It worried her. On some level it broke her heart because she suspected she wasn’t enough for Haddie. Her very deepest fear was that she wasn’t the mother her child needed.
Haddie turned her head slightly and Scarlett drank in the angelic perfection of her. Even from this distance, Haddie was beautiful. Otherworldly. Not like Scarlett, who was pretty enough in an ordinary sort of way, but not stunning like her child. A beloved little alien girl who had somehow come through her but was not of her.
She brought her knuckle to the window, hesitating again just as her skin touched the cool glass. And yet . . . Haddie had always been a cautious child—overly cautious if anything. It wasn’t her physical safety Scarlett obsessed over. So then . . . why not let her explore their new property a little? Haddie wasn’t perfect, no seven-year-old was, but she’d always understood boundaries. She wouldn’t venture far—it wasn’t in her nature—and she’d likely be back in ten minutes, her fist full of flowers, a rare look of carefree happiness on her lovely face. At that thought, Scarlett’s lips turned up. Slowly, she dropped her hand as her daughter slipped into the darkness of the trees.
CHAPTER TWO
A prickly bush caught on Haddie’s pretty dress and she stopped, using her hand not holding the yellow flowers to pull out the thorn. The branch fell away as she continued on through the trees of the forest that stretched out behind the house.
Lilith House. Mommy had said they could change its name, but that felt wrong to Haddie. The house already knew its name. And anyway, even if someone changed her name—if they called her Emma or Sarah or something else—she’d still be who she was. Changing a name couldn’t change anything else about a person or a thing. Haddie was very sure of that.
Mommy had funny feelings about the house, but Haddie didn’t think her mommy knew why. Maybe it had to do with her friend who ran away from there, and the fire that happened afterward. She’d heard Mommy talking to Aunt Merrilee about the girl named Kandace when she thought Haddie was sleeping. Haddie wasn’t sure if the house was bad or not, but she got a heavy feeling in her bones when she looked at the doors at the end of the second-floor hallway. She didn’t know if the house was mad or sad. She couldn’t tell what the house was saying because it was still only waking up. Lilith House was confused, the same way Haddie sometimes felt when she blinked her eyes open after a dream and didn’t know where she was.
The same feeling hung in the forest, but something else had pulled Haddie here. The shadow of the thing she’d seen darting through the trees as she’d stood in the window of her room. The thing that kept drawing closer and closer as if it wanted to get a look at the new people who had moved into Lilith House. It’d come right up to the burned-up building—the place that made Haddie’s bones feel like lead—in the back before disappearing into the trees once more. It was like it was curious about them.
Haddie was curious too.
She stepped gingerly over a cluster of wild mushrooms, careful not to touch them because she felt their heaviness, glancing over her shoulder when she heard a soft crunch. Whatever was moving behind her slipped into the shadows. She only got the impression of darkness and the sharp edge of a horn or a tusk. Haddie’s heart thumped and she swallowed, trying to pull forth the weight of the thing. Not the weight of its body, the feeling wasn’t about that. Haddie didn’t have a better word for the sense she got about things. She only knew that when her bones got heavy, when her whole body felt full-up with the weight of a person or a thing so that she couldn’t even move, that there was badness in it. The opposite of her mommy who felt as light as a feather to Haddie. So light that when Haddie was around her, she sometimes felt like she was floating. Her mommy was good and . . . light. As weightless as the sparkly bubbles Haddie blew with the big yellow wand Gram gave her.
She stood still, trying, trying to measure the weight of the thing behind her, but could not. Something was wrong. Or . . . different. She couldn’t get a sense of what and that made Haddie’s skin prickle even while her curiosity kicked up.
What are you? Why can’t I feel you?
She’d experienced this before. Sometimes with people she passed on the street, and once with a little boy who was in her music class. Mostly, she got it with very, very old people. Sometimes those old people died very soon after, like Mrs. Klaus in the apartment building where she used to live. She wondered if the thing behind her was very, very old and about to die.
She stepped forward, and the thing followed. She bent down to pick a white flower with a black center growing in the shade of a giant tree, adding it to the yellow ones clutched in her fist. Mommy would like these. That worried look she got on her face sometimes when she stared at Haddie and didn’t know Haddie could see her would vanish momentarily. Mommy would smile and put the flowers in water on the windowsill the way she did when Haddie used to bring a rose home from Gram’s garden, and their new house would feel a little more like home.
As Haddie stood straight, a slow drumming sounded behind her along with words, said in a low, scratchy voice. It wasn’t singing . . . but more like the way the men in the church had sounded at Mrs. Klaus’s funeral as they walked with smoking sticks down the aisle behind her casket.
Haddie didn’t know what the words the thing behind her meant, but they made her bones heavy. They made her bones so heavy they ached. The words were bad words. They meant something bad and terrible. Haddie barely noticed the flowers drifting to the forest floor as, trembling, she turned around to face the thing saying the words she didn’t know but could feel. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as the drumbeat and the words grew quieter, moving away from her in the other direction, deeper into the cool darkness. Whatever had been following her was leaving.
Haddie stood still for several moments, the ache in her bones subsiding. Movement to her right caught her attention and she turned to see a red fox staring at her, its head cocked to the right. The red fox felt light. It didn’t mean her any harm. She wondered if the dark thing did. Haddie let out a slow breath, turning toward Lilith House and making her way back to her mother.
CHAPTER THREE
Scarlett set the box of dishes on the kitchen counter and wiped her hands down her thighs. That was the last of the boxes, all they’d shoved into the trunk of her SUV before leaving their small rental apartment in the Playa Vista area of Los Angeles. The moving truck would arrive in a few days with their beds, mattresses, and a few other pieces of essential furniture. But all their other possessions now resided inside Lilith House. Or . . . Sunnyside Manor. Only, it was as though the house had silently declared its original name to her, planting it in her brain, because she couldn’t stop thinking of it as such.
So, fine. “Lilith House it is,” she told the walls of the estate. Haddie had been right. You couldn’t just change a thing’s name.
She turned, heading out of the kitchen toward the stairs when she caught sight of a man, standing stock-still in the foyer, his gaze fixed on her, expression filled with what could only be described as hostility. She let out a startled breath, bringing her hand to her chest. “My goodness, you scared me.” She released a nervous laugh as she shook her head, attempting to shrug off the fear that had spiraled through her veins. “You must be Louis. Thanks for coming.” No thanks for not knocking and scaring me half to death. And mean mugging me before we’ve even met.