Agnes Nitt was apparently reading, but, although she was looking at the words on the page, what she was actually doing was thinking - something she did distressingly well. Not only that, but thinking these days seemed to entail an internal monologue with her invisible enemy. It was late and she couldn't sleep. Mice chittered and rustled in the thatch.

She was in bed, attempting to read one of the cottage's many notebooks, a thick volume crammed with information about herbs and plants, and filled to the margins with notes written by witches of various spelling and penmanship abilities. This made it almost impossible to read in any kind of coherent order, but since Agnes wasn't actually reading as such, this didn't really matter.

And what she was thinking about was a choice, a choice made not so long ago. A choice that was not really a choice, and that involved a certain attractive young vampire. Oh of course there was no real choice. She was almost technically mostly a witch, after all, and that meant knowing right from wrong, something a vampire most certainly did not. No, there was never any chance of Agnes Nitt (formerly "That Agnes Who Calls Herself Perditax", latterly The Girl Who Wishes Perdita X Would Bugger Off) could have chosen to become a vampire. Quite apart from anything else, what would Granny have said?

But all the same, just once she would like there to be a choice. There were never any choices for the Agnes Nitts of the world, or for witches either. You did what needed to be done, and you didn't expect people to notice.

The first reasonably attractive man who had ever taken an interest in her (the first man full stop, interjected Perdita) had been a bloodthirsty demon. It was so unfair! Fate was a bastard with a sick sense of humour, it seemed. Would another man ever be so interested again? Sometimes Agnes (although mostly Perdita) thought that maybe she should have taken the money and run, or flown, as it were.

Agnes sighed, and then Perdita, not always malicious, nudged at another memory, just as fresh, just as strange, but not, perhaps, as painful. They smiled as they remembered...a small, pale man, a face subtley changed showing new facets and angles. A grateful smile, a quiet goodbye, and the promise of...one day.

Perdita was immediately full of admonitions: He might have stayed if you had asked! I told you to ask! But Agnes shushed her. It was as he'd said, the light needed to be taken into dark places. For a priest that meant bringing the light of faith and understanding to the darkness of a place like Uberwald, and as a witch she needed to bring light to the darkness of people's minds and lives.

They were still young. There was always time. And there was always that promise of one day to keep them both (all four of them?) going.

With a smile on her face, Agnes and Perdita fell asleep. Sometimes, it seems, even a person in two minds can want the same thing.