Bloodwitch (The Witchlands, #3)

With a touch light as snowfall, she laces her fingers around his wrist. Then she lifts his hand.

At first he thinks she is trying to read his palm like some Sightwitch from centuries past—just as his mother used to do. But then she lifts the arrow, and before he can stop her, she rakes it across his skin.

A soft pain lances through him. He hisses, and blood pools.

Then her free hand moves to the silver taler at her neck. A yank, a snap. She places the coin atop his palm.

Already, the cut is healing. Already the blood clots and the rough skin knits itself back together—but not before a smear of blood can mark the coin’s surface. A fresh spray of red to sink into the grooves of the silver eagle.

“You want me to be able to find you?” He can scarcely hear his own voice. It is caught somewhere inside his chest.

But she hears him. “I don’t want you to kill me. Assuming we ever meet again.”

“Ah,” he murmurs, although “ah” is not the word he truly wants to say.

Two breaths later, she plucks the coin from his palm, careful not to get blood on her own skin. Then she offers him one of her sly, subtle smiles—only visible if you know what you are looking for.

He knows what he is looking for.

“Also,” she adds softly, “I want you to be able to find me.”

Without another word, she turns and walks away. His heart thumps unevenly inside his chest. His lungs swell against his breastbone, as if there is something he ought to say. Something he wants to say before she is gone.

In her odd, perplexing way, he thinks she might be asking him to stay. No one has ever asked him that before.

No one. Ever.

But he does not speak, and he does not follow. In seconds, the forest welcomes her. The night turns colder. Yet all the while, he stands there, as rigid as the earth beneath his feet.

And all the while, he watches, moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat, as the cut on his palm closes until nothing is left but dried blood with a circle missing at its heart.