Chapter 14 #3
“No,” I interrupt again. I’m finding it difficult to breathe. “Genevieve isn’t—Genevieve wouldn’t—”
“It kept me trapped here. Feeding on my heart every ten years—thanking me for my “sacrifice”, like I’d had a choice, somehow managing to trick itself into thinking it was something else, but always, always coming back to tear me open once the truth of its nature inevitably rose again.
” Oh God. Oh God. “I render my heart practically useless, and somehow, it immediately, magically finds … you.”
“No.” I swallow. I’m shaking. “Genevieve wouldn’t—” I swallow again. My throat is so dry it hurts. “You have to be referring to her grandmother. Or her mother. I know Genevieve. She would never—”
“It’s not human!” my ancestor screams, like she wants to brand the words onto my skin with a smouldering poker.
“Your worst mistake is forgetting that. It’s going to bind you like its ancestors bound me.
Generations of them fed from me. It—the one you call “Genevieve”—has fed twice already from me.
They’ve spent so long clinging to their human forms they’ve ironically forgotten their roots. But nature always brings them back.”
My ancestor’s voice quiets, now a deadly whisper.
“It’s going to make you believe it’s your choice.
It’s going to make you believe you’re making a noble sacrifice for the greater good, for the better of humanity.
It’s so lifelike, isn’t it? Giving you sweet words?
Making you feel worshipped?” I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe. “The moment you let your guard down, you’ve already lost.”
She gives her final warning in English. “Heed my message, my daughter. Leave this place, or seal your fate.”
I wake up chilled to the bone.
It’s raining heavily, the usually welcome sound too loud and jarring in my ears.
I’m outside somewhere, lying on cold, hard ground with leaves and rocks and other debris.
Above me is an unfamiliar domed ceiling packed with cobwebs, sheltering me from most of the downpour.
For a moment, I’m confused, certain I’m still dreaming.
I sit up slowly. I’m in my nightgown, my feet bare. My body is covered in a sheen of moisture, the mist of rainfall I’ve been unable to avoid due to my current shelter’s lack of walls. I look around, and suck in a sharp breath.
I’m inside a gazebo. I glance frantically to my right.
The house sits innocently in the gloom, slightly blurry in the rain and without my glasses. All the windows are dark, the lights off. Shakily, I get to my feet. A glance toward my left shows me the back gates to the compound.
I squint, but the vision doesn’t change.
The gate is wide open.
I don’t move. But I know, if I leave right now, if I attempt to walk out of those gates, whatever juju had been keeping me bound would let me. Thanks in part to my ancestor, nothing is holding me here any longer.
But Genevieve.
There’s no dagbato. There’s no deal with a demon somewhere. There never had been. If my ancestor is to be believed, and I do believe her, there’s only ever been her.
For generations. They’d eaten her heart for generations. The evidence is in … Genevieve. She, her mother, and her grandmother are literally wearing my ancestor’s face, her form stolen from her via her heart; another stark, piercing reminder of what Genevieve is.
The oerhwu from my mother’s story had been real, but she’d never had her happy ending like I’d hoped. The “Chief”—Genevieve’s ancestors, I forcefully remind myself—had won. My other ancestors had really up and run, had up and left her, either believing she was truly dead or a lost cause.
It—the one you call “Genevieve”—has fed twice already from me.
What did you do when you were twenty? I’d asked, and Genevieve had said, I don’t remember.
Had she been telling the truth? How can she not remember?
She’d left school on Friday, a few days after her twentieth, and had come back Sunday.
Granted, she’d been behaving a little weird when she’d returned, unusually reserved and tight-lipped, but I hadn’t pushed.
I never pushed, I think bitterly, not even when it would have mattered.
What had happened when she’d been ten? The thought makes me feel ill. My ancestor’s voice emotionlessly reminds me that she’s not human, that I can’t think of her in the context of a human child, but I can’t help it.
It’s a family thing, she’d said as she’d been preparing to go off to her grandmother’s.
Oh God. I feel sick.
I need to calm down. I pace around the perimeter of the gazebo, trying to control my breathing. Fuck, the rain is too fucking loud. I jump when lightning flashes, and jump again at the answering rumble of thunder.
Every time I glance at the house, my heart skips a shuddery beat. Is Genevieve still in there? Is she watching me panic right now? Trying to come up with a way to stop me? Keep me here for her and her future offspring to use and feed on?
Stop. Stop it.
I begin to hum, a song my mother used to sing every time she made my hair. I’d sit between her legs, her fingers loving and gentle as she combed, always from the tips, never from the roots to prevent breakage in case of any tangles.
Am I offering myself to Genevieve out of some misplaced sense of duty? Am I so desperate for my gift to mean something—so desperate to simply have her—that I’d let her take advantage of me?
Is she taking advantage of me?
I think of how, for our entire friendship, I’d never really trusted her. I’d told myself it wasn’t about trust, that it was about society and my fear and trauma and everything else.
But when it came down to it, I simply hadn’t trusted her. We hadn’t trusted each other, both too entrenched in fear, assuming our secrets were too big to share, our worlds too different—too delicate to collide without them permanently shattering.
Even now, I still harbour a bit of fear. It’s why I’m yet to tell her my last and final secret, the downside to my gift. How its possible that generations of legbajus have been feeding on the same, single oerhwu for decades.
I’ve never said the words. I’ve never directly even thought them.
Even when my mother had confirmed it, she’d alluded to it in Ibiiom, in metaphors.
I’m so afraid if I say it out loud for the first time to Genevieve, I’ll be the one to leave her behind this time, convinced I’ll be saving myself the future inevitable heartbreak.
The last ten years might’ve been empty, devoid of light and life, but they’d also been devoid of this—the angst strangling my chest, shortening my breath.
To truly live is to feel. I’m feeling so much, every nerve ending sensitive and raw. I want to crawl back to safety, to numbness.
I press a fist to my chest, heat burning behind my eyes. It hurts, it hurts. Loneliness and grief swell, threatening to drown me. I refuse to let them.
I stop pacing and open my eyes.
My ancestor was wrong. Giving myself—giving my heart to Genevieve has nothing to do with any hang-ups I have about my gift. It has nothing to do with saving humanity or the rest of the world. It even has less to do with keeping Genevieve from losing herself.
It’s entirely and completely selfish.
I want her. I want to have her, in every way possible; to have myself as tangled up in her as she is in me. I want her addicted—to look at absolutely no one else. To taste no one else, the way she’s only tasted me.
And, deny it as I might, I know my ancestor is right about one thing I’ve been refusing to think about since the moment I’d caught Genevieve sneaking in through the back door, drenched in blood.
Something I’d confirmed when she’d tried to get the house to hold me hostage when she’d decided to give herself up to the dagbato.
The house obeys her, as much as it obeys the shannko and its own eshé.
She could’ve left anytime she’d wanted. She could’ve commanded it to let me out, and it would have listened. Consciously or subconsciously, she hadn’t even bothered to try simply because a tiny part of her—the raw, animal part of her—had wanted to keep me trapped.
But it’s that very part of her that calls to the same animal in me.
Because the house had listened to me, too.
We’ve both been pretending to be oblivious, our heads stubbornly shoved in the sand, like if we refuse to acknowledge the power we both wielded over this twisted thing, then the truth of our desires—in all its crude, perverse, and all-encompassing glory—wouldn’t be exposed.
Here I am, with absolutely nothing holding me back, with no walls keeping me closed in—the gates are wide fucking open, and I’m still here.
I still want her.
I still want now.
I’m calm, my breathing steady. Lightning flashes. Thunder booms. The roar of the rain has turned harmonious instead of discordant.
I start at the tips instead of from the roots; I think of our present, instead of mine and Genevieve’s shockingly entangled pasts. I think of our recent reunion, the time we’d shared in uni, and the empty years we’d spent apart—I think of the Genevieve I know and love; monster, human, or not.
Beneath my bare feet is the steady thrum of an ancient, familiar eshé, one I finally know the source of.
Before I go searching for the love of my life, there’s one last thing I have to do.