Breaking Ground

The cat is in the tree again.

Midnight—because of course the cat is named Midnight—sits on a branch about twenty feet up, tail wrapped around her paws, watching Meredith with that expression that says she knows exactly what she's doing.

Three years since her mother died. Three years since the cat appeared on the back porch like an inheritance. Three years of this dance—the tree, the waiting.

Meredith stands at the base of the old oak, hands trembling.

"Come down," she says.

Midnight blinks slowly. Doesn't move.

"I have work to do. I'm in the middle of a translocation charm. It can't sit half-finished."

The cat yawns, showing needle teeth.

Meredith turns to go back inside. Makes it three steps before she stops, sighs, turns back. This dance. Always this dance.

She sits at the base of the tree and leans back against the trunk. The bark is rough through her cardigan. The October air smells like wood smoke and coming rain.

The tree stands just beyond the property line. Beyond where her mother's magic ever reached.

Her hands stop trembling.

The headache that's been pressing behind her left eye for three days fades to nothing. The ringing in her ears quiets. She takes a full breath without her ribs aching.

She touches her wrist. Her pulse feels stronger here. Steady instead of that wrong, thready flutter.

Meredith closes her eyes. Just for a moment.

When she opens them, an hour has passed. The sun has moved.

The tree is empty.

And she feels worse for the rest. Weaker. Like it was waiting for her to stop paying attention.

That night, Midnight doesn't come home for dinner.

The cat has many faults—aloofness, superiority, a tendency to knock Meredith's carefully organized herb jars off shelves—but she's never missed a meal. Not once in three years.

Meredith stands on the back porch, shaking the bag of cat food. "Midnight? Here, kitty."

Nothing.

The woods behind the house are dark and deep. Her mother used to warn her about going in after sunset. Used to tell stories about the things that lived in the spaces between trees, the things that waited for careless witches who wandered too far from their wards.

Don't climb that tree, Meredith. It's outside my protection—outside where I can keep you safe. Anything could take you out there. You need me.

Meredith had rolled her eyes. She was seventeen and immortal, and her mother was old-fashioned and paranoid and suffocating.

Now she's thirty-two and her mother is three years dead and the woods look very dark indeed.

"Midnight!"

The wind picks up, rattling the dry leaves. No answering meow. No flash of black fur.

She goes inside. Climbs the stairs to her workroom.

The translocation charm sits half-finished on her table—salt lines and herb bundles arranged in careful geometry. She's been working on it for six days. It's delicate magic, the kind that requires absolute focus.

She reaches for her mother's grimoire to check the next step.

The book sits on its wooden stand beside her worktable. But when she touches the cover, dust comes away on her fingers. Thick dust. How long since she opened it? Held its weight? She's been working from memory for... weeks? Months?

Three years of her mother's voice in her head. The grimoire gathering dust while she works from instinct—from her mother's whispered guidance.

When did she stop needing to look at it?

A sound from the next room. Soft. Like footsteps.

Meredith freezes. She lives alone.

Another creak. The floorboards in her mother's old bedroom.

"Midnight?" Her voice comes out smaller than she intends.

Silence.

Then, so faint she might be imagining it: her mother's voice. You're not ready to be alone yet, sweetheart. You need me. You'll make mistakes without me.

Meredith's hands start trembling again. She looks at her reflection in the darkened window. Gaunt face. Sunken eyes. She's lost weight she didn't have to lose. Her hair is coming out. There's a permanent tremor in her hands that wasn't there six months ago.

Working herself to death, her sister had said last time they spoke.

The words had seemed dramatic then.

Now Meredith touches her own face and feels how thin the skin has become. How the bones press too close to the surface.

"Midnight," she whispers again.

The silence presses back.

Next door, the footsteps start. Pacing. Back and forth. The way her mother used to pace when she was working through a spell, muttering to herself, planning.

Meredith doesn't leave her workroom. Another night in her mother's chair. The one in the corner, where she would sit and watch her work.

She doesn't sleep.

By morning, Midnight still hasn't returned. Her food bowl untouched in the kitchen.

Meredith climbs the stairs back to her workroom, exhaustion making each step a mountain.

The door is open. She always closes it.

Inside, the grimoire stand is knocked over. The wooden base cracked. Claw marks gouged deep into the legs.

The grimoire is gone.

On the floor beneath where it sat: dark earth. The smell of deep ground. And leading to the window—drag marks. Deep grooves in the wood where something heavy scraped across the floor.

The window is open. She never opens that window.

Meredith looks out into the gray morning. The oak tree stands patient in the yard, branches empty.

Did the cat... ?

No. Impossible. The book weighs ten pounds at least. And cats don't steal grimoires. Cats don't—

The memories surface. Pawing at the workroom door. Scratching at the window. Knocking things off the grimoire stand. Once, Meredith found a dead mouse placed carefully on the book's cover.

Bringing death to the death-book.

She tries a location spell first. Simple magic. The kind she's cast a hundred times. But the spell slides off her concentration like oil on water. She tries again. The magic twists, redirects, shows her three raccoons in the woods behind the house.

Not helpful.

She tries a calling. A summoning. Tracking magic with her own blood and a map spread across her workroom floor. Each spell rebounds or succeeds but finds the wrong thing. Two possums. A fox. Something deeper in the woods that pushes back so hard she tastes blood.

Hours pass. The sun climbs. Falls. She barely notices.

The blood magic is her last resort. Her mother's specialty. The spell she swore she'd never use.

She draws the circle. Speaks the words. Cuts her palm.

The spell catches like kindling—too eager, too hungry. Power rushes through her, and for a moment she feels her mother's hands over hers, guiding, shaping, taking.

That's my girl. You need my help. You always need my help.

The spell slams back. The world goes dark.

She wakes on the kitchen floor. Blood crusted under her nose. Her head splitting. Her magic depleted.

Midnight still isn't home.

Two more days pass.

Meredith stops eating. Stops sleeping more than an hour at a time. She tries spell after spell, working through bindings and summoning's, anything that might find the cat, bring her back, explain where she went.

Nothing works.

She's dying. She knows she's dying. Can feel it in the way her body is shutting down, system by system. Her hair comes out in clumps. Her skin bruises at the slightest touch. When she looks in the mirror, she sees her mother's face superimposed over her own.

You can't do this without me. You need me. Stay with me. Work with me. We'll be together forever.

The house feels smaller. The walls leaning inward. Sometimes Meredith sees her mother in doorways—just for a second, just at the corner of her vision. Standing. Watching. Making sure she's still working, still using the magic, still connected.

On the fourth night, Meredith is sitting at her workbench—the empty stand a constant reproach in her peripheral vision—when she hears it.

Thump.

She holds her breath.

Drag.

Thump. Drag. Thump.

The sound of something heavy being pulled across the hardwood floor downstairs.

The ghost. It's the ghost. Come to finish what the spell started.

But then—a sound she knows. A small, exhausted meow.

Meredith staggers to her feet. Down the stairs. Into the kitchen.

Midnight is standing by her food bowl.

The cat is filthy.

Covered in mud and leaves and death—that thick, wet, rotting earth smell that makes Meredith gag. Her fur is matted with it, clumped and dark. She's panting, which cats don't do unless they're terrified or exhausted.

And she's dragging something.

Meredith's mother's grimoire.

It's not pristine anymore.

It's destroyed.

The leather cover is shredded, hanging in strips. Pages are torn—some missing entirely, confetti scattered across the kitchen floor. Claw marks gouge deep into the binding. Tooth marks puncture the corners. That same grave dirt is ground into the parchment.

And underneath, woven between the pages—roots. Tree roots.

The grimoire has been buried. But not in the cemetery.

Under the oak tree.

Midnight drops it at Meredith's feet, sits down, and begins washing her face.

"What did you do?" Meredith whispers.

The cat ignores her. Keeps grooming.

Meredith picks up the grimoire with shaking hands. The weight surprises her—ten pounds? Fifteen? Damp with earth and rot. The cover resists, then gives.

Pages spill to a spell she's never seen before. Written in her mother's hand, but different. Rushed. Desperate. The ink pressed so hard it's torn through in places.

The spell is written across two pages. No—three. Four. She turns the pages faster. Five. Ten. Fifteen. The entire grimoire. Every page. Every word. Three years of spells she thought were hers—all of it one massive working.

And threaded through it—hair. Her hair, woven between the pages. Not bookmarks. Tethers. The strands map her slow dying: brown giving way to lighter, lighter fading to gray. Three years of her life collected strand by strand, bound into her mother's book like specimens, like she was something to be preserved.

Her mother's handwriting fills the margins: She'll understand. She needs me. She'll always need me. Better mine forever than free for a moment.

The book vibrates in her hands, and Meredith understands with sudden, terrible clarity: this isn't trembling, this is the grimoire pulling at something inside her—has been pulling for three years—a thread from her chest to the book beating with every heartbeat, draining her life to feed her mother's desperate, hungry spell.

The spell is dated. Written one week before her mother died.

That week comes back to her in fragments. Her mother tired. Worried. Kept touching Meredith's face, her hair, gripping too tight. Meredith pulling away, impatient, twenty-nine and desperate for independence.

I can't leave you alone. You need me. Need my guidance. You'll make mistakes without me, fail, die.

And Meredith had said: I'll be fine, Mom. I'm an adult. I can take care of myself.

But her mother hadn't believed her.

Had cast a binding spell. A spell to keep them connected. To make sure she could still guide Meredith, still protect her, still—

Control her.

Even after death.

Especially after death.

The grimoire moves in her hands.

Not a twitch. Not imagination. The pages ripple, turning on their own, falling open to spell after spell—all the magic Meredith has been working for three years. Every charm, every binding, every piece of magic she thought was hers.

All of it her mother's. All of it drawing on the binding. All of it powered by Meredith's slow death.

And in the air above the book, smoke beginning to form. Not dissipating—coalescing. Taking shape.

Her mother's face. Her mother's hands. Reaching.

The ghost doesn't speak words. Not exactly. It's her mother's voice, but wrong—layered, echoing, hungry. Mine mine mine stay stay STAY you need me you'll die without me MINE—

Meredith stumbles backward. The grimoire falls, pages splaying.

Midnight hisses—that same battle hiss from when she fights things in the yard, low and sustained and wrong. The ghost flinches.

"You're dead," Meredith whispers.

The ghost reaches for her. Meredith feels the cold—that same wrong, draining cold she's been living with for three years. Every spell pulling at her. Every working taking pieces. And she never understood why. Every time she opens herself to magic. Every time she thinks in her mother's voice.

Midnight launches.

Not at the ghost—at the grimoire.

Claws out, teeth bared, the cat attacks the book like it's alive. Because it is alive. It's the anchor. The spell's physical form. And the cat knows.

The grimoire fights back.

Pages whip through the air like knives. One catches Meredith's cheek, draws blood. The leather binding writhes, trying to close itself around the cat, trap her, stop her.

The ghost screams—her mother screams—a sound of rage and betrayal and hunger.

"No," Meredith says.

She grabs the grimoire. The binding tries to cut her hands—she feels the leather move, feels edges becoming sharp—but she holds on. She can feel her mother in it. Feel the spell, the connection, the parasitic thread that's been draining her for three years.

All she has to do is pull.

Meredith rips the first page out.

The ghost shudders. Weakens.

She rips out another. Another.

Midnight helps—batting torn pages toward the fireplace, toward the flames Meredith hasn't let die in three years because her mother always kept a fire burning and Meredith has been living in her mother's house, her mother's life, her mother's shadow—

The grimoire is screaming now. Not her mother's voice. Something else. The spell itself, dying, fighting, refusing to end.

Pages try to reattach themselves. The binding attempts to close. Ink runs off the pages and tries to write itself on Meredith's skin—binding marks, ownership marks.

She won't let it.

She tears and rips and destroys, crying and cursing—words like fuck and bitch and rot in hell spilling out, words her mother would have slapped her for—and that just makes Meredith shout them louder into the screaming grimoire.

You were nothing without me—

"I'm alive. Without you."

You'll fail—

"Then I'll—" She rips another page. "Fail on—" Another. "My own goddamn terms."

You need me—

"I needed—" The binding slices her palm. She keeps pulling. "A mother. Not a fucking parasite."

The final page burns.

The ghost dissolves—not peacefully, not with acceptance, but screaming. Rage and possessive love and betrayal and hunger all mixed together, fighting until the very last moment.

Then: silence.

The kitchen is a wreck. Torn pages everywhere. Ash and grave dirt and the lingering smell of burnt leather and something fouler.

Midnight sits in the middle of the destruction, licking her paw, unconcerned.

Meredith slides down the wall to the floor.

Her hands don't tremble.

The headache is gone.

She touches her wrist. Her pulse is strong. Steady. Hers.

She starts laughing. Can't help it.

The laughter turns to crying somewhere along the way.

Midnight finishes grooming. Rises. Picks her way through torn pages and ash, and climbs into Meredith's lap. Still covered in grave dirt. Still smelling like death and earth.

Still the most beautiful thing Meredith has ever seen.

"Thank you," Meredith whispers.

Midnight purrs.

The truth settles slowly.

Not the truth about the spell—that part is clear enough. The grimoire destroyed. The binding broken. The ghost dissolved.

But the truth underneath.

Her mother would rather have killed her than let her go.

That's not love. That's ownership. Control wearing love's face. And Meredith has been mourning the wrong thing. Mourning the mother she thought she had instead of grieving the one she did.

The woman who raised her. Taught her. Held her when she cried. And then, at the end, couldn't bear the thought of Meredith existing without her.

Some love sets you free.

Some love is a trap.

Meredith doesn't know if she can forgive her. Doesn't know if forgiveness even matters when the person who hurt you is dead and gone and can never answer for it.

But she knows this: she's alive. And she's going to stay that way.

Midnight headbutts her chin.

Meredith wraps her arms around the cat—still covered in grave dirt, still smelling like death—and holds on.

After a while, Meredith stands. Gathers the torn remnants—pages still trying to crawl back together—and carries them to the fireplace.

She feeds them to the flames. One by one. Making sure each piece burns to ash.

Some inheritances are poison. Some legacies should burn.

When it's done, when the last piece has curled and blackened, when her throat is raw and her face is wet with tears—

"Come on," she says to the cat. "Let's go outside."

They walk into the backyard together. The oak tree stands patient and solid, branches empty, waiting.

Midnight looks up at it. Looks at Meredith.

Then, with the casual grace that only cats possess, she begins to climb.

Meredith watches her go. Up and up, black fur disappearing into the autumn leaves, until finally Midnight settles on her favorite branch and wraps her tail around her paws.

This time, Meredith doesn't call her down.

She sits at the base of the tree and leans back against the trunk, and for the first time in three years—maybe for the first time in her entire life—she feels the world settle into place: the rough bark through her cardigan, the October air thick with wood smoke and coming rain, her hands steady, her head clear, her pulse beating strong and true and hers.

And something else. A faint flicker of magic. Her own magic. Not borrowed, not filtered through her mother's will, not stolen. Just hers. Weak, maybe. Damaged, maybe. But growing.

The hollow space where the binding used to be isn't empty after all.

It's just... quiet.

Above her, Midnight purrs. Not because she's content. Because she's watching. Because some trees need guarding. Some witches need saving. And the work is never really done.

But for now—just for now—they can rest.

Meredith closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, the sun has moved. An hour has passed.

And she feels better for it.