Page 6

“I came to⁠—"

"To kill me, yes." She moved toward me as the air went cold despite the heat radiating from the boards. "With iron and anger. The anger of a man who thinks he's lost something. But you’ve lost anything yet, London boy. You haven't even found what you're looking for. You haven't admitted what you're hungry for.” She added, licking her lips painted in the same crimson of her skirt.

She stopped an arm's length away. Up close, she smelled of palm wine and brine mixed with sweetgrass and something metallic that might have been blood. Her face was beautiful—full lips that looked soft enough to bruise, high cheekbones, a nose broad and proud, eyes that held centuries of sorrow, hunger, and hope. She was solid and appeared to be real. Her presence was heavy, reminding you she existed, but did she? When she laid her palm flat against my chest, her hand was warm, warmer than skin should be.

"You feel that?"

My heart was slamming against her hand like a trapped bird. "Fear,” I answered, because I knew what she was capable of, yet I wanted to be near her. I didn’t fear her; I feared my desires.

"No, my love. That’s longing." Her hand slid up to my throat, to where my pulse hammered just beneath the skin. "You came thinking you’d find a monster; instead, you're scared to admit you’ve found a home. I can show you the Africa your grandmother whispered about. I can embrace the part of yourself you hid in London because it didn't fit in those university halls. That part of you is fueled by hunger."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Addie to the white folks who buy my art and don't ask questions. I'm the Lady of the Marsh to the shrimpers who leave me their first catch. I'm what survived when the ships came." She stepped closer, close enough that I could smell the complexity of her skin—shea butter, yes, and under it something wild and never domesticated. There was an element of danger I should fear, but her smell was alluring, erotic even. "And I've been waiting for you, Malik. Since before you were born. Since your grandmother whispered my name to your mother in the dark. Since the first time you did your research on me and didn't understand why you were crying after."

I couldn't speak.

"I can show you," she said, her voice sensuous as her touch felt like ownership on my bare skin, "what I truly am. What she warned you about. What you've been dreaming of since you were old enough to want."

She stepped back, and the air around her shimmered. For a moment, she wasn't a woman at all—she was a cloud of golden light, fireflies dancing in a shape that suggested hips, breasts, a mouth wide enough to swallow the moon. The insects hummed at a frequency that made my teeth ache, and my blood vibrate in my veins. I saw the traditional Adze then—the vampiric being that villages tried to ward off with Dzokawo, hoping to prevent the swarm from slipping through keyholes to feed on the innocent.

Then she was woman again, returning to her solid form.

"The firefly is my truth," she said. "I fly. I slip through cracks and find the lonely in the dark. But your grandmother's stories were told to her by men who feared women's hunger—they made me monstrous out of their own trepidation. Painted me as a disease-bringer. I'm not." She lazily dragged her hand across my chest—desire bloomed in my body feverishly. "I'm a memory-keeper. I feed on blood because blood is memory. I take men because I'm lonely for the Africa I lost. I make them night husbands because I miss being a wife."

She took my hand. Her palm was warm, human, real.

"There's a man following you," she said quietly. "Pale, overzealous, and smelling of gun oil. He's parked at the head of this road right now with a rifle across his lap, waiting to see where you go. He thinks you're already mine."

"Am I?"

"Not yet." Her smile was patient yet hungry. "Come to my house, not to fight, but to understand and to weave."

I should have said no and gone back for the knife, called Seabrook, done anything but what I did. Instead, I followed her into the gathering dark of the marsh, into the hunger that had been waiting for me my whole life. Behind us, at the head of the road, headlights flicked on and then off again, like a predator blinking.

CHAPTER SIX

THE HUNGER

He's beautiful, I thought to myself as he walked behind me down the shell road, his hand trembling where I'd held it, his pulse still racing from the touch of my palm—I can taste his desire from here. It's sharp and desperate. I’m holding the hand of a man who's been starving so long he's forgotten food exists, who's mistaken the ache of need for his natural state.

I’d be remiss to ignore the confusion in his heart. He wants me, but his desires are apprehensive. He's fearful of what I am, what I represent, and what I might make him become. He doesn't understand yet that the fear is part of it. That surrender is sweeter when it costs something; the binding is stronger when it's given, not taken.

I could feed from him right here. I could push him against one of these oaks that have watched me for three hundred years and sink my teeth into his throat while I ride his rigid dick to completion. Not only would he let me, but he’d thank me after. I can smell his submission the same way I can smell his fear.

Yet I won’t, at least not in this moment. He hasn't chosen me. This is what the stories never understood, what the men who hunt me will never let themselves know. The blood is not the binding. The sex is the binding—or rather, the capitulation that sex makes possible. When I take a man inside me, when his body opens and his guard drops and he climaxes with my teeth in his throat, in that moment there's no wall left between us. When his soul is wide open with mine, I weave. I thread him into my pattern, making him part of my memory, my yearning, my three hundred years. And I thread myself into him—dreams of a country he's never seen, a language he never learned, a grandmother's hand on his head.

The blood carries it, and the pleasure makes it possible, but the choice brings forth truth. A man taken by force stays taken only as long as the force lasts. A man who begs—who looks at everything I am and opens his throat and says, “consume me,” that man is mine forever, while I am his. That's the part the stories leave out, knowledge that the binding goes both ways. I have hundreds of night husbands woven into me, and every one of them owns a piece of me I'll never get back. I've never minded; in fact, I prefer that they have a piece of me to always hold on to, especially when I have a lot to give.

Malik is different, though. I've known that since 1963, since Akosua told me he'd come. I've watched him grow in the dreams I sent across the water—the boy too tall for his classroom, too dark for his street, too Ewe for the English and too English for the Ewe. I've watched him bury his esurience under degrees, rugby, and a grave demeanor. I've watched him touch himself in the warmth of his London flat as he cried out his release afterward without knowing what I've known: He is mine, the one who could finally see all of me.

We reach the house, breathing when we step inside. I let it, because I want him to feel it—the walls pulsing like lungs, the sweetgrass rugs adjusting to his weight. He sees the baskets, hundreds of them, a showing of each man's offering as a wedding gift. He sees the photographs, going stiff with anger when he recognizes david’s face. I let that happen too, because anger is just thirst with its back turned.

I take him to see his cousin, where he tries to pull David up from the solarium floor unsuccessfully. I let him call me monster because I know he’s grieving what David once was before I tell him to go. I see his lack of readiness and understanding. I see it in his face—the confusion, the rejection, the way his body leans toward me even as his mouth says he'll never surrender. He thinks I'm playing with him; I'm not. I'm doing the only thing that will make this work, honoring his choice. I'm giving him the door, so that when he walks back through it, he'll know it was of his own free will.

"When you're ready to stop fighting," I tell him, my lips against his ear, "come back. I'll be waiting."

He walks away down the shell road as I stand on my porch, hating to watch him leave. The bloodlust in me howls just as I turn my attention to the other thing, Vance. He's still at the head of the road. I can smell him—not the gun oil or cheap cologne, but the particular sourness of a man who's never once doubted his own self-righteousness. He's been in the Lowcountry for eleven days and has scoured multiple Praise Houses. He's offered money to six elders and threatened two. Yesterday he drove to the cemetery on Johns Island, where Zora’s mother is buried, and stood over her grave for an hour, taking photographs. I don't know why, and I don't need to because I know his kind.