The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab

remember running past a few low rocks, a tree, before everything went black, so my steps are wary, feeling for sharp edges. The wind keeps humming, a steady rise and fall, and I swear I know this song. A chill runs through me as I realize where I’ve heard it.
    The wind on the moors is a’singing to me
    The grass and the stones and the far-off sea
    The wind and the sound wrap around me, the rise and fall of the melody growing louder and louder in my ears, and the world begins to spin. I stop walking to keep from falling down. The hair on my neck prickles, and I stifle the urge to scream.
    Be patient with it, Lexi , my father’s voice intrudes.
    I try to calm down, try to slow my pulse, now so loud I can’t hear anything over it. Holding my breath, I wait for the wind song to form a layer, a blanket of noise. Wait for my heart to become part of that blanket instead of a pounding drum in my head. A moment after my nerves start to settle, a new noise comes from a few feet away at the bottom of the hill. A weight steps down on the grass.
    I spin back toward the sound just as the clouds abandon the moon overhead, shedding slivers of light that seem as bright as beacons after the heavy dark. The light glints off my knife, and the few scattered rocks, and the shadowed form, finally illuminating the outline of a man. I lunge, knocking him back against the slope. My free hand pins his shoulder, my knee on his chest.
    The light grazes his throat and his jaw and his cheekbones, just the way it did when I first saw him beyond my window. I am looking into the same dark eyes that refused to meet my own on the hill by the sisters’ house.
    “What are you doing here?” I ask, the hunting knife against his throat. My heart is racing and my fingers tighten around the handle, and yet he neither flinches nor makes a sound, but simply blinks.
    Slowly, the blade slides back to my side, but my knee lingers on his chest, pressing him into the grass.
    “Why are you out here?” I ask again, biting back my annoyance, both at the fact he was able to sneak up on me, and the fact that I’m silently grateful he’s here. He stares up at me appraisingly, his eyes as black as the night around us, and says nothing.
    “ Answer me , Cole,” I warn, raising my blade. His jaw tenses, and he looks away.
    “It’s not safe out here. Not at night,” he says at last. His voice is clear and smooth at once, cutting through the wind in an odd way, more parallel than perpendicular. “And my name isn’t Cole.”
    “So you were following me?” I ask, pushing myself off him, trying not to let him see that I am shaking.
    “I saw you out alone.” He gets to his feet in an impossibly graceful motion, his gray cloak spilling over his shoulders. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
    “Why wouldn’t I be?” I ask, too quickly. I take a deep breath. “Why did you run away?”
    I wait, but he doesn’t answer, instead studying the ground with an attention that’s clearly avoidance. Finally he says, “Easier than trying to explain.”
    The last of the clouds slide away, and the moonlight illuminates the moor around us.
    “You should go back to the sisters’ house.” I look around at the hill and the cluster of cottages behind us. When he doesn’t move or speak, I turn to face him. “I mean it, Cole. If anyone sees you here…”
    “ You saw me here.”
    “Yes, but I don’t think you took Edgar. Someone else might. You do realize you were in the village, by Edgar’s house, the night after he went missing. You can see how it would look.”
    “So were you.”
    “But I’m from here. And I’m a tracker. My father was too. What are you?” I wince at how harsh my voice sounds.
    “Once I realized what you were doing, I thought I could help,” he says, and it’s barely a whisper. I’m amazed I can hear it over the blustering wind.
    “How?”
    His dark eyebrows arch up. “I have good eyes. I thought I might find something. A clue or a