Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t think so? But, like, I don’t know. We’ve been in here for a minute. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
I recognized that voice as Sekou’s. The other was the voice of a ghost. I forced my eyes to open, finding three heads peering over me like an umbrella. I blinked again as my brain fired on all synapses and called out names as my eyes jumped from face to face. Hailey. Sekou. Naira.
My breath caught. Naira!
“I’m not dead, yet,” I croaked, waving them away so I could get up.
I shot upright, unsure what to do first. Grab my best friend who I hadn’t seen for what felt like an eternity?
Punch her for scaring me and dragging me into all this shit?
Cry? I was so happy to see her annoying self.
I was happy to see the extra-long box braids with the electric-blue tips she’d been sporting before she left, her once fresh do now old with a lot of new growth at the scalp.
Her clothes were dirty and torn. Like she’d been in a fight.
Or, I guess, held prisoner by demented people, a mad scientist, and a royally pissed-off adze on a power trip.
All things considered, Naira could have been worse off.
She was alive. That’s all that mattered.
“Where’s my grandmother?” I asked.
I searched around the dank, dark cellar, once used to keep food supplies for a family centuries ago, now grayish, with contemporary lighting fixtures screwed into the stone walls. The lights made the whole thing look creepy and gloomy.
The room smelled of stale air and old dust and dirt and rot, lots of rot.
A few dirt-crusted jars of preserved food still lined the built-in wooden shelves, among others that were broken either from someone or from years of rot and disrepair.
I had so many thoughts sitting here. The first being that enslaved servants had bustled in and out of this room, grabbing items the cook needed for meals for the family, bringing in fresh jars and food to keep for the next meal.
I could nearly see them going in and out.
“My grandmother?” I asked again, rubbing the fog away. I tried to concentrate, send feelers out for any sign of my grandmother, but there was too much noise around me, so much noise right on the other side of the locked door.
“They’re keeping us in here,” Hailey said.
“Keeping them out.” I rotated my shoulders, testing what hurt and what didn’t, finding myself feeling just fine.
If Hailey knew what I sensed, she’d prefer to stay in this locked room rather than out there with so many abalsoms, I couldn’t count.
Their hunger and want and need and pain and anger and all the bad things screamed out to me.
They sounded like they came from one of Dante’s nine circles of hell.
And over the din of their noise I could feel the looming presence of Effie and another equal but lessened force that I knew had to be Nana Ama.
Lessened and in pain. I could feel that.
She was hurting and I couldn’t help her.
“You came,” Naira broke through my thoughts.
I hesitated. Ashamed for how we’d ended, how I’d turned my back on her. I couldn’t ignore that Naira had brought me here, had made me bring my grandmother here, right to this woman’s feet to probably kill Nana Ama. Because that’s the only thing people with centuries-old vendettas had in mind.
We all made mistakes. It wasn’t Naira’s fault for wanting to go out and explore the world. To check out some history only to be kidnapped by an organization whose sole purpose was to take what wasn’t theirs and own it. Just like the true invaders and gentrifiers that they were.
“Hey.” I tried to smile and felt a cut on my bottom lip reopen.
My arms opened and Naira crashed into me.
Her body trembled uncontrollably against me.
Her heart beat rapidly, so fast I worried it might burst through her chest. I could feel her terror, nearly taste it.
It filled the room. I pulled away when I felt warmth on my shoulder and saw her face was slick with tears.
I leaned forward, and Naira met me halfway, forehead to forehead.
We were in the midst of hell, but this moment reunited with her was heaven.
Slowly, Naira explained everything she’d been through.
The brief moments of happiness with Luke.
The romantic boat ride. The storm that had been Effie, and being taken.
Snapshots of broken memory. Luke becoming sicker and sicker.
Naira trying to help him but him lashing out at her, scratching her, infecting her.
Effie offering to help, and giving her blood that cured but not quite, making Naira open and accessible to Effie.
Effie had seen the value in Naira. She’d seen Naira was the gateway to me, and I was the direct line to Nana Ama.
But I also saw that all the while Naira fought against Effie.
She couldn’t become like the others had.
“She said I tasted like her. Like Nana Ama,” Naira said out loud. “She said her blood healed.”
Startled, I pulled away and looked where Lyle positioned himself near the door, standing sentinel, finding nothing in the room to use as a weapon. I understood now.
“What does that mean?” Naira asked.
“You know Nana Ama’s elixir that she provides at the Festival?” I asked.
Naira nodded.
“The main ingredient is Nana Ama’s own blood, which has healing properties and boosts your immunity. It’s why the poison didn’t have the same effect on you as Luke. The blood protected you.”
From the floor, Hailey’s breath hitched, drawing our attention. Her hand went to one of her ankles. She tugged at her sock.
“Have you been bitten?” Sekou asked sharply, having been quiet up to this point, not far from where Hailey sat. “Did any of them scratch you?”
She shook her head. “It’s sore from the accident. I’m fine.” She drew her legs up against her chest, clamping her hands around her ankles.
“We have to get out of here because she is not going to let any of us go. If she can’t turn us, or make us abalsoms, or infect us with the hollowing, then she will kill us.
No matter what she promises.” Naira swallowed hard, averting her eyes from Hailey’s.
“She promised Luke and he … he…” She dropped her head into her dirt-crusted hands, blaming herself for being okay and for what happened to Luke. Luke was not.
Hailey said, “Luke’s just sick. He can be cured just like you were. That’s why I…” Her voice caught. “I was only trying to save him.”
From the snatches of Naira’s memory that she allowed me to extract, Luke was like the others, fed upon and too far gone.
Whatever blood transference Effie had shared with him was only more of Effie’s poison and had only prolonged his torture.
Luke had been barely kept human for the sake of drawing in Hailey and using her and Naira to get to me, and then, to Nana Ama for the Endowment to experiment on her. For Effie to do … what to her sister?
Naira continued. “There are barely bits of him left. If we’re lucky, maybe … but I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
Sekou quietly processed everything. He had folded his long body up as small as he could make himself, and his right foot tapped beats only he could hear.
I sensed how his mind repeated its mantra of how screwed up this was, how we were all going to die—it only stopped when Lyle straightened abruptly.
The noise outside the locked door receded.
Lyle said, “Ready yourselves. They’re coming for us.”