Witch Hunt the Wicked Wild

03 -- Henrik

Henrik

I woke to a gentle prodding of a finger at my shoulder.

"Hey, mister? Are you alive? Mister?"

Keeping my eyes closed for the moment, I reach out with my ears and my nose, searching. Where am I?

My last memory is of the Hunt. I ran with the Hunt. I was moments away from a capture. I nearly had the algol in my teeth, and then... a blinding light. Strong, powerful... undeniable.

There was a strong detonation. Now I was here, with someone else, but she is alone. I smell incense, herbs, spices, her, and mortar from a collapsing wall made of stone. Dust.

Whatever happened this was an accident, I decide. The smells are the scents of a home, not just a house. A place where people cared about the structure as a place of refuge and welcome. A home.

A wall doesn't collapse in a home on purpose. Something went wrong, and now the wall has collapsed, and I am here. Now this young woman is worried that she didn't just collapse a wall, but may have killed a man.

I must have changed. I can't imagine her being as worried in my other form; the form I ran in the Hunt with. Didn't matter what world I was in, that form didn't inspire calm or empathy.

"Mister, don't be dead. Please don't be dead."

"Henrik," I tell her. "My name is Henrik. I don't know this Mister you are talking about."

I hear her sit back. Opening my eyes I find she is young, early twenties. She's not cute but rather she is determined and serious. Her brown hair is gorgeous, and long. Wavy.

She is frowning in thought, her hand under her chin, the other supporting her elbow. Absently she tucks a lock of hair behind her right ear.

"Trying to figure out how to kill me?" I ask her.

"I'm a witch," she says in reply, as if that were an answer to my statement. A sharp correction.

Nothing feels broken as I begin to sit up, so I arrange myself on my butt and cross my legs, "You're a witch, and you're not going to kill me?"

"Why would I kill you? I don't kill people," Alice says, as she touches her hair near her ear and strokes it between two fingers.

"You don't?" I ask, not being able to keep all of the skepticism from my voice.

"No," she tells me, nodding to assure me this was true.

"Never?" I asked, lifting an eyebrow in deliberate meaning.

She crossed her arms giving me an impatient look with narrowed eyes and a lowered chin, "We are witches. We don't kill people," she says, annunciating each word — so that a dullard like myself would be certain to understand. Then she shrugs and turns away, reaching for a flower vase that had fallen and lay on some of the rubble from the wall. "Besides, we have a Black Wand in our coven who handles that sort of thing." She sets the vase to stand on one of the fallen stones from the collapsed wall.

This is bad. No, this is way past bad and into an area I have no experience with. And no words. This woman is a witch. And this is the house of their coven. That means there are more of them, and they are soon to arrive. If they discover what I am, they will kill me an instant later.