Free Beautiful Creatures by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Page B

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.”
    “And that vision, the fires, did you see it, too?”
    I nodded. It was almost too horrible to talk about. “This has to be Greenbrier, what’s left of it, anyway.”
    “Let me see the locket.” I handed it to her carefully. It looked like something that had survived a lot—maybe even the fire
     from the vision. She turned it over in her hands. “february 11th, 1865.” She dropped the locket, turning pale.
    “What’s wrong?”
    She stared down at it in the grass. “February eleventh is my birthday.”
    “So it’s a coincidence. An early birthday present.”
    “Nothing in my life is a coincidence.”
    I picked up the locket and flipped it over. On the back were two sets of engraved initials. “ECW & GKD . This locket must have
     belonged to one of them.” I paused. “That’s weird. My initials are