Chapter 16 #2
“Come and help me,” she says when we’ve somewhat caught our breaths, her hand wrapping around my wrist. “I don’t know why the flowers keep growing. I don’t know what this is, how to get rid of it.”
“They’re called orereowe. They’re supposed to keep her in a coma. But I don’t think they’re supposed to go into her heart.”
You’ve poisoned her! My grandmother had screamed, when the oerhwu had shoved the root into her chest.
The flowers had specifically been planted along her arms and legs, not at the source of her blood, the plant’s true nourishment. In her heart, endlessly healing, they had rooted permanently and would grow forever.
“Then we cut out her heart and let her grow a new one.”
I shake my head. “My grandmother had tried.” It had been the first thing she’d attempted in my mother’s shannko’s memories, but the heart had grown back with the plants already embedded, like the orereowe is a part of her now.
I can’t help but wonder at the specific nature of both the orereowe and sisireowe, how much time, effort, and research it must’ve taken for my ancestors to procure them, all to keep their sacrifice permanently immobilised, her heart optimised for their selfish use.
I tug at Rosemary’s hand, still wrapped around my wrist. “Maybe we should—”
On the other side of the room, my grandmother’s shannko appears.
I grab Rosemary and yank her behind me.
The shannko is now a shannde, horridly twisted out of shape. It’s limbs are swollen with rictus, torso twisted sideways and spine terribly arched, its skin sagging and pallid, eyes big, empty, and completely black. When it opens its mouth, its full of jagged, serrated teeth.
Rosemary gasps and flinches.
I spin around to find her yanking out an orereowe flower that had somehow managed to embed itself into her arm. Blood spills from the open wound.
More of the flowers rise from the ground, lifted by ghostly tentacles.
“Mama, stop!” I scream, tugging wildly at the flowers as those tentacles bury them brutally into my lover, and they immediately start to take root.
Rosemary’s already losing consciousness. I grab her around the waist as she sinks, her eyelids fluttering madly, struggling to stay awake.
“I’m doing this for your own good.” Mama has shifted into the mortal form I remember, though her body is greyscale, and almost completely translucent. “I brought her to you! Practically served her up as the perfect gift. Is this the thanks I get? I’m doing this for the survival of our kind!”
“You’re dead, Mama! You need to stop! You need to move on!”
She suddenly grabs her head and screams, like her skull is threatening to break apart. I turn away from her, frantically yanking the plants out of Rosemary’s flesh, fury rising at the sight of the bloody, dripping wounds, even as they heal themselves shut.
I’d promised no one would hurt her again, yet here I am, reminded that, at the end of the day, I’m only human.
But I’m not human.
I stand and turn around, letting instincts as familiar as an old glove take over. My grandmother’s ghostly form has grown a second head. Both heads are wailing, clawing at the other’s face, the body flickering and jerking. In them I can see Mama. I can see my mother.
Behind me, Rosemary stirs.
I begin to shift. My clothes rip as I change into my most basic form—the legbaju’s original form.
Just like I’d known what to do when I’d first eaten Rosemary’s heart, I instinctively know what to do now.
Funny how my mother had never taught me what it means to be a legbaju, despite her insistence on acceptance being her goal.
And my grandmother, despite her own goal of preservation, had failed to do the same.
I lope across the room, reaching both hands out to curl around the two necks extending from the jerking body, now back to its twisted, mangled form.
I look to the left, at my mother’s ghostly head. For once, her expression is lively, twisted with regret and anguish. She opens her mouth, but only a wail escapes. My grandmother’s face is contorted with grief and pain and rage, her eyeballs nearly bulging right out of her skull.
“All that training,” I begin. My voice is ghastly. Inhuman. The scrape of metal on a chalkboard. Of high-pitched wails layered on top of each other. The low growl of a beast. “Was just to teach me how to live with it? To somehow overcome this monstrous side of me?”
The head on the left nods.
“But Mama didn’t want that,” I add. Mama gurgles, one of the arms jerking, trying weakly to pull my own arm off.
“She knew the training wouldn’t work.” My mother’s head flinches, ducks with shame.
“That the only way to stay human, safe from ourselves and everyone else safe from us, was to continue using the … sacrifice.”
She nods again.
I growl at how blind they’d both been. Ironically, they’d both secretly longed for the same thing.
Mama thought using the oerhwu—performing that ritual was proof that she’d “accepted” who she was, when it was precisely the opposite.
She’d wanted to cling onto her stolen humanity at all costs; why change tradition when tradition is working perfectly fine?
Mummy had thought she could somehow teach me to be human—she kept repeating that, I think with a bitter laugh, how a “normal” person wouldn’t do this, a “normal” person wouldn’t do that, and all I could hear was that I wasn’t fucking normal.
“You were both wrong.” I look up, meeting their wild, pained eyes square on. “Maybe once, we were nothing but cold, unfeeling monsters trying to hide in plain sight, using this ritual as a cover. But somewhere along the way, we evolved. I evolved.
“I’m not entirely a legbaju. But I’m not completely human, either. I’m something entirely new, and I’m done pretending to be anything else.”
I don’t wait for an acknowledgment or a response.
I race out of the room, up the seemingly endless steps. The twisted shannde of my maternal figures wails and follows after me. Their moans sound eerie in the rainfall, echoing like I’m surrounded entirely by ghosts.
My legbaju form is shockingly fast.
The hole the house had made abruptly slams closed before I can get through, the concrete breaking apart at the force of the impact. It immediately tries to open again as both my mother’s and grandmother’s eshés and wills clash.
I ignore it, clambering up the side of the building like a spider.
The concrete groans as it shifts, blocks flinging themselves at my head and my body.
I manage to dodge most and ignore the others, regaining my grip when the brick flattens, trying to dislodge me.
I ignore the raindrops slashing against my skin like tiny knives, like the eshé of the shannde behind me is morphing everything around it, turning it vicious and cruel.
I punch my way into the roof, directly into my grandmother’s secret room.
Her body is there, a dried-up husk in the middle of a chalk circle.
I lunge for it as my jaw unhinges, impossibly wide. My chest swells with grief as I do what she’d done to my mother, except properly this time, the way it’s meant to be done.
It had felt so disgustingly wrong, watching my grandmother eat my mother, though I hadn’t been able to articulate why. I realise now it’s not because I’d thought the act monstrous, barbaric—but because a part of me knows it’s supposed to be the other way around.
A legbaju mother should never be the one to devour her child.
Mama had caused this. What she’d done had birthed some kind of curse. When she’d died, her spirit’s and my mother’s had formed this creature, a twisted remnant of who they’d once been.
The room is shrinking around me, threatening to crush me, but my mother isn’t letting it. The result is the concrete’s mad dance, blocks extending and retreating back into the wall, the entire house shaking on its foundations.
The house goes immediately still the moment my grandmother’s body is completely gone. The rain, which had sounded so overbearing, threatening to crush my eardrums, abruptly calms, the downpour now a soothing hum.
I turn, sensing something.
My mother’s spirit, in the form she’d been when she’d been alive, though it’s fading fast.
“I’m sorry,” she mouths. Her head fades away first, making my chest hitch, my eyes burn, then she’s gone.
I heave in a shaky breath, quickly shifting back into my human form. My shift hadn’t affected my clothes too badly, thank goodness. I race back to the gazebo.
Rosemary is back on the surface, waiting beside it.
Fuck, she looks like an angel. The heaviest part of the rainfall seems to have passed, the water spilling down in a gentle tide.
Her soaked nightie clings to every curve of her glistening form, the moonlight, peeking from behind thick clouds, bathing her dark skin in a gorgeous glow.
She’s squinting slightly, which makes me want to laugh.
Her eyesight had been perfect back in school.
There’s a part of me that feels privileged to have witnessed her change. Grow.
She quickly peruses my form once I’m standing in front of her. I do the same just as desperately. She’s okay; all the flowers that had dug into her arms are gone, her skin smoothed over like the wounds had never been.
“Are they—?” She starts in a whisper, her eyes darting toward the house.
“Gone,” I answer. “It’s over.”
She looks at me, but she doesn’t ask.
“I love you,” I whisper, feeling choked with it.
“I love you.” She sounds just as overcome.
Her gaze strays back to the exposed stairs leading to the hidden room down below. Slowly, I walk up until I’m standing beside her, both of us looking down.
Rosemary looks torn.
“She’d looked peaceful, in my memory, when she’d put the orereowe in her chest.”
“She’d done that to herself?”
“Yes.”
“So she’s just stuck like that? Forever?” She sounds like she’s about to cry.
“Rosemary,” I start in concern, attempting to pull her into my arms.
She takes a step back. My hands drop to my sides.
“I can’t die,” she admits abruptly. Her teary gaze meets mine. “It’s not just that I can’t be killed. I can’t die. I’m probably never going to die.”
“Oh.” I admit, a part of me had wondered, but she’d kept specifying otherwise.
I think about the oerhwu on the slab; she’s going to remain that way until the end of time, frozen in an eternal sleep of her own choosing. Since all the plants are doing is keeping her asleep, not actively killing her, her ability to revive would never be triggered.
“I’d said before that my gift—being an oerhwu—had been what had held me back from reaching out, but I hadn’t truly been honest about why.
This is it.” Her chest heaves, her breath hitching.
“How can I let myself love, let myself live, when I’m going to outlast everyone and everything I know?
How am I going to stand it when—” She cuts herself off, her lower lip wobbling until she desperately firms it, like she doesn’t want me to see.
“Fuck. Rosemary.” Her heartache makes my eyes sting. I see what she sees: an endless stretch of time, most of it spent alone as she watches everyone around her eventually leave her behind, through absolutely no choice or fault of their own.
I reach out, then again when she dodges me the first time, letting me hold her hands tight.
“Then I refuse to die, too. I refuse to leave you behind.”
“Genevieve.” She tries to pull her hands away once again but I refuse to let go.
“I literally ate your heart to steal your humanity—”
“Borrow.”
My lips twitch with amusement. Hers does, too, making my heart stutter with love.
“Fine. I literally ate your heart to borrow a bit of your humanity. Who’s to say I’m not borrowing a little of your immortality, too?
My grandmother connected to the eshé, did you know that?
” Rosemary’s eyes widen slightly. “And I’m pretty sure legbajus aren’t supposed to be able to do that.
She can’t have gotten it from anywhere else. ”
We both glance at the dark opening.
Rosemary turns to face me, but her head is ducked. “But … how can we be sure—? Maybe your grandmother had borrowed some of my ancestor’s abilities, maybe even her immortality, but she’d still been killed. She may not have died naturally, but she’d still been vulnerable.”
“Then I guess my very powerful oerhwu is going to have to do her best to protect me, isn’t she?” I tease, tugging her into my arms.
“Genevieve—” she whines, but she comes willingly.
“Isn’t she?” I repeat playfully.
“Yes.” She pouts. Smiles. Her expression softens, then goes serious when mine does. “Yes,” she repeats softly. “She is.”
Every step I’ve taken toward you, I’ve taken on purpose. It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me. Done for me.
Despite her fear of an endless slew of tomorrows, she’d still chosen me. She’d chosen to live.
“I love you,” I whisper, the words coming out choked. “I love you so fucking much.”
“I love you, omemi,” she whispers, her voice just as thick.
I’m choosing her right back, come hell or high water.
If I die, I’m going to crawl right back out of the grave.
I will tear through heaven and hell to get back to her.
I don’t care what it takes. I’d sacrifice a million souls to a dagbato just to stay by her side. I’d kill a dagbato. I’d kill a god.
I press my forehead against hers. The rain does nothing to hide that her eyes are filmed over with tears. I don’t have to speak; she’s reading everything I want to say in my gaze, her eyes dancing back and forth between mine, shining, filled with a mixture of hope and fear and love and disbelief.
I gently press our lips together. Her hands wrap around my neck, holding me close. The rain presses in around us like a blanket, gentle and cool.
“Besides, there’s only one way to know for sure.”
“Oh yeah?” Her eyes dance.
“You’re just going to have to spend the rest of your life with me.”
“Is that a proposal, omemi?” she breathes against my mouth.
“Yes, Rosemary,” I whisper, my eyelids growing heavy. “Stay with me for the rest of my life. Please.”
“All right, Genevieve,” she whispers in that lovely, indulgent tone. My heart dances against my ribs as our eyes fall shut, and we seal the vow with a kiss.
She tastes like the rain, like the promise of something clean and bright, washing away all the dark to make room for something brand new.