More from Hedge House, a paranormal/urban fantasy, almost finished first draft.  Cara has gone outside to explore the property a bit.

Her grandmother’s house – her house now – sat back from the road. It was completely surrounded by a tall thick untamed hedge of hawthorn trees, planted in an alternating double row. A stone fence snaked between their trunks, filling up the space beneath their branches, and a variety of bramble bushes – raspberry, blackberry, and wild rose – sprawled up and over it.

Cara walked along the edge of the property, feeling safe and protected by the thorny plants that surrounded it. And along with the security came a sense of belonging and she sighed, looking up at the trees as the soft wind rustled their leaves. It sounded as if they were whispering to her and she smiled, shaking off the flight of fancy. 

In one corner stood the largest of the trees, an ancient oak. Looking up, she saw that her tree house was still in its lowest branches. Curious, she clambered up onto the stone wall, mindful of the thorns, and peered onto the low platform. To her surprise, the wood seemed new and sturdy, and carefully she crawled onto it and leaned back against the trunk of the tree, smiling as she looked up through the leaves.

She remembered hours spent here, looking up through the leaves and branches, seeing pictures formed as they moved in the breeze and making up stories to go with the images. 

Focusing her attention on her breathing she let her mind and body relax, letting her eyes become unfocused, letting images come. It had been so much easier as a child…

She saw a woman’s face, familiar but not. It seemed to be smiling in approval, but then the wind shifted and a shadow blocked the sun. When the cloud had passed the face was gone and she shivered, sitting up again.

Tentative Blurb:

When Cara Hawthorne returns to the childhood home she had been torn away from twenty years earlier, she thinks it will be to do nothing more than settle her grandmother’s estate and return to her job as a junior lawyer at a prestigious law firm in Tulsa.

But every nook and cranny of the house and gardens unearths long-buried memories, and when the town’s mayor sets his sights on her and the property she finds herself caught up in a centuries old battle with powers she has only barely begun to understand

Find more great reading
at the Sunday Snippet group.

Picking up from last week in Hedge House.   

“All my life all I heard her say about my grandmother was that she was crazy, and a witch, and should be locked away where she couldn’t hurt anyone.”

 “Do you believe any of that?”

“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “It used to really hurt when she would say things like that. She said them about my father, too, that he was crazy and weird and not all there. I didn’t believe that, either. When I got older and she would start on that I’d ask why she’d married him then and that usually made her shut up. At least, it did until she got involved in some kind of crazy cult – she said it was a church – and then her answer to everything was that she had fallen victim to the workings of the devil.”  

“You sound like you don’t believe that, either.”

“I don’t.” She shook her head. “Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure if anyone’s crazy in my family, it’s my mother.”

Tentative Blurb:

When Cara Hawthorne returns to the childhood home she had been torn away from twenty years earlier, she thinks it will be to do nothing more than settle her grandmother’s estate and return to her job as a junior lawyer at a prestigious law firm in Tulsa.

But every nook and cranny of the house and gardens unearths long-buried memories, and when the town’s mayor sets his sights on her and the property she finds herself caught up in a centuries old battle with powers she has only barely begun to understand

Find more great reading
at the Sunday Snippet group.

Picking up from last week’s snippet of Hedge House. I’m still chugging away at the first draft, sometimes just a hundred words at a time, but I’m chugging.

“What did happen?” Cara asked. “I don’t remember much and my mother never talked about it, except to tell me that my grandmother was crazy and it was better that we were away from her.”

“What do you remember?”

Cara slowly chewed a bite of bagel, trying to summon some sort of coherent memories, but at last she shook her head. “I remember that my father died,” she said, “and then we left here. I remember my mother being…” She frowned, trying to put the impressions of a seven year old child into the words of a twenty seven year old lawyer. “She wasn’t sad or grief stricken. More… angry and…” She shook her head. “I think she blamed my grandmother but I don’t know why.”

Jacob nodded. “She did blame her. Unfairly, but people do a lot of things when they’re in pain that they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

“All my life all I heard her say about my grandmother was that she was crazy, and a witch, and should be locked away where she couldn’t hurt anyone.”

Tentative Blurb:

When Cara Hawthorne returns to the childhood home she had been torn away from twenty years earlier, she thinks it will be to do nothing more than settle her grandmother’s estate and return to her job as a junior lawyer at a prestigious law firm in Tulsa.

But every nook and cranny of the house and gardens unearths long-buried memories, and when the town’s mayor sets his sights on her and the property she finds herself caught up in a centuries old battle with powers she has only barely begun to understand

Find more great reading
at the Sunday Snippet group.