The Slova Bloodline

The House on Ashgrove Lane

Anvi Slova was very good at looking ordinary.

At Ridgemont University she was the senior who sat in the third row beside the window, her dark hair pulled into a low braid, a pen tucked behind one ear, a paper cup of tea going cold at her elbow. She kept a 4.0 and held a research fellowship in neuroscience. Her professors called her “the best mind in the department,” and they said it with the kind of respect that made other students glance at her sideways.

She was five foot six and slender, and she was beautiful in the unhurried way that never announces itself. People noticed it late, and then they could not stop noticing. Her skin was a warm olive-brown, smooth and faintly luminous, as if lit from within. Her face was heart-shaped, with a high, serious forehead, straight dark brows and a small, stubborn chin. Her lashes were thick and black. Her eyes were a deep hazel that looked plain brown until the light caught them, and then they flashed gold, like something small and wild watching from the edge of a forest. When she smiled, which was rarely, a dimple appeared at the left corner of her soft, rose-colored mouth, and it changed her entire face.

When she was nervous she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and bit the inside of her cheek. She did both a great deal lately.

And she was kind, in small, private ways that no one had ever thanked her for. She kept a bag of dry cat food in her satchel for the gray stray that haunted the loading dock behind the science building. She knew the night custodian’s grandchildren by name. She carried spare umbrellas in October and gave them away without being asked. She did not think of any of it as remarkable. She simply could not walk past someone who was struggling.

On the Tuesday of that October week, she walked down the science-building corridor with her laptop bag on her shoulder, and Brielle Kessler stepped into the middle of it and stopped.

Brielle was tall and blonde and lovely, in a cream cashmere cardigan, her ponytail swinging like a pendulum. Three friends fanned out behind her. She smiled with her mouth only.

“Still hexing the floors, witch girl?”

The words landed like a slap. They always did. Some part of Anvi’s body still remembered exactly what came after them.

Her heart began to pound like a trapped bird against her ribs. Her fingers closed around the strap of her bag until the knuckles blanched. Her palms were cold and damp. Her stomach dropped away, and for one awful heartbeat she was fourteen years old, and the hallway was the wrong hallway, and there was nowhere to run.

Then she lifted her chin.

“Move, Brielle,” she said. Her voice was low and steady, and it took everything she had. “I have a lab at two.”

Brielle blinked. Something flickered across her perfect face, surprise, then irritation, then something that looked almost like uncertainty. She stepped aside with a brittle little laugh. “God. Relax."

Anvi walked past. She did not hurry. She did not look back. She made it around the corner, through the fire door and up two flights of the east stairwell before her knees gave out, and she leaned against the cold concrete wall with her hand pressed flat over her racing heart and her eyes squeezed shut.

Breathe. In. Out. Ten counts. You did it. You did it.

She had been doing this for six years. It never got easier. She had only learned that being brave did not mean being unafraid. It meant being terrified and taking the next step anyway.

She had been fourteen the first time.

It was Career Week at Hollowmere Middle, and Mrs. Dunning had asked the class to write one honest paragraph about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Anvi had been a quiet, solemn girl with long braids and a habit of believing what she was told. Her family’s one rule was never speak of it. She had known that rule as long as she had known her own name.

She wrote the truth anyway. It was such a small, careful paragraph. I want to be a witch. I want to protect people, the way my family does.

Mrs. Dunning read it aloud to the class, smiling indulgently, thinking it a charming little fantasy. The room went quiet. Then someone snickered.

By lunch, the entire school knew.

Nobody believed it was real. That was the worst of it. Everyone knew what witches were. Witches were wicked, everyone knew that, poisoned apples and cursed cradles and burning stakes, and the girl who wanted to be one had to be something rotten underneath.

So they made sure she knew.

WITCH scrawled across her locker in black lipstick. Her lunch tray upended, more than once, more than twice. A locked supply closet in the gym, three hours in the pitch dark, her fists bleeding from pounding on the door. And one afternoon in the girls’ bathroom, four hands holding her still while Brielle Kessler cut off her braid with a pair of craft scissors, laughing, the long dark rope of it falling into the sink.

She had gone home that day with a scarf tied over her head and said she had lost a bet.

She had never told anyone. Not her father, who would have wrapped himself around the problem with a lawyer’s cold fury. Not her mother, who was too gentle and already too tired. And certainly not her grandmother, who regarded fear the way other people regarded a stain on a tablecloth, as something a person of quality would simply not permit.

Her hair had grown back. It had taken four years before she could carry a lunch tray into the cafeteria without her hands shaking. And the lessons had stayed in her marrow, quiet and cold and permanent:

The world hates witches. Your voice can ruin you. And you are not strong.

That was the secret she carried, folded small and hidden, like the scholarship letter in her bag. If she took the mantle and failed, real people would pay for it. And if she took it and succeeded, she would have to guard the truth for the rest of her life, from a world that would burn her for it.

Better never to take it at all.

The Slova house stood at the very end of Ashgrove Lane, where the pavement gave up and the oaks began.

It was a three-story Victorian, its clapboard painted the gray-green of old pewter, its slate roof steep as a witch’s hat, though nobody in the family found that funny. A round turret rose from the east corner, crowned with a copper weathervane shaped like a crescent moon. In the attic gable, an oval window of violet glass caught the last light every evening and glowed like a watching eye.

A wrought-iron gate guarded the drive, its bars twisted into branches that wove together overhead and framed a single crescent. Stone pillars flanked it, moss-furred and cracked, each topped with a weathered stone owl whose eyes had worn smooth over two centuries. The gate creaked when you pushed it, always, no matter how often her father oiled the hinges. Beyond it, a curve of crushed white gravel wound between the oaks to a deep wraparound porch, where the swing moved slightly even when there was no wind.

Inside, the front door opened onto a foyer tiled in black and white, cold under bare feet. A walnut staircase curved up and away, its banister worn pale by a hundred and forty years of Slova hands. The hallway was lined with tall mirrors in tarnished silver frames, and if you laid your palm against the glass, it was faintly warm, like skin. To the left lay the parlor, with its heavy velvet drapes, its window seat and its cold marble hearth. To the right was the kitchen, all copper pots and bundled herbs hanging from the ceiling beams, smelling of rosemary, woodsmoke and rain. At the back was a greenhouse thick with plants that did not grow in Virginia. And in the east wing, behind a door that stuck in wet weather, was the room the family called the Ledger Room.

The floorboards hummed when the house was thinking.

Anvi had grown up believing every house did.

She reached the gate that evening with her laptop bag on her shoulder and a sick, tight feeling in her stomach. She was twenty years old. In three days, at midnight on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, she would inherit something she had never asked for.

She pushed. The gate creaked.

She looked up at the ward that hung over the property like a thin sheet of glass, catching the twilight and turning it faintly silver. It had always been so bright it hurt to look at directly.

Tonight it looked thin as tissue. Near the eastern pillar it had flickered out entirely, leaving a ragged patch of ordinary air, and through it she could see the darkening trees and the first star, unprotected.

She stood there with her keys biting into her palm, and her heart sank.

It’s getting worse.