Chapter Six: The Bloodline Beneath the Skin
Elara didn't return home that night.
After the Hollow-Eyed Hunter retreated into the mist, the forest refused to release its grip on her mind. The image of its eyeless face—those voids sucking in everything—played over and over behind her eyes. Her body shook from the adrenaline, her hands still tingled with leftover magic, and her wrist—marked with the crescent—burned like fresh ink.
Kairo walked beside her silently, his face unreadable. There was something different in him now. Not just protectiveness—but fear. Not for himself. For her.
"Was that thing really hunting me?" she asked, finally breaking the silence.
"It was hunting your power," he said. "But that power is you now. You're not just the girl who cast the spell anymore."
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"No one ever does," he replied. "Magic doesn't care about consent. It only answers hunger. And yours was loud enough to shake the Veil."
They came to a clearing Elara had never seen before—tucked deep in the woods behind a crumbling stone wall. In its center stood an old cabin, crooked and half-eaten by ivy, like the forest was trying to swallow it whole.
Kairo pushed open the door without hesitation. "This place is safe. For now."
Inside, it smelled like herbs and old paper. Shelves lined the walls, filled with jars and feathers and bones. A crooked broom leaned in one corner. Books—some bound in leather, others in cloth—were stacked across every surface.
Elara turned in a slow circle. "What is this place?"
"A sanctuary," Kairo said. "It belonged to the last witch who tried to help me."
She looked at him sharply. "What happened to her?"
He hesitated. "She died. Protecting me."
The air grew heavy.
"I need to know what I am," Elara said quietly. "What's happening to me. Why I could cast a spell from a book I didn't understand. Why I'm connected to you."
Kairo walked to a chest at the back of the room. He opened it and retrieved something wrapped in silk—dark blue and faded with time. When he unwrapped it, Elara gasped.
It was a photo. A black-and-white portrait of a woman with sharp cheekbones and wild curls—eyes that gleamed faintly violet even through the photograph's age.
"She looks like me," Elara whispered.
"She was your great-grandmother," Kairo said. "One of the last bloodline witches born with true sight—the ability to see through the Veil without casting."
"My mom never told me—"
"She couldn't. The gift skips generations. Your mother didn't inherit it. You did."
Elara sat down hard on an old velvet bench. "So I'm a witch?"
"You're more than that. You're a veilborn. A rare kind of witch whose magic is tied to both the earth and the space between worlds. It's dangerous magic—wild, unpredictable. That's why the Hunter came. It can smell what you are."
Elara stared at the photo, her mind racing. The shadows of her mother's illness, the whispers in her dreams, the strange draw to that willow tree—they all started to make a horrible kind of sense.
"Why now?" she asked. "Why is this happening now?"
"Because fate ripples," Kairo said softly. "The moment you opened the grimoire, your blood remembered. And mine answered."
He sat beside her, close enough for their shoulders to touch. The warmth of him was comforting. Real.
"You're not alone anymore," he added. "But that means they'll come for both of us."
Elara looked down at her glowing wrist, then back at the photo of the woman with eyes like hers.
"For the first time," she said, voice steady, "I'm not afraid.