Page 13

She crossed to me and took my face into her cold hands. "I fed today. A shrimper who wanted to dream of his drowned wife came seeking me. I'm strong enough to be gentle with you."

She kissed me, and I tasted blood on her lips, metallic and sweet. "Come to bed," she said. "Let me show you something slower."

Later, tangled in the sheets with her lying across me, I traced patterns on her shoulder and asked the question that had been sitting in my chest since Seabrook's porch.

"Vance says you took eleven children in Benin."

She went very still.

"He told me he hunted an Adze in a market town in 2009. He says it presented a woman and fed on children. He claims to have burned it out, and he believes that's what you are."

Addie sat up, letting moonlight run down her back like water. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and very old.

"There was a thing in Benin in 2009, but it wasn't me. I haven't left these islands since 1721. But I'll tell you what it probably was, because I've met them—things that took the firefly shape and never learned what it was for. Things that fed because they could and never asked. Things that forgot they were ever human." She looked at me. "I'm not them and never will be. Vance didn't burn it out. He burned the village and the thirty-one people that called it home. He wrote a monograph about it afterward and called it a cleansing."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I read everything written about my kind, Malik. I’ve had three hundred years and nothing but time." She lay back down, pulling my arm across her belly.

"Seabrook told me how you protected the Gullah from the Red Shirts and the Klan,” I told her.

"He told you some of it. There's more." Her voice was steady. "A patroller in 1788 who liked to take girls from the quarters at the Fenwick place. I found him on the road at midnight. A planter's son in 1831 who heard rumors about Nat Turner and decided to make an example of three field hands. An overseer in 1859 who branded a boy for reading. A sheriff's deputy in 1947 who dragged a veteran off a bus and blinded him with a nightstick and went home to supper. Every one of them opened and left in the marsh as food for the gators and snakes." She turned to face me. "I have protected these people for three hundred years, Malik. Not because they asked but because they're mine. I came over in the holds with their great-great-grandmothers, and I carry those women inside me, and I will not let the pale ones take anything else."

I thought about Vance at the market—his soft Virginia voice. “I'm going to burn it out—all of it.”

"He's going to come for us," I said. "Not just you and me, but everyone he believes I’ve infected."

"Yes," was her only response.

"When?" I needed to know.

"Soon. He killed one of my lights last night. He's mapping where they sleep." She touched the scar on my throat. "And he saw you walk down my road and not come back. In his mind, you're already one of the things he's here to burn."

I held her, letting the reality of the prophecy settle in. In the cold-warm press of her against me, I was mapping out a plan.

"I don't think you're evil," I said. "I think you're the only thing that's ever stood between those people and men like him, and I'm done standing on the wrong side."

She didn't answer as she pressed her face into my neck until I felt something wet and warm against my skin. When she pulled back, her tears were black and viscous as palm oil.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE SHOWING

Ibring Celeste to the house at twilight, when the sky over the marsh is metallic with streaks of ox blood. It’s at this time the fireflies are beginning to rise. Malik is on the porch, weaving. He's approaching mastery levels in two weeks—his coils are tight and even. His stitches are complex, showing the confidence in his skill. His body glows faintly with the essence I've been feeding him when he looks up at the sound of the cowrie shells in my hair. Finally breaking his eyes from mine, he sees who walks beside me, and his eyes go wide.

"Malik," I say. My voice is already thick with what's coming. "This is Celeste, my night wife. My beloved whom my hunger matches.”

Celeste steps forward with the loose grace of a woman who has nothing to prove but everything to gain. She wears a simple white cotton dress that clings to the elongation of her shoulders, her thighs, and the proud line of her back. She was barefoot like me. Her short pixie cut perfectly framed around her face as her skin drinks the last of the moonlight.

"Malik." Her voice is smoky yet sweet. "Addie's told me so much. Her day husband, her bridge, and her beautifully angry boy." Her smile is filled with intrigue, and the sultriness in her voice excites me more than I care to admit.

“I’ve wanted to meet you to see what she tastes like on you. What we might taste like on each other,” she states boldly, making her intentions for intimacy known.

The half-finished basket drops from his hands as Malik stands. His body goes tense from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. I can smell the confusion and jealousy rolling off him, but beneath both— sharp and sudden arousal coiled tightly like the basket he was weaving.

"You didn't tell me," he says to me. "You didn't say⁠—"

"That my hunger is vast?" I go to him and press my body against his, feeling his hardness already rising against my belly. "That I love women too? That I have both wives and husbands? That three hundred years is a long time to want only one thing?"