Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
Nana Ama considered the crowd behind us, as if weighing her options on whether to handle this privately. But that had never been our way. Decisions were made in a group with nothing to hide.
“Ma’am?” Hailey could barely look at Nana Ama.
“Those things happening on Mainland,” Nana Ama said. “Your family owns the Endowment, yes? The people who have been trying to get access to Golden Isle? Is that why you’re here, snooping around?”
Hailey stuck to her script. “I’m not. I don’t know anything about that, ma’am.”
I prayed my grandmother would buy it. If pushed, I didn’t know how far my grandmother would go to protect our secret.
“I invited her, remember?” It was the same conversation I had with Sekou at Hailey’s bungalow.
I shot him a dirty look, knowing he’d told Nana his concerns. “Nana Ama, she didn’t see anything.”
Nana Ama turned toward me, the light catching her eyes like those of cat. “Don’t lie to me, Addae. I can smell her terror.”
Hailey shrank back like she was trying to get away again, crashing into the guards behind her.
“You are here on the island. What information are you seeking to take back to your family?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Nana Ama, can we talk about this?”
“Quiet,” Nana commanded, holding up her hand. “You know what it means that she has seen you. That she knows of our kind when she is directly and deeply related to the Endowment.”
“She won’t tell,” I said. I couldn’t allow us to kill to keep a secret. Whatever intentions Hailey had come here with, I didn’t think she deserved to die.
“I took the liberties of having the bungalow searched while we were looking for the trespasser,” James said.
He produced a small leather bag from within the folds of the colorful robes wrapped around his torso and across one shoulder.
He flipped open the flap, revealing several clear tubes and packaged syringes.
Hailey’s body sagged. “We found them in her bags when we searched her cabin, after she was spotted spying.”
Hailey’s voice rang out. “I wasn’t spying! That’s a lie.”
Her eyes slid to me, begging me to believe her. The earlier fear she had at my nearly making a meal of her was gone, replaced by her need for me to believe that she didn’t bring those vials here to get something.
But the vials … weren’t they proof? Why were they with her if she wasn’t going to use them?
Suddenly, I didn’t know what was going on. All I thought I knew, I didn’t. I hadn’t just shown Hailey my precious island. I had shown her who I really was, beneath the stoic, dutiful front I was forced to put up.
Was it all a lie?
Was this all just a part of Hailey and her uncle’s plan? Lure me in, make me trust her, make me want her, then use it to get whatever it was they were after on the island? From me and Nana Ama?
Nana Ama remained unmoved. She remained transfixed on Hailey, then me. She was unreadable, a stone statue with only her eyes moving from me to Hailey to me again. She didn’t have to say what she was thinking, her eyes saying it all.
Addae, what have you done?
Hailey cleared her throat.
“My uncle runs the Endowment, yes, but it’s research. We find ancient artifacts. We restore them and send them back to their place of origin. We try to help communities.”
The laugh that came from Nana Ama was like thunder. “Oh ho! You think the Golden Isle needs your help? How magnanimous of you to offer something unasked.”
Hailey shook her head emphatically. “No. I came here for Naira’s Homegoing. I swear.” She held her hand over her heart like she was making a pledge.
Nana Ama pointed to the vials in Elder James’s hands. “And these?”
Hailey twisted around to look at me, silently asking for me to plead her case, but I turned away, my own thoughts conflicted.
Hailey had violated something sacred, something intimate.
She’d seen me at my most vulnerable, when I was trying to finally Light and do something about those things we saw back in Charleston.
My Light had been right there for grasping, and she’d ruined it.
Hailey turned back around, dropping her head. “We use those, but I forgot they were still in my bag from our last trip. I swear to god that’s the truth.”
“What do you use them for?” Nana Ama prompted. She would make me hear it. Make me realize how quick I was to trust. How I should have listened to her and stayed on the island instead of running off to find more trouble.
“For samples. Samples of the soil. Samples of…,” Hailey stammered.
“Of our blood?” Nana Ama’s voice was low. “Of my elixir?”
Hailey was silent.
“You know what this means,” Elder James said. “She has violated us in more ways than one. This is indefensible. This deserves death.”
The word was poison to my ears. Death! Like we were those kinds of people. Nana didn’t even kill to feed. But would she kill to protect?
I looked at her and her cold regard of a terrified Hailey.
Yes, she absolutely would.
“I would have never done it. If I was going to do that.” Hailey found me again in the crowd. “If I was going to do something, I would have done it when you were in my home.”
Elder James looked at Nana Ama, his body practically vibrating, his eyes wild and shining, his voice elevated and excited, like he was drunk on power, on bloodlust, on the chance to show his strength to Nana Ama.
He bellowed, “You see! She is nothing but an invader. They’re trying to repeat history, Ama. They’re trying to invade us again. To colonize what we’ve spent years building, cultivating.”
Nana Ama was barely looking at him. She was looking at me. I held her gaze. What else could I do? All my bad decisions were on display for everyone to see.
“Where is this amulet you think belongs to my ancestors?” Nana Ama asked Hailey, but her eyes remained on me.
“It was gone when we went there,” I answered. “Taken.”
Nana barely registered a flicker. “By whom?”
“A scientist from the lab—Dr. Franco. He’s—he’s missing now, but we launched a massive investigation to try to recover it,” Hailey said.
“A familiar.” She spit the word out like it was garbage.
That word made no sense because Nana never mentioned it before in all her teachings about how to live as an adze. In books, movies, and typical vampire lore, familiars were human servants who served their vampire master and brought them victims.
She continued, “Do you even know what you have done, child? Here and there on Mainland? Your Endowment plays in things beyond its comprehension. And now?” She rubbed at her cuffs. “Now you have undone centuries of protection, of living quietly among humans undetected. You have brought her back.”
She is gathering.
The square was silent. The only person who knew what she was saying was Nana Ama, and she didn’t care to explain.
Nana Ama said nothing for a long time. Just stared with eyes that betrayed nothing.
Her singular focus was boring into Hailey’s center, as if determining if Hailey was lying or not.
Hailey, trembling from exhaustion and terror, managed to stay upright beneath my grandmother’s withering glare, one even I cowered at and didn’t want to be the object of.
No one here, except maybe Nana Ama, James, and some of the really old elders, had ever dealt with something like this, an intruder and what to do with them. Not even me. I could sense their unease. They weren’t sure if they wanted to know, or if they wanted to see what might happen.
The onlookers buzzed with nervous energy, unsure of what to make of this situation that I had caused. They whispered questions that worked their way through the crowd like a virus, their apprehension amplifying.
James wanted heads to roll, but I couldn’t read Nana Ama. She wasn’t throwing her weight like James. But she wasn’t forgiving either. Not when it came to this island.
Nana Ama paused, regarding Hailey for another length of time.
“This is a most unfortunate matter,” Nana Ama said gravely.
In that way of Nana’s that let me know this was the end of everything I’d ever known, she said, “Take the girl.”
This had to be some kind of sick joke. My grandmother wasn’t about to agree to the execution of a mainlander, a young one at that. Never in my life had I disagreed with anything she said, but this … this went against everything we believed.
“Nana, please. Wait.” I glared at James, and if I could will it, he’d combust where he stood. He pushed this harder than it had to be. There could have been a way to solve this with Hailey that kept us all safe.
He lifted his chin, daring me to speak against him in front of everyone, something that was never done to the unofficial consort to Nana Ama’s queendom and her supreme power.
I was not the matriarch, the Queen Mother, and should still be in deference to him.
He was itching, had always been itching, to knock me down a couple pegs.
His grandnephew was my best friend, and the two of them couldn’t be further apart.
Elder James returned my glare with his own air of superiority, and with something else just below the surface I hadn’t seen before. A malice that in the heat of the night among all the torches and bottles burned like hypothermia. He motioned for the guards to take hold of Hailey.
Nana Ama stood, facing Nyame’s stool in silent contemplation as if Nyame would materialize on his seat to give her guidance.
The decision she made tonight, to kill Hailey or not, would change the tide of the Kin, would vault us back a century or guide us to compassion and understanding that sometimes rigidity wasn’t always the route to follow.
I learned that the hard way, and now one of my best friends in the world was gone.
The buzzing in my head intensified, the pinprick enlarging. Nana Ama hadn’t moved. She wasn’t Lighting, wouldn’t do it in front of the Kin anyway, so where …