Chapter 1 Galilee
Galilee
The creeks in the forests around the Kincaid house did not extend into the nearby city of Salvation, so when Gali Kincaid
turned twenty-five and left her family home for a downtown apartment, she also left the water and those old groaning trees
behind. It hurt to leave, like she had torn off part of her body and left it seeping on the floor of her childhood bedroom.
The wind wept when Collette drove Gali down the blue bottle road, and Gali had wept too, as the Kincaid house grew smaller
and smaller in the distance. Nana Darling stood on the porch with Zélie and Leah, with Eunice and Shirley and Peony, until
they all vanished around a curve. Celestial had refused to watch Gali leave, and Jesmyn had gone after her into the woods.
Collette remained stony-eyed in the driver’s seat, her jaw edged with tension and her knuckles tight on the steering wheel
of her blue pickup as she took her daughter away, a hive of bees buzzing in the bed of the truck.
Oh, Galilee Kincaid knew she was breaking her family’s hearts, but she left them and the land anyway. Everything had a cost.
“Be sure you want it,” Nana Darling had said, and Gali thought of her nightmares, her visions, the way some of the Kincaids
looked at her when they figured she might not notice.
“I’m sure,” she’d answered.
It had now been a few months living in Salvation, and Gali had already asked herself several times if the cost was worth it.
Kincaid land was uncomplicated in that it had been cared for by Kincaids for so long—Gali hadn’t anticipated what it would
mean to live on land that didn’t recognize her. The earth didn’t hum to her the same way, and it didn’t cradle her at night.
She went to the roof of her building to sit with her bees almost every afternoon so she could still have a tether to home,
but Gali remained painfully aware that she was foreign here, that Salvation was threaded through with forces she didn’t know
and didn’t want to be noticed by. Some nights, she woke up in a sweat with foreboding heavy on her neck, as if danger was
pressing close, panting with all its teeth just inches behind her. Her sheets would be too warm, sometimes singed at the edges,
and her hands dripped with light until she brushed her palms together to kill the glow. She didn’t tell her family because
they’d worry that the foreboding was a true premonition. Besides, the light emanating from her hands was too unknown, too
unreal, to share with anyone else. It meant there was something very wrong with her, and Gali’s mind shied away from that,
dismissing it as a hallucination, as anxiety.
She wanted to be normal, so she bought new sheets and ignored the scorch marks on her mattress, ignored the way her bees would
cluster over her bathroom mirror the mornings after, their buzzing bodies obscuring the glass. The creeks of her childhood
stayed far away. Gali knew they were still there, cutting through fields and winding through dappled groves, holding memories
as old as bone and as terrifying as the dark. Their foaming currents still showed up in her dreams, rippling around her calves,
cold and biting, but Gali made sure she forgot any secrets they held by the time she woke up.
Her new place was a penthouse loft in a converted warehouse next to a small park.
It had large windows and original hardwood floors, soaring ceilings and pipes that creaked a bit when she ran the hot water, and Gali loved it.
She loved that it was all hers, no cousins barging into her room and rifling through her closets; yet in the soft afternoons, she sometimes found herself wishing that Celestial at least was there, that they were watching a movie together and taking turns oiling each other’s scalps.
But Celestial didn’t like the city—hell, Nana Darling couldn’t even get her to wear shoes at home—so if Gali wanted to see her cousin-sister, she would have to leave Salvation and return to the creeks, the watching trees, and the house full of extremely inquisitive and blessedly vulgar aunties and cousins.
The Kincaid women were coarse and sexual, sharp and sweet—women who had taught Gali how important pleasure was, how to walk with power coiling deep in her hips.
It was also Kincaid money that funded Gali’s life, so the aunts and cousins believed that gave them every right to pry into her business.
Zélie would’ve asked who she was fucking these days, and Leah would be demanding details that made even Gali blush.
They all wanted to come see her apartment, come meet her friends, come make sure their little Gali was doing okay living by herself, all on her own, so far away from the land she belonged to.
Gali had begged them for time to settle in, and Nana Darling had made them give it to her, but it was only a matter of time before the Kincaids descended on the city to see her.
In truth, Gali had settled in faster than she let on to her family. She’d even made friends, real friends, from a local yoga
class: Bonbon, a writer who published horror novels under a pseudonym, and Oriak?, the socialite daughter of a very wealthy
Nigerian family, who was forever unable to explain exactly where her father’s money came from. Their money made the Kincaid money look like loose change, and after a while, Gali stopped
her questions because the answers seemed like they were going to be more trouble than the questions were worth. Bonbon, however,
had kept asking, poking and prying until Oriak? had sighed one day and fixed her with a serious stare.
“Remember who my father is,” she’d warned. “If I told you, someone might have to take care of you.”
Oriak? was halfway joking, but there was something about her voice that time that made Bonbon go pale under her deep brown skin. Oriak? had smiled a little sadly and patted Bonbon’s hand.
“I know,” she’d said kindly. “Now imagine what it’s like for me.”
It was one of the first shadows. Before that conversation, Gali had always thought Oriak? lived a charmed life, untouched
by the dark. Oriak? was supermodel tall, with devastating bone structure and skin as dark as a scraped vanilla pod. She was
the baby of the family, with five older brothers, and when she’d told her parents she was trans in her early teens, they’d
both been ecstatic at having a daughter, proceeding to spoil her rotten. Her brothers adored her. She was neither the heir
nor the spare, so her father didn’t care if she got involved in the family business. Her mother had wept for days with joy
at having another woman in their family, and Oriak?’s social media was often filled with pictures of their mother-daughter
holidays and shopping sprees.
Oriak? had told them enough about her father for Gali to understand that he moved in a world very far away from and much more
violent than the bubble they all lived in with their picturesque little lives in Salvation. Gali felt she could understand
a little of it, being a Kincaid herself, but the stakes were different. As much as she wanted to believe that Oriak? was exaggerating
about the danger of telling them who her father really was, Gali had looked into Oriak?’s eyes as she warned off Bonbon. There
had been old pain and real fear there, and Gali couldn’t help but wonder if Oriak? had lost a friend before because she talked
too much. Her father was certainly rich and powerful enough to make people disappear. He might love his daughter, but the
loyalty was a gag shoved between Oriak?’s teeth. It wasn’t quite the same for Gali—she would keep her family’s secrets, of
course, but even if she shouted them in the middle of the street, people simply wouldn’t believe any of it. The Kincaids had
their own world, a world of sideways realities where they hunted down dangers in the thick of the trees.
Bonbon had grown up quite on the other end of the spectrum, with incredibly wholesome parents who owned and ran a flower shop in a small town on the West Coast. She looked like an athlete, with broad shoulders and defined arms, but she claimed she’d never trained for anything a day in her life.
Bonbon wore her hair in intricate floral cornrows, loved bright makeup, and called her parents every week.
They sent her care packages twice a month, parcels filled with baked treats and pressed blossoms, and Bonbon cried every time she opened one.
In contrast, the horror novels she wrote for a living were dark and terrifying stories, but they’d accumulated a bit of a cult readership.
Oriak? had been appalled when she discovered Bonbon used a pseudonym instead of claiming the glory herself, but Bonbon had just rolled her eyes (“Would you buy horror novels from someone named Bonbon?”) and said she didn’t need to celebrate herself like that.
It was entirely the wrong thing to say to someone like Oriak?.
Gali had watched in delight over the next few weeks as Oriak? came up with a thorough plan to retroactively celebrate every
single milestone in Bonbon’s career. They had spa days. They went to the beach and then to a carnival that was passing through
Salvation. They did a cake tasting and a wine crawl. When Bonbon tried to protest, the other two shut her down immediately.
“I’m having way too much fun with this” was Gali’s reason.
“You know your parents would do the most if they were here right now,” Oriak? had pointed out, which Bonbon could never argue
with. “Besides, you’re the only one out of us who actually works for a living,” Oriak? added. “We might as well celebrate
that!”