Lyle spoke up. “Becoming an Abotisa is a choice you make, Sekou. And you can see it is a choice you can make to leave it. Like I did. The hollowing and being an Abotisa are entirely different, because you lose yourself from the hollowing. Even if you choose it, it would be because you didn’t understand what would happen.”
Sekou shot me an uneasy glance. I couldn’t meet his gaze. I was too much in my feelings and fighting the insult that he’d think I’d ever take advantage of him in that way. Use him or anyone in that way. I thought my best friend knew me better than that.
“Sorry,” he mumbled sheepishly. “This is a lot, you know?”
It was a lot. And for once I wasn’t trying to act based off my emotions.
“I would never make anyone my slave,” I told him, hoping he’d understand.
“The kwandamu is an evil use of our power,” Nana Ama said. “No good comes from it, from what they become, if we do not take care.”
Beside me Hailey deflated, no doubt thinking about Luke. Hell, even I felt bad for him. The way Nana Ama and Sheriff Lyle were telling it, Luke was done for, and there was no fix like Hailey believed. Luke was gone. Naira… she wasn’t like him. Or, hadn’t been when she’d finally been able to break through and reach out to me.
Lyle continued. “I believe Effie is using abalsoms as her army.”
“For what?” Sekou asked.
Well, for nothing good obviously. She wasn’t turning people into mindless zombie hordes to solve world hunger, that was for sure.
There was a more important question that needed to be answered. “What happened to Effie and where has she been?” I asked.
Nana said, “I thought she was dead.”
“Why would you think that?”
Nana Ama paused before she spoke. “Because after the bounty hunters killed Effie, I was the one to bury her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“I said I would never recount this story again,” Nana Ama said. She shot Lyle a painful look, like she needed to draw strength from him instead of blood this time. “After I told you everything. That was…”
Lyle offered a quick glance and reassuring smile before returning to the road to focus on the many winding curves. It made me nervous whenever he took his eyes off. Plus he was going a little fast for my taste, making me think of Hailey behind the wheel. Nothing was that fast, thank Nyame. But Lyle could stand to take it down a bit. I kept my mouth shut though because there was no way I was going to ruin what would be a story of epic proportions.
“Nearly two hundred years ago—” She paused, her brows furrowing like she was unsure how to explain. “This thing we are is complicated. Before we came to be on that plantation, we never had the desire for blood, especially not human blood.” Nana seemed to pick around parts of the story, giving us only the information she thought we needed to know. I wasn’t sure if Hailey and Sekou could tell, but I knew how carefully she danced around her wording.
“We were caught by enslavers from Africa. One of the last ships here before trading enslaved people across the ocean was abolished. Effie and I didn’t know how to get back home. We didn’t know what it meant for our powers, as back home, we didn’t have to deal with people like we did here. We were very… secluded, Effie and I.
“With the length of time away from home, we experienced untold horrors, along with all the other enslaved. We tried hard to assimilate. We didn’t know how this new world would take supernatural people. But as more time passed, our needs became more primal. Food wasn’t sustaining us. We were becoming weak, unable to work well in the day, unable to communicate telepathically between the two of us.
“Then I became pregnant, and we realized the craving we were having was for blood. We tried to deny it, but the hunger was too much. If we didn’t become strong, soon the plantation owners would do away with us and take the baby.
“We held out as long as we could until we couldn’t anymore. And that’s when one of the overseers turned up dead in the forest. They thought he was mauled by an animal. I told Effie we couldn’t feed like that, that we had to find another way. But the way human blood rejuvenated, reenergized, revitalized us… it was too much to pass up.
“More deaths started happening. Illnesses that presented as a wasting blood disease, or what was called consumption. Today maybe anemia. The hunt. The power was intoxicating to the both of us. But I tried to maintain for the baby—your mother.
“Superstition spread like wildfire across the plantation that we were witch sisters sucking the souls of the innocent. People weredying or coming up weakened from blood loss—that was me, because I learned how to take some blood without infection or death. The word that the plantation was cursed spread to neighboring plantations and word was that mobs were amassing to root out who was behind these killings and illnesses. It was a loss of money and production, you see.
“The others on the plantation came to us, begging for an end to it, for the killings to stop. Effie wouldn’t listen to them. She’d decided to kill all the owners. She’d revolt and free the enslaved.
“But the bounty hunters got ahold of Effie’s lover, Fitzroy, and killed him right in front of Effie’s eyes. What they did to Fitzroy…”
There was a reason why Nana’s stories were well known. She had a way of telling them. Of making them so visual you could see the images move across you. She was a true griot, a storyteller, and as she told this horrible story of my aunt, I could see it all as if I were there myself.
Nana looked to Lyle, and he nodded for her to continue. “Fitzroy’s death was the final thing that did it, the final thread that held Effie together and allowed her to have reason. The men were coming for her next because they’d seen her with Fitzroy many times. She attacked them when they came for her. And she killed them horribly. I tried to help her. I told her we had to run, take the baby, and just run. But Effie wanted revenge for Fitzroy’s death. And she had always wanted it for being stolen and for her treatment here. I couldn’t convince her to run. She stayed and fought. I tried to fight, killing some alongside her. The plantation was in chaos. And I realized that we had made things worse for the others. We hadn’t thought of the effect our revolt would have on them. Wehadn’t asked what they wanted to do. And then there was the baby. Who would care for her? She couldn’t grow up not being free. I told Effie we needed to leave.
“Effie was enraged… There was no reconciling with her, and she just killed and changed, and the bloodlust took her over. She was not herself anymore. She could get not only herself killed but the baby and me. She could get all of these human Black people killed because the blame would fall on them. We were in hiding by now. I was terrified and I kept begging her that we needed to go. She changed into an adze. You know what that means.”
Nana Ama looked pointedly at me. She wouldn’t say aloud, especially with Hailey in the truck, the thing that was not only our greatest strength but our greatest weakness.
