Chapter Thirty-Five
At the crossroads of great power, buried beneath the earth, is a candlelit room, several stories above where the lines converge.
This is where we meet to talk about things can’t no one else know.
Time down here moves different, closer to the ley lines winding through Black Mountain.
Down here I always get to sniffling, the dank mildewy air making my nose run. That’s how come Ms. Lois thought I was crying earlier today.
“What’s wrong with you, girl?” she asked me, mouth all firm and eyes like Judgment Day.
Visions of the Mother and her orders that Mama Mae shared with me crowded my mind. Opened my mouth. Pulled the words from my tongue.
Ms. Lois face went from stern to scared to angry to something new altogether. She clapped her hands real loud and yanked me to the front of the room, her hair fluffing over her shoulder, still smelling like the hot comb.
Her grip on my arm was too tight. Now as I look at it, five fingerprint bruises darken my skin.
I held the lantern far out from my face, staring into the eyes of those gathered to hear Ms. Lois speak.
Usually she talks of revolution. Of freedom—’cause what we got now ain’t freedom, I don’t care what they try to call it.
She speaks of a future where we don’t have to worry about no hunter, no man in beast skin, no essence thief thirsting for the power that flows in our veins.
She speaks of a righteous universe. Of a world where we don’t have to give nothing, and no one can take nothing from us.
Today there was nearly twenty and a half of us. All brown skinned and buzzing with power, on edge from the fire, from the threats, from the knowledge that it only gets worse from here.
When Ms. Lois told the others what I’d seen, my heart felt like it was going to rip right out my chest.
Her hands helped her craft the story, weave the words with passion as her voice boomed, echoless against the dirt walls.
“She seen it herself! The prophecy will come, just as the Daughter foresaw.”
“Why would we give it all up? That don’t make no damn sense!” one of the women yelled. She wasn’t the only one feeling that way.
“Shoo’,” a tall man called from the back. “Why not just fight ’em back now?”
The men might not have power, but they have gumption. And guns.
Ms. Lois sucked her teeth. “And then what? We can’t kill ’em all. These days they outnumber us. And y’all know it ain’t just them that want us gone, neither.
“How many girls gotta go missing? Slowly, they taking what’s ours. More of us are marked every damn day. They planning something. Some of us still remember what happened down in Wilmington all them years ago.”
“Speak on it,” Mama Cora called from the back as she fanned her face. “They want a cullin’ all right.”
“Mhm,” her sister agreed.
Ms. Lois puffed out her chest. “If we don’t act soon, that will be us. Besides, the other covens are too far spread. Letters take too long to go back and forth, and by the time we get the help we need, half of us’ll be dead.”
“Not if we kill ’em first!” another woman yelled, her fist squeezed tight and raised in the air as she jumped to her feet. “We’ve taken this shit for too damn long! And now you want us to give up everything. Everything born from the Twelve. From the gift they gave to our people?”
A couple others stood as well. And soon the room turned to chaos.
“We can’t!” Mr. Ezechiel Clark yelled over everyone else.
“When my granddaddy come to this land, it was to give us freedom so we could live our lives with the power bestowed upon our people by the Mother’s sacrifice.
It became our duty to protect the lines here from wickedness.
To see through the prophecy. But we can’t do that if we give it all up. That’s not how we gon’ get this done.
“Until recently, we ain’t have much problems. There was peace between our kinds even if it was fragile. They got their power from other covens, and the killings wasn’t so often. They got their licks in, we got ours back. But the scales have tipped. They ain’t playing by the old rules no more.”
“There has to be a reason,” another woman called. “The trees tell me they searching for something. Gotta be looking for the Cusp.”
In the back of my mind I could practically feel her. Mama Mae, huffing and puffing. Mad at the Mother, mad at me, mad at the stars for leading us here.
“Wait! Wait!” Sylvia Montgomery-Walker said, pulling to stand in a chair beside Ms. Lois. “We gotta think about this, y’all. Let Ms. Lois speak!”
Ms. Lois straightened out her shoulders, and I looked down at my belly. I patted it gently. I wondered if my baby could hear all this. What she was thinking about it all.
“The visions have come, just as the ancestors said they would.” Ms. Lois pointed at me. “She carries the way of the water!”
The sound of their gasps made me flinch. I backed up until I was against the wall, no care for the stains that would surely mark my dress.
“We have heard it, in the stories passed down from our mamas and our mamas’ mamas’ mamas…
Never thought I’d live to see the day of the calling.
Live to know of a future where balance is restored.
But it’s coming. If we let it. This is a sacrifice; it is a burden; it is a bargain we cannot take lightly.
But it is what we must do to save the future of our people. It is the only way!”
By the time she finished talking, she was shaking with power and sorrow and passion.
Nearly a dozen of us are already marked by the hunters. The sacrifice is coming whether we want it to or not. Nearly a dozen doomed to bloom pointed fruit, to sour on the tongues of monsters.
But not anymore.
It happened slow at first, and then all at once. The change. The way our shoulders dropped. Because we knew what she said was true.
Still, there were a few who remained defiant.
Lucille shot to her feet, face redder than I ever seen it before. She pointed a shaking finger at me, her teeth bared as she spoke.
“Liar!” She threw the word like a spear at my chest.
Behind her Odette Jones hugged herself real tight, her eyes bouncing between us.
It’d been a fortnight since she’d started to feel the sparks. Since she’d been marked, though she didn’t know who by. They rarely did.
Lucille had come knocking on our door not long after, first time she’d spoken to me since that day at the market.
“We gotta find who done it,” she cried. “And then we gotta kill him.”
But I’d known even then that we couldn’t. Odette would face the same fate as the others.
“We can’t kill him, Lucy,” I admonished, “You know that.”
“What’s another dead man?” she shouted. “I’ve done it once, I can do it again. I’d do anything to save Odie.” Lucille’s eyes darkened. “Anything.”
I was too stunned to speak.
All that time I’d thought Dorothea had been the one to kill that man, but I was wrong.
“But… what about Dory?” I’d whispered.
Lucille lifted her chin, shame trembling her lip. “It’s too late now.”
When I turned her away, when I told her we couldn’t find the hunter who marked Odette, when I refused to help her kill another man, she spat at my feet.
In the tunnels she looked like she’d do much worse to me if given the chance.
Ms. Lois stared down Lucille until she sat back in her seat. But Lucy never did stop crying. Ms. Lois met us one by one, eye to eye.
“You can join us,” she said, “or you can betray us. But when the Water ascends, war will come for us all.”
Part of me still don’t want to believe. But I can taste it. The weight of the truth. Like dirt and embers and the sting of salt on an open wound, the burning in my lungs when I accidentally breathe in a mouthful of lake water.
I know what we must do. But I just don’t understand why our power always has to come at a cost.
Why do they get to take and take and take, when all we can do is give?
When I told Mama, she curled into a ball on the floor.
I can’t seem to shake the guilt.
There’s something I ain’t tell the others.
I don’t feel right lying, but none of this is right no way.
Now I can’t sleep, and the sun is already rising on a brand-new day.
—Nora