Witches

Witches occupy a rare and structurally important position in the supernatural world. Their defining trait is a magical inheritance that skips a generation: one generation may lack witchcraft, while the next receives the witch gene. This pattern produces unequal family identities, as seen in Lola and her mother, and makes witchhood both a personal inheritance and a source of conflict. Within the vampire community at The Fort, witches are not merely practitioners of unusual abilities; they are custodians of knowledge, healers, and participants in governance whose disappearance could endanger the community’s continuity.

Inheritance and Family Conflict

Witchcraft is presented as a hereditary condition rather than a skill that anyone can acquire. Lola explains that she comes from a long line of witches and inherited the magical gene even though her mother did not. The skipped generation has a compensating ability to predict the future, which helped Lola’s mother become successful, although she would never openly acknowledge that source of power. The division leaves mother and daughter with different supernatural capacities and deepens an already hostile relationship: Lola’s mother resents the witchcraft that Lola possesses, while Lola grows up excluded from family life and treated as an embarrassment beside her glamorous, publicly celebrated parents.

The contrast also complicates the usual hierarchy between visible social prestige and hidden supernatural inheritance. Lola’s mother is an actor, former top model, philanthropist, member of New York’s elite, and trophy wife to a business tycoon, whereas Lola is kept away from parties and denied access to her mother’s designer clothing because of her size. The mother’s public insistence on privacy conceals a more specific motive: she wants attention directed away from Lola. Witchcraft therefore marks Lola as both less acceptable within her family and more significant within the supernatural world that eventually recognizes her abilities.

Powers and Practical Functions

The available evidence identifies witches as capable of direct magic. Lola demonstrates this power when a fire breaks out: rather than allowing the other women to fetch a fire extinguisher, she waves her hand and extinguishes every flame, then snaps her fingers to complete the effect. Victoria immediately recognizes what the act means and identifies Lola as a witch. The scene establishes that witchcraft is visible through controlled physical intervention, not merely through prophecy or inherited reputation.

Witches also serve medical and protective functions. The Wicce at The Fort can heal wounds caused by sunlight, an especially valuable ability in a vampire society whose members are vulnerable to the sun. Her healing role places witchcraft at the intersection of magic and communal survival: witches can repair damage that ordinary treatment cannot address, making them indispensable even to a population that otherwise depends on blood, secrecy, and inherited custom.

The Wicce’s knowledge extends beyond healing. She sits on the Council and is described as being as important as the Head of The Fort, Lola’s father. The precise matters handled in the Council or in the Wicce’s private chambers are not fully known to the other residents, but her authority is unmistakable. Witchcraft thus combines practical power with institutional influence, while its inner knowledge remains partially hidden from the wider vampire community.

The Wicce and the Fort’s Succession Crisis

The Fort has no Ancients from whom its origins, customs, and traditions can be learned. Its vampires possess inherited practices whose original reasons have been obscured by time, leaving the Wicce as one of the community’s principal living links to the past. That role becomes urgent when the Wicce falls ill. Although long-life potions have slowed her aging, they have not stopped it, and the doctor believes that she will soon die of old age.

The danger is not limited to the loss of an individual healer. The Wicce has no successor to whom she can pass her knowledge, and the Fort has no other witch among its residents. During a task-assignment meeting, the Head announces that finding a replacement is a communal priority and offers a substantial reward to anyone who can locate one. The same meeting reveals that the vampire community is also facing a blood shortage: its stocks are neither being depleted nor replenished at a sustainable rate. The juxtaposition makes the Wicce’s succession part of a broader survival crisis. The Fort needs both blood supplies and the specialized knowledge that allows its social and supernatural systems to continue.

The community’s blood economy also shows how witches exist within, rather than outside, the Fort’s institutional machinery. Humans are brought to the lowest levels, provided with nourishing food, and used as blood donors through either direct feeding or more controlled extraction by tubes. Against that background, the Wicce represents a different kind of resource: not a source of blood, but a source of healing, ritual knowledge, governance, and continuity.

Lola’s Recognition and Emerging Role

Lola’s arrival changes the succession problem from an abstract threat into a possible solution. After revealing her magic by extinguishing the fire, she is identified to the Fort’s leadership as a witch. Five days later, Valnoir reports that Lola has been taken to meet the Wicce, who is revealed to be Lola’s grandmother. The family lineage that caused Lola pain in her human life therefore connects her directly to the institution most in need of her inheritance.

Lola may become the Fort’s new Wicce, and she begins learning from her grandmother. This transition separates her from the immediate romantic and domestic setting in which she had previously been seen. Valnoir complains that he sees her only rarely and that she deliberately ignores him while moving through the Fort with an air of superiority and purpose. His frustration underscores the scale of Lola’s change: she is no longer merely an outsider or a new presence in the Harem, but a possible successor whose education has communal consequences.

The recognition also reverses the value system imposed on Lola by her mother. The traits that made Lola feel inferior in her family—her difference from her mother, her exclusion from elite social life, and her inheritance of the witch gene—become the very qualities that make her necessary to the Fort. Witchhood converts a stigmatized family difference into authority, responsibility, and a possible future for an endangered tradition.

Narrative Significance

Witches mediate several oppositions in the story: inheritance and exclusion, mortality and continuity, hidden knowledge and public authority, and individual identity and communal need. Their power is not presented as decorative fantasy alone. It has concrete consequences, from extinguishing fire and healing sun wounds to preserving customs whose origins have been forgotten. At the same time, the succession crisis prevents witchcraft from becoming an isolated personal gift. A witch’s abilities matter because a whole society depends on them.

The lineage’s skipped-generation pattern also resists a simple model of progress or accumulation. Magical power does not steadily intensify from parent to child; it disappears and returns, leaving families divided and institutions vulnerable. The Wicce’s aging makes that vulnerability visible, while Lola’s emergence offers a conditional form of renewal. Her possible succession does not erase the damage caused by her mother’s rejection, but it gives the inherited difference a new social meaning: what was treated as a family defect becomes the foundation of collective survival.