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She took me to a back room where boxes of oral histories sat in climate-controlled dark, the air smelling of old paper. I knew the memories were older and sacred.

"The Ewe people brought her. Not the body but the idea of her. She was waiting in the stories they told each other, the songs they sang when the overseers weren't listening, and when enough of them died in one place, and enough blood hit this ground, she was set free to find something to wear."

"She's wearing a woman now," I said. "A wealthy woman who resides on Wadmalaw Island."

Yvonne's expression shifted—pity, maybe, or recognition. "What you want with her? You been doing your homework on her. You think you gonna kill her? With what's in that bag?"

I didn't ask how she knew. "She killed my cousin."

"Your cousin ain't dead." She pulled a file from a cabinet and handed me a photograph. It was David, at a family barbecue in Lewisham two summers ago with his arm around a mystery woman. Yvonne turned the photo over, and on the back, in handwriting I didn't recognize—elegant, looping, old—someone had written D. Owusu with the date.

"He ain't dead, he just ain't here no more. Not the way you understand,” she said cryptically.

She handed me a second photograph. David again, standing in front of a shrimp boat, the marsh gold behind him. He was thinner than I remembered and wearing a smile I'd never seen before—peaceful, emptied of something, filled with something else. Behind him, barely visible in the shadow of the boat's cabin, stood a woman. Plus-sized, regal, her skin seeming to drink the light rather than reflect it. She wore a headwrap in gold and crimson. My heart was palpitating as I examined it further, noticing the colors belonged to my grandmother. It was the same kente she'd been buried in.

"She's got him," I said. "In the marsh,” half asking and half stating.

"She's got a lot of men in the marsh." Yvonne's voice went soft, almost tender. "Night husbands, we call them. Men who couldn't find their way home, so she made them a new one. She feeds on them gently and keeps them dreaming. They age slow, and they don't suffer. They learn to weave, to remember, to be something other than lonely."

She touched my arm, her fingers warm and dry, and added. "But you ain't gonna find her with iron and anger. You gonna find her when she want to be found. Also, Brother Seabrook gonna want to look at you first. He gonna want to see if you worth her time."

"Worth her—" I stopped. "She's a monster."

"She's many things." Yvonne wrote directions on a slip of paper to help me get to the Praise House on Johns Island along with a name and time. "Come with an open hand, not a closed fist. Leave the knife at your hotel. You bring iron to her, she gonna show you what she really is, and you ain't ready for that."

I took the paper, turning to leave. As I reached the door, she stopped me.

"One more thing." Her voice dropped. "There's a white man who’s been asking the same questions you’re asking. He came in three days ago—Dr. Harlan Vance. Says he's a folklorist from a college in Virginia and he says he’s writing a book."

"And?" I asked, probing further.

"And he's got a rifle case in his truck. He asked me where the Gullah bury their dead, and whether we still practice the old ways, and whether any of us had ever consorted—his word—with the thing in the marsh." Her mouth tightened. "I looked into him, and he's hunted before claiming research. He’s been hunting the Adze all over the world. From Haiti to Benin, even somewhere in Brazil. Everywhere he goes, he leaves bodies and calls it God's work. He doesn't just want her, Malik; he wants everyone who knows her. Everyone who's ever protected her. He thinks we're all infected."

A cold thread wound through my chest at the thought of him exacting his revenge before I could exact mine. "Did you tell him anything?"

"I told him sweetgrass only grows where the salt and fresh water mix, and I hoped he'd go wade out there and find out what else does." She almost smiled. "Watch yourself. He's gonna see a tall Black man from London asking about the Adze, and he's gonna think you're one of hers. Maybe you are, maybe you ain't, yet. But he won't wait to find out."

I thanked her for the heads up and walked out into the oak shade, standing for a long moment with the photograph of David in my hand, his new smile, his new thinness, the woman in my grandmother's colors standing behind him like a shadow or a shelter. Across the parking lot, a white pickup with Virginia plates sat with its engine off. The windows were tinted, keeping me from seeing what’s inside, but I felt it—the attention, the weight of being looked at by someone who'd already decided what I was.

I got in my rental and headed to Johns Island. In the rearview, I checked to make sure the pickup didn't follow. It didn't need to because the driver knew where I was going. We were going to the same place.

CHAPTER THREE

THE TEACHER

Brother Seabrook's Praise House sat at the end of a shell road under oaks so old their branches touched the ground and rose again like the knuckles of some buried giant. The building was no bigger than a garden shed, painted white, with a single wooden cross above the door that looked older than the state. Inside, rough benches faced a plain altar. There was no pulpit. The Gullah have never needed anyone standing above them to talk to God.

He was waiting on the porch, working a sweetgrass coil in his lap. He didn't look a day over 70, but his hands gnarled from decades of weaving; fingers that moved with a grace that belied their age gave him away. His eyes searched and easily found my intentions before I'd finished walking up the steps.

"You got the look," he said, not glancing up. "The look of somebody who thinks they’re bringing light to darkness, sit."

I sat on the step below him. Spanish moss moving, but the breeze couldn't be felt.

"The Adze is old," Seabrook said, his voice gravel and honey. "Older than Charleston. Older than the Ewe, maybe. They say she finds children sleeping and feeds on their blood. It’s believed she brings sickness, that she's a vampire that hates everything that breathes," he resolved, pulling a stitch tight.

"And what do you say?" I was curious to know.

"I say that's fear talking. Fear of what flies in the dark. Fear of what takes without asking. Fear of a woman who's hungry and doesn't apologize for it." He looked at me then, and his eyes were ancient and amused and sad all at once. "What they don't say is she was human once. What they don't say is she feeds on blood for a reason. Since her arrival here, she’s never harmed a child. Never brought sickness or disease.”