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I've met plenty like him before. The overseer with the brand. The patroller with the dogs. The Red Shirt captain on his white horse in 1876, who'd come to burn out the Simmons family and who'd screamed when I came up out of the marsh grass in my true shape. The Klansman in 1923 who'd tried to pray while I opened his throat, only to realize the prayers of the wicked were always in vain. Not to mention they all smell the same and bleed the same—rancid and foul with poisoned blood thick enough to gag a maggot. I learned on the ship their blood was not fit for us, and I've never forgotten. I don't drink from them, but I don't need to drink to kill.

Vance knows about Malik now. He saw him come down this road and not come back for two hours. In Vance's mind, that makes Malik compromised and infected. Therefore, Malik has now been added as another thing he's here to burn out. I could kill Vance tonight. Slip through his truck's cracked window in my firefly form and reform in the passenger seat, taking his throat out before he gets a chance to scream. It would be easy, but Akosua's grandson is walking down my road with iron in his hotel room and a choice in his chest, and I've waited three hundred years for someone to choose me with their eyes open.

So I'll wait a little longer and allow Vance to come to me. When he does, Malik will be standing between us with his grandmother's knife in his hand, and we'll all find out together what the iron is for.

I go back inside where David looks up from his weaving and smiles at me, dreaming.

"He'll come back," David says.

"I know, Baby." I sit beside him and pick up a coil. "Everything that's ever been mine comes back."

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONFUSED DESIRE

Her house sat at the end of a dirt road under oaks that had stood since before the Revolution, their branches draped with moss that moved like the touch of something that loved you and wanted to keep you. It had once been a plantation house, and over time it had been restored with money that came from nowhere I could trace. Yvonne said Addie's art and sculptures sold for thousands of dollars at galleries on King Street. Abstract pieces that looked like nothing until you saw them...in moonlight, and then they looked like screaming faces.

Inside, the walls pulsed slowly; it was as if they were aware of me, tasting me, deciding whether to swallow. I could vividly recall seeing baskets everywhere. They sat on shelves, hung from the ceiling, stacked neatly in corners. Some new and tight, some ancient and fraying, some filled with things I didn't look at too closely: locks of hair, dried herbs, cowrie shells, photographs of men who all shared the same dreaming expression, including David.

"David is in the back," Addie said, leading me through rooms that seemed to rearrange themselves when I wasn't looking directly at them, seeming larger inside than the walls allowed.

David sat in a solarium flooded with moonlight, though it was barely dusk. He was thin but muscular, translucent around the edges, working a sweetgrass coil with fingers that moved automatically. I could tell they knew the pattern better than he knew his own name. He looked up when I entered, smiling a smile I'd never seen on him—peaceful and fulfilled.

"Cousin," he said, his voice echoing like he was speaking from underwater, from somewhere deep and warm. "She said you'd come and that you'd stay to make a home with her.”

"David." I crossed to him, dropped to my knees. "I'm getting you out of here."

"Why?" He held up the basket, half-finished, the pattern more complex than anything I could make in a year. "I'm learning our ancestral ways. The Gullah and Ewe ways. I'm making something, Malik. In London I was just taking up space and air. I was lost over there. Trying to find a purpose in a place that never loved our ancestors and damn sure didn’t love us. Here I'm—" He searched for the word, his eyes drifting. "I'm being woven."

I grabbed his arm to pull him up, but he didn't move. He was heavy, which should have been the total opposite given his svelte stature. It was as if he was rooted, like one of the oaks that sat out front of the house. His eyes stayed dreamy, and I realized he wasn't a prisoner. He was where he wanted to be.

"Let him be," Addie said from the doorway. "He's happy here; they all are. I feed on their blood, but with me I’ve given them passage back to what was lost, and now they’re afforded a connection to their true selves."

I stood and turned on her, anger rising hot in my chest and tangling with something else, something I refused to acknowledge. "You're a monster. The stories say you kill for your own benefit while bringing disease and harm to everyone you encounter, including children."

"The stories say what white mongrels needed them to say." She spoke with conviction.

I expected Addie to move toward me, enraged. Instead, she stood in the doorway, backlit by the moonlight, her voluptuous body outlined through her dress—powerful and abundant. I wanted to say more, but my mouth went dry, and my hands shook. I was battling a deep animalistic part of me that wanted to kneel but refused.

"I could show you my truth, Malik. Yes, I am the swarm that slips under doors, but rarely does my hunger take without asking. Blood is sweeter when it’s given freely."

She came closer as the floorboards creaked under her weight in a rhythm like beating drums, mimicking a heartbeat during sex. "I won't keep you here tonight. You're not ready. You’re fighting with your anger and submission.”

"I'm never going to surrender."

“Hmmm…not yet." Her smile was patient. "But you will because you already have, in your heart. You just don't care to own it, yet.”

She walked me to the door. Her hand on my arm was reminiscent of fire and ice together. It was the feeling that overtook your body like the second before orgasm; you’re not sure you’ll survive.

"Go back to your hotel and think about what you've seen. Think about your loneliness. Reckon with the fact that you came all this way not to save your cousin, but to find me." Her lips brushed my ear. Her breath was cold while her touch engulfed me in the blaze of arousal. "When you're ready to stop fighting, come back. I'll be waiting."

I walked down the shell road in the dark. At the head of it, the white pickup was gone, signaling Vance had seen enough.

A shrimper gave me a ride to the ferry landing without asking questions as I rode back to Charleston with the smell of her on my hands—palm wine, brine, and her arousal. I didn't sleep that night either. I lay in the narrow bed with my body aching and my mind running circles, and my fingers traced patterns on the sheets without my permission. The coils and spirals mirrored the curve of her hips under that dress. I thought about her weight and the way she filled space like gravity had rearranged itself around her. I thought about the fireflies dancing in the shape of a woman, and how she reminded me of what my grandmother said about men who were frightened of a woman's hunger. Before finally drifting off, I thought about David's smile and comfort in Addie’s home.

I didn't go back for three days. I told myself I was gathering intelligence and planning my next moves to rescue my cousin from a creature that had him under its spell. I went to the library and read about the Weeping Time, the Stono Rebellion, and the rice coast. I walked the Battery and looked at the mansions built on the bodies of people who looked like me. I ate shrimp and grits at a counter on Market Street and didn't taste any of it. I was growing tired of lying to myself. Trepidation was holding me hostage, not because of her but because of myself. I hated to admit how badly I wanted to walk back down that shell road and knock on that respiring door.

On the second night, I woke at three a.m. hard and sweating with the taste of palm wine in my mouth. I'd been dreaming of her putting her weight on top of me, pressing me into a mattress that smelled of wet pussy. Her teeth at my throat, not biting but resting there with the promise of feeding. I took myself in hand, stroking from the head of my shaft, down to my balls. I moaned her name as my release crept up my spine until finished in under a minute with my face in the pillow and her name in my mouth. Afterward I lay there shaking and ashamed, more awake than I'd ever been.