And way below in the bowels of the house, the noise of the creatures amplified, Effie’s hold on them loosening a bit more. I tore myself away from Effie to Nana, who had slipped down a little from Effie’s distraction of me. If I could keep her busy, Nana could get free.
Two pairs of eyes looked up at me, one stunned and the other as if I was expected. I swung my gaze from my grandmother to her sister.
“There she is.” Effie’s smile was devious. “Fitting, don’t you think, that the child be here to watch me rip your thieving heart out and drink you dry? You took everything from me. You have been living my life.”
What did she mean Nana was living her life? My head felt like it would explode. I grabbed it, grimacing through its invasion.
“Because of that damnable choice,” Effie said, answering my unspoken question. “Nyame, the supreme god.” She said it likeit was a curse. “Our choice to leave the pantheon of gods. Our punishment for doing so. Our father giveth and he taketh away.”
Effie read my confusion with glowing crimson eyes, a stark and horrifying contrast to Nana’s golden. One stoked fear and chaos to feed her rage while the other gave her life to use her damning blood to heal, to give life. Two twins with journeys vastly diverted. Different enough to physically change the same healing gift they had, their whole being, their adze into something like Effie, evil, vengeful, resentful, and wanting everyone to pay for what she’d been through.
“Dear child, you are mine.” The word stretched for syllables, like she relished in my misery and shock, finding pleasure in the truth of where I came from.
“You are ofmyblood. She stole your mother, my child, from me and thus you as well. Look at the thief and the liar. She betrayed not only me, but you as well.”
I looked at Nana, the only person who’d been there for me when my own mother couldn’t. The one who’d still had faith in me even though my father was human and we didn’t know how I would turn out from the first moment I started to feel charged, like I was lighting up from the inside out, and Nana said, “We’ll ride out the unknown together.” Nana still believed in me. More than I’d ever believed in myself. Yet that didn’t keep her from lying to me my whole life.
Hadn’t I thought those same things earlier? That Nana had betrayed me and lied? I was so angry and hurt then. I still was.
“Addae, look at me.”
I did, caught in her hypnotizing eyes. Thinking how beautifully red they were.
“You are of my blood,” she repeated, her voice like a snake charmer. Her words coiled themselves around me, constricting my brain in a vise, squeezing out any good thoughts I had.
How could I ever be of her blood and not of Ama’s, who had spent years trying to pay for not only her mistakes, but Effie’s as well? I could see that now. Centuries cultivating the elixir she had created from her blood and godly energy, offering the Kin choice of community and life if they accepted her gift. Ama had found a way to live and thrive without using humans as a meal ticket or thrusting them into mindless servitude, a new race of unthinking, unfeeling, forever-hungry shells of former selves. She didn’t take lives unceremoniously.
Effie, on the other hand, had no care for life outside her own. And she would eventually only see me as one other thing to own. How was she any better than those who had enslaved her, who had traumatized her, whose evil had driven her to become this way?
I was the grandchild ofthat?
No way in hell!
I screamed, pushing Effie and her corruptive thoughts out of my head with everything I had.
The ground shifted beneath me, and Nana dropped like a sack of weights to the floor, released from Effie’s mental hold on her already weakened body. She landed, one knee to the ground, steadying herself. She struggled to come to me.
I reached out. “Nana!”
“Don’t call her that,” Effie snapped. “Don’t call her that ever again.”
I tried to get to Nana, but Effie merely flicked her hand, pushing me back like I weighed nothing. I stumbled back with my arms pinwheeling to keep me upright as I careened into the narrow hall and into a group of abalsoms who had suddenly appeared with Luke stumbling ahead of them.
He was a complete mess. Thick, black veins had crawled all the way up to his scalp. His eyes looked rheumy, leaking tears of blood. His mouth looked horrible, teeth fighting one another for space in it. His once-blond hair was slimy and dirt- and blood-crusted, and hanging around his face like wet Silly String.
I struck my hands out to stop my backward momentum, hitting against the splintered doorframe. The wood caught my palm, snagging it, and ripped a chunk clean off. Bright blood dripped. Both Effie and Nana froze, both looking at me, one intrigued and the other in terror because they knew what blood spilled in this house of horrors meant.
On the other side of the doorframe, I stopped myself, where I’d noticed Luke and the rest hulking there, all semblance of their humanity lost because these were the ones most far gone. They breathed collectively. Like sharks, they circled me, the scent of my blood churning in the air, filtering into the noses they were sniffing the air with. Until they caught the scent of my blood.
And my being an adze or not made no difference to them.
They snarled, hissing at me as one, the scent of blood thick in their nostrils while inside, the two sisters went at it again. NanaAma made a run for me, breaking Effie’s control of them. She couldn’t control someone as strong as Nana and keep her monsters at bay and see to me at the same time. Even Effie had her limitations.
I backed out past the monsters, my hands held out to hold them at bay. Dumb move, because my hand was still bleeding and it only churned them up even more. The abalsoms’ humanoid claws were ready to scratch every piece of skin from my bones. I shuffled back, trying to keep space between them and me. Could I take them on? All of them?
I snuck a peek over my shoulder, noting the banister and the railing overlooking the front hall of the plantation home only a couple feet behind me, with the abalsoms closing in. I could hear yelling from down below and commotion as Lyle and Sekou tried to get past Franco to the stairs.
The abalsoms pushed me toward the edge, closer and closer—toward the railing, the rickety one where a piece of rotted, hollowed-out wood had come off in my hand when I’d grabbed it to run up the stairs, spraying dusty petrified wood, now like sawdust, in the air.
