I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the BENEATH BEAUFORD
GROVE by E. Denise Billups Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Title: BENEATH
BEAUFORD GROVE
Author: E. Denise Billups
Pub. Date: August 22, 2025
Publisher: Shivering Pond Publishing
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
Pages: 376
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/u/4A6Qlo
For fans of Anne Rice's 'The Witching Hour', Silvia
Moreno-Garcia's 'Mexican Gothic', and Tananarive Due's 'The Good House'
The curse flows through her veins, but so does the cure.
Dr. Evangeline Beauford thought blood held no secrets from her.
As one of Boston's leading hematologists, she's dedicated her career to
studying blood's mysteries—until a posthumous letter from her estranged sister
draws her back to Beauford Grove after eighteen years away.
The family's olive plantation shouldn't exist in Alabama soil. The trees
shouldn't weep crimson sap. And her own family's blood work shouldn't show
impossible anomalies that her scientific mind can't explain.
But as Evangeline uncovers centuries-old diaries hidden in the grove, she
learns the devastating truth: her mother didn't send her away out of
rejection—it was protection from a sinister blood pact forged between French
colonists and enslaved practitioners of powerful African and Haitian magic.
The plantation's unnatural prosperity came at a price paid in blood and bound
both bloodlines to the land through ancient rituals. Now, with the pact
demanding its due, Evangeline must confront her family's dark legacy and her
own dormant power.
Her medical expertise may be the key to breaking the cycle—or the final
sacrifice it demands.
Excerpt:
Prologue
EVA’S FIRST MEMORY of blood magic came with the smell of rotting olives and her Grand-mère Marie’s whispered French. The old woman’s fingers, gnarled as the roots she tended, guided ten-year-old Eva through a grove where Mediterranean trees thrust through red Alabama clay, like bones through skin. Spanish moss hung from twisted branches in gray shrouds, and kudzu choked the wrought-iron fence that caged the groves. Even the summer air felt wrong here—thick as blood, sweet with night-blooming jasmine that couldn’t quite mask the decay beneath.
“Ma petite,” Grand-mère murmured, her voice rough as centuries of buried secrets, “you must understand the gift in your veins.” The silver tip of her gardening knife caught the moonlight like a cat’s eye. “The land knows our blood. It has known it since before your ancestor Celestine set foot on this soil, since before the first slaves were buried in the grove to feed the trees.”
Eva didn’t flinch when the blade bit her finger; she’d seen enough of her mother’s stillborn births to know genuine pain. Besides, something in Grand-mère’s eyes scared
her more than any small hurt—an ancient hunger deeper than the roots themselves. A single drop of blood welled up, black as sin in the moonlight. Grand-mère guided her hand down, and the blood fell.
The soil sighed like a dying breath. The drop disappeared into the earth, which seemed to pulse beneath their feet, and where it landed, tiny shoots of green unfurled like skeletal fingers reaching for the moon. Eva watched, transfixed, as delicate leaves sprouted and uncurled in seconds, their edges tinged with red.
“C’est la magie dans notre sang,” Grand-mère said. “The magic in our blood.” She touched the tiny plant with the reverence of a penitent. “We do not rule this land, ma chérie. We are bound to it, as it’s bound to us. A covenant written in blood and soil, sealed with sacrifices you’re too young to understand.”
Eighteen years later, Eva’s finger traces her deceased sister’s letter, sensing the spot where Grand-mère had drawn blood that night. She had buried the memory deep, entombed with other childhood horrors—the whispers from the slave quarters’ ruins, the shadows that danced too freely in candlelight, and the weight of generational sins in her mother’s eyes. But now, holding her sister’s last words, those memories stir like something long buried clawing at the surface.
Dearest Eva, the letter read, its ink brown and flaking like dried blood. If you’re reading this, I’m already gone. There are elements you must understand about our blood—things Grand-mère tried to tell us before Mama sent you away...
Eva sets the letter down on her lab bench, where slides of anonymous blood samples wait for analysis. A hematologist now, shipped north of the Mason-Dixon Line at age ten, she’s as far removed from Alabama as her test tubes and microscopes. She’s spent her career studying the mysteries of blood—its components, its mutations, its
secrets—trying to reduce its power to mere chemistry. But as she stares at her sister’s spidery handwriting, she hears Grand-mère’s voice slithering through the night air: “The land knows our blood.”
Outside her lab window, a massive oak spreads its arms to the Boston sky like a supplicant at prayer. Eighteen years later, Eva wonders if it senses her presence like the olive trees did. Was that night real, or an invented memory justifying her family, casting her like Cain into the wilderness?
Only one way to find out.
Her hand moves to the drawer where she keeps her lancets, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she swears she hears the trees whisper.
Chapter 1: Dark Things
ABSENTMINDEDLY, EVA STROKES the head of her Portuguese water dog, Hewson, while inspecting the blood flow through the IV line. Her mind drifts to the lab results she reviewed yesterday—hemoglobin levels critically low, bone marrow failing. Sophie Evans has become Eva’s personal mission after arriving at Mass General six months ago with no family, no history beyond a state caseworker’s thin file, and a devastating Diamond Blackfan anemia diagnosis. Yet something’s different today.
“Your blood feels warm,” Sophie murmurs, her voice stronger than yesterday. Eva’s clinical mind seeks a rational explanation as she checks the transfusion equipment. But Sophie’s monitors are showing impossible improvements—oxygen saturation climbing, heart rate stabilizing. Color blooms across the child’s pale cheeks like watercolor on wet paper. Eva glances at the door, acutely aware of what she’s done. The hospital board has approved standard treatments for the orphaned eight-year-old, not experimental transfusions from her own veins.
The memory hits her at once: moonlight filtering through ancient olive branches. Her Grand-mère’s voice, thick with a Creole accent: “Our blood, ma petite—it carries life itself.” The scent of rich soil, and the impossible sight of green shoots unfurling in seconds where her blood had fallen. She’s buried that memory deep, wrapped it in layers of scientific certainty. Dreams don’t happen in real life. Plants don’t grow in seconds. Blood is just blood: red cells, white cells, plasma, and platelets.
Each day, Eva sits beside the hospital bed, studying the child who bears an uncanny resemblance to her younger self. Despite repeated failures of corticosteroid treatments, this case fractures everything she understands about the disease. Something deeper than science lurks beneath Sophie’s inexplicable condition that makes Eva question everything she’s learned about medicine.
Eva’s hand trembles as she reaches for her tablet to document the vitals, her eyes catching the worn envelope from her sister peeking out of her pocket. The letter she’s scoured since it arrived three days ago is heavy with the weight of family secrets.
Hewson whimpers, his dark eyes moving between Eva and Sophie, as if he senses the shift in the room’s energy. Eva remembers her grandmother’s other words that night: "When you’re ready, ma chérie, the groves will call you home." As if responding to the memory, the heart-shaped birthmark beneath her wrist pulses with its own rhythm—the same mark that adorned her mother and grandmother’s skin, a legacy etched into every firstborn Beauford daughter.
Eva stands transfixed by Sophie’s bedside, watching the monitor display numbers that mock everything she learned in medical school. Each steady beep marks another impossible improvement, another miracle science can’t explain. The bandage on her arm, where she drew her own blood for Sophie’s transfusion, pulses with an unsettling
warmth. Her grandmother’s herbs, her sister’s letter, generations of Beauford women, and their whispered secrets… Her history now flows through this child’s veins. Sophie drifts to sleep, and Eva notices that her skin is radiant with unnatural vitality as she adjusts the blanket. For years, she’s hidden behind medical journals and clinical trials, using science to shield herself from her family’s mysteries. Now, seeing her patient thrive on blood that should have been incompatible, she can no longer deny what she is. Eva touches the bandage once more before walking back to her lab, where vials of their mingled blood await testing—though she knows she won’t find the truth under a microscope.
As she makes her way to her lab, the familiar cramping, worse than most women experience, proclaims a monthly malady. She checks her period-tracking app—fourteen days until her cycle begins.
Her first period at twelve was a nightmare of biblical proportions. The pain wasn’t normal menstrual cramps; it felt like molten iron coursing through her abdomen. She’d been pruning her cousin Laurel’s herb garden, a stubborn patch of green tucked behind their Beacon Hill brownstone, when an immediate and violent cramp seized her, doubling her over the plants. Her hand caught the rusty edge of ancient garden shears, a family heirloom that traveled north from Alabama with her cousin. Blood welled from her palm as she steadied herself against the withered rosemary bush. A drop fell onto its dried leaves. Through her tears of pain, she saw the impossible: brown stems flushed green, and new sprigs erupted from dead wood, spiraling toward her bleeding hand like hungry vines. The plant’s sudden vitality pulsed in time with her cramping, and the rich scent of rosemary filled the air—far too strong for Boston’s thin soil.
Cousin Laurel had found her curled up in the herb garden, surrounded by the baffling overgrown rosemary. Unlike other adults who might have questioned the impossible growth, Laurel’s face had gone pale with recognition. She’d helped Eva into the house and into bed, hands shaking as she made a phone call: “Madeline, it’s happened. The blood... It found her even here.”
Eva learned early to speak of her condition in careful, clinical terms. Three generations documented with similar symptoms, she’d explain during rare discussions with concerned colleagues—her mother, her grandmother, every firstborn daughter marked by the same pattern. The medical rationalist in her had once suggested genetic testing, but Cousin Laurel’s warning glare had silenced that inquiry. “Some family histories,” she’d said while steeping her special tea, “are better left unwritten.”
Now, back in her lab, Eva glances at her sister’s letter again, focusing on a previously overlooked line: The entity demands its monthly tribute through the daughters’ blood. The groves flourish, the town prospers, and we bear the burden.
A realization settles over Eva like a shadow as she recalls the strange images that have manifested over several weeks—those no medical textbook can explain. Trees in the Public Garden contorting toward her, their branches like desperate fingers seeking her touch as she passed. Her reflection in shop windows moving a half-second too slowly, as if something else watched through her eyes. Most disturbing is Sophie’s case— a mysterious recovery that perfectly tracks Eva’s approaching cycle.
Images flash through her mind: her grandmother’s garden, impossible lushness during certain weeks. Times when her mother would disappear into the groves monthly, returning pale, but the olives always ripened perfectly afterward. Her inexplicable connection to blood disorders. Perhaps a genetic memory led her to hematology.
Eva drops her arms to the polyurethane lab chair’s armrest, her memories shifting and reforming. Did her mother send her to live with Cousin Laurel in Boston at ten to give her a traditional life, away from Beauford Grove’s dark legacy?
Eva remembers fragments of Laurel’s hushed phone conversation with her mother when she discovered her on the ground, contorted in pain with her first menses, dead herbs revived and growing: “... tried to protect her...” and “... blood will out, no matter how far...” At twelve, she hadn’t understood. Now, monitoring Sophie’s blood work, which is showing impossible improvements, those whispered words take on new meaning. She opens her phone to a text from Laurel:
Eva, honey, we need to talk about what your mama
was trying to protect you from.
Hewson nudges her hand, and Eva realizes she’s been staring at the failed experiment for an hour. She packs up her supplies, knowing that Laurel’s brownstone, not the lab, holds the answers she needs. Her cousin has carried this secret for eighteen years, watching and waiting for Eva’s blood to betray its true nature.
Eva enters the home quietly, finding Laurel in her usual spot—the dining room table of their Beacon Hill brownstone, grading papers from her literature students at Boston University. Hewson trots ahead, settling at Laurel’s feet as if he senses the gravity of what’s coming.
“You knew,” Eva says, not a question. “Every month since I was twelve, you knew what was happening to me.”
Laurel sets aside her reading glasses, her face etched with the fatigue of carrying a heavy truth. “Your mama called me that night years ago, crying so hard I could barely understand her. Said she’d seen the signs—you, talking about the olive trees whispering to you, the way you’d wake up with dirt under your fingernails even though you’d been in bed the entire night.”
Eva sinks into the armchair across from her cousin, her sister’s letter clutched in her hand. “The blood magic… It’s real, isn’t it? What I did today with Sophie...” “Madeline hoped...” Laurel’s voice catches. “God, she hoped distance would break the curse. Prayed she’d sent you far from the grasp of the groves. Boston was supposed to save you.” She laughs, but it’s hollow. “Your mama didn’t count on you becoming a hematologist. Blood will call to blood every time.”
“Why did Mom really send me away?” Eva demands, though part of her dreads the answer. She can’t wait for Laurel’s response—not with what just happened. “You know I have to tell you about Sophie,” she says, watching Laurel’s face. “My blood... It did something impossible.”
Laurel presses her hands together, a gesture Eva’s seen countless times when her cousin wrestles with hard decisions. “Your mama made me promise to give you a normal life. To let you be just Eva—doctor, dog mom, and terrible cook who sets off the smoke alarm making toast.” Her attempt at humor falls flat.
“But I’m not just Eva, am I?” She holds up her sister’s letter. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Laurel rises, crossing to the antique mahogany secretary—a family heirloom Eva recognizes from Beauford Grove. Her fingers trace the memory—the intricate floral scrollwork climbing its edges, the tarnished brass hardware, those ornate pulls she once
reached for on tiptoe. The piece stands on graceful, curved Queen Anne legs, both delicate and imposing in the afternoon light.
Eva watches Laurel’s practiced hands slide across the polished surface, pressing an imperceptible seam along the cabinetry. A small compartment springs open—one Eva never knew existed. Laurel retrieves a leather-bound journal from within, its spine cracked with age, edges worn soft.
“Your mother sent this the day before she died,” Laurel says, her voice catching. The journal hovers, a bridge across decades connecting them. “Asked me to only give it to you if...” She stops, the unfinished sentence hanging in midair like dust motes caught in sunlight.
“If what?”
“If you ever had to go back.” Laurel’s voice breaks. “Eva, honey, there’re things about Beauford Grove, your birthright, that I can’t... I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. But before you decide anything, please read your mama’s words first.”
Hewson whines, pressing against Eva’s legs as she takes the journal. An old sepia portrait falls from the journal to the floor. Eva kneels to pick it up, her long Creole curls falling forward like a curtain. The woman in the picture could be her twin—the same warm brown skin and high cheekbones inherited from her Haitian ancestors. Their full lips curve into the same careful smile, although the woman’s Victorian lace collar conceals her neckline.
Eva touches her face unconsciously, her fingers tracing her jawline. The woman’s eyes hold the same intensity as her own amber-brown ones. “She looks like me,” Eva whispers, her fingers hovering over the drawing as if touching it might make her resemblance too real. “Who is she?”
“Celestine, your fourth great-grandmother. And yes, you are her spitting image. Your lineage begins with Celestine and her French lover—her owner, François.” Eva stares at the journal. “Does the journal explain why Mom sent me away? The real reason?”
Laurel touches Eva’s cheek, the gesture full of love and regret. “Your mother wanted you to choose your own path. To fall in love on your own terms. To live free of...” She stops again, too many unspoken truths hanging in the air.
Eva senses Laurel’s reluctance and grips the journal tighter. “Okay. I need to read this alone,” she says, turning toward the stairs. Hewson trails behind her as she retreats to her bedroom.
She settles on the window seat, Hewson curled up beside her as she opens the leather journal. The pages are stiff, a few wrinkled from liquid or dried tears, and her mother’s familiar looping handwriting fills them:
My dearest Eva,
If you’re reading this, the blood has awakened in you. I tried to give you freedom, ma petite. Every Beauford woman accepted our fate without question for two centuries—our prosperity purchased with our blood, our bodies, and our choices, all demanded by the entity that blesses our groves.
I believed I could endure it, as my mother did, until that moonless night when I found you among the twisted olive branches. There you stood, only ten years old, your nightgown caught in an impossible wind. Ancient and terrible words poured from your lips—promises of flesh and forever—in a voice that echoed with centuries of our women’s sacrifices. Hearing those vows from your
innocent mouth, I knew I had to free you, to give you a chance at your own life, however brief our reprieve.
Eva’s memory of that night flickers like a damaged film reel. She remembers the cool soil beneath her bare feet, the way the olive trees seemed to bend toward her, their leaves whispering secrets she almost understood. Her father had followed her into the grove, calling her name with increasing desperation. When he reached for her, something shifted in the shadows between the trees. She remembers her father’s eyes widening with recognition, then terror—not of the entity, she realizes now, but of her. He crumpled at her feet, and she watched as darkness coiled around him like smoke before slithering back into the ancient grove. The memory ends there, replaced by the stark morning light and her mother’s tear-stained face delivering news she already knew somewhere deep in her bones: Papa was dead.
Eva’s hands tremble as she turns the page, finding pressed olive leaves between the pages, releasing a sweet and metallic scent like flowers blooming in old blood.
There are things about your birth I can’t explain in writing. The entity has ways of knowing—of punishing those who speak too freely of its nature. But know this: your power isn’t just in your blood. The groves respond to you because you were born under an ancient covenant—one sealed before you took your first breath.
You’ll feel the pull to return. When you do, seek the old olive tree—the Mother Tree in the north grove. Count three trees west and then look for the one with roots that form a perfect circle. Dig there, and you’ll find what I left for you.
But Eva, ma chérie, remember—no matter what they tell you about destiny and duty, your heart remains your own.
Pressed flowers, photographs, and mysterious symbols drawn in the margins fill the following pages. Eva finds a page dated the year her mother died:
The time approaches. I feel it in my bones. The groves are failing, and only a true Beauford firstborn can restore them. But you have built a life in Boston, become the doctor you dreamed of being. How can I ask you to give that up?
There’s much more to learn about the grove and the young man who…
The entry ends abruptly, leaving a half-empty page.
Eva traces one of the peculiar symbols in the margin—an intertwined olive branch and vine forming a circular pattern. As her finger moves over the ink, a wooden splinter buried in the paper catches her skin. She recognizes the distinct silvery grain of olive wood, its surface warm to the touch. Blood smears across the symbol, and Eva jerks back as the realization strikes: the bark from her family’s groves should be long dead in these aging pages, yet it pulses with unsettling vitality. The symbol seems to shift, and the faintest scent of olive blossoms drifts up from the page.
She sits up straighter, Hewson lifting his head at her sudden movement. There, beneath the smeared blood, the ink has changed color slightly, revealing a tiny map within the original design. But before she can examine it more closely, the effect fades, leaving her wondering if she imagined it.
She flips through the journal again, noting similar symbols scattered throughout—some looking like decorative borders, others simple doodles. But now she
sees them for what they are—how they connect page to page. Certain lines mirror the paths in the grove she remembers walking through as a child.
Her phone buzzes—a text from Sophie’s night nurse about another inexplicable improvement in her condition. Eva looks back at the journal, at a particular symbol that appears repeatedly, always paired with moon phases.
“They’re not just symbols,” she whispers to Hewson. “They’re keys. Mom left me a way to understand the groves, but only my blood can reveal their true meaning.” Eva stares at one particular symbol that initially seemed like a decorative border—but with her hematologist’s eye, she instantly recognizes it. The pattern mirrors the molecular structure of hemoglobin but with subtle alterations. Where oxygen molecules should bind, her mother drew tiny olive leaves.
“Mom knew,” she whispers. “She knew I’d understand as a hematologist. These aren’t just maps; they’re molecular blueprints.”
She grabs her tablet and pulls up cellular imaging from Sophie’s latest blood work. Under the microscope, the clustered cells in Sophie’s recovery sample form a pattern matching a symbol from the journal’s margins—one that untrained eyes might mistake for a Celtic knot. But Eva recognizes it as a specific type of platelet aggregation.
Her mother encoded the grove’s magic using the language of blood itself—a secret message that only a Beauford woman with medical training could fully comprehend. Eva begins cross-referencing the symbols with her medical texts. One sigil resembles the clotting cascade pathway, but tiny grove landmarks replace the factors. Another mirrors bone marrow maturation, with olive trees marking each developmental stage. The most frequently repeated symbol combines the structure of stem cells with what appears to be the grove’s irrigation system.
Her hands shaking, Eva photographs one of the more complex sigils and overlays it with a standard hematological diagram. They match perfectly—except for one additional path her mother added, leading to what looks like the oldest part of the grove.
“She didn’t just want me safe,” Eva realizes. “She wanted me prepared. Every medical text I studied, every blood sample I analyzed—I was learning to read these maps without knowing it.”
Late into the night, Eva spreads her medical journals across her bed, Hewson watching as she overlays transparent diagrams over her mother’s sigils. Intrigued by a symbol she first thought decorative, now she understands it’s a diagram illustrating the process of blood cell creation—hematopoiesis.
But her mother added something—tiny symbols woven through the familiar medical pathways. Her mother drew a minute olive branch where stem cells would ordinarily differentiate into red blood cells. Next to it, in handwriting too small, Eva needs her magnifying glass to see: Life calls to life. Always follow the iron markers, Eva. Seven rows into the grove, then ninety-three steps northeast. Thirteen steps from the twisted tree to the stone, twenty-one to the Mother Tree. The old paths must be maintained.
Eva pulls up Sophie’s latest labs on her tablet. The child’s stem cells have produced healthy red blood cells at an unprecedented rate, matching the pattern in her mother’s modified diagram. But the sigil shows something more—a secondary pathway that doesn’t exist in any medical text, one that flows from the grove’s oldest trees into the blood formation process.
“Oh, God,” Eva whispers, the realization hitting her. “The entity didn’t just bless the groves. It changed our blood at a cellular level.” She traces the unusual pathway with
her finger, accidentally smearing it with blood from the cut. The ink shifts, revealing more text hidden within the spiral: The groves sustain the blood; the blood sustains the groves. But beware, ma chérie—every healing draws us deeper into the pact. Choose wisely which debts you take on.
Does saving Sophie carry a price?
About E. Denise Billups:
E. Denise
Billups is an American author whose journey spans from rural Alabama to the
vibrant streets of New York City. This diverse background has infused her
writing with a unique multicultural perspective.
Formerly a
Wall Street Portfolio Analyst, Billups now channels her analytical skills into
crafting haunting paranormal mysteries, suspense, and thrillers. The discipline
of ballet shaped her early years - a rigor that now manifests in her meticulous
approach to writing.
Based in New
York City, Billups embraces a dynamic lifestyle. She starts her days as a
fitness enthusiast, transitions into her role as a writer, and unwinds by
immersing herself in literature. When not weaving her next thrilling tale, she
can be found lost in the pages of a book or cherishing moments with friends and
family.
Billups'
work reflects her multifaceted life experiences, blending the Southern Gothic
traditions of her roots with the fast-paced energy of her adopted home. Her
stories often explore the intricate dance between the paranormal and the
psychological, keeping readers on the edge of their seats.
To dive
deeper into Billups' captivating world of fiction at her author's website.
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Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a paperback of BENEATH BEAUFORD GROVE, US Only.
Ends November
8th, midnight EST.
