“I ran with the baby. They caught Effie, she lost her amulet, and they killed this devil monster they couldn’t explain. They left her body so they could get other people to come see it, this monster that had been making everyone sick or dead. I knew they would search for me because if there was one, there would be the other. I asked one of the people running with me if they’d watch the baby. I changed and took my sister’s body, burying her near Savannah, deep in swampland where I thought no one would find her. And that was the end of it.”
“You didn’t know that she was still alive?” I said, shocked. “When you took her?”
Nana shook her head. “I didn’t know. She was dead in every sense of the word. I had no idea she was in a sort of living death. Remember, this was a first for us too. Being away from home transformed what we were. You being half human is new. That’s whyyour Light—” Her eyes slid suspiciously to Hailey. “That’s why we can’t definitively say how and when, or even why, for you. I did what I thought I needed to do to save the baby and save myself and help to protect the others as best I could. Effie and I had wrought all these problems on them. We’d jeopardized them long enough, and I had to make amends. Effie would have eventually destroyed everything. She would have turned on our fellow Kinfolk on the plantation if she hadn’t been killed and I hadn’t buried her.
“I couldn’t leave the proof of us, of adze. I couldn’t let the men desecrate her body. We were on foreign land, but I needed to send Effie home properly, as had been custom in Africa. I spoke to the gods to protect her and see her to Asamando. I prayed and hoped she would never be discovered.”
“But she was alive, Nana. Didn’t you feel her essence? Her thread of life?” I thought about Naira’s thread and how it called to me for help. The connection was weak, but it was still there. Wasn’t there a connection between sisters?
“I didn’t feel anything. Until that earthquake a few months back. Then I felt a faint emittance of energy, in and out. She has learned how to conceal herself from me. It’s also been centuries, and our connection was severed. There, Addae, is your who and why.”
I looked into Nana Ama’s eyes, stunned by these revelations. I couldn’t believe she’d kept so much pain and loss buried for so many years.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw lights swing into view, growing brighter.
Then everything turned upside down and the world stopped cold.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Explorer spun twice before crashing to a stop against a tree, the engine clicking like a time bomb. The unexpectedness and force of the impact was disorienting, the actions that came after happening in a flurry of movements and in a blurry haze. Hailey, Sekou, and Lyle were out cold, their heads against the windows and the steering wheel.
A pair of hands, fingernails long and sharpened to points, whipped in so fast I couldn’t tell what was real and what was imagination. One hand wrapped its long, brown, elegant fingers around the seat belt that secured Nana Ama and plucked the belt right out of its housing like dental floss. Then they slid, almost lovingly, down to Nana, as if relishing in the feel of my grandmother, who tried in vain to beat at these powerful hands. They moved quickly because Nana’s incapacitation and surprise were wearing off. The hands grabbed Nana by her jacket lapels and yanked her out of the car. The owner of those hands said nothing, but the intensity of its presence was staggering. There was nosound, no movement from anything else. Even the ticking time bomb of the stalled engine seemed to stop. I held my breath.
The next sound I heard was awhooshand the wind blew harder, pushing a sickening smell into the car. And then the noises began. The noises from the alleyway outside Hailey’s home. The noises of despair from my nightmares. All around the car, there were skittering nails on metal and scuffling on the dirt ground. Things, multiple things, grunted and keened as if in pain, as if hungry.
My vision went in and out as I fought to stay awake. My head throbbed and I was getting weaker and weaker, the nourishment from the small amount of blood I took from Hailey dissipating under all the pressure and exertion I wasn’t used to. It was getting hard to stay awake and alert. To see who was prying open the doors and pulling us out. To fight against the sickly-sweet and rotting smell of infection flooding the car as the outside air blew in.
The voice I’d heard back in Charleston accompanied the glistening face of a pale Dr. Franco, with intelligent, red-rimmed eyes—Franco, the former lead researcher for the Endowment, bending down so he was eye level when it was only me left in the car. He held a phone to his ear.
“Thank you, Mr. Hall, for use of the Endowment resources. The… extraction went well. The lady thanks you and will provide you the samples you wish to have, as well as the return of your nephew.”
I felt like I should know what he was talking about, but thinking was too hard at the moment. My head pulsated with too much sensory input. Too many of those things around me with thekwandamu steadily eating its way not only through their blood, but their very souls—there would be no Asamando for them. Franco wasn’t like them, didn’t have the hollowing devouring him from the inside out so he’d end up nothing but a human exoskeleton. But he didn’t have the blood either. I wasn’t sure what he was. He continued, speaking to whomever—whatever was waiting for his instructions.
His voice sounded far away, like he was moving away from me at lightning speed.
“Lock the others away until the lady is ready for them. And the girl—”
But the rest got swallowed up when I faded to black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t think so? But, like, I don’t know. We’ve been in here for a minute. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
I recognized that voice as Sekou’s. The other was the voice of a ghost. I forced my eyes to open, finding three heads peering over me like an umbrella. I blinked again as my brain fired on all synapses and called out names as my eyes jumped from face to face. Hailey. Sekou. Naira.
My breath caught. Naira!
“I’m not dead, yet,” I croaked, waving them away so I could get up. I shot upright, unsure what to do first. Grab my best friend who I hadn’t seen for what felt like an eternity? Punch her for scaring me and dragging me into all this shit? Cry? I was so happy to see her annoying self. I was happy to see the extra-long box braids with the electric-blue tips she’d been sporting before she left, her once fresh do now old with a lot of new growth at the scalp. Her clothes were dirty and torn. Like she’d been in a fight. Or, I guess, held prisoner by demented people, a mad scientist, and a royallypissed-off adze on a power trip. All things considered, Naira could have been worse off. She was alive. That’s all that mattered.
“Where’s my grandmother?” I asked.
I searched around the dank, dark cellar, once used to keep food supplies for a family centuries ago, now grayish, with contemporary lighting fixtures screwed into the stone walls. The lights made the whole thing look creepy and gloomy.
The room smelled of stale air and old dust and dirt and rot, lots of rot. A few dirt-crusted jars of preserved food still lined the built-in wooden shelves, among others that were broken either from someone or from years of rot and disrepair. I had so many thoughts sitting here. The first being that enslaved servants had bustled in and out of this room, grabbing items the cook needed for meals for the family, bringing in fresh jars and food to keep for the next meal. I could nearly see them going in and out.
“My grandmother?” I asked again, rubbing the fog away. I tried to concentrate, send feelers out for any sign of my grandmother, but there was too much noise around me, so much noise right on the other side of the locked door.
