Eva’s first memory of blood magic came with the smell of rotting olives and her Grand-mère Marie’s whispered French. The old woman’s fingers, gnarled as the roots she tended, guided ten-year-old Eva through a grove where Mediterranean trees thrust through red Alabama clay, like bones through skin. Spanish moss hung from twisted branches in gray shrouds, and kudzu choked the wrought-iron fence that caged the groves. Even the summer air felt wrong here—thick as blood, sweet with night-blooming jasmine that couldn’t quite mask the decay beneath.

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 “Ma petite,” Grand-mère murmured, her voice rough as centuries of buried secrets, “you must understand the gift in your veins.” The silver tip of her gardening knife caught the moonlight like a cat’s eye. “The land knows our blood. It has known it since before your ancestor Celestine set foot on this soil, since before the first slaves were buried in the grove to feed the trees.”

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Eva didn’t flinch when the blade bit her finger; she’d seen enough of her mother’s stillborn births to know genuine pain. Besides, something in Grand-mère’s eyes scared her more than any small hurt—an ancient hunger deeper than the roots themselves. A single drop of blood welled up, black as sin in the moonlight. Grand-mère guided her hand down, and the blood fell.

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The soil sighed like a dying breath. The drop disappeared into the earth, which seemed to pulse beneath their feet, and where it landed, tiny shoots of green unfurled like skeletal fingers reaching for the moon. Eva watched, transfixed, as delicate leaves sprouted and uncurled in seconds, their edges tinged with red.

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“C’est la magie dans notre sang,” Grand-mère said. “The magic in our blood.” She touched the tiny plant with the reverence of a penitent. “We do not rule this land, ma chérie. We are bound to it, as it’s bound to us. A covenant written in blood and soil, sealed with sacrifices you’re too young to understand.”

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Eighteen years later, Eva’s finger traces her deceased sister’s letter, sensing the spot where Grand-mère had drawn blood that night. She had buried the memory deep, entombed with other childhood horrors—the whispers from the slave quarters’ ruins, the shadows that danced too freely in candlelight, and the weight of generational sins in her mother’s eyes. But now, holding her sister’s last words, those memories stir like something long buried clawing at the surface.

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Dearest Evangeline, the letter reads, its ink brown and flaking like dried blood. If you’re reading this, I’m already gone. There are elements you must understand about our blood—things Grand-mère tried to tell us before Mama sent you away...

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Eva sets the letter down on her lab bench, where slides of anonymous blood samples wait for analysis. A hematologist now, shipped north of the Mason-Dixon Line at age ten, she’s as far removed from Alabama as her test tubes and microscopes. She’s spent her career studying the mysteries of blood—its components, its mutations, its secrets—trying to reduce its power to mere chemistry. But as she stares at her sister’s spidery handwriting, she hears Grand-mère’s voice slithering through the night air: “The land knows our blood.”

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Outside her lab window, a massive oak spread its arms to the Boston sky like a supplicant at prayer. Eighteen years later, Eva wonders if it senses her presence like the olive trees did. Was that night real, or an invented memory justifying her family, casting her like Cain into the wilderness?

Only one way to find out.

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Her hand moves to the drawer where she keeps her lancets, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she swears she hears the trees whisper.