Of Witches and Monsters
When you are near the house, you can feel it in your bones.
Returning home was never part of the plan. But some places never let you leave.
Lili Wildes is tired of hearing the stories about the house she grew up in and wants nothing to do with her mother or her past, but it doesn't stop her from constantly thinking about them both. And when a series of strange occurrences, bad dreams, and another tragic event pull her back toward the house where the worst happened, she realizes she can no longer ignore her past and the fact that she may have more in common with her mother than she'd like to believe.
As the walls seem to breathe and old secrets claw their way back to the surface, Lili must decide if the house is truly haunted...or whether the greatest horror has lived inside her all along.
Prologue
Lili
When you are near the house, you can feel it in your bones. It’s like being called back to the nest, even when deep down inside, you know the nest is rotten, filled with horror and bone dust. There is both soft comfort and horrendous pain trapped under this roof. That’s the reason why some people vow to never go back, and others can’t seem to stay away. Either way, this place leeches off you. The few people who have been inside never were the same after. For me though, it’s worse. Having been born within its walls forces me to carry a special part of the house with me at all time. A part which refuses to let go, its rotten teeth sinking a bit deeper in the flesh with every biting dream, every unwarranted thought I find impossible to silence.
I thought all the anger I directed toward my mother would help me move on, but I forgot that the house loves angry women. It’s what it feeds on. Especially us, Wildes women.
Vivian, my mother, is a strange woman. We both share a blatant, unhealthy obsession with our family home, but when my father, Adam, returned home a mere sixteen years after abandoning her while she was pregnant, her obsession turned into rage. I didn’t even have time to celebrate a birthday with my father. Vivian killed him only a few weeks after he moved back in with us. I was still a child then, and I witnessed the awakening of a fear already so deeply ingrained in her mind that when provoked, turned out to have the strength of a thousand demons. A day before my seventeenth birthday Vivian Wildes was arrested. And even then, she never stopped talking about the house. Almost a decade later, she still claims that stabbing her former lover to death while her daughter slept in the adjacent bedroom is what the house wanted.
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