“Ours,” they replied together. “She is ours.”
It was a spoken ritual, this claiming, and every Kincaid woman knew what it meant. Sage had remained silent, but even she cowered as Galilee’s grandmother walked up to her. Collette slipped out of the way.
“Blood and dirt,” Darling said, reproach heavy in her mouth. “The Kincaids have made bargains in the belly of the creeks before our bloodline even had this name.”
The air looked like dusk now, even though it had been midafternoon just minutes ago. Collette stared out the window, worried. “It’s getting darker,” she said.
Darling didn’t look at her, still fixed on the cousin trembling next tothe stove. “The deal is struck and Gali is ours,” she said, and iron clanged in her words. “The girl’s a Kincaid.Youa Kincaid. Never question if she belongs here again. We ain’tnothingif we not loyal.”
Sage sniffled, her shoulders folding in on themselves. “I’m afraid, Nana Darling,” she whispered. “She holding too much light. Should be burning, but it’s so cold.” Her voice dropped even lower, soft with terror, her eyes glazing over. “What happens when she gets too bright? When she’s discovered?”
Collette glanced away from the window, frowning at Sage. “Is she having a vision?”she asked the rest of the women.
Sage was a seer, but her gift was never as clear as the family would have liked. The other women put down their work and gathered around.
“Fragments,” Shirley decided, after leaning in. “Glimpses of the future, but they’re all colored by fear.”
Darling turned away. “Fear is useless.”
She went to stand by Collette at the window, her silver plaits brushing against her shoulders. In the darkening outdoors, a young Galilee was staring up at the sky. She was eleven then, her hair in twists, barefoot and wearing a hand-me-down pinafore from her favorite cousin, Celestial, who was napping in the grass. A paperback was sprawled out next to Galilee, its pages dog-eared and well loved, and a handful of bees circled lazily above her like a halo. Her cousins Zélie and Leah were playing tag around her, shrieking with all the delight of youth. As the women watched, Galilee waved an impatient hand at the roiling clouds.
“Go away,” she scolded, her voice as sweet and high as a bell. “I was still reading.”
The sky paused, then the clouds rolled back and splintered into nothing, exposing the blue sky. Sunshine broke over the Kincaid house, and just like that, the world was reset.
Collette exhaled sharply, her fingers biting into the windowsill. “She’s never going to be safe, Nana Darling.”
Darling placed a wrinkled hand on her shoulder. “We’llmakeher safe. You just remember to call her in for dinner.”
Outside, Galilee curled back up with her book. She could hear the land humming under her body and feel the pull of roots winding deep in the dark earth, but the ache in her chest was loud. All the stings seemed to echo under her ribs, like part of her was as hollow as a dead tree, waiting to be resurrected. Galilee didn’t talk much about it to her family. They would want to fix her, and they wouldn’t rest until they figured it out. It would be exhausting. She would wait instead, and if it didn’t go away when she was older, maybe she would say something then.
And so the years passed. No one spoke to Galilee about deals cut on creek beds or the many small and uncanny things she could do. All the Kincaids were favored, one way or another, but no one talked to her about how some anointings are different from others, or how some little girls come not just from their mother’s bodies but from bloody bargains sealed in dirt and fleeing water. So Galilee continued carrying her stinging ache, and no one told her anything.
Given what she turned out to be, perhaps they should have tried.
I could have intervened at any point.
The girl was bright and sharp, but she was missing something, just enough for that missing to grow into somethinghungry—a chasm clamoring to be fed. I watched her from the dappled shadows of the drifting willows, this child who was strange enough to feel othered within her own family, even as peculiar as they all were. I watched her play with her cousins: the near-feral Celestial, sweet Zélie, and quiet Leah. I heard her soft snuffling breaths as she slept sprawled among them as the night breeze billowed out the curtains in their room. I smelled the salt of her tears each time Sage hurt her feelings. The halfway seer never got over her suspicion of the girl, and it spilled out in pieces—she gave Galilee the dirtiest chores, whispered gossip to the other aunts about her, just enough for some of them to start treating Galilee a little different too. Itadded up to a hundred small slights that cut deep into the child’s heart. It was cruel, most likely, but it was necessary.
This is what youdowith power. You cannot let it fade away or adapt to something lesser than itself just for the sake of mere comfort. It would be a terrible waste, and I had no intention of squandering Galilee Kincaid.
I had such plans for her.
1.
Galilee
The creeks in the forests around the Kincaid house did not extend into the nearby city of Salvation, so when Gali Kincaid turned twenty-five and left her family home for a downtown apartment, she also left the water and those old groaning trees behind. It hurt to leave, like she had torn off part of her body and left it seeping on the floor of her childhood bedroom. The wind wept when Collette drove Gali down the blue bottle road, and Gali had wept too, as the Kincaid house grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Nana Darling stood on the porch with Zélie and Leah, with Eunice and Shirley and Peony, until they all vanished around a curve. Celestial had refused to watch Gali leave, and Jesmyn had gone after her into the woods. Collette remained stony-eyed in the driver’s seat, her jaw edged with tension and her knuckles tight on the steering wheel of her blue pickup as she took her daughter away, a hive of bees buzzing in the bed of the truck.
Oh, Galilee Kincaid knew she was breaking her family’s hearts, but she left them and the land anyway. Everything had a cost.
“Be sure you want it,” Nana Darling had said, and Gali thought of her nightmares, her visions, the way some of the Kincaids looked at her when they figured she might not notice.
“I’m sure,” she’d answered.
It had now been a few months living in Salvation, and Gali had already asked herself several times if the cost was worth it. Kincaid land was uncomplicated in that it had been cared for by Kincaids for so long—Gali hadn’t anticipated what it would mean to live on land that didn’t recognize her. The earth didn’t hum to her the same way, and it didn’t cradle her at night. She went to the roof of her building to sit with her bees almost every afternoon so she could still have a tether to home, but Gali remained painfully aware that she was foreign here, that Salvation was threaded through with forces she didn’t know and didn’t want to be noticed by. Some nights, she woke up in a sweat with foreboding heavy on her neck, as if danger was pressing close, panting with all its teeth just inches behind her. Her sheets would be too warm, sometimes singed at the edges, and her hands dripped with light until she brushed her palms together to kill the glow. She didn’t tell her family because they’d worry that the foreboding was a true premonition. Besides, the light emanating from her hands was too unknown, too unreal, to share with anyone else. It meant there was something very wrong with her, and Gali’s mind shied away from that, dismissing it as a hallucination, as anxiety.
She wanted to be normal, so she bought new sheets and ignored the scorch marks on her mattress, ignored the way her bees would cluster over her bathroom mirror the mornings after, their buzzing bodies obscuring the glass. The creeks of her childhood stayed far away. Gali knew they were still there, cutting through fields and winding through dappled groves, holding memories as old as bone and as terrifying as the dark. Their foaming currents still showed up in her dreams, rippling around her calves, cold and biting, but Gali made sure she forgot any secrets they held by the time she woke up.
