Updated Nov 6, 2025 • ~8 min read
The lavender wouldn’t stop screaming.
Sage Mitchell pressed her palms against the greenhouse table, trying to steady herself as the plants around her shrieked their grief into the early morning air. Not audible to human ears—or even most witches—but she heard them. She always heard them.
And right now, they were telling her someone was dead.
Her phone buzzed against her hip. She didn’t need to look at it to know. The rosemary had started weeping an hour ago, drops of dew sliding down its silvery leaves like tears. The sage—her namesake—had gone brittle and brown at the edges, a sure sign of death magic in the air.
Three weeks. Three deaths. Three funerals she’d stood through with her jaw clenched and her hands fisted in the pockets of her black dress.
The phone buzzed again. Insistent.
Sage pulled it out with shaking fingers, already knowing what she’d see.
Mom: It’s Lily. Come home. Now.
The phone slipped from her hand, clattering against the terracotta pots.
Lily.
Not Lily.
Her cousin’s face flashed through her mind—bright smile, terrible jokes, the way she’d braided Sage’s hair every Sunday when they were kids. Lily was twenty-three. She was supposed to start grad school in the fall. She was supposed to have time.
The greenhouse tilted, or maybe Sage did. She caught herself on the edge of the worktable, her breath coming too fast, too shallow. The plants pressed their concern into her mind, trying to soothe her, but their magic felt distant. Muffled.
Everything felt muffled except the panic.
Three deaths in three weeks.
First, her great-uncle Thomas. Then her second cousin Marcus. Now Lily.
All Mitchells. All powerful witches. All dead within days of each other, their magic snuffed out like candles in a windstorm.
Sage forced herself to move. She grabbed her bag, her keys, nearly tripped over a bag of soil on her way to the door. The morning sun cut across the glass panels of the greenhouse, too bright, too cheerful for a day like this.
Her small apartment above the apothecary was dark and cool. She didn’t bother changing out of her dirt-stained jeans and loose cotton shirt. Didn’t bother with shoes that weren’t her battered sneakers. She just grabbed her leather jacket—covered in hand-stitched protective sigils that had taken her months to perfect—and ran.
The Mitchell family estate sat on forty acres just outside the city, hidden behind wards so thick that humans drove past without ever noticing the gates. Sage’s hands trembled as she pressed her palm to the iron, letting her magic identify her.
The gates swung open.
She’d barely parked her beat-up Honda before her sister Iris was there, pulling her into a crushing hug.
“I can’t believe it,” Iris whispered against her hair. “I can’t—Sage, what’s happening?”
Sage held her sister tight, breathing in her familiar scent of vanilla and woodsmoke. Iris was the second oldest, the practical one, the one who never cried. But her shoulders were shaking now.
“I don’t know,” Sage said, and hated how helpless she sounded.
They walked to the main house together, fingers intertwined like they used to do as kids when the world felt too big. The house was full of people—aunts, uncles, cousins, coven members who were family in magic if not blood. Everyone looked shell-shocked.
Everyone looked scared.
Her mother found her immediately, pulling her into the study where the coven elders had gathered. The room smelled like old books and older magic, the kind that had seeped into the walls over generations.
Elder Mitchell sat in the high-backed chair by the fireplace. Sage’s grandmother. The matriarch. At ninety-seven, she was the oldest living Mitchell, her magic still sharp enough to cut.
“Sage.” Her grandmother’s voice was steel wrapped in silk. “You felt it.”
It wasn’t a question. Everyone knew Sage’s connection to the natural world ran deeper than most.
“The plants knew before I did,” Sage admitted, moving to stand by the fireplace. She needed the warmth. She couldn’t stop shaking. “They’ve been restless for weeks.”
“Three deaths,” her uncle James said from the corner. His face was gray, aged ten years overnight. “Three in as many weeks. This isn’t coincidence.”
“It’s a curse,” Elder Mitchell said flatly. “We’ve confirmed it. Dark magic, targeting our bloodline specifically.”
The room went silent.
Curses were rare. Bloodline curses were nearly impossible—they required enormous power, intimate knowledge of the family’s magical signature, and a level of hatred that burned cold and deep.
“Who would do this?” Iris asked, still gripping Sage’s hand.
But Sage already knew the answer. Everyone in the room knew, even if they didn’t want to say it out loud.
“The Thornes,” her uncle James spat the name like poison.
Sage’s stomach twisted.
The Thorne Coven. Their enemies for longer than anyone could remember. Three generations of hatred, of magical skirmishes, of teaching children to fear and loathe a family they’d never even met.
Sage had been raised on stories of Thorne treachery. Of stolen magic and broken oaths. Of her great-great-grandmother, killed by Thorne magic during a territorial dispute no one could quite explain anymore.
She’d also been punished, more than once, for asking why.
Why did they hate each other? Why couldn’t they just… stop?
Her family called it naivety. Thorne sympathy. Betrayal of the worst kind.
But standing here now, looking at her grandmother’s grief-hardened face and her uncle’s rage-bright eyes, Sage couldn’t shake the feeling that this hatred—this pointless, endless hatred—was going to destroy them all.
“We don’t know it’s the Thornes,” she said quietly.
Every head in the room turned toward her.
“Sage.” Her mother’s voice carried a warning.
“I’m just saying we don’t have proof,” Sage pressed on, even as her pulse hammered. “A bloodline curse is serious magic. Illegal. If the Thornes did this and we can prove it, the Witch Council—”
“The Council,” Elder Mitchell interrupted, her eyes flashing, “has done nothing to protect us for a hundred years. They preach neutrality while Thornes pick us off one by one. No. We will not go to the Council.”
“Then what?” Sage demanded, frustration bleeding into her voice. “We just wait for the next death? Hope it’s not one of us? There are children in this coven, Grandmother. My nieces. Iris’s daughter. If this curse is escalating—”
“We protect our own,” her grandmother said sharply. “We strengthen the wards. We increase patrols. We find who cast this curse and we end them.”
The room murmured in agreement, but Sage heard the fear beneath the bravado.
They didn’t know how to stop this.
None of them did.
She stayed for another hour, listening to the elders argue about protective strategies and retaliatory measures. But eventually, she had to step outside, had to breathe air that wasn’t thick with grief and rage.
The gardens sprawled behind the main house, acres of carefully tended herbs and flowers that had been cultivated by Mitchell witches for generations. Sage walked the familiar paths, letting the plants whisper their comfort.
But even here, she could feel it.
The wrongness. The dark magic threading through the earth like poison in the bloodstream.
Three deaths.
How many more before this ended?
She was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear footsteps until Iris sat down beside her on the stone bench.
“You don’t think it’s the Thornes,” Iris said. Not a question.
Sage exhaled slowly. “I think someone wants us to think it’s the Thornes. This curse—it’s too obvious. Too theatrical. The Thornes are smart. If they wanted to destroy us, they’d be subtle.”
“Maybe they’re done being subtle.”
“Maybe.” Sage picked at a loose thread on her jeans. “Or maybe someone else is playing us both.”
Iris was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Be careful, Sage. You know how the family feels about… doubt.”
Sage knew. She’d spent her whole life being told that questioning the feud made her weak. Disloyal.
But she couldn’t help it.
She looked at her sister—strong, fierce Iris who’d always protected her—and saw the exhaustion in her eyes.
“I’m tired,” Sage whispered. “Aren’t you tired of hating people we’ve never met?”
Iris smiled sadly. “Every day. But tired doesn’t stop curses.”
No, Sage thought as her sister walked back toward the house. It doesn’t.
But maybe the truth would.
Her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number, just three words that made her blood run cold:
You’re next.
Sage stared at the screen, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Three deaths in three weeks.
And apparently, the curse wasn’t done with the Mitchells yet.
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