Chapter 9 #2
“Ah, Rosemary.” She swallows visibly. “I’ve missed you.” My hand flies to my chest, like I need the pressure to confirm my heart is still beating. Genevieve’s eyes look wet. “Fuck, Rosemary, I’ve missed you so much.”
And I’m shifting onto my knees, getting ready to crawl into her arms.
“No.” Her hand flies into the air between us, making me freeze. “Stop. That doesn’t—this doesn’t mean—”
“Why?” I don’t care that I sound anguished.
“I understood before; the fear of people finding out. The knowledge that if we ever gave in, if you were ever truly mine, the entire world would know.” We’re both breathing hard, our eyes helplessly locked.
“But we’re alone here. Genevieve. It’s been so—surely we can—”
“It doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head, resolute. “None of that has ever mattered. You won’t understand.”
“Won’t I?” I rest back on my calves, thinking of what had happened in the study before …
something had killed me. Something that seems so entwined with the shannko I hadn’t noticed the danger until it was too late.
I don’t want to think about it right now.
It’s clear Genevieve hadn’t heard everything the shannko had said.
“That was your grandmother, wasn’t it? In the study. ”
She jolts.
“Rosemary.” It’s said with warning.
“She says your family—especially the women—are born with a generational curse,” I continue stubbornly.
Genevieve stiffens, jaw clenching, her expression guilty. At first, it seems like she isn’t going to say anything, like she’s going to pretend I hadn’t just spoken.
I’ve given two of my secrets—even though they’d had to be pulled from me—and she still refuses to give me anything back. It hurts.
When she finally speaks, I soak up her words like a sponge.
“It’s not a curse.” She’s staring me down, like if she does so hard enough, I’ll back off. I’m never backing away ever again. I’m done fighting this. “It’s—” Her jaw clenches again. The pain in her eyes is insurmountable.
“I know,” I say because she can’t. “I know. She—your grandmother said you’re …
changing. That years ago, your family had made a deal with a dagbato, and now, if you don’t uphold your end of the bargain, its promise—its deal to make—”—you human.
I can’t say it. She looks too raw. “Its eshé on your family is … fading.”
“Upholding the deal is the entire reason I’m here,” Genevieve says, her voice strangely flat.
I’d suspected as much. I sit up straighter, like she’d take me more seriously if I do. “I want to help.”
It takes a moment for her to catch my meaning.
“No.” She sounds alarmingly calm.
“The deal with the dagbato demands a sacrifice,” I say, one eyebrow lifted.
“No,” she repeats, then, still with that terrifying calmness, she stands and begins to leave.
I follow. The candy had helped with the blood loss and pain from my death, but my stomach rumbles, reminding me I haven’t eaten today.
“So, what’s the plan? Snatch a random person off the street?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
I inhale sharply. “Just like that, abi?”
“Just like that,” she mocks.
There’s something wrong. She sounds so—what is she hiding from me? “You’re really ready to kill an innocent?”
At the bottom of the stairs, she spins to face me.
“And killing you would be different, somehow? Better?” She continues before I can respond, “In exchange for our humanity, the deal with the dagbato demands a sacrifice every ten years for every member of my family until we die. As far as I know, I’m the last living member of my family, and I plan to let this shit die with me.
” A knife twists viciously in my chest when she references her mortality.
“So yes, I’m ready to do whatever it fucking takes. ”
“That’s even more reason why you should use me.”
“I said no.”
“But killing someone every ten years—”
“Stop acting so concerned when you want me to do the same thing to you—”
“I literally can’t be killed, Genevieve; that’s the entire point!”
“Stop pushing, Rosemary.” Her eyes are entirely black.
My chest heaves. I feel strangely warm. Despite the black pit that her eyes have become, I can feel the weight of her stare, the sheer hunger behind it. A rush of self-consciousness washes over me when I feel myself growing hot between my legs.
Genevieve’s nostrils flare. She takes a stumbling step backward, at the same time that an inhuman growl vibrates in her throat.
And I’m definitely getting wet, squeezing my thighs together.
“Your grandmother believes the dagbato is here,” I blurt, trying to divert her attention.
I don’t think it works. “That’s why she contacted me.
She says that somehow, over the years, the dagbato has sewn its eshé into the eshé that birthed the house.
The deal your ancestors made acted like a tether, keeping it here.
It should never have left the crossroads in the first place; I don’t know how it did.
“She said the dagbato killed her. It’s probably the thing that killed me. The house is fighting it, but the demon is going to wear it down eventually. Your grandmother believes it wants to absorb all the house’s eshé and use it to gain free reign to let it keep killing indiscriminately.”
Genevieve looks pale. “And the ritual—the sacrifice won’t be enough to stop it?”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “But your grandmother must’ve called me for a reason. If I perform a powerful enough cleansing, I think I’ll be able to untangle it from the house and send it back to the crossroads it came from.”
Genevieve’s chest rises and falls gently. “And what happens to the deal when its gone?”
“The deal will probably remain,” I say quietly.
The dagbato must’ve taken advantage of Genevieve’s ancestors, somehow, swindling its way into their home so it could entwine with their eshé over generations—waiting for that eshé to build and build until it had enough to eventually drain it to gain true freedom from the crossroads.
“Right.” Genevieve straightens her shoulders. “Like I said, I literally came here to uphold the deal. You do whatever it is you need to do, and leave me to mine.”
“I think we should stay in the same room.”
“Rosemary.”
“What if it kills you?” The question makes bile fill my throat.
I desperately swallow it down, my hands fisted at my sides.
“It killed your mother and your grandmother, Genevieve. It’s already killed me once.
” Twice, I think vaguely, remembering the taste of dirt in my mouth when I’d woken up that morning.
It had probably suffocated me, reduced my oxygen so slowly my conscious hadn’t realised what was happening until it was over.
“Clearly its starting to care more about gaining its freedom than upholding this deal. I’m not going to risk you. ”
Genevieve’s chest heaves. “I’ll stay in the sitting room.”
“Genevieve.” I don’t care that I’m begging.
“We can’t stay in the same room, Rosemary. You don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.”
She crowds into my space. I instinctively back away until she has me caged against the wall. Her eyes are still entirely black, her cheekbones sharper, her teeth pointed.
“I want to kill you.”
I gasp quietly. My pulse flutters madly at the base of my throat. And despite that flat, black gaze, I can feel her staring. Heat burns in my lower belly. Between my legs. In my cheeks.
“Every time I look at you, all I can think of is how your blood will taste. How easily your flesh would tear underneath my teeth. The many ways I can make you scream. Make you sob in pain and terror.” I’m trembling.
I can’t help it. “You keep repeating that you can’t be killed,” she scoffs, “as if I can think of anything else.” The hoarse admission makes my stomach tighten with filthy desire.
“Do you get it?” She snarls through sharpened teeth.
“I’m afraid I’m—” She inhales shakily. “I’m afraid there’s literally no difference between me and the dagbato.
This thing inside me wants to watch you die, over and over and over again, just for its sick pleasure. It wants to consume you.”
“Maybe I want to be consumed,” I confess breathlessly, shamelessly, all my inhibitions gone.
“Are you really that desperate?” she spits, her black eyes bright, her jaw clenching.
“Aren’t you?”
The pause is heavy, taut with exquisite tension.
Then Genevieve breaks it, turning and taking the steps two at a time.
I sink against the wall behind me like my strings have been cut, one hand pressed to my heaving bosom.
Desperately ignoring the thump of my heartbeat in my clit.
The tingle that shoots down to my belly every time my stiff nipples rub the insides of my bra.
The fact that, for the first time in my life, I actually want someone to kill me.
And I want that someone to be her.
It should horrify and disgust me, how desperately I want it. How much the thought turns me on. Oh God, there’s obviously something very fucking wrong with me, with how easily I’m letting myself sink into this twisted desire.
When I was five, my grandmother told me a story that has stayed with me to this day; it’s one of my clearest memories of her, a few months before she’d died.
When she’d caught me shoving pieces of asaeme—spiced dough mixed with pounded, sweet, overripe plantains, fried into thumb-sized golden balls—underneath my bed, where even more untouched pieces lay, the oil in them melted away in the Delta heat, each old sweet covered in ants.
She’d wiped my oily fingers clean with the edge of her wrapper, and taken me to the back of our hut. I’d sat on the mat, she on her favourite wooden stool, both of us bathed in the moonlight as she carefully re-braided my hair.
“Once upon a time, there were two hungry little frogs.
They travelled far and wide, trying to find anything that would stop the pain and rumbling of their empty little bellies.
But no matter how far they travelled, they could not find any food.
One day, the gods took pity on them. They sent them all kinds of food—so much food it would last for their entire lives.
“The first frog was too hungry, and too afraid.
What if tomorrow, all the food disappeared?
So it ate all of its share of the food—stuffed its stomach so full it burst, and it died.
The second frog thought, what if the food does not last my entire life?
What if it is not enough? So it did not eat at all, deciding to save its own share of the food for a rainy day.
The rainy day never came, and the frog starved to its death.
“This is a story about moderation,” she’d finished, gently stroking her fingers through my afro—like my mother, she always started at the tips, never from the roots.
“Saving your special treats for later is a good habit, but not when it turns into hoarding. Into waste. You don’t want to end up like the second frog, do you, edémi?
” She’d tickled me, and I’d laughed as I’d squealed a loud, “No!”
Unfortunately for her, it seems I’ve ended up like the first.
I’ve been starving myself for so long I’ve gone way past propriety and the threat of tomorrow’s consequences.
Now that I have Genevieve right in front of me—now that I’ve finally given in to this wicked, all-consuming hunger, all I want to do is eat.