Page 1 of A Time of Witches

Prologue

Lilith

Present Day

Savannah, Georgia

Every night, Lilith Legare burned alive at the stake. The recurring dream was inevitable, unstoppable, and she was powerless before its fury.

Each time, she braced for the assault as she was dragged under: smoke choking her lungs, splintered wood biting her bare feet, the rough rope rasping over raw wrists. And the flames. Blistering hot, licking at exposed flesh.

The dream tossed her into a landscape she’d never seen, yet somehow remembered. A preternatural storm roiled above stretches of green hills, a town at her back, a horizon of slate-roofed homes. Eighteen figures swayed by their necks from a beam of wood, tainting the smoky air with the stink of death.

A crowd churned before the woman, spitting accusations, seething with bloodlust.

Witch.

The dream tonight, however, was different. This time, Lilith was not the woman tied to the stake, but a spectator.

A teenager at the front stood apart from the mob with gleaming red-gold hair that hung in a heavy braid down her back.

The air crackled with tension, a charged energy that drew the throng closer, pushing Lilith forward. A man wearing black robes strode toward the woman on the pyre—the woman who had taken Lilith’s place. Wind snapped at her plain white shift, revealing the harsh lines of her emaciated body. Her eyes were bright with fear. With hate.

The man gripped a torch in his fist which he unceremoniously flung onto the pyre. A moment of collective awe silenced the crowd. A sputter followed, a whisper of hope that the fire would not catch.

But Lilith knew it would. She knew.

Horror gripped her throat as light glowed within the kindling. All at once, the embers erupted into a blaze of demons. The flames clawed toward the woman, clambering over the shift’s hem and up thin, dry fabric.

Lilith relived every sensation the woman experienced. How quickly that linen shift singed away, the agony of those white-hot flames, the effort of dragging burning air into starved lungs. Even now, Lilith found herself sucking in a hard inhale, ash gritty in her mouth.

And yet she could not look away.

Her gaze locked on the woman as the intense heat warped her vision. But the woman did not scream as Lilith had in her dreams.

The sky blackened with rage and lightning speared through the clouds. Rain spat fat, angry drops on the earth and the woman lifted her face as if to savor the cool splash against her skin.

Suddenly, the teenager with red-gold hair turned, her eyes narrowed as they locked on Lilith with fierce determination. Her lips moved and Lilith caught the words as they were torn away by the wind.

“Help her.”

Lilith wrenched her gaze back to the woman standing on the pyre as the conflagration whipped around her. And that’s when Lilith saw it, branded on the flesh in the crook of the woman’s right arm: the shape of a crescent moon.

The exact replica of Lilith’s own birthmark.

Chapter One

Lilith

Four cups of coffee brought no relief. The dream clung to Lilith like a cobweb, the odor of smoke lingering despite the humid July morning air. She perched on the bottom step of her back porch and pulled in a deep breath to clear the phantom smell. The dream always left her disoriented and weighted with an ache over her mother whose death had changed everything.

The sun’s brilliance hummed within Lilith before the golden light filtered through layers of draped Spanish moss to splash across the lawn. Beneath her feet, the earth vibrated with life and vitality.

She’d always been sensitive to the rhythm of the moon and the sun as day blossomed and then rolled back into night. Never with such intensity as now though. Not until Mama’s death only months before.

Guilt tugged at Lilith. Mama had never been kind, not even when Lilith dropped out of college to care for her. Still, she had expected grief.

Instead, there was only that heaviness in her chest and something she hated to name.