She snapped, her long blackened nails and fingertips catching in the light. “Kinks. I’m still working the kinks out. So, I regret they caused your fall. But you are well now, yes? I have mended you?”
The iron taste in my mouth was unfamiliar, and I realized it wasn’t my blood.
It was hers.
I could feel its power surging through my veins like liquid fire, healing my body and filling it with vitality.
“We shall not be much longer.” She waved away her servant, the Renfield to her Dracula, with a flick of her fingers. That’s when I noticed the cuffs on her wrists. Nana Ama’s cuffs. They looked so wrong there.
“Where is your amulet? The one I saw in the dream?”
She watched me for a long time before answering. And instead of speaking, she pulled apart the opening of her cloak, revealing the amulet against her chest. “For safekeeping until I return back to my homeland and to the front gates of the Oosoro. My memory has told you what they are now, yes? My amulet and Ama’s cuffs are needed to unlock the door. Together. Our father always wanted us together. Not one twin without the other. Except Ama and I will never be together again.”
She sounded a little wistful.
“When I return without her, the trick will be on him. I guess Anansi is not the only trickster in the family?” She laughed, but there was no humor in it, only bitterness.
“You did not know of your lineage? Of our history?” Effie asked, her head cocked to the side as she studied me. Her teethglinted and her dark pupils held a crimson circle in the low light. Crimson, not gold like Nana Ama’s.
“Because I do as is our nature now. I feed how we’re supposed to feed. On humans. Often. Until they are dead. I do not care. Your auntie’s”—she emphasized the word and made it sound as if it were a curse—“eyes glow gold because she is weak and would rather take bits and pieces than accept who we have become. We no longer have palm oil to sustain us in the Skies. We have what this damned world of humans has provided for our sustenance, their blood. Their essence. Their obedience as our abalsoms.”
Our abalsoms.Monsterswas more like it, I thought.
Effie balked. “What do you consider these humans who live with you and Ama, these—” My head pulsed, my mind being raked too hard. “Kinfolk?” she finished.
She had no problem invading minds without permission. The act was so invasive and a violation. I wanted so much to push her out so my thoughts could be my own.
“Are these humans who swear fealty to you nothing but better versions of my followers?” Effie asked.
“Yours are monsters. Yours are sick with the hollowing, and they’ll never be human again. They’re zombies,” I replied.
She laughed. “Zombies. Is that what they are here? What makes your Kinfolk any different or better, girl? They follow your ways. They do your bidding. Even though Ama doesn’t always feed to kill, she has killed to feed, and still might on occasion, which makes her no better than me.”
It was way too much coming in at once. I needed space from her. From Effie’s words that made too much sense. From NanaAma’s love and care, the only parent I’d really known even when my mother was alive.
A small smile played on Effie’s lips as she read my thoughts like I was an open book, stoking the confusion, the rage, the betrayal of a denied history and lineage.
I shook my head, still woozy, images of the dream that wasn’t a dream crystal clear in my mind. I was having a hard time remaining in the present. I wanted to go back. I wanted to see the god who was my great-grandfather.
Effie said, “Good. That anger you are beginning to feel toward the liar. Keep that, Addae, hold it in you and thrive from it. Then you will really be like your true grandmother. Like me.”
She was right. My anger was an oncoming train with its horn blaring.
I was enraged at Nana—at Ama—for the lies she told me. But they weren’t lies. Not directly. She omitted the truth. Lies of omissions were just as bad as lies told directly. Weren’t they? But what was the harm in telling me where I came from? Why did she hide the fact she had a twin sister, that the Above was her home, and what had happened to her and her sister? Nana Ama had even hidden her age. Not centuries old and a former enslaved. But thousands of years old, maybe millennia.
Why didn’t she trust me enough to tell me any of that?
A red mist clouded my line of vision, and I closed my eyes to clear it. I couldn’t think this way. I wasn’t in control of my emotions. The blood Effie used to repair me was affecting me in ways I didn’t like. It was like a bad acid trip, like the inability to trust anyone seeping in. Paranoia and rage.
Ama had lied by omission, yes. But there had to be a reason why she’d left Effie behind.
Effie’s anger simmered and her eyes blazed, making me waver even with her blood and her story. I couldn’t throw away the last eighteen years of my life. Nothing compared to how long Ama and Effie had lived and what they’d been through, but I’d been around long enough to know all the good Nana Ama has been doing. Despite all Nana kept from me, she loved and protected me. She’d tried to raise me to be a person who helped, not a person who hurt. Nana would always be my grandmother.
“And what’s wrong with a little hurting after what they have done to people like you and me on this godforsaken rock?” Effie said.
“There is a difference between your abalsoms and the Kinfolk.Theyhave choice. They are human. They live without fear from her,” I said weakly. “But most of all, they are our family.”
Effie drew back as if I’d struck her. The red of her eyes flashed and her hand raised like it would hit me. I flinched, waiting for the blow that would take my head off.
