Witches Burn at Dawn ✔

4. Yaroslava

✧ ✧ ✧

Now

I turn on the faucet and stand in the shower, silky hot steam rising around me. I just stand, letting the water wash away the graveyard cold.

If your mom's crazy, then you're too!

No. No, I am not crazy. I was dead, and now I'm alive. It's not a sick dream, a fantasy of an expiring mind. It's magic.

I am a vedma now.

I knew magic was a vicious joker, capable of many things--I've done many things myself--but...resurrection? In another girl's body? And who agreed to give up their body to me? Magic is nature breaking its own rules. It's death. And now I am death in the flesh.

Forbidden books say if you're brought back from the abyss, you return broken. You don't know who you are anymore, and what's real. Darkness doesn't simply let go of those who belong to it. But here I stand, and I've never felt more alive.

I'm just cold.

The last day of my life is still vivid in my memory: blood and screams and police sirens. I still remember the smell of burnt skin, and the dead standing and tearing at the flesh of the living around me like it's nothing but paper.

The Queen of the Dead?

"If you know what I did before I died," I repeat the words I haven't told Mir.

It was real, it's always been.

Turning the water off but feeling not a whit warmer, I step out onto the glossy white tiles and wrap myself in a towel. I don't recall towels being so soft, but I've never had a chance to take a shower in one of the apartments in the rich old quarters of St. Daktalion where the car brought me, either.

As I dry my damp skin, I avoid the mirror, avoid meeting my eyes, partly because I fear finding a haunted stare piercing me back, partly because I fear not finding it. Nevertheless, I can't resist the urge to inspect my new body. The skin is of warm ivory shade, tender, definitely well-cared and fed. My fingers find no familiar dimples on the cheeks as I make an attempt to smile; I see no birthmark on my left thigh, and surely--no scar on the inner side of my arm that granted me powers.

No reminder of Vlad.

Is it true what they say? You're a witch, a criminal...

Is Vlad still alive? Mir and his friends explained nothing, they kept silent till the very moment I shut the bathroom door behind me, and I couldn't understand if they didn't want to talk to me or were scared to. But why would they bring me back if they were scared? They needed me. Do they want me to cure someone? To kill? Would they send me back to the abyss after?

I don't want back to the darkness. I'll truly go mad if I hear it crooning my name, every syllable winding like woodsmoke sipping through shattered glass. Anything but this. The water felt so nice against my skin, so calm. Even my childhood fears suddenly grow to possess some new taste--of life.

I'll do whatever it takes to stay here. To breathe.

My finger brushing my arm where the scar used to be, I squeeze my eyes shut. Listen. Muffled sounds are coming from the living room, Mir and the others talking about me, no doubt. I hear the tunes and the timbres of their conversation, my breath and my heartbeat in my ears, but nothing else. No darkness. No magic. I used to hear the heartbeats of those around me, I used to be able to make their hearts hammer faster, to make them stop.

But it's only my heart now. Rhythmic, quiet, lonely. One, two, three--stop--it doesn't.

Nobody would choose to be a bad guy.