, sliding along the hedges that lined the Hendersons' garden, close enough that I could've closed the distance in under a second if the whispers finally decided to reach out and grab instead of just talk. Close enough to smell her, if I let myself — cinnamon and sugar clinging to her hair from a full shift in the bakery, and underneath that, something that was just her. Something I'd have known blindfolded in a room full of a hundred other girls.

She thought she'd walked home alone. She always thought that.

She hadn't, not once. Especially not since the night the wrongness in the Pines had spiked hard enough to make my teeth ache clear across town, hard enough that I hadn't slept properly since without knowing exactly where she was and exactly how fast I could get to her if it came to that.

I hated doing it like this. Hated hovering in hedges like some overgrown gargoyle instead of walking beside her in the open, hand at the small of her back where it belonged. Hated that she'd moved out in the first place — packed her whole life into four cardboard boxes and a duffel bag rather than let me keep watch on her the easy way, from the next room instead of from someone's rose bushes. She'd said it was so I'd stop feeling like I had to take care of her. Like that was some kind of weight instead of the only thing in three years that had made getting out of bed feel like it had a point.

She thought she was a burden on me. She had no idea she was the only ballast keeping me upright most days.