We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The House at Watch Hill, a new paranormal romance by Karen Marie Moning—publishing with William Morrow on October 1st.
Zo Grey is reeling from the sudden death of her mother when she receives a surprising call from an attorney in Divinity, Louisiana, with the news she has been left an inheritance by a distant relative, the terms of which he will only discuss in person. Destitute and alone, with nothing left to lose, Zo heads to Divinity and discovers she is the sole beneficiary of a huge fortune and a monstrosity of a house that sits ominously at the peak of Watch Hill—but she must live in it, alone, for three years before the house, or the money, is hers.
Met with this irresistible opportunity to finally build a future for herself, Zo puts aside her misgivings about the foreboding Gothic mansion and the strange circumstances, and moves in, where she is quickly met by a red-eyed Stygian owl and an impossibly sexy Scottish groundskeeper.
Her new home is full of countless secrets and mystifying riddles, with doors that go nowhere, others that are impossible to open, and a turret into which there is no visible means of ingress. And the townspeople are odd…
What Zo doesn’t yet know is that her own roots lie in this very house and that in order to discover her true identity and awaken her dormant powers, she will have to face off against sinister forces she doesn’t quite comprehend—or risk being consumed by them.
“How many people live in Divinity?” I asked my driver, Evander Graham, a burly man with silver hair who looked to be in his early sixties, as I stared out the sedan’s window at the passing landscape.
“’Bout twenty-five thousand.”
Kellan’s dark head between my thighs. Challenge blazing in his eyes as I gripped fistfuls of his hair, bucking against him as I came.
The unbidden image brought a flush to skin that still bore his scent, spicy and intoxicating. There’d been no time for a shower. I needed one, as soon as possible, to wash away all memory of that man. Last night, and well into the day, had been merely a nameless one-night stand, no different from the others, never to be repeated, never thought of again: one of my many unbreakable rules—never take the same lover twice. I’d never wanted to. Until now.
Twenty-five thousand was roughly ten thousand more than Frankfort, closer to the size of Brownsburg, where I’d finished high school. It was a comfortable size, large enough to offer amenities, small enough to feel cozy and navigable. “Everybody knows everybody, don’t they?”
“Pretty much. There’s a lot of history in Divinity. It was settled in the late sixteen hundreds, and we’ve dozens of families that trace their roots back to those early settlers. Folks take pride in our town, work hard to keep it nice. It began as a planned settlement, stayed small until the late eighteen hundreds. Got a lot of fancy houses in the Queen Anne style, some Colonial and Antebellum. Streets are the prettiest I’ve ever seen. No real pollution. In my opinion, it’s the best town in the whole damn country to live. We don’t advertise the fact, though. Towns get attention, they start drawing the wrong kind of folk. Got no crime to speak of, work’s plentiful, though some keep offices in New Orleans. Mostly we stay to ourselves.”
Sounded too good to be true. All towns, no matter their size, had dark sides: drugs, homelessness, racism, economic inequity, religious intolerance. Although, when I was younger, I’d hated being constantly uprooted, torn away from new friendships again and again, my sense of loss was ameliorated by the endless discovery of new towns and new people. I hadn’t gotten the best schooling, but I’d acquired resilience, curiosity, and an open mind from our nomadic lifestyle. The only thing I’d missed was my best friend, Este. When Mom let us stay in Brownsburg for two years, I’d been ecstatic, especially since I knew, for reasons beyond my fathoming, Mom didn’t like Este any more than Dalia Hunter liked me. They’d barely tolerated our friendship—and they’d not tolerated each other at all, unwilling to share the same room. Hell, they wouldn’t even occupy the same city block, which had only made me and Este more protective of our friendship.
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The House at Watch Hill
Este and I had been inseparable from the moment we met in fourth grade, when I was the new kid once again and both of us were outsiders. Me because I was always moving, often hastily, in the dead of night, and Este because she was brilliant, fierce, and—in a town that was 95 percent white in blue-collar jobs— biracial and from an affluent family, a singularity in both grade and high school. I still remembered what I was wearing the day we met, as I sat alone in the cafeteria picking at a greasy corn dog and fries on an orange plastic tray: jeans that I’d grown too tall for, so Mom had sewn bits of a flowered pillowcase to the bottoms, with a faded pink T-shirt that had only the tiniest of tears near the hem. I didn’t look bad. I merely looked what we were: poor. Not Este. Her folks had money, lots of it, and it made her even more of a misfit at school.
Casting a glare about the cafeteria that had kids ducking their heads to avoid her withering gaze, nine-year-old Este swaggered to my table, plunked down her tray, flashed me a smile as warm as her cyan glare was icy, and said, Name’s Este Hunter. I’m going to be a famous artist someday, and everyone will know my name. You look like you have the balls to be friends with me. Do you?
I was a goner. Only nine years old, and she’d said balls like she owned the word. Este did everything like she owned it. There was no “Zo, like no,” on my lips that day. Este was then and has always been able to blast through my countless barriers.
I smiled at the memory, gazing out the window at the passing scenery. Louisiana was subtropical-lush with trees and flowers I’d never seen before. The abundance of greenery was a feast to my winter-starved eyes. It was sunny, the sky cloudless, the temperature seventy-five. I hoped whatever local hotel Mr. Balfour had put me in had a pool, that prior to heading back to New Orleans to catch my return flight, I could have breakfast outside and soak up the sunshine before returning to a town where the only flowers brightening the dreary landscape were listless daffodils, assured of another killing frost, devoting scant effort to their pale blooms. In the Deep South, the foliage exploded with brazen audacity, exotic and wild, while I, feeling too much like those wan Midwestern daffodils, would droop home tomorrow to the same chilly terrain I’d left, with the same bone-deep chill in my heart. For a moment, I imagined living down here, never shoveling snow again, never de-icing my car as I shivered in the early morning gloom, never having to watch the world go colorless and cold around me for six long months, until the relentless gray of the sky was so similar to the roads, I might drive into the horizon without even realizing I’d left the ground. Then I sighed. I couldn’t afford to move. I was so deeply in debt, dreams were beyond my budget.
When we passed the sign that announced we were entering Divinity, I sat up straighter, hugging my purse, gripped by a sudden tension and apprehension I attributed to the unknowns of the meeting I was about to have. I wondered if I really did have relatives, if the last one had recently died or if some remained and I might find family here. It was strange to be so alone, and I hadn’t wrapped my brain around it. I could feel the awareness of it, far off in the distance—You, Zo Grey, have no family in all the world—but it drifted aimlessly beyond a cyclone of grief.
Mr. Graham wasn’t exaggerating. Divinity was the prettiest town I’d ever seen. The streets were immaculate, the centuries-old houses faultlessly maintained behind cast-iron fences, their bright Victorian facades painted in historic shades, some with fluted columns, others with whimsical romantic turrets, lace curtains fluttering in the afternoon breeze. Nearly all had inviting porches and lawns bursting with bougainvillea, crepe myrtles, and magnolias.
As we entered the town commons—a one-block square of park hemmed on three sides by shops, with a fountain at the center and benches dotting the hawthorn-hedged green—I gestured to an unusual building that resembled an old-time theater, modernized with a striking cerulean and chrome facade. “What’s that?”
“The Gossamer. It’s a popular club with the young folk, live music and such. Then there’s the Shadows at the south end of town, where a more adult crowd gathers.”
We passed dozens of quaint businesses, restaurants, a bank, a retro pizzeria, the post office and local gym, two coffee shops, and three bars. Then we were turning off the main thoroughfare and down a maze of cobbled alleys before exiting onto another main road and pulling into the circular drive of the Balfour and Baird Law Firm, which occupied a stately Colonial home, entry framed by tall white columns.
“Do you know where I’ll be staying tonight?” Not with Kellan. Never with him again. My unbreakable rules are essential for navigating my life. I’d begun making them young for good reasons.
Mr. Graham got out of the car and opened my door. “I imagine Mr. Balfour will be telling you that.”
As I stepped out, a sultry breeze lifted my hair and a sudden chill pierced the nape of my neck, burrowing to bone. My spine constricted with a violent shiver, as if an icy airborne dart came concealed within the draft.
Later, I would understand I’d begun feeling the house at Watch Hill long before I saw it, the moment we’d entered the intangible but oh so carefully guarded boundaries of Divinity, a cold, disturbing burn in my blood. When I stepped from the car, we got that much closer to each other. I just hadn’t understood what was happening.
Some things should never be awakened. Joanna Grey knew that. Home to three centuries of secrets, blood, and lies, the mansion on the hill was a dark, slumbering beast.
Come to me. Know me. Live in me.
Shivering again, I tipped back my head, feeling irresistibly compelled to glance up and to the east.
Beyond gnarled, moss-draped limbs of centuries-old live oaks, an enormous hill hulked over the town of Divinity. At the crest of the hill, behind an ornate black cast-iron fence that was nearly swallowed by vines, crouched a dark, forbidding edifice flanked by turrets at the north and south ends. It peaked at five stories, its west-facing windows blazing like hellfire with afternoon sun, and, despite the brightness of the day, the fortress loomed, a stygian citadel on a high promontory.
It appeared to have been added on to multiple times. The vertiginous lines of the roofs soared and fell, veering off at opposing angles, creating heavily gloomed niches between. It was a colossal structure, sweeping from grand porch to tall chimneys, from turret to balcony to rooftop garden, hemmed by oaks twice the size of any I’d ever seen, their long, wandering, moss-fringed branches brushing perilously near windowpanes.
Crouching high above Divinity, an uneasy blend of whimsical Victorian and funereal Gothic, painted pewter with ebony trim, it squatted, a venomous spider presiding over the town, studying its meticulously spun web of streets below. The structure fascinated and repelled me in equal measure. I wanted to explore the oddity; I never wanted to set foot inside it. I shuddered, hoping I wasn’t expected to stay there tonight. “Is that a hotel?” Please say no, I willed silently.
Mr. Graham laughed softly. “Private residence.”
I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until it exploded in a sigh of relief. I wouldn’t be sleeping there. Good. “That’s a house?” More a mountain of malevolence, watching Divinity with shuttered eyes. “It’s enormous.”
“Oldest in town, built on the spot the first settlers chose. The original, centuries-old cabin was incorporated into it. The first families still hold their funerals in the cemetery up there.”
I forced my gaze away from the house with reluctance, with relief. The chill retreated as the ordinariness of the day washed back in, and I was suddenly embarrassed by how spooked I’d become. “I didn’t think there were any hills in Louisiana.” This was coastal plain, renowned for its unbroken flatness.
“We got a few. Watch Hill’s the tallest in the state at six hundred fifty-four feet above sea level. Divinity’s fifty feet above sea level, then there’s New Orleans at eight feet below, which causes countless problems. We don’t advertise our hill either. Louisiana’s pride, Mount Driskill, is only five hundred thirty-five feet, and folks flock in droves to hike it, litter it up, and spoil the beauty.”
One day I would marvel that the largest hill in the state of Louisiana had been kept so secret that only Mount Driskill appeared on maps, but by then it would seem trivial compared to the countless other impossibilities I was facing.
When I withdrew some of what remained of my dwindling store of cash—a waitress never fails to tip—he waved away my money, assuring me Mr. Balfour had taken good care of him, and directed me to the door.
“Will you be driving me back to New Orleans tomorrow?”
“Welcome to Divinity, Ms. Cameron. It’s good to have you here,” Mr. Graham replied, as he got back into the car.
“Grey,” I corrected. But the door was closed and he was already driving away.
Excerpted from The House at Watch Hill, copyright © 2024 by Karen Marie Moning.
