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"She's a monster," I said, but the words had no weight anymore. "The stories⁠—"

“Frightened men told the stories. I told you that when you were seven." She squeezed my hands. "The Ewe elders paint her evil because they fear her hunger. They call her a vampire and demon with no soul. They accuse her of carrying disease, yet there’s no proof. She's older than those words. She's the hunger of the displaced. She's the loneliness of the Middle Passage given teeth. She's what survived when everything else drowned."

“You knew her in London?” I asked.

“I loved her fiercely.” Grandma's eyes were wet. "She found me crying in the Lowcountry when I came to study abroad as a young woman. I was twenty-four and so lonely I thought I'd die of it. She sat beside me, and I knew she was different, so I asked what she was. She told me the truth about herself, and I believed her, because I'd already read enough colonial anthropology to know what lies sound like." She laughed, and it was the laugh I remembered from my childhood, big and unselfconscious. "We were sisters for the three years I was there. Then I went home to marry your grandfather, and she continued to protect the Gullah from her marsh. Over the years, we stayed connected by writing letters, hundreds of them. They're in a tin box under Brother Seabrook's altar, if you ever want to read them."

A firefly drifted down and landed on her finger, glowing gold.

"She takes firefly form because fireflies are souls that haven't found rest," Grandma said softly. "She's been looking for rest for three hundred years. Searching for a home and someone who would see all of her and stay." She looked up at me. "I knew it would be you. From the day you were born, too long for your bassinet and screaming like you were already angry at the world. I knew."

"You sent me to her?” I asked, seeking confirmation of what I already knew.

"I gave you the knife. I gave you the stories—the real ones, underneath the frightening ones. I told you iron is for monsters and to be sure which one you were looking at." She touched my face. "I didn't send you or promise you to her. I just made sure you'd know her when you found her. The rest was always going to be your choice."

Behind her, the compound was filling with mostly women, old and young, in cloth from a dozen different centuries. They stood quietly and watched me with eyes that held something I recognized—the same gold thread that was in mine now.

"Who are they?" I needed to know.

"The ones she carries." Grandma didn't turn to look. "Every grandmother from the holds. Every night husband and night wife who's ever offered her their throat, live within her. Now that you're woven into her, they live a little in you too." Her smile shone bright, filled with pride. "You've got a big family now, Malik. Bigger than you ever knew."

"Grandma—" I didn't know what I was going to say. I considered apologizing for only believing the lies about Addie. I even considered apologizing for spending so many years committed to misunderstanding everything my grandmother had told me, but the words never came.

"I know, baby." She pulled me into her embrace as the familiar smell of palm oil comforted me. This was a love that never asked for anything in return. "Be happy and let her love you. Let yourself be woven. And when the pale man comes—" she pulled back and held my face in both hands "—remember what the iron is for."

The compound was fading, and the blue sky was fading to dusk.

"Wake up, nye lɔlɔ̃. She's calling you."

I was now awake in the same bed I’d been sharing with Addie as tears slipped down my face. Addie was watching me, propped on one elbow, her feline-like eyes wet with black tears, running slowly down her cheeks like oil.

"You saw her," she stated rather than asking.

"I saw her, and she said there are letters."

"Three hundred and twelve of them." Addie's voice cracked. "I've kept her memory since she died. I've kept her spirit close. Last night when our souls intertwined, I felt her move from me into you, and I knew—" She lay down and curled her warm, soft body around mine as she always did when she wanted to be close to me. "She's proud of you and happy for us. She's been waiting as long as I have."

"Thank you," I whispered.

“Don't thank me, love me. That's all I've ever wanted.”

“I can do that,” I reaffirmed, turning to kiss her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HUNT OR BE HUNTED

It happened on the fourth night after Celeste. I was on the porch past midnight, weaving by lamplight. Addie was in the marsh; she went most nights to feed, to fly, or just to be what she was under the moon. David was asleep. The fireflies drifted thick around the porch, hundreds of them, and I'd learned by then to read their moods the way you read weather. Tonight they were agitated. I watched them cluster, trying to pull toward the east.

Then I heard the shot.

A flat crack across the water. A heartbeat later, I felt it, a bright, small pain behind my eyes. I could only describe the pain as having my tooth pulled with no numbing agent. Addie had described this pain to me as signifying one of her lights was gone. Then another crack and more pain. The fireflies on the porch went wild, rising in a roaring column.

I was running for safety so I could decide on a plan of attack. I'd brought the knife from the hotel three days earlier, wrapped in Grandma's cloth, and I'd set it on the shelf beside the door without saying why. I grabbed it now. The red kente came away in my hand. The iron was cold and heavy and fit my grip like it had been waiting.

Heading down the shell road to the path through the oaks. I’d made my way to the marsh opening up silver under the moon. I ran the way I'd run at Durham with the ball under my arm and a wall of forwards coming, and I didn't feel the roots or the mud or the briars. I only felt her. She was in pain and filled with fury. I came out into the clearing where the grass grew tall, and I saw them.

Addie was in her true form. Her translucent wings spread wide, veined like a dragonfly's, catching the moonlight and breaking it into color. Her skin mimicked cypress bark and beetle shell, glowing from inside. Too many arms and eyes burning with disdain. Usually she was magnificent in her truest form, but right now she was hurt—one wing hung wrong with a ragged hole punched through it as dark fluid dripped into the mud.