I bristled.
She waved a dismissive hand, as if to saycalm down. It was such a perfect mimic of my mother’s own gesture that I’d felt my throat thicken.
“The dagbato is a crossroads demon, one our family has had a deal with for generations. Your mother broke that deal, and the dagbato killed her for it. Heart attack, ke?” She’d scoffed. “I’m here because I need you to uphold your end of the bargain before your … symptoms … start to manifest, and the dagbato decides to kill you, too.”
Madness, my mother’s voice whispered. And, like her good little lamb, I’d listened.
“Don’t think because I’m letting you witness this that we suddenly have a relationship,” I said coldly.
“Oh, you’relettingme, is it?”
I hadn’t reacted to the dangerous tone. My mother had been just as dramatic, like she’d ironically forgotten my training; I don’t react to kicks and punches and literal fire, why would I react to a tone of voice?
The silence had stretched until the body was in the ground, covered in a mound of dirt. The gravediggers had left us afterward, their money safe in their pockets.
Her loss hit me all over again, slamming into my back like a truck. What was I going to do without her? How I was going to manage? At least she’d owned the house.
The painfully empty house, filled now with only memories and reminders.
God, I wanted Rosemary.
Ineededher.
My claws threatened to pop. I grit my jaw so hard I was practically shoving my teeth back into my gums, my entire skull aching with it.
All the reasons why I couldn’t have her. Why leaving her behind had been the right thing to do.
“I see you’re not ready to receive my message,” my grandmother said eventually. I felt her searing gaze on the side of my face. Even though I hadn’t been looking directly at her, I had felt her amusement. “I’m going to give it, shall we say, ten years?”
Ten years had been exactly how long it had taken. When my already heightened senses elevated even more. When my body began to … change. When I felt every single emotion a thousandfold. When the hunger, which had suspiciously—though only barely—quieted after I’d left Rosemary, began to claw at my belly once more.
When something that had once been easily ignored, threatened to become all that I am.
My deterioration had been slow, so slow I’d ignored it. It had been a stray leaf brushing lightly against my ankle, yet when next I’d looked, I was completely enveloped in vines, wound so tightly I could barely breathe.
I don’t remember the dog. Maybe I refuse to remember. I’d come to myself in a heady daze, the hunger, for once, marginally satisfied. I was squatting in the backyard of the house I’d once shared with my mother—a few feet from where I’d buried her. My mouth and my front had been soaked in red, like just now, my right hand still curled mercilessly around the dog’s limp throat, great chunks of its flesh missing. Bitten and torn off.
Its rib cage lay ripped brutally open, its heart gone.
I’d felt my mother’s presence standing over me, glaring down like I was a disgusting slug. She had screamed in my head, that perhaps she had gone too easy on me if I’d forgotten my training this fucking easily.
I hadn’t even bothered with cleaning the blood off before I’d tried to contact my grandmother with blurry eyes, a tightening throat, and shaking hands. She’d said something about a deal. About “symptoms”. She had to know something—a way to help me stop it. To help me re-wrap the sluggishly unspooling thread of my control.
Only, at the exact moment I’d made that decision, her message had come, landing in my phone like my panic had summoned it.
Edémi,
If you’re reading this, I am already dead.
She’d left me everything; all her assets, a sentient ancestral home, and the secrets of our family.
Fuck. It’s only been a few days since I’d gotten that message, but it feels like a lifetime has passed, my life now segmented into four parts: Before and After Rosemary, and Before and After the Truth.
Imagine if I hadn’t left Rosemary back then, when I’d still believed my affliction was just “madness”. When I’d believed all that training had helped me suppress this—thishunger,when in reality, no amount of training would have helped. My ancestors had literally had to make a deal with a crossroads demon for that very purpose, with hundreds of years of my foremothers fulfilling this deal.
Until my mother had broken her end of the bargain, and my grandmother had tried futilely to get me to keep to mine.
I’m not simply losing control, or whatever illusion of it I’d thought I’d had.
