Chapter Eight
Lilith
Rain pattered against the windows and the old wooden floors groaned beneath Lilith’s pacing from room to room.
The house embodied her past, handed down from mother to daughter since the nineteenth century. Mama had wanted to escape the
legacy, always seeking something more before she was tethered by Lilith’s birth.
Was this what the fortune teller had meant when she said the answers to the past were always in the present? Was there really a clue
in Mama’s unwanted inheritance?
Lilith drifted into the study, the room that reminded her most of Daddy.
Books filled the mahogany shelves, legal texts long out of date.
She’d just dusted the day before, but old houses weren’t airtight, and a thin layer of dust dulled the glossy surfaces.
The lightest scent of sandalwood still clung to the room, a reminder that her father’s presence had once been there, the only warmth that house had ever known—at least in Lilith’s lifetime.
This was the only room that hadn’t been touched by her mother, the only one not smattered in an explosion of florals and ornate
gold-painted frames and brass fixtures. Boutique buys did not equate to good taste. The gaudy decor hemmed her in as she continued
her aimless pacing.
She stopped, pausing in front of the door she seldom entered, and her heart gave an involuntary lurch.
Hesitant, she settled her fingertips on the cool brass doorknob. Gritting her teeth, she opened the door.
Darkness blanketed the room. Mama’s presence lingered there—suffocating, oppressive, absorbing whatever light eked into Lilith’s
life. The odor of lilies was still pervasive, a flower Lilith had always despised.
They’d been Mama’s favorite. She’d ordered bouquets of them for herself, adorning the house with crystal vases bursting with
their aggressive blossoms and sprinkling the table with thick orange pollen.
Stomach swirling with unease, Lilith stepped into her mother’s room. The bed was piled with floral pillows, positioned exactly
as Mama preferred.
Lilith opened the closet, devoid of all the designer clothes once crowded within. Donated to Dress for Success to help women
reenter the workforce—a way for Mama to do some good in the world, even if it was post-mortem.
At the top of the closet was a box labeled “Ancestry.”
Lilith pulled the hatbox down and hurried from the room, slamming the door shut behind her. As if the memories could be as
easily sealed away.
The box was heavier than expected, weighted with Mama’s hopes that they were related to a Hollywood star, or even nobility in some distant country with an inheritance that could have made them rich.
They weren’t.
All those years of Mama wishing for wealth, and it finally did come—in the form of an insurance payout.
Guilt squeezed Lilith’s chest.
Daddy had died when she was in high school. His life was worth more than his outrageous insurance policy, and though Mama
enjoyed spending that windfall, she never forgave Lilith.
As if sensing his death made Lilith responsible.
She’d tried to stop him from going into the office that day, begging him to see a doctor instead.
She shoved the memory from her mind and sank onto the stiff couch. Suddenly the moment seemed too poignant, like she was standing
on the edge of a cliff knowing once she leaped off, she could never go back.
Desperate for a mindless distraction, she picked up her phone.
Essie’s last text was unanswered: How did it go at Enchanted? Please don’t tell me you chickened out.
There had been too much to say via text.
She wished Essie was there with her, to rehash the entire weird scene from Enchanted, to get Essie’s real-world advice paired
effortlessly with her easy humor for a bit of levity.
If Lilith texted her right now, Essie would be on the doorstep in less than fifteen minutes.
But Sundays were family days for Essie, a chance to enjoy her husband and Amara without phone calls and courtroom drama. Given
how hard Essie worked, Lilith would never pry her from that special quality time.
With a sigh, Lilith set the phone down and flipped the top off the hat box.
Sepia-toned photographs stared up at her. Several faded documents, thin as onion skin, and more than a few printouts were piled haphazardly inside.
Mostly documents tracing the women who had owned the house on East Waldburg Street before Lilith’s grandmama, who’d died before
Lilith was born. A lineage with wealth that peaked in the 1800s before eventually crumbling into poverty along with most of
Savannah.
That is, until Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil came out and breathed life back into their sleepy Southern city. Lilith had been a girl then, when the historic district
was transformed into a line of high-end stores, quaint boutiques, and fine dining, and the squares were reinvented with colorful
splashes of azaleas and camellias.
She continued to riffle through the box, finding a handful of census printouts and various documents with approved requests
to alter the exterior of the house. You couldn’t paint a shade off from the current house color or replace a spindle on the
balcony without approval from the Savannah Historic Association. Lord, did she know that…
At the bottom of the pile was a journal.
Floral, of course, blooming with Victorian roses.
The moment Lilith’s fingers grazed the cover, warmth tingled from her fingertips to her birthmark.
The opening had several paragraphs crossed out. Lilith skimmed the writing beneath the bold X of dark ink.
How Mama had always felt she’d been missing something in her life, the same as her mama had felt.
How she thought she could fill that void with money—until Lilith’s father died, then she realized maybe that void could have
been filled with love.
Lilith doesn’t have that emptiness in her.
Lilith’s pulse stuttered at the sight of her name in her mother’s journal.
She thinks magic completes her, and maybe it does. We didn’t imagine that honeysuckle vine growing toward her.
Most likely, I resent her. Because I know I’ll never have that. I tell her the magic is all nonsense. Maybe it’s my way of
protecting her from being hurt like I have, but part of me realizes I might be making her feel small, the way Mama did with
me. To make her feel the way I always have.
The journal almost slipped out of Lilith’s hands. Mama hadn’t feared magic—she’d feared Lilith, been jealous of her.
Resentful.
Something painful twisted in Lilith. Something she didn’t have the time, energy, or capacity to unpack.
She returned her attention to the journal, this time her mother’s crisp handwriting detailed their ancestry, dating through
Savannah’s existence and reading like a history lesson from school.
Their family had been one of the first to relocate to Savannah after it was established as the first city in the newly claimed
thirteenth colony of Georgia. There was a grandfather killed in the late eighteenth century while trying to reclaim the city
from British rule. More than a few ancestors fell victim to yellow fever.
Before Savannah, the family had been in Maryland.
Lilith continued reading, skimming Mama’s handwriting. A strange scent caught Lilith’s attention. Lavender and…hay?
Brackenmere Manor—Bury St. Edmunds, England.
An image flashed in Lilith’s mind, a Great Hall with glossy wood paneling, a hearth that covered almost the entire rear wall,
carved with two women standing on either side adorned in Grecian attire. Overhead, beams arched like a ribcage, stretching
above straw-like rushes that were slick underfoot. The scent of hay and lavender grew stronger, revealing something else.
Meadowsweet.
How could she identify an herb she didn’t even know?
Lilith blinked herself back into her living room in Savannah, her heart slamming.
What the hell was that?
She hadn’t imagined that room. She had been there.
Even now, the redolent fragrance of the floor rushes still lingered.
Fingers trembling, she turned the page…and froze.
Sybil Brantham.
Burned as a witch.
The fortune teller’s voice hissed in Lilith’s mind, “Sybil.”
Thunder cracked outside, lightning flashed, and the entire house went dark.