When the fight was over, Grashcoatah had many ropes of webbing hanging from his fur, but there was no time to pull or cut it off. There was a great flash from within Ekwensu’s house, and everything went dead silent. “I’ll bet people all over Osisi felt it!” Chichi said. Then Ekwensu’s house began to crumble. With Sunny seemingly inside it, it crumbled to dust. To nothing. Nothing but a palm tree.
Sunny told her friends everything. Everything except the part about meeting Chukwu. That was hers. None of them asked where her Mami Wata comb was, and she was thankful. Let them assume that it had been knocked off when she fell from Ekwensu. Or something like that. It was better this way.
“So are you still… doubled?” Chichi asked.
Sunny nodded. “But I’m… we’re okay with it.”
The three of them looked at her skeptically.
As they flew out of Osisi minutes later, glad to leave the place behind, Sunny used her knife to crack open the coconut the masquerade had handed to her. She gave it to Chichi. “Drink,” Sunny said. Chichi happily obliged and said it was delicious. Moments later, the wound on her chest grew warm and itchy. When it began to flake off along with the ant stiches, revealing new skin underneath, Chichi wept. “It hurt a lot more than I said it did,” she whispered, wiping her tears. “I wasn’t sure if I could take the pain much longer.” Sunny broke the coconut fully open, and they shared the sweet, buttery meat. Even Grashcoatah ate a piece, though he preferred to eat the crunchy shell.
31
AND SO IT WAS DECIDED
As soon as Lagos came into sight, Sunny checked her phone. It was evening and in the darkness the screen of her phone glowed like a star. It had one bar of energy left. When she saw the date and the time, she laughed. She leaned back, her hand pressed to her chest. She shut her eyes. Only a few hours had passed since they’d flown away from her irrationally terrified brother.
Her relief only lasted a few seconds. She sat up. “If no one else is going to ask, I will,” she said. “What are we going to do?”
“Let them whoop our asses and throw us in one of the other library basements where you haven’t killed whatever is lurking in there,” Sasha said.
Sunny gasped, whispering, “Oh God, we’re all going to die.”
Sasha shrugged. “What else can we do? Go on the run? I ain’t. I’ve got an education to obtain. I’d rather just face the music… whatever it is.”
“But what about Grashcoatah?” Sunny said. “Maybe he should have stayed in Osisi. There are more of his kind there, anyway.”
“I thought about that,” Orlu said. “But he’d never really be safe. They’ll still eventually find him.” He patted Grashcoatah’s back, and Grashcoatah grunted. “We’ve already talked it over.”
“You and Grashcoatah?” Chichi asked.
“Yes,” Orlu said. “I wanted him to stay in Osisi, but he convinced me that it was better if he took the chance and tried to clear his name. He doesn’t believe he did anything wrong; it was an accident. Really, there are moments of breach between the Lamb and Leopard worlds all the time. Someone sees, hears, or walks into something. And usually Lambs don’t believe or understand what they see. No one gets punished for those because they’re accidents. Well, this was an accident, too.”
“True,” Sasha said.
“It’s still risky, though,” Chichi said. “The council’s rigid as hell.”
“We have to state our case well,” Orlu said. “Really well. Grashcoatah could lose his life.”
“So could we, if they put us with something like that djinn,” Sunny said. But she understood the difference. For Grashcoatah, death could be guaranteed.
“Sunny just defeated Ekwensu,” Orlu said. “She sent her back into the wilderness, and now she can’t cause the apocalypse. I think the council will take well to the idea that Grashcoatah helped make that happen. We need to explain things. Sunny’s brother had to be with us, or Sunny wouldn’t have been allowed to come to Lagos to meet Udide who wove Grashcoatah who took us to Osisi. You see?”
They all did. And so it was decided.
Invisible, Grashcoatah softly landed in the compound. They all climbed off, making sure to hang on to his fur. Adebayo’s Hummer and Chukwu’s Jeep were parked and the house was quiet except for the sound of the TV in a room on the second floor. It was close to midnight.
“Okay,” Orlu whispered. “One, two, three!”
They all let go of Grashcoatah’s fur at the same time. The warm breeze met Sunny’s face. They were visible now. She could hear Grashcoatah quietly move to the side of the house. “Goodnight,” she whispered. Part of one of the bushes disappeared and she could hear Grashcoatah chewing.
They rang the doorbell, Sunny standing in the front. She took a deep breath, holding on to the doorway to steady herself. Was her brother even here? Maybe they had taken him. Maybe he’d run off into the street and been killed by oncoming traffic. The door opened. He took one look at her. His eyes grew wide and his nostrils flared. Then he grabbed her into a hug. “Thank God,” he said.
When Chukwu let her go, he looked at the others and they looked at him. He clearly wanted to say something. Then his mouth pressed shut. “Have… have you had dinner yet?” he finally asked.
They all said no.
“You and Chichi can go make it, then,” he said with a laugh. “Adebayo and I haven’t eaten, either.”
They all went inside. Before following them in, Chukwu looked outside at the parked cars and the rest of the compound. Sunny stayed back and caught his shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He opened his mouth to say something. Then instead paused for a very long time, an uncomfortable look on his face, again. “I… I am now, Sunny,” he said. “You should call Mummy and Daddy.”
She nodded, bringing out her cell phone. She watched Chukwu join the others in the kitchen. From his behaviour, it was clear. The council had performed a trust knot on him, yet they hadn’t altered his memory. How much did he know? And why was he allowed to know? She called her parents.
32
REALIGNED
The drive back to Aba was different from the drive to Lagos. Chukwu gritted his teeth as he looked ahead at the road and mashed down on the accelerator. They were speeding down the expressway at eighty miles per hour.
“You might want to slow down,” Sunny said. She was sitting in the passenger seat this time, and her seat belt felt like a flimsy piece of toilet paper over her chest. Chukwu’s favourite album of all time was playing yet again, but in this moment, it was not helping matters at all. Track four of Who Is Jill Scott?, “Gettin’ in the Way,” belted out of the speakers. It added another layer of attitude to the foul one that Chukwu was cultivating.
“I know how to drive,” he muttered, looking straight ahead.
Behind him, Chichi sat snuggled close to Sasha, his arm over her shoulder. They were looking at one of Sasha’s books, whispering to each other, oblivious to Chukwu’s growing rage. They’d been this way since Sasha had saved Chichi from the Aku masquerade. Chichi hinted to Sunny that there was something amazing Sasha had done while in the maelstrom of biting insects that had cleared her mind and reminded her of why Sasha was her “truest love.” Of course Chichi didn’t bother to explain even the most mundane aspects of this to Chukwu. That wasn’t Chichi’s style.
Sunny looked back at her, giving her a dirty look. “Stop it!” she mouthed when Chichi glanced up at her.
“What?” Chichi asked.
Sasha smirked, pulling Chichi closer as he looked Chukwu in the eye through the rearview mirror.
Sunny turned back to the front as Chukwu pushed the car to drive faster.
“You’re not going to be able to get away from them by doing that,” Sunny muttered.
“Yeah, but we’ll get home faster,” he said.
Behind Sunny, Orlu was fast asleep. He hadn’t told her all that he’d been through with Grashcoatah, but it must have been something. He and the grasscutter had spent
most of last night in quiet conversation, Orlu taking a mat and sitting beside the invisible creature, quietly speaking to him, and Grashcoatah grunting and sharing mental images with Orlu. Sunny had left them alone and gone to bed. Come morning, when she looked out the window, she saw Orlu lying on the mat, assumedly beside the still-invisible grasscutter.
To cover for his behaviour, Chichi rather convincingly explained to Chukwu and Adebayo that Orlu was from some remote Christian sect where they liked to pray for hours outside and then sleep where they prayed. Nigeria was full of so many different types of Christians that neither Sunny’s brother nor Adebayo thought anything of it. Sunny wondered what Orlu and Grashcoatah had spoken about as she watched Orlu sleep so deeply that he didn’t notice the shenanigans among Sasha and Chichi and Chukwu.
Grashcoatah flew above the Jeep, invisible to the world. Sunny would have rather been up in the sky with Grashcoatah, even if it was drizzling. Anyanwu was up there, sitting on Grashcoatah’s back, feeling free as a bird.
33
GRASSCUTTER STEW
An hour later, about halfway through the drive back, they stopped at a raggedy-looking shack on the side of the road. It looked as if the next rainy season would wash it away. The walls were made of worn-out wood, the roof made of tin. Behind and beside it were tangles of trees, bushes, and plants. There were no buildings to its left or right. The shack had no sign. Yet there were cars parked all along the roadside.
“What are we doing here?” Chichi snapped.
“Lunch,” Chukwu said, putting the car in park.
“They serve food in there?” Chichi asked. “And you want to go in and eat it? Kai! Do you want to die of dysentery?”
Sasha snickered.
“Why not just wait until we see a better place?” Sunny asked.
“Don’t let the look of the place fool you,” Chukwu said. “I’m not just stopping here randomly. Adebayo told me about this place. He said it serves some of the best grasscutter stew he’s ever tasted. He said the meat is so sweet you’d think they fed the thing chocolate for a year before they slaughtered it.”
“Let’s do it!” Sasha said, getting out of the Jeep. “My father had grasscutter meat the first time he came to Nigeria and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. I want to try it.”
Chichi got out, too. “I know good grasscutter stew. Let’s see if Adebayo knows what he is talking about.”
Orlu was still in the car, frowning. Sunny got out and opened his door. He didn’t have to say anything; she knew what he was thinking and why he was frowning. She took his hand. “Come on. They are not going to be serving the meat of flying grasscutters. Just the regular kind. And you can eat something else. If it makes you feel better, I will, too. I’ve never liked eating grasscutter, even before we made friends with a giant flying one.”
Orlu sighed and got out of the Jeep. They both heard a soft grunt directly above them. An image of lush bush bloomed in Sunny’s mind. Grashcoatah was going into the bush behind the building to see what he could find to eat.
“Okay,” Orlu said.
“How will he know when we leave?” Sunny quietly asked Orlu, as they followed Chukwu, Sasha, and Chichi.
Orlu smiled mysteriously. “I’ll tell him.”
The grasscutter stew was indeed the best on Earth, at least according to Chichi. Sasha ate three bowls, Chukwu four. By the time they were all done, he and Chukwu were in such high spirits that they were talking and laughing at each other’s jokes.
“It’s like they are drunk on stew,” Sunny told Chichi, as they walked out the front door. The owner of the restaurant had told them the restrooms were in the back. Sunny wasn’t too confident about what she thought they’d find. If worse came to worst, she was content with going in the bushes.
“Well, it was good stew,” Chichi said, picking at her teeth with a pinky finger.
“They make good ogbono soup, too,” Sunny said. “With chicken.”
“They just need to do some remodelling,” Chichi said. “At least a sign for the place. Word of mouth can only go so far.”
The sun was setting, but the heat of the day seemed intent on staying. The pepper soup Sunny had eaten was extra spicy. Not tainted-pepper spicy that left her tongue and mouth tingly while enhancing the flavour of everything else she ate, just a normal type of spicy that warmed every part of her and cleared out her sinuses. This warmth mixed with the heat of outside made her feel a little dizzy.
As soon as they walked to the side of the shack, the chatter from the filled dining room receded. The grass here was tall and unkempt, a narrow path through it roughly hacked. When they got to the back, the grass was shorter. Sunny expected to see Grashcoatah at work here making the grass even shorter, but he was nowhere in sight.
On the back of the shack was a large door with garbage bags on both sides of it. The door was ajar, and Sunny heard the clink and splash of cutlery, cups, and dishes being washed. There was a small clearing of dirt directly behind the shack where a large thick wooden table sat. Behind the table were three red outhouses with tin roofs. And behind the outhouses, more trees and bushes grew.
“Disgusting,” Chichi said, stepping up to the large table. It was slick with congealing and dried blood, bits of meat (there was even a chopped-off paw), and milling flies. “I hope this isn’t where they cut the meat they use in the restaurant.”
“It probably is,” Sunny said, the food in her belly rolling.
Chichi picked up the grasscutter paw and held it up.
“Ugh!” Sunny said “How can you touch th—”
Click. Click, clack, click.
Chichi looked past Sunny and her eyes grew wide. “Oh my God.”
Sunny stared at the source of the clicking. Then she quickly slapped the grasscutter paw out of Chichi’s hand. But really it was a useless gesture. If the oily-looking black vultures with wingspans wider than her height standing on top of the outhouses had wanted the paw, they’d have taken it long ago. There were five in all. The click-clacking sound was their talons on the tin roofs of the outhouses as they moved around.
“They’re probably here for the meat when they are chopping it up,” Sunny said. “Disgusting, lazy birds. I’ll bet they live here, scavenging off of whatever the restaurant people throw away.” She shook her head and started to step away. “I’m going to go pee in the bushes. I’m not going near those vultures, let alone those nasty outhouses. I can smell them from–”
“Sunny,” Chichi said. And that’s when Sunny noticed that Chichi wasn’t even looking at the vultures. She was looking towards the trees. As Sunny turned her eyes in that direction, she felt every hair on her body stand up. There was a ringing in her ears and pressure on her face. Sunny’s nostrils flared. She smelled smoke. A very specific type of smoke.
“Shhh,” Chichi said, still staring towards the trees. “Don’t speak.”
Sunny had to resist the urge to scream. If she screamed, someone from the kitchen might hear and come to investigate. Then he or she would see the glorious giant bristly spider with legs powerful enough to part trees standing in the shadows. Would seeing Udide be a breach of the Leopard rules? Udide was more than a magical beast. Udide was one of Chukwu’s deputies – a deity.
Udide blasted a thick puff of breath at them. Burned houses, that was the specific smoky smell. Sunny and Chichi clutched each other, the soon-to-set sun beating against their backs.
“Didn’t I tell you that I can find you anywhere?” Udide asked, her voice vibrating in Sunny’s head like a passing train. By the look on Chichi’s face, the same was happening to her, too. “The venom of my people is bound to your very DNA.”
“I know what you want,” Chichi said, straining. A line of red tumbled from her nose to her lip. Sunny touched her nose and found that hers was bleeding, as well. “Please!”
“You have heard rumour,” Udide said. “You have heard myth. You have heard gossip. You know what I ask.”
Sunny shook her head. “We don’t?
??”
“We can’t go in there,” Chichi said. She paused. Sunny was shocked to see that Chichi looked absolutely horrid, tears streaming down her face. “The last time my mother was there, they nearly killed her!” She took a deep breath. “Because of me. They… they nearly killed her.”
“It is a story,” the spider said. “My story. Written as a ghazal on a tablet-shaped Möbius band made of the same material as your juju knife, albino girl of Nimm, so you will recognise it. It will call to you. It cannot be broken. It is mine. One of my greatest masterpieces. It belongs to me. Go there, get it, and bring it back to me. My venom is in your blood. The doubled albino girl is a Nimm warrior; this story has made that clear. She will be your woman show.”
Sunny frowned, rolling the idea in her mind. Woman show? Her brother had worked as a “man show” during wrestling matches when he wasn’t wrestling. A bodyguard. She would be Chichi’s bodyguard.
“You are a Nimm warrior, Sunny. Like your grandmother,” Udide said, retreating into the trees. Her voice was fading now. “My venom is adhered to your DNA.” Then she was gone. Chichi stood there, silent, tears flowing from her eyes.
“Let’s go,” Sunny said, putting an arm around Chichi. Never had she felt so much taller than her best friend. So much bigger. Physically so much stronger. Chichi looked up at her with trembling eyes and pressed lips.
“What is it?” Sunny asked. “Why are you looking like that?”
Chichi only shook her head and tiredly looked away.
“Let’s just get home,” Sunny said. “We’ll deal with all this later.”