Witches

Witches are supernatural magick users whose place in the Underworld is defined by collective power, political history, and practical intervention. They once controlled the ruling order, but their numbers were catastrophically reduced during a spell, allowing vampires to seize power. That history makes witches more than a background species: their existence represents a possible alternative to vampire supremacy and explains why the ruling vampires seek to preserve their dominance through experiments involving pureblood creation.

Nature and Political History

Witches gain power by numbers rather than by the same bloodline-based advantages that define pureblood vampires. Eric explains that when most of the witches died during a spell, vampires were able to take control of the supernatural world. The balance of power therefore remains conditional rather than permanent: it could shift from vampires to witches, shifters, or another supernatural species if the distribution of power changed. Witch society is consequently part of the political logic behind the vampire regime, even when no witch is present in a scene.

This history also provides the immediate rationale for the artificial pure-blood experiment. Because there are few pureblood vampires, the ruling vampires fear that another species could eventually become strong enough to challenge them. Their attempt to manufacture purebloods is presented as a method of ensuring continued vampire rule. Witches thus function as both a historical predecessor to vampire authority and a reminder that supernatural supremacy is vulnerable to demographic change.

Avi and Practical Magick

Avi is introduced to Jenifer as her witch and as someone living one floor below her. She is helping Dean and Katalin, placing her within the protective arrangements surrounding Jenifer rather than outside the Underworld’s political networks. Avi’s greeting is immediate and physical: she identifies herself, shakes Jenifer’s hand, and pulls her into a hug. Her familiarity contrasts with Eric’s guarded response, since he treats her manner as insufficiently subtle even while accepting her assistance.

Avi demonstrates her abilities by producing two keycards from an empty hand. Black smoke rises from her palm, and the cards materialize there moments later. She also reports that the building’s wards are active and stronger than ever. Her magic therefore has both a visible, almost theatrical form and a concrete protective function: it grants access, reinforces a secure location, and supports the building’s defense against Underworld threats.

Alliances and Supernatural Law

Avi’s position connects several overlapping powers. She assists Dean and Katalin, while Dean and his pack are assigned to watch Jenifer and guard her from Underworld matters. Eric distrusts Dean because he believes a member of another supernatural group could turn against them, but Katalin insists that the arrangement is mandatory. Within this structure, Avi’s role shows that protection is not supplied by a single species or authority; it depends on a coalition whose members remain subject to competing loyalties and laws.

The broader supernatural order is sharply hierarchical. Eric claims that Katalin cannot harm him because of their law and because Jenifer’s bloodline should deter her from attacking Jenifer. Katalin rejects that limitation by invoking her superior status as heir to the throne and by pointing out that Eric’s bloodline would continue through Christy Wilson even if Eric died. The exchange demonstrates how species, bloodline, rank, and political authority interact. Witches belong to this contested legal world, but their collective strength gives them a different kind of power from the hereditary authority exercised by vampires.

Contrast with Other Species

Witches are distinguished from werewolves by the source and expression of their power. Werewolves are born human but awaken a family curse that transforms them during the week of the full moon, causing them to lose control and surrender to bloodlust. Underworld law calls them the Cursed Species and orders that they be killed on sight. Witches, by contrast, are described through their capacity to accumulate power through numbers, not through an uncontrollable transformation or an inherited curse that dictates their behavior.

Their history also contrasts with the vampire system of controlled blood inheritance. Vampires use blood to create or strengthen supernatural bodies, while witches’ decisive political resource is population. This difference helps explain why the loss of witches during a spell had such enormous consequences: their power could not simply be replaced by an individual survivor, whereas vampire authority can be concentrated in bloodlines, royal status, and the engineered production of new purebloods.

Narrative Significance

The novel uses witches to widen Jenifer’s personal crisis into a struggle over species, governance, and survival. Jenifer’s severe aplastic anemia makes her the only living subject of an experiment intended to create a pureblood vampire, and her future awakening at eighteen is tied to the vampire fear of losing power. Against that backdrop, the earlier witch ascendancy gives the political conflict historical depth: the current order is not natural or guaranteed, but the result of a previous collapse in another species’ power.

Avi embodies the more immediate side of this significance. Her magic appears not as an abstract legend but as smoke, materialized keycards, and strengthened wards. At the same time, the novel repeatedly places supernatural power beside bodily vulnerability. Jenifer’s medication, vampire blood, heightened emotions, pain, and forced awakening all show that power can sustain life while also making the body dangerous to itself and others. Witches remain less fully explored than vampires or werewolves, but their collective political force and Avi’s practical protection establish them as a meaningful counterweight to the vampire order.