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Galilee Kincaid was born with an ache inside her.
She’d felt it for as long as she could remember, continuous and insistent, a thousand small stings that never let up. Sometimes it swelled into a wanting with no direction, just an explosion of volume and intensity—sharp wings that tore her apart over and over again. She learned to breathe through it, to accept the stings even as the ache cost her sleepless nights staring at her ceiling while cicadas shrieked outside her window.
Galilee had grown up in the deep country, many miles outside the nearby city of Salvation. The water whispered that far out in the land; it sang and bubbled and held all kinds of secrets in large, scaled bodies and powerful jaws. It carried whispers over moss-covered rocks, spilling in small waterfalls as black birds flew in circles against a lurid sky. In the forest, dark, gangling figures snapped through the underbrush, and the white-tailed deer screamed as they fled on their delicate, panicked limbs. The Kincaid women had lived on that land since before they took the name, and it had been many decades since they built the monstrously large house in which Galilee was raised, surrounded by aged oak trees and weeping willows. A winding road led to the sprawling porch, and every tree lining that road was adorned with a storm of blue bottles, the glass spinning in the sunlight.
The Kincaids were led by their matriarch, Darling Kincaid, and the house was filled with generations of women—Darling’s nieces and herdaughters, alltheirdaughters in turn. When the girls came of age, they often stayed in the big house, but sometimes they left for towns and cities nearby: St. Paradise, Lucille, Cypress. No matter where they ended up, Kincaid women kept no men and bore no sons. Those who remained on the land were a little wilder than the others—fishing in the endless creeks, hunting for meat and for things that did not belong on this side of the veil, blood on their hands and ease in their throats. Every single one of them watched Galilee closely, because they knew she wassomething, though no one could say exactly what. The child smelled of bones under dead leaves, and sometimes, when she played in the gardens, the bees covered her arms and chest in a thick blanket while her white teeth laughed through the swarm, certain that none of her tiny buzzing companions would ever sting her. The Kincaids were careful not to speak to Galilee about her strangeness, only to each other when the child was safely out of the way, when she couldn’t hear anything that might make her feel different or like she didn’t belong. No matter how strange she was, the Kincaidsknewshe belonged, because they had decided the moment the newborn Galilee had been placed in her mother Collette’s arms.
In their bright kitchen, Collette Kincaid worked a round of piecrust dough under her rolling pin and felt it exhale beneath her hands. Her cousins and sisters and nieces were talking about her daughter again, the little strange girl with inky eyes and copper hair, with freckles and dark honeycomb skin. Collette was tired of hearing it.
“Let her be a child,” she snapped. “Don’t ask her for more.”
“Just a laying of hands,” one of the cousins argued. “Shirley swears her knee hasn’t been hurting since Gali helped her rub it down with ointment last week. It won’t take her but a minute to help Peony.”
“Celestialmade that ointment,” Shirley countered. Collette shot a grateful look at her sister for trying to deflect.
“Exactly,” another cousin chimed in. “It’s got nothing to do with Gali.”
“Can’t hurt to try!”
“Jesmyn, why don’t you tell Peony to use the damn garden stool we got her and maybe her back won’t hurt so much!”
“You cold as a snake, Eunice. My wife is hurting—”
“Enough.”The entire kitchen fell into a respectful hush as Darling Kincaid looked up from her tumbler of whiskey. “That girl is anointed.” Her voice was both a rasp and a blade, and her descendants cringed. Darling Kincaid was the last of her generation after her sisters had passed. Her hair was long and coarse and silver, braided into small plaits that hung around her shoulders. “Thatgirlis also too damn young for y’all to be hanging your hearts on her like this. Whatever God gave her? It ain’t no tool to be picked up like a damn wrench.”
When Galilee was born, something had bruised Darling’s spirit terribly. She never spoke of it, but her daughters felt the difference—a millstone of grief swinging from their mother’s neck, a wild sorrow that hung in the back of her gaze and cut her smiles short. Still, Darling was Galilee’s fiercest protector, no matter what the child had cost her.
Jesmyn lowered her gaze, a little shamed in the wake of her pleading for Galilee to lay hands on her wife. “Not a tool, Nana Darling. A gift.”
Darling’s voice took on even more of an edge. “A giftshewill use in her own time, whenshefeels good and ready.”
There was silence again, then a cousin who was boiling berries on the stove spoke up. “Now we on the subject...” Everyone swiveled their heads to look at her, and a flush crept up the cousin’s neck. “I know no one likes to say this about Gali, but we’ve all noticed, I know we have. Shesmellsdifferent—”
A muted but collective gasp went around, and Collette stepped back, flour falling off her hands. It was dangerous to say things like that out loud, even as well warded as the Kincaid house was.
“Hush, child,” Eunice warned in a hoarse whisper. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Collette glanced as the sky began to darken outside.Goddammit,she thought. It was as if the world was always waiting for some things tobe said about Galilee, constantly eavesdropping. The sunlight that had been filtering into the kitchen was fading, but the cousin hardened her jaw and put down her red-stained wooden spoon.
“I know the smell of wrong worlds and misplaced creatures,” she hissed, then gestured widely toward the fields and swampy forest that surrounded their home. “We don’t live out here for nothing!”
Her words brought in more darkness as a thunderous cloud rolled over the house. Collette lunged across the kitchen to clap a hand over her cousin’s mouth.
“Bequiet, Sage!” she hissed. “You know better!”
Sage’s eyes filled with hurt, and she pushed down Collette’s hand. “I just wanna know when you’re gonna tell us what she is.”
“She’s mydaughter,” Collette snarled.
“You know what I mean.”
Collette flinched, but Sage grabbed her wrist tightly.
“Why are wehidingher?”
“Quiet!” Darling’s voice cracked cowhide slick through the room as she stood up, her dark eyes brutal. “When anyone asks what that child is, what do we answer?” She raked her gaze across her family, and they lowered their eyes.
