Chapter 8
I don’t remember the first time I died. I was six years old, according to my mother. We’d gone to the market, she and I, and I’d slipped away from her side for a moment while she’d been haggling over the price of something. I don’t even recall what had been important enough to snag my attention.
One second, my mother had told me, years after. All it had taken was one second.
I don’t remember the car hitting me. I don’t remember flying across the road. What I remember is waking up, disoriented, surrounded by a multitude of strangers staring down at me like I was an alien, and the taste of earth and blood in the back of my throat.
My mother had shoved her way between the bodies until she’d gotten to me, her expression wild with a visceral fear that still makes me break out in goose pimples when I think back.
She’d managed, by some miracle, to get me away from the crowd before all my injuries had finished healing, my broken skin and bones knitting themselves neatly back together under invisible hands.
She’d used her eshé on the witnesses, she’d later told me, forcing them to forget what they’d seen.
As she’d carried me away, I remember asking in a strangely detached voice, “Mummy, am I going to die?” and her answering hysterical laugh.
“No, honey.” I’d wondered why she sounded so sad. “You’re not going to die.”
The moment had passed, insignificant in the eyes of six-year-old me. When all my cuts and bruises disappeared abnormally fast compared to everyone else’s, my mother had smiled brightly—though a little maniacally—and told me my long awaited gift from our ancestors must’ve been healing.
But it seemed she hadn’t been sure. I’d been confused when she’d insisted on bathing me a few weeks later; at that age, she’d started letting me take my bath in privacy and without supervision. I hadn’t thought her request odd—why would I have?—so I hadn’t protested.
The sleep had come unnaturally, so heavy I felt like the eshé itself was trying to drag me into its powerful, unseen depths.
I’d slipped onto my back in the water, my limbs refusing to respond, as though weighed down by elephants.
I’d tried to hold my breath, but my body had disobeyed.
I couldn’t jerk. Couldn’t move. I laid there in frozen, helpless silence, screaming on the inside while I drowned, my mother sitting stiffly on the floor with her back to the bath.
When I came to, I was out of the water. My mother was sobbing, clutching my wet, naked body to her chest. I gasped, coughing, heaving as I vomited bathwater all over her shaking form.
“Oh God, oh God,” she cried, holding me so tightly it hurt. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, edémi.”
Even then, a part of me had refused to comprehend what she’d done. I’d been too young to understand, and she’d probably felt too guilty and upset to explain. Perhaps she’d thought, if she’d given a name to it, it would have become too real.
I only, finally understood when I was nine—when I’d aggressively rejected thirteen-year-old Efighenelo’s advances for the millionth time, and he’d responded by shoving me into the stream. I’d stumbled and slipped on the moss-covered bank, and cracked my skull open on a rock.
Efi had run home to cry to his parents. They’d rushed to the stream and stood over my corpse, frantically arguing over how best they could cover for their son, unaware that my blood had stopped flowing freely into the water, and my skull was pressing shut, the skin around it slowly sealing itself back together.
I’d heaved in a breath while they’d still been whispering furiously, rising up from the shallow waters like a demon from their worst nightmares, my eyebrows furrowed from a residual headache.
They’d both run screaming, and my “secret” had been exposed.
“That is not a gift,” Efi’s mother had spat when the village had called a meeting. She’d buried her empathy before she’d even seen my dead body, staunch with the need to protect her son, and as such, willing to throw me to the wolves. “That is the touch of the devil.”
My mother and father had stood in the middle of the gathering hut, framing my trembling body on both sides like sentinels, my mother’s fingers digging possessively into my arm.
I’d wondered why they’d made us stand in the centre like we were the ones on trial.
Shouldn’t Efi be standing in my place? This was his fault.
How often had he been told to leave me alone? He’d hurt me.
“It is a gift,” my mother had protested. “She heals. She has a healing power more astounding than we’ve ever conceived.”
“Can she heal anyone else but herself?” Efi’s father had asked serenely, his cold, calculating eyes locked on mine. Willing to do anything to keep the attention off what his son had done.
My mother’s grip on me tightened when I tried to speak. I reluctantly pressed my lips closed, even though the words burned like hot pepper in my throat.
“Yes,” she’d said with unshakable faith, willing to lie for me. To die for me.
“Step aside then, and let her heal me.”
“Her gift is still settling,” my mother had replied smoothly. “She still needs some time—”
“Dominique.” The High Priestess’s voice was soft but reprimanding. “Enough.”
My mother’s mouth snapped shut. Her hand, still wrapped almost painfully around my arm, began to tremble. The High Priestess’s gift was that she knew when people were lying.
“How do we know that what you speak is the truth?” one of the elders had asked, eyeing Efi’s parents critically. “After all, no one but your son and yourselves witnessed this apparently amazing feat.” He’d said “amazing” like he meant precisely the opposite.
I remember Efi’s father going strangely still.
The High Priestess might be able to tell when people were lying, but I’d come to learn that sometimes, the difference between a lie and a truth depended on the belief of the person who told it.
They’d seemingly seen me “come back to life”, but who was to say I’d actually died in the first place?
Perhaps Efighenelo, in his panic, had been mistaken.
In his hand, Efi’s father had held his hunting spear, his knuckles pale with how hard he’d gripped it.
The next thing I remember is excruciating pain. My mother screaming. My father shouting. The elders and other coven members yelling. My mother had caught me before I could fall. I remember staring in confusion at the hilt of the spear standing straight from my chest.
That, to me, is the first time I’d died.
It had lasted barely a minute—thirty seconds, if that—for me to awaken again to my mother on her knees, cradling me to her chest, rocking me back and forth, her face wet, chest heaving with sobs.
The spear was gone, my torn and bloody dress the only outward evidence of what had just happened.
I was healed, but I could still feel the phantom jab, pain spreading out from my heart to what felt like my entire body.
It hurt worse than anything I’d ever experienced.
I brought my knees protectively up to my chest, buried my face in my mother’s bosom, and wept.
“We are in agreement, then. Our ancestors’ gifts are supposed to serve the community and the world at large. This gift,” the elders decided, their gazes unforgiving, “serves no one but yourself.”
I wake to the taste of earth and blood. Somehow, I’ve ended up on my back on the floor.
The sun is shining brightly into the study through the wide windows, my candles flickering gently around me.
I roll over, coughing uselessly because the taste in my throat is psychological—a magical manifestation of my “gift” after it has completed its job.
I stiffen when I remember everything that had just happened.
Fuck. Oh God. Genevieve.
I stumble to my feet, gritting my teeth against a rush of lightheadedness. Pausing for a much-needed moment makes me feel like screaming, but I need to if I don’t want to immediately pass out. I need the sticky toffee from my trunk, but Genevieve can’t wait.
The study is splattered in blood and gore. My blood and gore. I extend a shaky hand and murmur an incantation to summon my glasses.
The lenses are intact, thank God. A short chant gives them a thorough clean. The cheap frame shifts willingly according to my command, straightening and fixing itself. I plop them on my face and everything in the distance sharpens.
“Where—?” My voice comes out thick. Raspy. Desperate. “Take me to her.”
The study door is wide open. I brace my feet when the floor moves, much gentler than the last time the house had relocated me according to its will.
It leads me to the sitting room, where Genevieve is standing in the far corner, like she’d heard me coming and had run as far as she could get.
I can’t remember the last time my death actually meant something. When last I worried about someone else witnessing it, if that had ever even been a worry in the first place.
Genevieve sees me and lets out a strangled sound. Her expression is twisted with horror and anguish.
And my soul is shattering. My heart is fucking disintegrating.
“No,” she keens.
“Genevieve,” I try, clearing my throat. The floor stops moving when I’m a few feet from her, my shaking hands outstretched in supplication.
“No, no, no—” She clenches her eyes shut, pressing harder against the wall even though there’s nowhere for her to go.
I ignore that her hands are tipped with claws, gauging out paint and concrete behind her.
The evidence of my latest, violent death is splattered all over her face and hair and tank top. Oh God.
“Genevieve, it’s me, I’m fine, I promise—”
“No, please, God, no—”
I’m crying; her pain is so visceral. “Genevieve—omemi.”
Her breath hitches at the endearment—we’d never allowed ourselves to refer to each other so intimately, so obviously—her chest heaving, but she doesn’t open her eyes. I don’t move any closer. I’m too afraid.
“Omemi,” I whisper again. Mine; my own.