Chapter 3 Bloodline

Lily

It started with a dream. But not like the others.

No sweat-slicked sheets. No phantom touches.

This one was cold. Crisp. Real.

I stood in the middle of a dense forest. Fog wound around my ankles like smoke. The moon above was full, but wrong-oversized, blood-tinged, pulsing. The trees leaned in, whispering with brittle leaves that sounded like voices. They chanted something I couldn't quite make out.

Carson. Greywood. Forgotten daughter. Blood of both.

A silhouette moved between the trees. A woman. Long hair, dark gown, eyes like mine. She didn't speak, but I felt her words press against my bones.

"Don't let them bind you."

She held out her hand. Pale. Familiar.

I took a step-and the ground split.

I fell. Screaming. Reaching.

And woke up gasping, tangled in sheets, my skin cold with sweat.

The dream haunted me all day.

I couldn't shake her face. The curve of her jaw. The way her voice echoed inside me even now, hours later. It didn't feel like a dream. It felt like a memory.

It felt like her.

My mother.

I barely remembered her. A scent here. A lullaby there. She disappeared when I was five. They said she walked into the forest and never came back. Everyone called it postpartum psychosis. I remembered it differently.

She used to whisper at night. "There's a part of you no one must see, Lily-girl. Not even you. Not yet."

At thirteen, I overheard my aunt whispering to a neighbor:

"The bloodline's cursed. Her mother was a Greywood witch and that man she married-well, no one really knows what he was. But that baby... she ain't normal."

They thought I didn't hear. But I never forgot.

I went looking for answers.

I slipped into the east wing's record room after my shift. Celeste would kill me if she found out, but I had to know.

The place was wall-to-wall dusty ledgers, estate journals, employment logs. I sifted through names. And there it was.

Elaine Carson.

Hired: March 1997. Title: Kitchen maid. Terminated: June 2001. Reason: Disappeared.

Attached to the file was a handwritten note:

Poss. bloodline. Greywood. Purged from public record. May require containment if returned.

My blood went cold.

Purged. Containment.

What the hell had my mother been involved in?

What the hell was I?

I didn't notice Link until it was too late.

He was standing just outside the open door. Arms crossed. Face carved from stone.

"You're not supposed to be in here," he said quietly.

I straightened, heart hammering.

"I was just-"

"Looking for your mother?" he finished.

I blinked. "How do you know?"

He stepped inside, slow, deliberate. Each step echoed like a drumbeat.

"Because I've been looking too."

He pulled something from his coat. A folded document. He handed it to me.

It was a photo. Grainy. Old. Of a woman standing at the edge of the woods, hand outstretched toward something unseen. Her face turned just enough.

It was her. From the dream.

"She was seen near the west woods two days ago," Link said.

"That's not possible," I whispered. "She's been gone for over fifteen years."

He didn't respond.

But his eyes... his eyes said everything.

It was possible.

And if she was back-

So was the danger.

That night, I didn't dream.

But I woke with the scent of pine on my pillow.

And I wasn't alone in my room.

Not really.

Something-someone-had left a single sprig of wolfsbane on my nightstand.

And beneath it, a note.

You're awakening. Choose carefully who you trust.