Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Smoke stung my eyes.
The fire had burned down wrong, the last log smoldering instead of catching. I sat up coughing, waving the haze away from my face while thin light leaked through the cracks in the boards. A whole day and night had passed. I’d slept longer than I meant to.
I’d fallen asleep waiting for him, waiting for the scrape of the outside bar lifting, for heavy footsteps on the threshold. I’d told myself the inside bar was defiance, not fear. Told myself I didn’t care if he came back or not.
He hadn’t.
I kicked off the furs and stood, my back aching from the hard floor and my neck stiff enough that turning my head hurt.
Everything I’d checked yesterday would still be locked.
I knew that. But I tried the door anyway, lifting the inside bar and pushing the latch.
The outside bar held firm. He’d vanished into the forest and left me caged.
I sat back on my heels. There was no way out. He would decide when I got to leave.
The rage flickered but I pushed it down. Getting angry wouldn’t open the door, wouldn’t do anything except waste energy I might need later. If I couldn’t escape, I could at least learn something useful while I waited.
A chest sat in the corner near the bed, old wood, dark with age, iron bands across the top. I’d noticed it yesterday when Dietrich pulled out grandmother’s clothes, but I hadn’t looked closely. Now I crossed to it and knelt down.
The lid was heavy and opened with a creak that echoed in the quiet. Inside were more clothes — a gray wool dress folded carefully, a white linen shift, a brown shawl with moth holes along one edge. I lifted them out and set them aside.
Underneath were other things. A wooden comb with half its teeth missing, a string of glass beads, bundles of dried plants wrapped in cloth and tied with twine. Everything smelled like grandmother. I pressed the shawl to my face and breathed her in one more time, then set it aside and kept digging.
At the very bottom was a book.
It looked untouched. Dietrich had pulled clothes from this chest yesterday. He’d lived with it for more than two decades, must have opened it hundreds of times. A book this size sitting beneath the shifts and shawls would have been the first thing his hands found.
Unless it hadn’t been there for him.
Thick, the cover worn smooth in places where hands had held it over and over. No title — just dark leather and a small metal clasp. I pulled it out and set it on my lap, my hands unsteady as I undid the clasp.
The pages inside were yellowed and brittle at the edges. The handwriting changed from page to page, some sections in a neat, careful script, others hurried and cramped. Some looked old enough to crumble if I touched them wrong.
The first page stopped me.
Names. A column of them, written in different hands and different inks, stretching down the page.
Dozens of women. The oldest entries were faded nearly to nothing, the script so ancient I could hardly make out the shapes of the letters.
The newer ones darkened farther down the page.
Grandmother’s hand sat near the bottom, her careful slanting script that I’d know anywhere.
And beneath hers, the last name on the list.
Sophia.
Her handwriting. The letters tilted left instead of right, the way she’d always written because she held the quill wrong and Grandmother could never break her of the habit.
She had written her name here. She had held this book in her hands.
She had sat in this room, behind these boards, in this cage, and added herself to the list.
I flipped to the last filled page, but everything was blurred, as if the words were not ready for me to see.
Every word swam and slid away from my eyes the way water slides off glass. I tried to focus. I squinted until my head ached. The text would not come clear. The book had decided I was not ready for whatever Sophia had written in her final days.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the page as if I could absorb her words through my skin. She had been here for two years. Two years of entries. And I could not read a single one.
I closed my eyes. Breathed. Then I turned back to the first page and started from the beginning.
I’d seen Grandmother’s books before. She had kept a shelf full of them, and I had tried to read them once when I was young and curious about what she wrote.
But the words had blurred and swum, as though I were looking at them through water, and no matter how hard I squinted, I could not make them clear.
Grandmother had found me with tears of frustration in my eyes. She had taken the book gently from my hands. “Not yet, little one.” She had smoothed the hair back from my face the way she always did when I was upset. “When you’re ready, the words will come clear.”
I had asked what that meant. When would I be ready?
She had only smiled and touched my cheek. “You’ll know.”
I had changed in that cellar when Klaus attacked me, when that heat had surged through my body, when I had felt power wake inside me for the first time. That was when I became ready.
I looked at the first page again. Past the names. To the text below.
The words were sharp. Clear. I could read every single one.
A Record of Creatures Known and Unknown Compiled by the Blood-Keepers May those who read this survive to add their own knowledge
I turned the page.
This book contains entries on the creatures that walk this world alongside humanity. Some hide in plain sight. Others haunt the dark places. All are dangerous.
The blood-keepers have tracked them for generations. Recorded their habits. Their weaknesses. Their territories. Everything we’ve learned through observation and through the blood price we’ve paid for that knowledge.
But this book is protected. It will not reveal everything at once.
The magic woven into these pages decides what each reader is ready to know.
Some entries will be clear. Others will blur when you try to focus on them.
Do not fight this. The book knows what it’s doing.
When your power grows strong enough, you will see more.
Trust your blood. Trust the book. Survive.
A creature encyclopedia. Written over generations, protected by magic that decided what I could know.
I flipped ahead. Page after page of entries, each one starting with a creature name at the top in bold letters.
Fae
The text below was blurred. Swimming. I squinted and tried to focus, but the words wouldn’t come clear. Something about the blur felt different here, thicker, older, like the book was guarding these pages harder than the rest. Whatever the Fae were, the grimoire didn’t want me knowing yet.
Sanguinarians
Blurred. I caught one word before it swam away. Blood. Then nothing.
Demons
Blurred.
And then I saw it.
Blood-Keepers
Blood-keepers are the line of witches tasked with tracking and recording the creatures of this world. We are watchers. Documenters. Survivors.
The gift passes through women. Mother to daughter. Sometimes it skips a generation, but it always returns. The power manifests differently in each of us, but the core remains the same. We see what others cannot. Sense what should stay hidden. Walk paths between the living and the dead.
Common abilities include: prophetic visions, sensing death before it comes, finding lost things or people, seeing spirits, heightened intuition about danger.
Our purpose is not to hunt. Not to destroy. Only to witness and record so that future blood-keepers might survive what we have learned.
The creatures know what we are. They can sense our blood. Some avoid us. Others hunt us. This is why we must be careful. Why we must hide what we are from the ordinary world. Why we document everything we learn.
So that the next blood-keeper might live where we have died.
Blood-keeper. That’s what I was. What Grandmother had been. What her mother and grandmother before her had been. My visions weren’t madness, weren’t a curse, they were an inheritance.
I turned the page.
Protective Symbols and Tools
Blood-keepers have used various methods to mark themselves and ward off danger. These symbols change across regions and time, but their purpose remains constant.
Red is the most common color worn by our line.
It affects how certain predators perceive us, the color registers differently to supernatural sight and can mask our magical signature or make us harder to track.
It also serves as psychological armor. A reminder to ourselves and a warning to others.
We are not prey. We are not helpless. We survive.
Historically, our women have worn red cloaks, red ribbons, with red threads woven into clothing. The tradition continues because it works.
The red disrupts. It does not protect. A predator tracking by scent will falter when it sees the color, a moment’s confusion, an instinct to pull back, the briefest hesitation.
But a predator already in pursuit, already locked onto its prey, will push through the disruption the way a wolf pushes through a thorn bush.
The red buys time. It does not buy safety.
I touched the red cloak draped over the chair. My fingers found the ribbon at my wrist, faded, fraying, still tied where it had been since I was a girl. Protection. Both of them. Not just tradition, survival.
I kept flipping. More blurred entries, more creature names I couldn’t read. Then another clear entry.
Humans
Never underestimate the ordinary. Humans without magic are still the most dangerous threat blood-keepers face.
They fear what they don’t understand. That fear turns to violence faster than any supernatural predator. They drown us. Burn us. Hang us from trees. Call it justice. Call it God’s will. Sleep soundly after watching us die.
The witch trials are not isolated incidents. They are patterns that repeat across centuries and continents. Wherever fear takes root, the fires follow.