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PROLOGUE (THE WHITE LION)

The ship was called The White Lion, though there was nothing reminiscent of African lions in the paleness of its wood, sails, and especially its pale crew with their cold, lifeless eyes that looked through us as if we were already ghosts. I was twelve years old, or perhaps thirteen—the age stopped mattering somewhere between the fort at Keta and the open water. Only hunger and survival mattered after that.

My mother had braided my hair the morning they took me. I remember that more clearly than I remember her face now, which shames me, though I've had three hundred years to make peace with shame. Her fingers in my hair, the smell of shea butter and woodsmoke, the way she hummed while she worked—a song about a fish who wanted to be a bird. She pressed her lips to my forehead when she finished and told me to hurry back with the eggs before the sun got high.

I never made it back. The men came instead, out of the mangroves where the brackish water met the sea, and they took eight of us before the village even knew to scream or fight.

Where they held us was decorated with the stink of waste and the particular sweetness of bodies beginning to rot while still breathing. Aside from the stench of decaying flesh, fear wafted through the air where two hundred of us were packed so tight we slept on each other, in each other, became one mass of suffering that wept and prayed and died in shifts. The men who owned us came down sometimes, their lanterns casting shadows that danced like demons on the planks. They raped women and girls before chaining us back to the other captured bodies like we were a pile of shit. They took whatever they wanted. They believed they could, because they'd forgotten—or never cared that we were human, that we were sacred, that Gods loved us they didn't have names for.

I died on the thirty-second day. Not my body, it was stubborn, clinging to life with a tenacity that would've made my mother proud. But the girl I was—Abla, born on a Tuesday, who laughed at roosters and dreamed of marrying the boy with kind eyes from the next compound—that girl drowned in the bilge water sloshing around our ankles, the water that carried the waste and blood and tears of two hundred stolen souls.

I remember the moment the darkness started closing in. My heartbeat slowed and continued to fade until it stopped completely, but then there was the light. Not the light of heaven. Not the light of any God the missionaries would later try to sell me. The light of fireflies. Thousands of them, millions, pouring through the cracks in the hull, through the gaps between planks, through the spaces where the pain was too great for the world to hold together. They swarmed me. They entered my mouth, my nose, my skin, my blood. They spoke in a language older than Ewe, older than my captors’ native tongue, older than the division between living and dead.

“Become,” they said. “Become and survive. Become and remember. Become and avenge.”

I became.

I fed for the first time that night. A sailor came down to check the cargo—that's what they called us, cargo—and he saw a girl lying still in the corner, a girl who looked already dead, who couldn't fight back. He unchained me and dragged me to the shadows, and I let him. I let him touch me. I let him think I was helpless. I let him expose his throat with his eagerness, his hunger, his certainty of his own power.

Then I showed him what power was.

My teeth—newly sharp, newly hungry—found the thick vein in his neck. My mouth, no longer entirely human, latched onto the wound and I drank. His blood was wrong. I knew it instantly, the way you know spoiled meat before it reaches your tongue. Thick with hatred. Sour with the conviction of his own superiority. It burned going down, poisoned, devilish, the blood of a man who could do what he did to children and sleep soundly after. I spat it out. I retched. And then, because the hunger was still there and he was still gasping beneath me, I did what my body already knew how to do.

I tore his throat out.

Not drinking. Killing. My nails went into the soft flesh beneath his jaw, and I pulled, and the sound he made was wet and brief, and I've never forgotten it. I've heard it hundreds of times since. It's the sound that keeps my people safe.

The women saw. The ones still alive, still conscious. They didn't scream. They understood. They'd prayed for deliverance, and I'd become their answer. They whispered my name—Abla, Abena, the Tuesday child, the special one. They told me stories of the adze, the night flyer, the firefly who fed on blood and became the bridge between the living and the dead.

But they also taught me, those women in the dark. They taught me who to feed from. A grandmother from Anlo, dying of fever, pulled me close and pressed her wrist to my mouth. "Take mine," she said. "Mine is sweet. Mine remembers home. Take it and carry me with you, child, because I won't make it to the other side and I don't want to be forgotten."

I drank, and she was right. Her blood was warm as palm wine, rich as yam porridge, and inside it I found her whole life—her village, her husbands, the children she'd buried and the ones she'd raised. She died smiling. She lives in me still.

That's what the stories never say. The men who fear me, the ones who've hunted me across three centuries with their iron and their silver and their crosses—they don't understand. I don't feed on my people as prey. I feed as communion. I take only from those who give, and I carry them, all of them, every grandmother and lonely fisherman and lost son who's ever offered me their throat. They aren't gone. They're woven into me.

The others—the pale ones, the captors, the ones who believe they can own what isn't theirs—I don't drink from them. I can't. Their blood is poison. When they come for me, when they come for my people, I kill them with my hands and my teeth, and I leave them for the marsh.

The ship made land at Sullivan's Island. The survivors were sold, scattered, broken like pottery. I followed them as fireflies, slipping through keyholes, drifting over rice fields, finding the ones who were dying and asking if they wanted to be remembered. I found the Gullah. They knew me, not as a monster—as an ancestor. They gave me shape, a name, a purpose. I became the Lady of the Marsh.

And I waited. For three hundred years, I waited for someone who would see all of me—firefly and woman, protector and wife, the hunger and the hand that holds—and not run.

I found his grandmother first. Akosua, in a London museum in 1963, weeping over a mask that looked like home. I told her the truth. She believed me. She said, "He'll be lonely, the grandson I haven't had yet. He'll be searching. Promise me you'll wait."

I promised.

He's coming now. I can feel him on the wind—tall, dark, angry, carrying iron meant for me. Ahead of him by three days comes another—a pale man with a rifle and a cross and the oldest hatred in the world. I've survived his kind before, and I'll survive again, but this time, I don't want to survive alone.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARRIVAL

Iarrived in Charleston on a Thursday in late October, when the humidity had finally broken but the air still carried summer's memory like perfume on skin that hasn't been touched in years. I’d made the trek from Heathrow to Atlanta on British Airways, now heading to catch a puddle-jumper down to Charleston International with my grandmother's iron knife wrapped in red kente cloth and buried deep in my carry-on where TSA wouldn't find it. They never looked even though I'd wanted them to.

On the small plane, I fished the knife out my bag as it landed cold against my hip as I walked through the terminal. Iron, forged in Ho by my great-grandfather, passed down through four generations for one purpose: to kill the Adze. Grandma had put it in my hands when I was nineteen, the year before she died, and she'd said something I didn't understand at the time. "Iron is for monsters, Malik. Make sure you know which one you're looking at before you use it.” I assumed she was being poetic because she usually was.

The Charleston airport was small and smelled of jasmine and jet fuel and something damp underneath, a mineral richness I'd read about in a dozen books on Lowcountry ecology and never actually breathed. I collected my duffel—three changes of clothes, two notebooks, a copy of The Golden Bough I'd been pretending to read for six years, and my knife—and stepped into the afternoon light.

The cab driver was a Black man in his sixties with a Gullah accent thick as the pluff mud. He took me over the Ravenel Bridge, and I saw the city for the first time: church spires piercing a sky the color of weak tea, the Cooper River glittering, the promise of the Atlantic beyond. The breeze through the window carried salt and something older that I was eager to discover. My blood hummed with it, a frequency in my bones like a memory I couldn't access.