Chapter Eleven

For one heartbeat, I was still kneeling.

For the next, I was gone.

The world inverted—sight folding inward, sound exploding into silence. The runes screamed through color I couldn’t name, and then the ground disappeared from beneath me.

It wasn’t falling, exactly. It was being unmade.

The faint sound of someone shouting my name, boots scraping earth, then someone screaming, “Catch her!”  I felt my body hit something hard somewhere far away. 

But I wasn’t there anymore.

I was inside her.

Cold. Heavy. Still.

The world bled back in shades of red and gray, then slowly focused. I tried to gulp air into dead lungs that had forgotten how to breathe. A groan of caving lungs losing the last of their air filled into cracks in the chaos. Her lungs. My eyes—her eyes— had opened.

I was staring up through the weeping willow tree’s branches. The moonlight fractured through leaves like glass. Everything was muted, soft around the edges, as if the air itself was made to comfort the dead.

The memories began.

---

I was small. Barefoot. Mud up to my knees. The smell of iron and wet bark filled my lungs as I stumbled through the woods. My hands shook. My lips were split.

Someone was yelling behind me. A man’s voice—deep, cruel, and familiar.

“You worthless little devil!”

I ran faster. Branches clawed at my arms, snagged my hair. The sky was bruised purple.

Somewhere behind, another voice—lighter, amused, unafraid.

“Well, that’s just plain rude and dramatic.”

I turned, heart pounding—and saw a younger Thea.

It was the real me. Less tired around the eyes, hair a wild tangle, a candle flame dancing in one hand like it owed her rent. She -I- crouched on a fallen log, looking at the young witch in front of her with a sly, dangerous smirk that never quite reached the eyes.

“Lost, are we?” she asked.

I couldn’t speak. My throat was a throbbing bruise.

She tilted her head. “You’re half-starved and beaten blue.”

When I didn’t answer, she sighed, stood, and offered me her hand. “Come on then, child. Let’s get you somewhere with fewer men who think they can scream at whoever they wish without consequences.”

When I didn’t move fast enough, she rolled her eyes. “I’m not gonna eat you. I save that for people who deserve it.” She sent a sly look at me with gleaming eyes. "Like that one."

Her hand was warm.

When I took it, something clicked into place inside the young witch. A tether. A beginning.

---

The scene shattered into a new one. Faster. Brighter.

The coven. Laughter. Firelight. Tonya is dancing on a table. Darcy swats her with a broom.

Younger Thea at the edge of it all, pretending not to smile when I tripped over my first spell.

“You’re stirring it like you’re beating a confession out of it,” she scolded. “Gentle, child. Magic’s a conversation, not a hostage negotiation.”

She’d braided my hair with calming lavender that night. I’d sworn to be mad at her forever. It lasted about two minutes.

---

More flashes of lingering memories came tumbling by.

Learning to write sigils. Stealing extra sweets from the ritual table.

And then—darker ones.

The upcoming rituals. The growing distance. The crumbling treaties. The whispers about “forbidden blood” and “fractured bonds.” Thea’s -my- name was spoken with reverence and fear by others in passing.

The young witch had seen me lose myself once before. Not like this—but close. The ground had cracked under my feet. Darcy had called it “ancestral interference.” The young witch called it terrifying.

And through it all, the young witch had stayed. Because the younger Thea had rescued her when no one else did.

---

Then came the last memory.

The grove again. But brighter. Full. Alive.

I was walking the outer ring, gathering candles. I remember humming. Something simple. The kind of tune Mira hated—sweet and repetitive.

And then—

A noise behind me. Soft. 

I turned.

Light. Motion. Pain.

Someone grabbed me from behind, an arm like iron around my throat. The smell—earth, blood, something metallic and wrong.

I tried to scream, but it came out as a gurgle.

I saw the willow tree tilt sideways. The candles tumbled to my feet.

The world went black before a face was ever revealed.

---

The memories finally shattered away like a broken mirror.

I was back in her eyes again—dead eyes. Staring at the moon through swaying branches. The world muted, muffled.

And somewhere far away, I felt the tug—the ache of being called home.

Someone was shaking me. My real body. Hands pressing on my shoulders, voices calling my name, begging, commanding.

“Thea!” I heard chanted over and over in the back of my mind. The sound of the voice cut through the fog like a blade.

The light around me splintered. The corpse’s vision cracked, and I was sprung forward—out, out, through color and dark and something that felt like grief given form.

I hit my body hard enough to feel it in every bone. My lungs spasmed. Air tore in.

And I screamed in grief. The kind that shakes loose the last bit of silence from a grave.

When I opened my eyes, the grove was chaos—Darcy kneeling over me with assessing eyes, Tonya crying, and Dylan holding my head like it was the only thing keeping him together.

The blood was gone from my throat as the magic was all used up. The corpse still lay beside me. Still. Empty. The eyes were closed.

I knew her laughter. Her pain. Her fear. Her love. Loyalty.

And I also knew one thing for certain.

She hadn’t seen her killer.

But I had felt them even if she didn't.

Their magic still clung to the air like oil. Old. Hungry. Not vampire. Not wolf.

Something else.

I sat up slowly, the world tilting around me, my pulse echoing with that strange rhythm of two lives out of sync.

“Thea,” Darcy whispered. “What did you see?”

I looked at the corpse, then the grove, then the silver line of moonlight across the blood-soaked earth.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It was full—so thick it pressed against the chest, settling in every heartbeat still brave enough to continue.

I forced my body to move, muscles shaking with the echo of too much power. The air still trembled, the last threads of forbidden magic slithering back beneath my skin like smoke unwilling to clear. I tasted metal. Ash. Someone else’s sorrow.

All around me, the grove waited.

Darcy stepped closer, the hem of her robe dragging through the blood-stained grass. Her eyes were wide, wet at the edges but sharp as ever. She looked from the corpse to me and back again before lowering herself to one knee between us. Her old hands hovered over the young witch’s body, trembling with reverence.

“Postpone the ritual,” she said finally. Her voice cracked on the word ritual but steadied on postpone. “Tonight we bury our own.”

No one argued. Even the wind seemed to nod.

Across the grove, Tonya started weeping quietly. The other young witch knelt to gather the fallen candles, her shaking fingers smudged red with wax and blood. The glow from the runes dimmed in sympathy, the sigils bleeding from white to gold, then to nothing.

And then—movement.

The wolves.

Dakota stepped forward from the shadows, his expression unreadable, his wolves fanning out behind him like a living wall of silence. For a moment, I thought he might speak. Instead, he lowered his head and bared his throat—a single, solemn line of surrender and respect.

One by one, the pack followed. A ripple of fur and moonlight. Every howl subdued, every grunt swallowed. Not deference to me, exactly. To the dead. To the magic that had just shown them what grief looked like through a witch’s eyes.

Then they faded back into the treeline, their shapes melting into shadow until only the scent of pine and glowing eyes remained.

The vampires stayed longer.

Always the dramatists.

Niklaus stepped forward, his silk cloak whispering against the ground. His face was pale, not with fear but with something dangerously close to humility. He inclined his head once—no smirk, no game. Behind him, the rest followed, bowing in a ripple of movement before slipping away between the trees, their departure like smoke exhaled from the night itself.

And then it was just us.

The witches. The dead. The silence.

I became aware of Dylan before I saw him. His aura—wild, untrained—buzzed faintly against my skin, searching for something to hold. A second later, his arms were around me, strong and shaking. He pulled me against him again like he thought I might vanish if he blinked too long.

I let him.

For the first time in a long while, I let someone hold me without a joke on my tongue or a shield of sarcasm between us. His heartbeat pounded against my ear—fast, uneven, achingly alive. It anchored me, dragging me back from wherever my soul had been wandering.

“It’s alright,” I whispered, though we both knew it wasn’t.

He didn’t answer. Just buried his face in my hair, breathing like he was trying to memorize proof of life.

Darcy’s voice broke the quiet again, softer now. “We’ll cleanse the circle at dawn. Burn the herbs. Lay her to rest beneath the willow's reach.”

“She deserves the grove,” Mira murmured.

Darcy nodded. “She’ll have it.”

Slowly, the coven began to move. Gentle hands lifted the girl’s body, wrapping her in silver-threaded cloth. Runes reignited just enough to light the path toward the center clearing. Tonya whispered a hymn older than our written language—something about moonlight and mercy.

I stayed kneeling long after they passed.

Dylan stayed with me.

When I finally looked up, the sky had shifted. The moon hung higher, thin clouds veiling its face like mourning silk. My magic still hummed, fragile and restless under my skin, but quieter now—like a storm that had learned shame.

Darcy rested a hand on my shoulder as she passed.

“Sleep tonight,” she said. “If the gods allow it.”

“I don’t think they like me much right now.”

Her mouth twitched. “That’s why they listen.”

And with that, she joined the others, her figure disappearing into the dim light of the grove.

I sat there until the torches burned low, until the earth beneath me cooled, until the silence felt almost kind again.

Only then did I whisper to the empty air, “I’ll find them.”

The promise didn’t echo. It sank—down into the soil, into the roots of the ash, into the bones of every witch who’d ever dared to love this cursed grove.

And somewhere in the dark, something heard.