Page 2

"I'm looking for Johns Island," I said.

He glanced in the rearview. "You got family there?"

"Research."

"Mm." The sound carried centuries of skepticism. "You one of them historians?"

"Ethnobotanist."

"Same thing. Y'all come down here digging in our business, writing books, going back to wherever you came from, leaving our land no better than you found it.” He paused at a red light on Meeting Street, tapping his aged fingers on the wheel. "But you ain't looking for plants, are you?"

I didn't answer, and he nodded like he'd confirmed something.

"Penn Center got archives," he said as if to whisper it. "St. Helena Island. And Brother Seabrook on Johns Island—he know things ain't in no book. Things you gotta feel in your hands." He looked at me in the mirror, and his gaze stripped me down past the tweed jacket and the SOAS credentials to the hollow place underneath.

“You be careful, you hear? The marsh don't give up its secrets to just anybody. There’s some secrets, once you learn 'em, they learn you right back,” the older man informed me.

The hotel was in the French Quarter, a quaint little boutique affair with exposed brick and ceiling fans turning lazily, doing nothing to move air that pressed against my skin like a hand. I checked in under my own name, though I considered not doing that. I'd thought about a lot of things on the flight over and done none of them.

Standing at six feet four inches, the breadth of my shoulders and the narrowness of my waist showed the years of being an athlete who took his frustrations out in the gym. My most striking feature was the skin the color of polished mahogany that housed my body. I'd played rugby at Durham and still carried the muscle, though my hands had gone soft—long fingers stained with ink, nails neatly trimmed, palms that held books now instead of anything that mattered. My face holds years of anger until I smile, which I rarely do anymore. My cheekbones sat high with a chiseled jawline and eyes the color of dark honey that women fawned over—telling me they’re my best feature—though sometimes intimidating. However, when I look in the mirror, I only see their tiredness. I didn't feel handsome in this moment; I felt hunted, which was strange, because I was supposed to be the hunter.

Death brought me here. Four men in three months, found in their beds on Wadmalaw Island—desiccated as mummies, bloodless, their faces locked in expressions of ecstasy so profound it looked like pain. The local papers called it overdoses, heart attacks, "unknown causes"—the phrase medical examiners use when the body won't fit the categories. But I'd recognized the details buried in paragraph six of the Post and Courier: Scattered cowrie shells, the smell of palm wine lingering in the rooms for days, the bodies curled on their sides as if they'd died embracing someone.

The Adze had crossed the Atlantic, but when?

In the old stories, the Adze was a monster. A vampire’s familiar that takes the shape of a firefly at night—a flickering light that slips through keyholes and under doors, that finds the cracks in windows and the spaces between boards. It feeds on blood and brings disease. It steals children from their beds and leaves them smiling and empty. Grandma had spoken of it in whispers when I was small, her voice trembling with a fear that seemed too big for the words, warning me to watch for fireflies that moved against the wind.

I’d been living in a state of confusion because, when I was older, my grandmother told me other things too, late at night when my parents were asleep and the house in Peckham was quiet and the world felt safe. She'd told me the Adze wasn't always evil. That sometimes it was just lonely, taking men not to kill them but to keep them. The Adze turned men into something like husbands, something that lived between life and death in a state of perpetual dreaming. “Men tell the stories, Malik," she'd said once, stroking my hair. "Men who are frightened of a woman's hunger. Remember that."

Then my cousin David had gone to Charleston on a Fulbright hoping to further his education and stopped answering his phone. When I finally reached his disgruntled landlord, who only wanted to know if I’d pay the rent David skipped out on, he’d also mentioned finding cowrie shells in his bed, and I'd immediately gone back to what Grandma said.

I showered in the small bathroom with water barely warm, and stood naked in front of the mirror examining my body like evidence—the rugby scars on my knees. The muscle beginning to soften from too much sitting. The ink on my fingers. I touched my throat where the pulse beat, and let myself wonder, for the first time—what it would feel like to have teeth there—to have someone drink from me like I was wine. Like I was water and necessary for sustenance.

I got hard thinking about it, which disturbed me more than the thought itself. I didn't sleep; I couldn’t. Instead, I lay in the narrow bed listening to the French Quarter through the open window—laughter, a saxophone, the clatter of horse hooves on cobblestone, the distant throb of drums that might have been a party. Underneath it all, beneath the register of hearing was the whisper of something that knew my name in a language I didn't speak but somehow understood. It reached inside me and touched the hollow place I'd been carrying since I was a boy who didn't fit because I was too tall, too dark, too Ghanaian for the English kids and too English for the Ghanaian ones, too hungry for a world that kept telling me to want less.

Near dawn, a single firefly drifted through the window. It circled the room slowly and deliberately before landing on the kente cloth wrapped around the knife. It glowed there for a long moment, gold against red before leaving the way it came. It was October and fireflies didn't fly in October. The Adze found me before I found it.

CHAPTER TWO

SWEETGRASS AND IRON

The Penn Center sat on St. Helena Island like a jewel in the rough—white clapboard buildings surrounded by live oaks that stood tall, holding all the history and ancestry of the Lowcountry. The branches draped with Spanish moss that moved in the breeze like ghostly fingers with the hair of drowned women. The air was thick with salt and pine and a smell I was learning to name: pluff mud, decay and life so tangled together they'd become the same thing.

I found the archives in a converted chapel where the pews were replaced with reading tables while the walls were painted that particular white that churches use to suggest cleanliness. A woman named Yvonne met me at the door. She was perhaps fifty, with locs wrapped in indigo cloth and dark eyes that saw straight through my jacket and my credentials to the hunger underneath.

"Professor Owusu," she said. "From London, here to learn about the plants."

"Yes."

"Mm-hm." She led me inside. "Which plants?"

I'd prepared an answer about sweetgrass ecology and saltwater intrusion, but when I opened my mouth, what came out was, "Adze."

She didn't blink because I think she knew before the Freudian slip happened. "You mean the night flyer."

"You know it?" I asked.

"Baby, I'm Gullah." Her laugh was like drums in another room. "We know everything that flew over that water. We know what came in the minds of the enslaved, what hid in the rice fields, what fed on the dying in the holds."