Beautiful Creatures(20)

“Like the dreams.” I watched her face, looking for even a flicker of recognition.

“Like the dreams.” She said it without thinking, then flinched and looked at me, stricken. I had been right all along.

“You remember the dreams.”

She hid her face in her hands.

I sat up. “I knew it was you, and you knew it was me. You knew what I was talking about the whole time.” I pulled her hands away from her face, and the current buzzed up my arm.

You’re the girl.

“Why didn’t you say something last night?”

I didn’t want you to know.

She wouldn’t look at me.

“Why?” The word sounded loud, in the quiet of the garden. And when she looked at me, her face was pale, and she looked different. Frightened. Her eyes were like the sea before a storm on the Carolina coast.

“I didn’t expect you to be here, Ethan. I thought they were just dreams. I didn’t know you were a real person.”

“But once you knew it was me, why didn’t you say anything?”

“My life is complicated. And I didn’t want you—I don’t want anyone to get mixed up in it.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I was still touching her hand; I was so aware of it. I could feel the rough stone beneath us, and I grabbed for the edge of it, supporting myself. Only my hand closed around something small and round, stuck to the edge of the stone. A beetle, or maybe a rock. It came off from the stone into my hand.

Then the shock hit. I felt Lena’s hand tighten around mine.

What’s happening, Ethan?

I don’t know.

Everything around me changed, and it was like I was somewhere else. I was in the garden, but not in the garden. And the smell of lemons changed, into the smell of smoke— It was midnight, but the sky was on fire. The flames reached into the sky, pushing forth massive fists of smoke, swallowing everything in their path. Even the moon. The ground had turned to swamp. Burned ashen ground that had been drenched by the rains that preceded the fire. If only it had rained today.

Genevieve choked back the smoke that burned her throat so badly it hurt to breathe. Mud clung to the bottom of her skirts, causing her to stumble every few feet on the voluminous folds of fabric, but she forced herself to keep moving.

It was the end of the world. Of her world.

And she could hear the screams, mixed with gunshots and the unrelenting roar of the flames. She could hear the soldiers shouting orders of murder.

“Burn down those houses. Let the Rebels feel the weight of their defeat. Burn it all!”

And one by one, Union soldiers had lit the great houses of the plantations ablaze, with their own kerosene-laden bed sheets and curtains. One by one, Genevieve watched the homes of her neighbors, of her friends and family, surrender to the flames. And in the worst of circumstances, many of those friends and relatives surrendered as well, eaten alive by the flames in the very homes where they were born.

That’s why she was running, into the smoke, toward the fire—right into the mouth of the beast. She had to get to Greenbrier before the soldiers. And she didn’t have much time. The soldiers were methodical, working their way down the Santee burning the houses one by one. They had already burned Blackwell; Dove’s Crossing would be next, then Greenbrier and Ravenwood. General Sherman and his army had started the burning campaign hundreds of miles before they reached Gatlin. They had burned Columbia to the ground, and continued marching east, burning everything in their path. When they reached the outskirts of Gatlin the Confederate flag was still waving, the second wind they needed.

It was the smell that told her she was too late. Lemons. The tart smell of lemons mixed with ash. They were burning the lemon trees.

Genevieve’s mother loved lemons. So when her father had visited a plantation in Georgia when she was a girl, he had brought her mother two lemon trees. Everyone said they wouldn’t grow, that the cold South Carolina winter nights would kill them. But Genevieve’s mother didn’t listen. She planted those trees right in front of the cotton field, tending them herself. On those cold winter nights, she had covered the trees with wool blankets and piled dirt along the edges to keep the moisture out. And those trees grew. They grew so well that over the years, Genevieve’s father had bought her twenty-eight more trees. Some of the other ladies in town asked their husbands for lemon trees, and a few of them even got a tree or two. But none of them could figure out how to keep their trees alive. The trees only seemed to flourish at Greenbrier, at her mother’s hand.

Nothing had ever been able to kill those trees. Until today.

“What just happened?” I felt Lena pull her hand away from mine, and opened my eyes. She was shaking. I looked down and opened my hand to reveal the object I had inadvertently grabbed from under the stone.

“I think it had something to do with this.” My hand had been curled around a battered old cameo, black and oval, with a woman’s face etched in ivory and mother of pearl. The work on the face of it was intricate with detail. On the side, I noticed a small bump. “Look. I think it’s a locket.”

I pushed on the spring, and the cameo front opened to reveal a tiny inscription. “It just says greenbrier.

And a date.”

She sat up. “What’s Greenbrier?”

“This must be it. This isn’t Ravenwood. It’s Greenbrier. The next plantation over.”