Chapter Six

Non-ancestry vehicles weren’t allowed within ten miles of ancestral grounds and so Agbe was back to running. He was kicking up dirt, but he didn’t care. Clouds of dust billowed up around him, he breathed in the dust particles, and coughed. He coughed until his chest was raw from it, but he never stopped running. Agbe ran faster than he’d ever run in his entire life. He kept tripping, first over a rock, then over the ledge of a pavement, and once over the root of a tree. Each time he caught himself on his hands, pushed back up, and dusted off the dirt against his trousers. His vision was blurred. He’d given up on trying to swallow the tears a long time ago. Now they just fell freely. He left a trail of teardrops in his wake.

“Mama,” he hiccupped and swiped at his eyes with his palm. He was panting.

“Watch where you’re going!”

“Be careful!”

Hands reached out to him and pushed him away, he swung to the right and was immediately shoved back to the left. He just kept going, kept running, because he had to save Ehimen. He could barely breathe he was so out of breath. He’d long since giving up on trying to get air in through his nose, his mouth was open as he ran, he drunk in air and kept pushing himself to run faster. Even when his legs screamed at him to stop, when his heart pounded so hard his chest hurt. He kept going. He knew that if he let himself stop, he’d never be able to go on. It was either move or fall and Ehimen’s life was too precious for him stop.

“Mama,” the tears watered his eyes so much that everything appeared fuzzy through them. He couldn’t get the picture of her out of his head. Lying there on the floor, bullet hole on her shirt, her clothes stained red with her blood. Who was going to call him Bebe now?

One moment Agbe’s feet were on solid ground, the next he found himself vaulted in the air, his arms and legs flapping uselessly, trying to gain purchase. Then he was dropping, and his body slammed against the concrete ground.

“Stay there, you tout! Don’t you dare get up!” A low, gravelly voice, barked at him.

Everything hurt. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth and his forehead throbbed. Tears sprang to his eyes, joining the bank that had already been there. Pain drummed through his entire body. His shoulders had slammed into the ground when he’d landed, and his exposed chest scraped against the rough road. Heavy footsteps approached him from behind, three pairs. They thudded determinedly towards him. Agbe knew that if they grabbed him, they would demand answers, and he didn’t have time to give it to them. But he was so tired. His heart still pounded in his chest and he heaved for air. He tried to push himself off the ground but his legs refused to budge.

“Come on,” he whispered. He spat the blood out of his mouth and tried again.

“I’m going to beat you bloody if you move. Stay down! Who do you think you are causing a raucous this close to ancestral grounds?” The same gravelly voice warned. It sounded much closer than before.

He lifted his head and for the first time since he started running, his chest swelled with hope. Standing only a few feet in front of him, was a curved archway, lined with clay bricks. There was a great darkness in the hollow space beneath the arch, and lush green grass and beautiful flowers on the wall around the clay bricks. He’d made it to the Tunnel of the Twins.

“There we are. Now we can pick you up, nice and easy,” the gravelly voice sounded above him.

Oh no! Agbe rolled out of reach of the hand that came down towards him, and kept rolling, till he’d knocked the bear of a man off his feet. Silver irises flashed at him. Agbe only had a second to process the fact that the man wore leather, before he placed his palms against the ground and pushed with all of his might. He threw himself forward and willed all of his strength into getting his legs to move.

They co-operated.

“I’m going to kill you!” the gravelly voice sounded behind him.

Agbe ignored him and kept running.

“Stop! Son, stop, you’re running into the Tunnel of the Twins! Are you out of your mind? You’ll get killed! Stop!” The voice sounded panicked now, no longer threatening. “Don’t you know anything! The Tunnel kills…”

The man’s words got cut off as soon as Agbe entered the Tunnel. He sunk to his knees from the weight of it. He felt as if he’d been hit with a boulder. The breath was knocked right out of him. He couldn’t see anything, it was dark, and aridly hot. Agbe opened his mouth but no air came in. It was like he was in a vacuum where air didn’t exist. The heat got worse, he just wanted to rip off his clothes, but he could barely make his limbs twitch. How long had it been since he’d last had air? Stupid! He was so stupid! He’d actually believed that his biological father was Ovie Omoruyi, it was the only reason he’d done something as foolish as running into the Tunnel of the Twins. Now he was going to die because of it, and Ehimen would die because of him.

Agbe wanted to cry but he couldn’t even do that much. He couldn’t believe that he’d escaped death by the InCoSeM rep, only to willingly run into his own execution. It wasn’t fair, he was supposed to have Enikaro blood. He was supposed to be immune to the Tunnel of the Twins. It hurt, actually physically hurt, not being able to breathe when he needed air so badly. It felt as if his brain was about to explode. He could hear singing, tiny angelic voices, deep rumbling baritones, shrill pleasant operatic whispers. He grew delirious, shivering. The singing voices got louder. He hated them, then he heard the snap of a whip and he wanted to borrow into the earth to avoid the bite of the lash. By the time death came, he was ready for it. Anything to escape the sounds.

He was on fire. Actually burning, he expected to open his eyes and see the flames of hell flickering around him at any moment. It took him a while to realize that the burning was coming from inside him. Like his blood was boiling. Then he gasped, and to his surprise, air rushed into his mouth. It flowed into his nose, his eyes, heck even his ears felt like they were breathing too.

Agbe blinked, and light seeped into his gaze. The visions swam in front of him. He saw lines and splotches of color and heard white noise, but nothing he saw or heard made any sense to him. His ears rung, his eyes burned, and his throat felt dry, but he felt the rush of air around him, letting him know that the worst was behind.

He blinked a few times before the scenery started making sense. Light, beautiful violet light bathed the surroundings. Agbe had never seen light like this. The ground he knelt on was marble, as smooth as silk, and nice and cooling after the heat of the tunnel. He looked up and saw large, magnificent glass houses looming in front of him. Some had tinted windows, others were left clear so he could see their plush furnishing and expensive décor. A pair of leather clad legs came in front of him, blocking his view. Hard hands clamped unyieldingly on his upper arms and yanked him to his feet. He blinked again still trying to get re-oriented after the Tunnel.

The man that had been chasing him on the other side of the Tunnel loomed in front of him now. He lifted his beefy hand and slapped Agbe across the face. Agbe’s head snapped to the right. He was certain he would have fallen if they weren’t holding him up. The left side of his face smarted from the strike and he heard bells ringing in his left ear for long seconds after.

“That was for the stunt you pulled outside ancestral grounds,” the gravelly voice informed him in a matter-of-fact tone. “Who are you?”

Agbe shook his head. It took him a while to remember why he was here, why he’d come running into ancestral grounds in the first place. Mama. Ehimen. He had to save Ehimen. “They’re going to blow up the wielder meeting.” He looked up at the hulk, trying hard not to feel puny by comparison. “Please,” he begged, “you have to save him.”

The large man snorted. “Blow up the wielder meeting? On ancestral grounds? And who exactly is going to do that?”

Agbe pulled at his arms, but the holds tightened. “Please!” he screamed. “You have to believe me! You have to help me!” When his eyes locked with the amused gaze of his questioner, he knew he wasn’t going to gain any ground with him. He turned to the men holding him. One was taller, the other about the same height as Agbe. Neither of them appeared inclined to believe him.

Agbe bit into the arm of the taller man, and slammed his head into the shorter. He took advantage of their shock and wrenched his arms free of their hold. Then he kneed the hulk in the groin and ducked around him when he doubled over in pain. “That was for slapping me!” he yelled at him as he ran away.

“I’m going to kill you!” The hulk growled.

Agbe kept running. The marbled path outside of the Tunnel led to a V road, both sides of it were eerily empty. Where were all the people? Agbe picked a road and continued running. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. The men chasing him thudded behind him. They were running faster than they had before, faster than a normal human could. They would catch up to him at any moment.

He started to despair. He was still looking back when he collided with a wall of flesh. Smooth fingers wrapped around his neck. He could see from the bottom fringes of her leather dress that it was a woman holding him. He tried to shake off her grasp, but she was surprisingly difficult to get away from.

The footsteps stopped behind him. His captors had returned.

Agbe glanced up at the woman. “Please help me,” he begged her, “I’m trying to save my father’s life. There’s a bomb at the wielder meeting, they’re going to blow it up.”

The woman was tall and slender. She glanced down at him, revealing golden irises. It dawned on Agbe that she was a werejackal. He writhed but she held him fast. She gave him an emotionless look then lifted her gaze. Large beefy hands wrapped around his much slenderer ones. They pinned his wrists together at his back, and tightened their hold until he could feel his bones grinding against each other. The hold twisted his arms back at a painful angle.

“Please…”

“Shut up,” the hulk growled. He gave Agbe a menacing look, before taking his gaze to the woman. “Thank you, I have him from here.”

The hold on his neck tightened for a second and then it was gone. She nodded curtly. “Hurry up, you have orders.”

“I know.” He pushed up on Agbe’s wrists and Agbe’s shoulders stung. “I’ll just take this one back with me. He still hasn’t told us how he managed to survive the Tunnel of the Twins.”

The woman’s gaze returned to Agbe with far more interest. “He survived the Tunnel of the Twins?” Her voice lifted at the end. “Impossible.”

“Well, that’s….”

The earth shook beneath them and then there was a loud explosion. One bang followed another, then another, and one last bang. A black smoke rose from a building far off in the distance.

“Is that…” A voice sounded behind him.

“The wielder meeting.” The woman turned her head in the direction of the building and then back to Agbe. Her eyes widened and then she frowned at him.

Agbe’s heart sunk. The last pieces of hope he’d held onto smothered and died in his chest. Ehimen. Tears filled his eyes. He couldn’t support himself anymore, his legs just gave out under him. The hulk’s vicious hold on him kept him up. It tore at his shoulders and burnt into his wrists, but the pain just didn’t mean much to Agbe anymore. He was alone. Everyone he loved was gone. He had no one. Mama, Prisca, Chika, Larry, Madam Celia, the whores, and now Ehimen. Every family he’d ever known and loved was gone. Taking from him by the InCoSeM rep. Agbe screamed. He howled, yelling obscenities at the ancestry men and woman. He’d told them! He’d warned them! They could have saved Ehimen, they could have saved his dad! Why hadn’t they just believed him? Agbe screamed through the hot tears. He howled at the ether, at the unfairness of life. He’d never even gotten to call Ehimen dad. That was all he’d wanted. From the moment the wielder marched into his life, all silver skinned and forbidding, challenging the ancestry bitch on Agbe’s behalf, all Agbe had wanted was to call him dad.

Now he never would. Just like he would never see his mother again. Never burrow into the crook of her neck, never have her fingers stroking through his hair, never hear her call him Bebe. He was all alone in the world. InCoSeM had taking everyone he loved from him, they’d taken away his family.

“Calm down, son, calm down.” The hulk’s voice was slightly soothing, but it enraged Agbe further.

“I’m not your son! You let my father die! You let him die!” He howled. “Why?” He looked up into the sky, at the twinkling stars, the luminous banana moon. “Why?” He didn’t even know who he was speaking to anymore. Duraya? Bleep Duraya! His chest burned. He wanted to be alone. He yanked at his arms, swaying around, throwing his full bodyweight on the other side to pry himself free of the grasp.

“Stop it, you’ll rip your arms off! Calm down, young man, calm down.” The gravelly voice tried to reason with Agbe, but Agbe was beyond the point of reason. He just wanted to grieve his dead in solitude, why wouldn’t they let him be?

“What is going on here?”

Agbe landed so hard and fast on his knees, that the shock of it, snapped him out of his grief. All the ancestry people were kneeling. Even the hulk. Agbe lifted his gaze and found himself staring into the lightest brown eyes he’d ever seen. The woman was alone, she wore a long-sleeved white velvet dress and had strings of orange coral beads on her wrists, her neck, her waist, and wrapped around her hair in a style that resembled a coronet. Her hair was thick and curly, left natural but styled so flawlessly, Agbe was jealous of her hairdresser’s skill. She had strands of grey hair. Rays of power just seemed to radiate off her. She appeared so calm and poised, regal in her bearing and completely in command of all that surrounded her.

Agbe had never met her in person, but he’d caught glimpses of her from a distance and seen pictures, paintings, and sculptures of her hanging in public places and sold at market stalls. This was the God-born, Uhonmon the first, head of the clan of rulers. As a commoner, Agbe knew that he should be prostrated, lying flat on the ground in greeting, but he could not pry his eyes away from her. She wasn’t just the God-born, she was his biological grandmother. Not that he had any intention of telling her that.

Agbe’s eyes widened when she bent forward, towards him. The corners of her eyes wrinkled. Deep furrows formed on her forehead, dipping in at the center where her eyebrows bent together. She stretched out her hand and ran the back of her fingers against his skin. In that moment, Agbe knew that he had to tell her. He could barely resist the urge to yell it at her. It was only the memory of the whipping he’d gotten the last time he’d tried that tactic which kept him from just spurting out, ‘I’m your grandson’. But this time was different. Agbe knew that this woman would never hurt him. He just knew that he could trust her. For the first time since his mother died, Agbe felt as if he was not alone. Every part of him warmed.

“You are Ehizokhae,” the God-born’s voice was a low murmur, “I can feel your blood calling out to me. But how can it be?” Her frown deepened. “Who are you?”

As soon as the God-born said he was an Ehizokhae, the hulk released him. The hulk knelt with both knees on the ground and his head bowed, but he shot Agbe a terrified, apologetic, look out of the corner of his eye. Agbe massaged his sore shoulders and wrists, all the while looking into the God-born’s eyes and enjoying the feel of her warm touch stroking his skin.

“Who are you?” she asked again. “Are you Ejehmen’s? You can’t be.”

Agbe cleared his throat. “Ovie Omoruyi is my biological father.”

Her eyes widened. “Omoruyi. And your mother?” She kept stroking him and he unconsciously leaned into her touch.

“The ancestry noble-woman Uwa.” Agbe surprised himself by not calling her the ancestry bitch.

The God-born closed her eyes as if she was in pain, then she straightened, pulling her touch away from him. Agbe was surprised by how much the loss of that touch bothered him.

Her gaze roved hungrily over him, her eyes flicking from his cornrows, over his face, down his body, as if she was just taking all of him in for the first time. Then she stopped looking him over and a frown marred her tranquil features. She cast a withering glare at the ancestry members around him, and asked “are you in pain, dearest?”

Agbe blinked. Dearest. Him? He blinked again. “What?”

The God-born’s lips twitched, but she still looked quite threatening. “You’re rubbing your shoulders. Are you in pain? Did anyone hurt you?”

No one had ever cared if Agbe was hurt before, in that way. His mother and Ehimen had cared, but they’d cared in the comforting, ‘it’s just part of life, Agbe, you have to endure it, now come let me kiss your injuries and make them better’ way, not in the ‘I’m going to destroy anyone who hurt you, because I’m the freaking queen and I can’ way. Agbe liked it.

The hulk tensed up beside him, but Agbe shook his head.

The God-born stared at him, as if she could see through his lie, but she didn’t call him out on it. Agbe was grateful for that, he didn’t want anyone getting punished because of him. Besides, he’d kneed the hulk in the groin for the slap he gave him. That pretty much made them even in his book.

“Okay,” the God-born said. She turned her gaze towards one of the ancestry members kneeling behind him. “Take us to Erimwin, then find Osaretin, she should still be here, and send her to me.”

“Yes, menoba.”

A dark fog enveloped him. It made him feel odd and it reminded him of the InCoSeM commune Paul. He’d traveled around using black smoke. Agbe was still thinking of that when the fog fell away and he was standing in a place that befitted the name the God-born had given it. Erimwin, meant spirit world, and this place sure as heck didn’t look like anything from the normal world Agbe was used to.

The place was soaked in blue light. The light was almost bright enough to be white but not quite there. The ground was rich, red, clay soil. It was the natural soil of the state, Edo soil in its purest form. All around, trees with varying colors of leaves and stems sprouted from the ground. There were numerous of them, far more than Agbe could count. A canal snaked through the ground, it bent around a small hill and disappeared from his sight. The water in the canal was blue blue, like real blue, pure beautiful blue, the kind of blue you see water painted as in drawings but rarely ever actually see in real life. This felt like some kind of garden, with all the trees and the pure blue water. He wanted to take off his clothes and go for a long swim in that water.

Agbe kept turning and looking around. It was completely enclosed. There were no holes, no windows, no openings, yet it felt as if he was outside, in fact, the air here felt purer than air outside. He kept whirling and taking it all in, and then his gaze fell on the God-born who appeared to be taking him in.

Agbe remembered himself then, and prostrated as he’d been taught to. He sprawled out flat on the ground in front of her.

She chuckled. “Get up dearest, come, sit by me.”

Agbe stood and stared down at himself. There were no red streaks on his clothes, no marks to show that he’d just been flat against soft soil. He walked over to the God-born and joined her on a rock bench. The bench was smooth, and silver. When he sat, it felt as if he was seated on cushions, not on stone.

The God-born placed her fingers underneath his chin and tipped his head towards her. Then she dipped a white cloth into a calabash filled with blue water – Agbe had no idea where those had come from – and began wiping at his face. The water she rung out of the cloth was streaked with dirt and blood. Agbe was grateful that he wasn’t able to see himself. The cloth actually seemed to be healing the cuts on his forehead from when he’d fallen, the bruise on his lip from when the hulk had thrown him outside ancestral grounds, all the minor scrapes he’d gotten from tripping.

“Tell me about your life…” she paused in the middle of wringing out the cloth and stared sadly at him. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Agbe,” he hurriedly provided, “Agberukeke.”

She reared back in disgust. “Agberukeke? Who would dare name my grandson Agberukeke?”

Chapter Seven

He laughed. He’d pretty much reacted that way when he’d learned what his name meant. Agberukeke meant riffraff, and Agbe, his nickname, wasn’t much better, it meant oppressed. Madam Celia had been the one to name him, but his mother had kept the name and she’d explained why. “My mama liked it. She said people look down at a riffraff, but a riffraff has to hustle, they’re not born with anything, everything they accomplish comes from hard work. They earn what they get. She wanted my name to serve as a legacy, a reminder to work hard and also to find the positives in the professions, ideals, and names that are inherently saddled with negative connotations.” Just thinking about it made him yearn for her. How was he supposed to go through life without her? Mama, he cried for her in his heart.

The God-born smiled. “She sounds like a unique and wonderful woman.”

“She was.”

The God-born cupped his cheek in her right hand. “I’m so sorry.” Agbe leaned into her touch and closed his eyes. “Her intentions were respectable, but no grandchild of mine will be called Agberukeke. Ivie, that is a much more fitting name.” The God-born’s voice while comforting, left absolutely no room for argument.

“Ivie,” Agbe repeated, “precious jewel.” He liked it, but he felt like an Agbe, a riffraff, a hustler. It was what he’d been all his life. This new connection to the most powerful woman in his world wasn’t suddenly going to change that. He didn’t argue with her though.

“Tell me about your life, Ivie, all of it.”

“Yes, menoba.” He prepared to start but she cut him off.

“No, you’re my grandson, you can’t call me menoba.”

He couldn’t? Menoba loosely translated to ‘my king’, it was a genderless ‘king’ just as Ovie was a genderless ‘prince’ title. Agbe supposed it was a bit formal for family. “What should I call you then?” He stared into the calabash of water, it was blue again, no longer stained with the dirt and blood she cleaned off him. It was as if the water healed itself the way it healed him.

“Your cousins call me mamin, do you like that?”

He smiled, he liked it a lot. He liked having cousins even more. “Yes, mamin.”

She smiled back. “Good.” Then she nodded, gesturing for him to proceed and so he did.

He told her his life story, not leaving off any details. There were parts that were hard for her to hear. Her hands clenched tight around the cloth whenever he hinted at being hurt in anyway. When he skimmed over the confrontation with the ancestry bitch her face had filled with so much ire that he’d started downplaying how bad the beating was, and putting far more emphasis on the good things, like Ehimen. She hated that he’d grown up in a brothel. She didn’t say it, but he could tell every time he brought the whores up, she cringed. By the time he was done he felt so much better. She’d wiped off every scrape on his body, from his face, to his chest, and his hands and shoulders. Everywhere that had been injured was healed now. She wasn’t a healing witch, so there had to be some sort of medicinal herbs in the water. Agbe heard a slight sniffle and was stunned to see tears rolling silently down the God-born’s face. She placed her hands on his upper arms and then slowly drew him towards her. Agbe went. She wrapped her arms around him and Agbe felt cocooned by her essence. She smelled of mint.

“I’m so sorry Ivie. You should not have lived like that. If Uwa wasn’t already dead, I would have her killed for not bringing you to me the moment you were born.”

The ancestry bitch was dead? Agbe didn’t know how to react to that. He hadn’t had any love for her, but it felt like he was losing a lot of people today.

“I’m happy it was your mother who found you. From everything Ehimen told me about her, she was a gem of the highest quality. I owe her so much for finding and caring for you, and now I’ll never be able to show my gratitude.”

Ehimen. Agbe’s chest hurt. “Ehimen told you about her?”

He felt her nodding against him. “He needed my permission to marry your mother.”

Agbe pulled back. “What of my fa…what of Ovie Omoruyi?” He couldn’t call Ovie Omoruyi his father any more than he would call the ancestry bitch his mother. There was only one man who’d been a father to Agbe, and he was dead.

She pulled back too and looked him in the eye. Then she shook her head. “He’s dead, Ivie.”

Agbe’s eyes widened. “Dead? How? I just saw him this evening in the brothel. That couldn’t have been two hours ago.”

She stroked over his cheek with her thumb. “A lot can happen in two hours, dearest.”

Agbe frowned at her. Why was she sitting here so calm after her son had just died? As a matter of fact, why was she sitting so calm after her entire wielder army had been massacred? Shouldn’t she be gearing to strike back at InCoSeM? “Mamin, InCoSeM isn’t done, they’re going to attack ancestral grounds, level it the same way that they did the wielder meeting. How did they even get in to plant a bomb in the wielder meeting anyway?” Only members of the ancestry and people with Enikaro blood could pass through the Tunnel of the Twins.

“A traitor,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, “a member of the ancestry turned against us.”

Agbe sat taller. “So, what are we going to do to strike back at InCoSeM?”

She smiled at him. “I’m so proud of you Ivie, so very proud.” He basked at the praise in her voice. “But we aren’t going to do anything. You are going to leave the Community.”

“What?” his gaze snapped to her face. He searched over her features, but she seemed at peace, completely unbothered by InCoSeM’s attacks. “I’m not leaving you, mamin.”

She smiled. “Yes, you are. I’m sending you to your uncle, Ejehmen, and his family. You’ll live with him, his wife, and their four children. They’ll take care of you Ivie, you’ll never have to worry about anything again.”

Leave the Community? Sure, he didn’t have much in the Community left for him. His family was gone, but still, he’d spent his entire life in the Community. He had no idea how to navigate the world of the unmarked. He eyed his grandmother. She’d said he would be joining his uncle and his family, but she hadn’t said she’ll be joining them. “And where will you be?”

“Here.”

Didn’t she understand? “InCoSeM is going to level this place, mamin.”

“I know.”

Agbe frowned. Suddenly, her calmness made sense. “You’re not even going to try to fight them? But you’re the God-born, head of the Enikaro, is InCoSeM really that much stronger than you?”

She snorted. “We could crush InCoSeM, easily.”

Agbe’s confusion deepened. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because this fight is bigger than InCoSeM. This fight is bigger than just our existence.”

Just our existence? Agbe felt as if he was losing his mind…or she was losing hers. The God-born had turned out to be more than Agbe could ever have dreamed. She was kind, warm, loving, and she called him ‘dearest’. Of course, that meant she also had to be crazy. “Mamin, you’re not making any sense.”

“The knowledge of the existences is not widely taught, certainly not in secondary school. There are other existences Ivie, other worlds with much more powerful creatures. Duraya lives in one of these existences, the supreme existence. The supreme existence is our birthright, as descendants of the Enikaro. When we die, we ascend to that existence and live with Duraya.” Agbe stared wide-eyed at her. Duraya was a god so it made sense that you had to die to live with her, wasn’t that how all gods worked? What did InCoSeM have to do with that? “I can’t teach you all of it in one night, Ivie, just trust me. We need to ascend to protect you, your uncle, your cousins, and the future generations of Enikaro descendants that you will bear. The war that is coming is going to echo throughout all the existences, and the only chance the Enikaro has is if some of us ascend to the supreme existence, now.”

She was right, Agbe didn’t understand and nothing she said was educating him. “You’re choosing to die, to leave me?”

Her smile turned wistful. “I’m more tempted now not to than I was when I had this conversation with Ejehmen. I feel robbed Ivie, robbed of a life with you. At least I got to know my other grandchildren, I got to spend time with them. You are my eldest grandchild and I’m only now finding out you exist, moments before I must leave you. I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”

“But it doesn’t! You can fight back, you can crush InCoSeM, for me. You don’t have to leave me, mamin. I don’t want you to.” Please! The cry caught in his throat. How many times did he have to lose people he cared about in the same fucking day?

“The choices I make now will save our family in the long run. I have to think beyond my desires, Ivie, I have to make the right choice for the Enikaro.”

Agbe slumped into his seat. He normally sat up straight, elegantly, it looked better, but right now, he didn’t have the strength for it. He wasn’t sure that he could survive another loss, but it was clear that nothing he said or did could change the God-born’s mind. She was convinced that her way was right. And really what did he know? He didn’t know anything about other existences, he didn’t even know that much about Duraya. Maybe the God-born really was making a great sacrifice for him and his cousins and his uncle. His choices were to fight and end things horribly with her, or end things well. For the first time that day, he was being given the chance to say goodbye. “Okay, mamin,” he sighed, “okay.”

“Thank you,” she leaned forward and placed a kiss on his forehead. Agbe breathed in her minty scent and held it in his airways. “Osaretin will take you to your uncle.” The wrist beads on the God-born’s left arm clanked against each other as she stretched her hand out to the side. Agbe turned and found a young woman kneeling on the ground. She knelt between the hill and a tall tree with orange leaves. The tree had sweeping branches which covered her a little, still it shocked Agbe that she’d been kneeling there and he hadn’t seen her. The woman had her head bowed, so he couldn’t really see much of her other than her skin, which was a dark honey brown, and her hair which had been plaited back in cornrows like his. She wore leather, a member of the ancestry then. “Osaretin is your mother…Uwa’s youngest sister.”

Agbe froze. He didn’t want to go anywhere with the ancestry bitch’s sister. He glanced at the God-born and decided, what with preparing for her ‘ascension’ and all, she didn’t need to be worrying about him too. Besides, he wasn’t the nine-year-old boy the ancestry bitch had whipped, he was a man now, he could take care of himself.

The God-born began to rise, but Agbe grabbed onto her palm before she could. She sat back down and stared curiously at him.

He cleared his throat, darted a glance at the ancestry bitch’s sister, and then turned back to his grandmother. “Mamin,” he whispered, “what am I?”

She looked concerned, “I don’t understand Ivie.”

“I mean my mark. You are the God-born, the strongest augur to ever live. If anyone can see my mark, it’s you.”

The God-born looked pityingly at him. “Oh, precious Ivie,” she cupped his cheek, “you don’t have a mark.”

Agbe frowned. Couldn’t she see it? But she was supposed to be a strong augur. “I killed one of the InCoSeM reps with magic, mamin, I know I did. And the other one, Paul, he looked at me strangely after it was done and he asked, ‘what are you?’”

She shook her head. “If you had a mark Agbe, I would have seen it, you’re not marked.”

Agbe’s shoulders slumped. He’d thought…did it matter? He’d never been marked. Why had he thought that anything changed in that room? He had no idea what happened. For all he knew the InCoSeM rep had killed the other one. But Agbe’s eyes had turned red though, hadn’t they? Wasn’t that a commune thing? “Are you sure, mamin? Can you look again?”

She smiled, “okay, Ivie, I’ll look again.” She slipped her hands into his and held him tight. Agbe was surprised by the strength in those old hands. Her palm was so smooth. Agbe watched as her eyes changed. White covered her eyes fully, taking over the brown irises and black pupil. Agbe couldn’t keep his gaze from darting to the ancestry bitch’s sister while he waited for the God-born to do her thing. The woman still knelt there, her head bowed, her hands demurely in her lap. If not for the fact that she was breathing, Agbe would have thought she was a statue. The God-born’s hands clamped around his. When he turned back to her, she was out of her mark, the color of her eye had returned to normal.

She appeared confused.

“Mamin?” Agbe prompted. “Did you see my mark?”

She shook her head. “No dearest, I saw a vision.”

“A vision?”

“A secret untold.
A truth unknown.
A history unwritten.
A song unsung.”

Agbe frowned. “I don’t understand mamin.”

“You are a song unsung, Ivie, that would explain why I’ve never seen any visions of you.”

“But am I marked?”

The God-born smiled. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She beamed at him. “Don’t you see, that’s what makes you so special. I am one of the most powerful augurs in Benin Community history and I don’t know.”

He would feel special if she knew. If she could just say, yes Agbe, you’re marked, you’re an augur, like me. Or, Agbe, be careful with your emotions because you’re a commune. That would be special. Having a mark would be special. Having an ‘I don’t know’, well that sure as hell didn’t make him feel very special.

“A song unsung,” she mused to herself, “Ivie, I think you’re what I’ve been waiting for.”

“I am?”

She nodded. “I’m going to give you something. When InCoSeM destroys the ancestral grounds, it’ll only be temporary, you and your cousins will rebuild when you come back and the key to rebuilding is the Bridge of Kohini.” She placed her hands on either side of his face and closed her eyes. Agbe had passed the point of confusion about two ‘song unsung’s ago. So he just sat there with his mouth closed wondering what he was supposed to do now. Then he felt something, like a light inside of him, a feeling of connectedness, as if he could sense his purpose as part of a great world. He was one piece in a large jigsaw puzzle and the full picture was coming together. Then the God-born’s soft hands fell off his face and the feeling went away. “It is in you now. You must guard it Ivie, it is the key to our family’s survival. The ancestral grounds hold the knowledge of millennia and what you carry inside you is the only key to securing it. Do not give it to anyone. Swear it to me Ivie.”

He trembled at the intensity of her stare. “I swear mamin, I will never let it go.”

She regarded him for some time after that. When she was satisfied by what she saw, she pulled her gaze away. She stood and extended her right hand to him. Agbe took it and stood when she pulled on his hand. “Rise Osaretin.”

The ancestry bitch’s sister stood, but she kept her head bowed.

“Come, both of you, we’re running out of time.” The God-born held onto him, leading him around the small hill, past a cluster of trees, to the end of the canal. The canal disappeared into a tunnel. Agbe couldn’t see where the tunnel led, but he had a feeling it was somewhere outside the Community.

“Canoe, please.” The God-born said.

Agbe looked around. He couldn’t see anyone. Was she talking to the ancestry bitch’s sister? The woman still had her head bowed. A canoe rose out of the water, like it just rose from the water, and the God-born stood there as if stuff like that happened every day.

“Thank you,” she said.

Agbe was this close to losing his shit. He felt like a frog with the way his tongue hung out of his gaping mouth. The God-born bent down, touched the empty canoe and came back up holding a black wallet and a black sack. Agbe blinked a few times. She was an augur. Augurs didn’t have magic. Augurs could see visions and identify other marked. Sometimes they could do telepath stuff with other augurs, but that was about it. So why was the God-born able to command canoes to come levitating out of water, and make wallets and sacks appear out of thin air. That was commune teleportation territory, but there hadn’t been any black fog. What was happening here?

“This is a sinehk, Agbe...you can think of it as a bijou.” The God-born placed the wallet in his hand. Bijou, he corrected himself, it looked like a black leather wallet, but apparently it was a bijou...or rather, something he could think of as a bijou. She opened up the wallet and showed Agbe that it was empty. Agbe nodded acknowledging this demonstration. Then she swiped her palm over the top corner and it tore a line into her palm.

“Are you okay, mamin?” Agbe rushed forward.

The God-born waived him off and showed him the wallet. Now it had money in it. He blinked again, dazed. The money wasn’t like any currency he’d ever seen, though he’d only seen comnai so it really could be any currency. “The wallet was made from pure ancestry elements, by Enikaro warlocks. This one is tied to Ehizokhae blood. The wallet is connected to a bank account that contains a million naira. Think about the amount of money you need to appear in the wallet, prick your palm or finger on the corner of the wallet, and the money will come. Do you understand?”

Agbe slowly nodded with his mouth hanging open.

“This should be more than enough to get you to your uncle, and take care of any emergencies that may pop up along the way.” She placed the now full wallet in his hand. Agbe couldn’t stop staring at it. Had money really just magically appeared in an empty wallet? He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

She reached for the sack and began to take off every coral bead she had on.

“Mamin!” Agbe snapped out of his stupor. “What are you doing?”

“The coral beads are bijou, Agbe, you’ll have far more use for them here, than I will where I’m going.”

“But…but…” he sputtered, “those are your jewels, they’re worth a fortune.”

She spoke slowly as she took them off. “Never show the full extent of your wealth. If you need to sell any of these, take them a few beads at a time. Never a whole string of beads, except it’s a wrist bracelet, and only for emergencies. Any unmarked bank outside the Community will give you naira in exchange for bijou jewelry. They will cheat you, but it will still be a lot of money. I would prefer that you not sell these. These have been in our family for centuries and I would like them to go to your female cousins. But do not hesitate to sell them if you are in trouble.” She placed the sack into the canoe. Then she reached for her earrings.

“No,” Agbe stopped her, catching her hands and holding them gently in his, “no, mamin, that’s enough. You’ve given me more than I could spend in my lifetime.”

She shook his hold off. “These are for you, to remember me.” The earrings were studs. At first glance they looked like cheap glass, but on closer inspection, anyone who’d spent enough time around Marked jewelry could tell they were bijou. Agbe stood still, tears pooling in his eyes, while his mamin took the studs off her ears and put them in his. He had his mother’s engagement ring in his pocket and now his mamin’s earrings in his ears. “Besides,” she teased, “you shouldn’t have empty earholes.”

Agbe threw his arms around her and pressed himself flush against her. His cheek rubbed against hers and he soaked in her mint scent. She wrapped her arms around him. Then she moved her hands soothingly across his back.

“Come with us mamin, please, come with us.”

She shook her head against his. “My son and my grandchildren are my legacy now. I must make this sacrifice for you. Go to your uncle, Ivie. You will mourn the ones you loved, your mother, Ehimen, your friends. But don’t let mourning them blind you from the love and family that you have now. Let your cousins comfort you. Grieve, but never stop living.”

“Yes, mamin, I promise. I will make you proud.”

She chuckled. “You already have, dearest, you’ve made me so proud, and so unbelievably happy. But now it’s time to go.”

Agbe held on tighter. He didn’t want to let go, to lose her. But he had to. Eventually, he moved into the canoe and sat on the wooden board, staring up at her. She looked so different without her coral beads. She still looked dignified, regal, her back ramrod straight, but she also appeared more normal, like a grandma he could have baked bread with. This was the last time he was ever going to see her. Agbe teared up. He was so damn tired of loss.

“The canoe will let you out in the unmarked Benin City.” The God-born bent to touch the water and came back up with a piece of paper. “That is Ejehmen’s address,” she gave the paper to the ancestry bitch’s sister, “take him there.”

The ancestry bitch’s sister knelt and took the paper. “Yes, menoba.”

“Rise. Go.”

The ancestry bitch’s sister did as she was ordered and she walked into the canoe. She sat opposite him.

“Be safe my most precious Ivie. Be happy.” The God-born blew him a kiss. He waved back at her. The canoe began moving, it moved on its own, and Agbe watched his grandmother fade away as they entered into the tunnel.

“I love you,” he whispered.

Then they were fully in the tunnel, completely covered by red clay soil, their way lit by the same unnatural blue light.

Agbe needed a distraction. He turned his attention to the ancestry bitch’s sister and stretched out his hand. “Let me see the address.” It wasn’t like he knew anything about the unmarked world, but he needed to be distracted. He would go crazy if he was forced to think of everything he’d left behind. His grandmother, the Community. He had to think about where he was going and not what he was leaving. It was the only way to stay sane.

Agbe realized it was the first time that he was seeing the ancestry bitch’s sister’s face. She was much younger than he’d thought, she appeared to only be a few years older than him. She looked so much like her sister, Agbe recoiled, which of course meant that she looked a lot like him, just a few shades of skin lighter. Her eyes shimmered now, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why. He didn’t know if it was the weird light reflecting oddly, or something else. Then he wiggled his fingers reminding her he was waiting for the sheet. The shimmer in her eyes brightened. She looked at the paper and then she smiled. Agbe felt a sudden apprehension at the mischief in her twinkling eyes and grinning face. He reached forward, but before he could grab the paper from her, she’d thrown it in her mouth. She chewed it up swallowed it and then showed him her empty mouth. Then she smiled.

Agbe’s eyes widened. He couldn’t believe the crazy bitch had actually done that!

Sorry for the piecemeal update. I had to break it into smaller chunks to isolate the part that was flagging the bots so I could exclude that part. And I used my other accounts to post those so I could play with posting from more accounts so I had more to fall back on in case some got blocked during posting lol. Hope you all enjoy the update and sorry for the long wait

Thanks for the update dear.... It was worth the wait

Chapter Eight

Ehimen walked around the marble swimming pool watching the strokes of the girl’s arm, the way the agile arms sliced through the surface, how the drops of water glided over her dark skin. She nodded a greeting at him and for the life of him, Ehimen couldn’t figure out why. She stopped swimming and righted herself, she was in the deep end, her feet couldn’t possibly be touching the floor, but somehow she stood straight, with her head above water. He should know how she was able to stand afloat in water, his mind shouldn’t be this boggled.

Her lips moved. The lips were wet, shimmering with water, and more of that water trailed down her face as she spoke. Ehimen couldn’t hear her. She frowned at him, then her eyebrows lifted, and her gaze turned pitying. The corners of her lips tipped down slightly and then her lips moved again. She shook her head and dove back into the water, like a mermaid.

His pretty mermaid. She hadn’t known how to swim. Who could believe that? Twenty-six years old and she hadn’t known how to swim. He’d taught her. He’d taken her to one of those beautiful streams the elemental witches maintained in the Community and he’d taught her. He remembered the way she would look back at him in the water, face wet, hair covered, and just stare, as if in a daze. “Why me, Ehimen? Why? You could have anyone, why me?” And every time she said it, he’d be asking himself the same thing. What did this gorgeous, warm, generous, woman see in him?

And now she was gone. Ehimen couldn’t even live in the delusion that he’d been in right after he’d found Madam Celia’s burnt to ashes. He couldn’t tell himself that they’d somehow escaped. He couldn’t convince himself that they’d jumped out of the building right before it burnt down. Not after he’d searched for them, not when he knew they’d been in there when the fire started, and no one had seen them leave. Their cellphones had last been active in that building and then the phone signals had died right when the crimson inferno consumed the building. They were gone. Isoken, his beautiful mermaid, and Agbe, both gone.

A sharp jab in his side tore him out of his thoughts. He blinked a few times, seeing the pool for what it was, and the girl swimming in it. It was his sister, not Isoken, but his sister. He turned to the side.

Mischief stared up at him, her cat eyes wide and teary. She stretched out her hand, offering up a piece of square cloth. He hadn’t even realized he’d been crying. He took the handkerchief from her and wiped at his eyes. He tried to make a joke, to ease the pain he saw mirrored on her face, but he couldn’t speak through the lump in his throat.

“I’m sorry brother,” she said, “I was looking forward to meeting sister Isoken and Agbe.”

Ehimen swallowed down the tears. He placed his hand on Mischief’s short hair and rubbed. She borrowed into him, wrapped her arms around his belly and rested her head on his side. She shook silently against him and moments later his shirt was wet with her tears. She hadn’t met them, none of his family had, except Omon, and Omon had only met them when he’d whipped Agbe. None of his horde had met Isoken and Agbe as members of his family. Isoken and Agbe had been commoners, outside ancestral grounds, while his family, his horde, was ancestry, noble. He wished they’d met, but he’d thought they had time, that the introductions could come later.

Ehimen became aware of the eyes trained on him. His sister had continued her laps in the pool, but every now and then she lifted her head to give him another one of her sad looks. The last two litters sat on the ledge of the smaller heated pool, swinging their legs in the water. They turned away hurriedly when he caught their gazes. The fourth litter were on patrol. When his eyes locked with theirs, Omon and Odion hastily dropped their gaze to the ground.

Ehimen sighed. He rubbed Mischief’s back until she stopped crying, then he pulled her away from him. “Thank you,” he kissed her on her forehead. She just looked up at him, her eyes wet with unshed tears and then nodded.

He cleared his throat, tried to speak and then tried three more times after before he was able to get his vocal cords to work properly. “It’s late, Omon, take the children to bed.”

“Yes brother,” Omon’s gaze was aimed in Ehimen’s direction but fell a little awkwardly to the left of his face. Then Omon clapped his hands together and darted his gaze to the heated pool with the younger ones gathered around it. “You heard brother Ehimen, it’s bedtime, come on little sprouts.”

“I can stay with you,” Mischief offered, “I’m not feeling sleepy.”

Ehimen shook his head.

She nodded. Ehimen watched as she solemnly pulled away. She turned back to stare at him a few times and each time he was watching her, waiting to give the nod she needed to see to prompt her forward, until finally she trailed behind Omon, and walked into the house, through the heavy oak doors.

Ehimen wasn’t ready to go inside. He could clearly see through the large glass window, that the InCoSeM reps had gathered around the dining table. He wasn’t yet in enough control of his emotions to be around any of them. It was irrational, he knew, it wasn’t their fault that Ovie Omoruyi had ordered his horde to escort them. Still, if he wasn’t here, escorting the five InCoSeM reps, he would be back in the Community searching for the commune who’d started that crimson inferno, the one who’d taken his family from him. Instead, he was forced to be here, babysitting InCoSeM reps who were more than capable of teleporting themselves wherever they wanted to go but insisted on ‘seeing Nigeria’ first.

Ehimen tried to think clearly, to give them their due and all that. And so, he conceded that they had allowed his horde to delay their departure and help in Ehimen’s search for Agbe and Isoken, but they hadn’t been willing to just wait a few days so that Ehimen could find and kill the person responsible for that fire. He was a soldier though, the assignment came first, and so he was stuck with the InCoSeM reps. Didn’t mean he liked it, and it sure as hell didn’t mean he was going to be joking around with the InCoSeM reps the way the third litter did. One of the InCoSeM reps chose that moment to look up.

Their gazes locked. It was an American looking at him, a white one, Paul, he believed. He was one of two communes in the party of InCoSeM reps. There was one other American with them, a black woman. There was also a Scottish woman, a French man and a Brazilian man. Ehimen was sure they’d been chosen to show off the diversity of InCoSeM. InCoSeM was after all the International Coalition for the Security of the Marked. They liked to stress how every other marked Community in the world had fallen under InCoSeM’s banner and the Benin Community was the last holdout. As far as Ehimen was concerned, InCoSeM was a large bureaucratic hole, desperate to pull every marked person in. They were nothing but rules and standards, while the Enikaro was power and tradition. But Ovie Omoruyi’s order was to protect these InCoSeM reps and that was exactly what he was going to do. Even though his heart and soul screamed to be back in the Benin Community, searching for Isoken and Agbe’s killer. Ehimen looked away.

He held his hands behind his back and walked around the compound. Every few feet he came across a lamppost. The light the lamppost streamed today was violet, but tomorrow it might be a different color. The Enikaro had a thing for lights, they changed the colors in the streetlights across their vast holdings all around the country, to match the color of the lights on ancestral grounds. He walked past two of his siblings, seated on the carpet grass, cords of glowing material covering every inch of their body. They were celestial witches, charging the witches’ talismans with the power from the glowing banana moon and the hundreds of twinkling stars.

“What is this?” Her voice was so soft. She looked up at him uncertainly, smiling, but only with half of her face. It was the cutest thing he’d ever seen.

“A talisman, what else?”

She dropped her gaze back to the glowing silver-blue coral beads in her hand, then lifted it up and smirked at him. “So, this is how the ancestry do talismans, ehn? Hmm, una dey enjoy oh.” Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Thank you.”

Ehimen smiled and then he blinked, and she was gone. She wasn’t standing in front of him, it was all in his head. He stopped walking and leaned heavily against a lamppost for support. It had felt so real. He could even smell the lavender oil she bathed with and the citrusy scent of the wash she used for her hair. His chest tightened. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the lamppost, just for a second, he told himself, until he was strong enough to keep going.

But then the light that had seeped through his closed eyelids went away. He tore his eyelids open and found darkness. He was close enough to the celestial witches that he wasn’t completely dependent on the heavenly lights, the talismans still glowed bright, but all the other lights were out. No violet streetlights, no lights from inside the house, nothing.

Ehimen pushed himself off the lamppost. Instinctively, he reached for Enforcer, and cursed when he found his whip holster empty. He’d been so grief-stricken that he hadn’t thought too much of the fact that Iye had seized his whip in punishment for his earlier defiance. He cursed again and reached instead for his speed. He still had a little speed evbaire left from earlier. He did a quick run around the perimeter of the mansion, and then went into the trees that surrounded it. It was dark with so much foliage blocking off the moonlight, so he used some of his sight evbaire to help him see through the dark. The evbaire painted everything in silver light. Sight lasted longer when used to extend vision, but it burned out quickly when used for seeing in the dark. Ehimen tried to balance his speed with his sight, hoping he could keep the speed lasting long enough to run through the trees before his sight burned out completely.

He burst through the trees and stopped close to the outermost ring. He always unconsciously used hearing to give himself a sharper edge and so when the generator came on, the roar of it rung through his head. Ehimen stopped using all his evbaire then, stripping the enhancement from his senses. The trees were suddenly lit, but the lights were white instead of the violet they’d been before. Ehimen frowned. He went through the last set of trees and stopped between two large mango trees, staring out at the porthole riddled street. Lines of street vendors stood on the opposite side of the road, they roasted suya, cooked indomie, fried puff-puff, battered their goods, all yelling to be heard over the backdrop of so many roaring generators, and loud booming music. Ehimen watched them carefully and felt a certain chill run up his spine when their conversations halted, and one after the other, they turned towards the trees he stood buried in, pointed their fingers towards the compound, and then gaped, mouths hanging open, and eyes wide with wonder.

“Bleep, that’s not good.”

Ehimen turned. Odion was standing beside him. He’d probably used speed to get there before Ehimen could hear him approach.

“No, it’s not.” Ehimen agreed. It was really, really, not good. From their reactions, it was clear that the unmarked people could see their compound. If they could see the compound, then they could see the large Enikaro mansion sprawled in the center of it. There was supposed to be a cloak preventing them from being seen, the cloak showed the compound as a forest and had commune magic laced in it to mess with emotions so that no one felt obliged to check it out.

There were fifty-seven people on the street opposite them, Ehimen did a quick count, and each one of them started moving towards the compound. Ehimen spotted a group of twelve middle-aged men, coming out of a bar across the street. Police, he easily identified them from their black uniforms, and the guns they carried. They were pushing people out of their way and heading directly for their compound.

“That’s even worse,” Ehimen said, tipping his chin in the direction of the unmarked Nigerian policemen. “Have any extra speed and sight?”

Odion dug into the leather pocket of his trousers and tossed two at Ehimen. Ehimen grabbed them and then tossed them into his mouth. “What happened to the cloak?” he spoke while chewing down the evbaire.

“Same thing that happened to the imps who were supposed to be keeping watch, I suppose, they’re both gone.” The pentagon emblem on Odion’s forehead burned a deep shade of crimson to match the crimson growing in his eyes. He’d entered his mark. “I’ll try to hold them off as long as I can, brother,” he pulled his glass coiled whip out of its holster, flicked his wrist, and let it out, uncurled, and leather. It came loose with a snap. Ehimen heard that snap and longed to unleash Enforcer. He reached again for his holster and cursed again when he found it empty.

“I’ll send the rest of your litter to join you. Try not to kill, but don’t hesitate if it can’t be avoided.”

Odion jerked his head down in a sharp nod. “Yes, brother.”

Ehimen nodded back, and then he blazed the speed evbaire he’d just consumed and ran into the house.

Chapter Nine

The InCoSeM reps turned their curious gazes on Ehimen when he appeared in the room in front of them. “Breach.” He told his siblings, the third litter. All three of them immediately jumped to their feet and brandished their whips. The snaps echoed through Ehimen making him ache to join them. “Take command. I’ll take over when I get back.”

“Yes brother,” they nodded, then they were gone in a blink.

Four of the InCoSeM reps jumped in their seats. “My god!” One exclaimed. “I daresay, I have never seen wielders in fighting form before. I’m quite excited.” Ehimen glared at him.

“Is there anything you’d like us to do, scion?” The question came from the only InCoSeM rep that hadn’t startled. It was the commune Paul, Ehimen appreciated how steady he was in the crisis.

“You can teleport back home.” Ehimen said, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“Nonsense, you’re an oriakhi wielder horde, we’re perfectly safe with you.” Another InCoSeM rep chimed in. “We’ll stay right here.” Of course, Ehimen scoffed, InCoSeM, always going out of their way to be a pain in the ass. If their horde didn’t have to stay to protect the Enikaro property and make sure word of this holding didn’t spread, they would have teleported out and left InCoSeM to fare for themselves. Well, not really, but Ehimen allowed himself to dream that they could.

He ignored the InCoSeM reps then and used his speed. While he ran to the East Wing where his mother’s rooms were, he reached into his augur bond with the fourth litter augur. ‘Odion is fighting at the perimeter, your litter should join him.’

‘Yes, brother.’

He was at Iye’s doorstep as soon as he pulled out of the bond. Ehimen took a deep breath. The thought of battle always made his heart race, it sent blood boiling through his veins, and had goosebumps standing allover his skin. This was a small battle, in fact, it was less than a battle, just an unmarked invasion that needed rounding up, but he’d heard his siblings’ whips snapping and that was all the encouragement his body needed to pump him full of adrenaline.

He knocked on the door when he felt calm enough to do that and then simmered his hearing ebvaire at a lower intensity so the sound of the generator didn’t tear at his eardrums. He’d turned on the hearing enhancement because Iye always whispered her ‘come in’, and if the person seeking entrance wasn’t listening for it, she was more than happy to leave them standing at the door for hours.

He heard the whispered, “come in,” and twisted the doorknob. The door opened silently.

Iye sat on a couch in the rectangular receiving room, with two of the second litter seated on either side of her and the last three, scattered on sofas around the room, fully sprawled out, as if their younger siblings weren’t fighting on the ground floor. Iye and the two littermates sitting with her, wove together the whiphairs for a new wielder’s whip. Iye’s gaze lifted to him the moment he walked in, her eyes climbed steadily over his body, from his feet to his head, moved down to his eyes, and then turned back to her weaving. His other siblings looked at him, with curious detachment, as if he was a specimen under a microscope. It made his skin crawl. The second litter were definitely not his favorite siblings. There was only one of them Ehimen liked, Aisosa, she sat at their mother’s right side, straightening out the strands of whiphair for their mother to weave. They could all weave their own whips, but only the horde matron could weave in the notches that made a wielder’s whip special.

Aisosa looked at him almost the same way as her littermates did, except in her case, her curious look held a touch of concern, belied by the slightly mocking twist of her lips. The woman was a study in contradictions.

“Iye,” Ehimen greeted, with a bow, “we’ve being breached.”

His mother answered without glancing up. “I’m not deaf Ehimen, I can hear them.”

She could? Ehimen scowled, he didn’t dare increase the intensity of his hearing with the loud generator powering the mansion, but apparently his mother didn’t share the same limitation. Ehimen wanted to ask for his whip back, but then he looked at the second litter and just couldn’t bring himself to voice the words with them staring at him. Instead, he reached into the bond that he shared with Iye, hoping to beg for his whip back in the privacy of their shared telepathic connection. She denied the bond. Ehimen tried again, trying to push into her mind through the doors she’d closed against him. He hoped the intensity of his push would show her how much he wanted to reach into their bond, but his mother kept him locked out. Ehimen tenaciously kept pushing even when it felt as if his brain was splitting, and warm trails of moisture streaked down his nose. A bit of it seeped between his closed lips and he tasted the metaling tang of blood.

“Stop it,” Iye snapped. She stopped her weaving altogether and gave him her full attention. “You’re only hurting yourself. The last time I checked you had a mouth, use it.”

Ehimen’s jaw clenched. He almost glared at her. “I should be leading my siblings.”

She eyed him. “You trained them well, they’re doing fine without you.” She flicked her gaze away from him, taking it back to the weaving. Silently, his siblings fed her more strands, and she continued her weaving. He’d been dismissed, but he stood his ground. He looked at his siblings trying to stare them out of countenance, but they just stared back at him. He couldn’t intimidate the second litter, they were only two years younger than him, and they were Iye’s guard, they didn’t answer to him.

He cleared his throat. “I can’t just sit back while my family fights, Iye.” He caught a warning glance from Aisosa, probably trying to tell him to control his tone. He gritted his teeth.

Iye didn’t say anything, she just kept on with her weaving. Ehimen felt like a fool standing there while she weaved.

“Give me back my whip mother, I need to fight.” He shouldn’t have said it, especially not in that tone, as if he was ordering her to, as if he had the right. The minute the words were out he wished he could take them back. His siblings froze, all five of them, and stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. Maybe he had, he’d never been forced to stand back while his younger siblings fought.

When Iye’s gaze lifted from her weaving, the look she gave him made his blood run cold. He knelt down and bowed his head. “That was rude Iye, I’m sorry, please forgive me.”

The room was silent and tense. The intensity of his hearing had been enough to pick up the swishes of his mother’s fingers while they ran across the strands of whiphair. He’d heard the slight shifts in his siblings positioning on the sofas. Now no one moved, there was no sound, just the gentle buzz of the electricity in the light bulbs.

“Leave us,” Iye ordered, “stand outside and don’t listen in.”

“Yes, Iye.” The five answered in unison. The second litter often moved as one, almost as connected as Omon and Odion, their hordes only womb twins. They left the room and closed the door behind them.

Ehimen gulped nervously. He wanted to lift his head, to gauge the depth of his mother’s rage, but he didn’t give in to the impulse. The silence dragged on until he couldn’t take it anymore. He lifted his head and stared into his mother’s chilling gaze.

“What would you do to any of your younger siblings who spoke to you the way you just did to me?” Her voice was soft, warm even, in stark contradiction with the hostility in her eyes.

Ehimen lowered his gaze. “If they were younger, I’d cane them, if they were older it would be the whip.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time after.

“Do you argue my right to seize your whip?”

Ehimen swallowed. “No, Iye, I disobeyed a direct order from you. Your punishment was kind.” Ehimen wasn’t sure he believed that, but he knew it was the right thing to say. If he was being honest, he would say it hadn’t been a fair order to give. He’d just found out that Madam Celia’s was burning. How was he supposed to wait simply because she ordered it? His wife and his son were dying and she’d ordered him not to go to them, and he was meant to have obeyed?

‘Yes, you were meant to have obeyed.’

Ehimen’s gaze snapped up. He couldn’t keep the accusatory look from his eyes. Now she chose to go into his head. If only he was a strong enough augur to push her out of his mind the way that she’d done to him.

‘You don’t mean that.’

Ehimen forced his mind into emptiness, no thoughts, no musings, nothing, it was a trick he’d learned when he was younger.

‘Now you’re just sulking.’

She sighed. “We’re wielders Ehimen, a horde fights, it’s what wielders do. I thought I trained you to be a soldier.”

“You know you did.”

“A soldier follows orders, regardless of his emotional state. When you came back and asked your family to help you search for them, did I deny your request?”

Ehimen shook his head.

“Did you running there accomplish anything?”

Ehimen clenched his fists. It was unfair, just plain unfair to hold him to such a standard. He was human. The woman he loved had just died.

‘And if one of your siblings falls in battle? Will you turn your attention from the fight to go and cry over their corpse?’

Ehimen’s jaw clenched. He’d never known his mother to be heartless, but now he felt as if he was seeing a whole new side to her and he didn’t like it. Iye was strong, she was strict, but she wasn’t cruel, and he felt that this conversation was cruel, and given the fact that he’d just found out Isoken and Agbe where dead, it was unbelievably insensitive.

“Come here, my love.”

He wanted to stand up, turn around and storm out of the room. He wanted to rail at her. But he couldn’t do any of those things. He was her scion, he couldn’t be such a bad example to his younger siblings. Since he couldn’t do any of the things he wanted, he decided he also wouldn’t do what she wanted. So, he ignored her.

‘I’m not above truly punishing you Ehimen. I don’t want to do it, especially not now, given all that you’ve lost, but I will if you force me to. Now come here.’

Ehimen stood up and walked towards her. He avoided her eyes. She was in his head, he knew that much already, but he didn’t want her to see the emotions in his eyes. She pointed to the ground and he knelt by her feet.

“You are my scion. When I die, I’ll be leaving my children in your hands. You will be their protector. You are an ancestry wielder, Ehimen, you need to be stronger than your emotions. I understand your grief, but you can never let emotions trump reasoning. You just ran there. What if burning the building down had been a trap to lure you in? Were you in any frame of mind to protect yourself?” Ehimen didn’t respond and luckily, she didn’t try to make him. “I wouldn’t have stopped you from going, my love, but I would have insisted that you take some of your siblings with you. Instead, you completely disregarded my orders. When you’re at your most vulnerable is when you have to be most alert. Do you understand me?”

Ehimen looked up into her eyes. He nodded, he did understand, and he saw all the ways that he had failed her. “Forgive me, please.” This time he really meant it.

She smiled at him. “I’ll give you your whip back when the horde truly needs you to have it. Till then, don’t ask. Understand?”

“Yes, Iye.” There was nothing like telling a wielder they couldn’t have their whip, to make them yearn for it. He’d watched Omon the year that he’d lost his whip. That had been the punishment Iye deemed fit for him misusing his whip on Agbe’s back. Ehimen didn’t think he could survive a year without Enforcer. But he’d been warned, and he knew Iye was being particularly forgiving with him, if he asked for his whip again, the repercussions would be much worse.

A soft knock sounded on the door.

‘Sit down, Ehimen.’

‘Thank you, Iye.’

Ehimen stood and sat beside her. She took her time staring searchingly into his eyes, then she nodded and whispered, “come in.” Two of the fourth litter came in with the two American InCoSeM reps trailing silently behind them.

“Please,” Iye’s voice was louder now. Their mother rarely spoke with her regular voice to them, so it always came as a shock when the loud, authoritative, horde matron voice came out. She gestured to the sofas and the InCoSeM reps sat. The fourth litter did not.

Ehimen looked over his siblings. There were no bloodstains on them, and apart from a slight tear on the collar of Omon’s leather shirt, there was no sign they’d been in a fight. Their whips were coiled and hung as glass from their holsters. “Report,” Ehimen ordered.

“We’ve rounded up the invasion. There were eight fatalities, five unmarked killed by stray bullets fired by the unmarked police, and three were unmarked policemen we killed in combat. The rest we’ve gathered together in the compound and the memoir witches are working on removing their memory of what they saw tonight.” Omon reported.

“And the cloak?” Ehimen asked.

“The quintise has repaired it. Still no word from the imps though. They were here before the lights went out, but they’re gone now.”

Ehimen frowned. He turned to his mother. She appeared to be just as confused as he was. Imps had been assigned to each of the Enikaro holdings outside the Community, they kept watch at the perimeter and they were supposed to report to any commune in residence if there was trouble, or return to ancestral grounds and report to a commune there. They couldn’t just leave without the Enikaro’s direct orders.

“What happened?” Ehimen asked.

The InCoSeM rep, Paul, cleared his throat. He sat forward on the white sofa and adjusted his blue necktie. “I’m afraid we’ve received some very distressing news from the InCoSeM headquarters.”

“What has happened?”

Paul’s gaze dropped to the ground. He steepled his hands and then slowly dragged his gaze back up. His lips pursed. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how else to say this, but the Enikaro has been destroyed.”

“What?” Ehimen struggled with processing this. The Enikaro couldn’t just be destroyed. The Enikaro wasn’t a thing that could be destroyed. They were strong, stronger than anything on this earth that could destroy them. Ehimen looked at his skin, then at his siblings’ and his mother’s. They all still had the silver oriakhi brand all around their bodies. If the Enikaro was destroyed, they wouldn’t. He reached into his fourth litter augur brother’s mind and saw his thoughts. He was standing with his quintise, they all still had the pentagon emblem on their foreheads, if the Enikaro was destroyed, the quintise would be no more. “The Enikaro isn’t destroyed.”

Paul leaned forward. He stared curiously at Ehimen, as if he was wondering how he knew. Ehimen wasn’t about to tell InCoSeM that the oriakhi and the quintise were tied to Enikaro blood. If InCoSeM found out that secret, there was no telling what they’d do. “You’re right,” Paul said, “not all of them, there are still a handful of descendants of the Enikaro alive who fled the Community before the attack was over, but the ancestral grounds have been destroyed. That’s why the lights went out, why the cloak did to, the quintise that did the cloaking died and so their magic died with them.”

Ehimen was stunned. He didn’t know how to react. He thought of all the wielder hordes who’d been at the meeting tonight. Dead? The God-born, Ovie Omoruyi, Omonoba Ejehmen and his family, all gone? What of the rest of the clan of rulers?

“How did it happen?” Iye asked.

“A traitor inside the ancestry. A bi-marked warlock named Isokun, that’s what the headquarters is reporting. This Isokun character wired up crimson inferno bombs around the ancestral grounds and just blew the whole place up.” Paul shook his head. “We’re all reeling from the news. We are so very sorry for your loss. What will you do now?”

Ehimen blinked, dazed. They were ancestry wielders, sworn to the Enikaro. What were they to do if the ancestry was gone?

“There’s only one thing we can do. Find the remaining descendants of the Enikaro, and serve them.” Iye spoke and they all nodded in agreement, even the InCoSeM reps. Ehimen was still reeling. It felt as if the entire world had changed in a single day. He remembered Isokun. He was a bi-marked warlock that the God-born had welcomed into the ancestry with open arms. Ehimen couldn’t believe that Isokun would betray the ancestry like that. He wanted to return to the Community now more than he’d wanted to before. Not just for his revenge, but for the ancestry’s. His mother was right though, there was something much more pressing than revenge. There were descendants of the Enikaro lost in the unmarked world, and they had to find them and protect them.

Chapter Ten

She hadn’t just done that. She had not just done that. Agbe couldn’t stop staring at her. He thought his eyes might just pop out of his socket with how wide he’d pulled his eyelids apart. Although he’d seen her throw the paper into her mouth, chew it up and swallow it, he was still waiting for her to reach into her dress, pull the paper out and then say ‘gotcha!’ with a twinkle in her eyes. No such luck though. She just stared back at him, smiling. She really was crazy.

Then she turned her gaze to the side, as if the stratification on the clay tunnel walls had suddenly become fascinating. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said finally, darting her gaze back to him. “I read the paper before I swallowed it, I have your uncle’s address memorized.”

“And that’s supposed to be comforting?” She’d glanced at the paper for a second before swallowing it up. There was no way she could read an entire address in that time, let alone memorize it.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m an omem, I couldn’t forget it, even if I wanted to.”

Agbe grudgingly relaxed. He let his gaze trail over her slowly, an omem, he exhaled and felt the anxiety that had gripped him seep away. Own memory recalls, omems, remembered everything they saw, heard, felt, everything, forever. They only had to glance at a page full of words and even on their deathbed, they’d be able to remember every detail on the page, down to the texture of the sheet.

“So, you don’t think it’s safe to walk around with the address written on a sheet of paper?” That was the only reasonable explanation he could think of for why she’d done what she had.

She startled. Her eyebrows pulled together as if he’d spoken a different language.

“That’s why you swallowed the sheet?” Agbe prompted.

“Oh,” she giggled, and Agbe couldn’t stop himself from smiling. She had the most adorable little girl giggle he’d ever heard, which was really weird cause she had to be at least seventeen. That giggle alone would have had patrons knocking at her door if she’d been a LovePeddler. He thought of whores and remembered his brothel, his home, his mama. He swallowed down the urge to cry.

“You are so handsome,” she said, “it’s almost scary how good-looking you are. So unreal. People must stop on the street and just leer at you whenever you walk by.”

Agbe scoffed. He narrowed his eyes at her. What game was she playing? Yeah, he was handsome, but he wasn’t that handsome. He decided to play along. “I grew up in a brothel district,” he replied nonchalantly, “trust me, there were much better things to leer at.”

“Wow, you’re so bad,” she teased, and then she giggled again and turned to stare at the canal. She leaned over the side of the canoe and put her hand into the water. She beamed when her hand dipped beneath the blue surface.

Agbe looked away from the childlike delight on her face. The canal was wide, wide enough that two canoes could move together side by side without touching. The canoe they rode on was rather simple, and pretty cheap looking. He’d seen much more stellar speedboats outside ancestral grounds. Though none of those speedboats had propelled themselves forward on calm waters.

Drops of water splashed on Agbe’s face and his half-open chest. He jumped back and then frowned when he heard that little girl giggle. He turned to the ancestry bitch’s sister and found her staring at him, eyes twinkling.

He wiped the water off his face. “How old are you anyway?”

“Eighteen. How old are you?”

“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in a month.” Ehimen and his mum had planned a surprise party for his seventeenth birthday. He’d been blowing Larry when Prisca slipped up and spilled the secret. Agbe had laughed so hard that the vibration in his throat took Larry over the edge. He could almost taste Larry’s cum. But they were gone now, all of them. There was no one left alive who remembered his birthday. He felt empty inside. He had to remind himself that he still had family, he wasn’t all alone in the world. He had an uncle, Ejehmen, he had cousins. He knew this, but he yearned for the family he’d lost. “Tell me the address,” Agbe said, pulling himself from the gulf of grief threatening to devour him. He gave her the most convincing smile he could manage in his current frame of mind. “I’ll feel better knowing it.”

She ducked her head and dropped her gaze to the pleats on her dress. She played with them, twirling the dull brown leather garment around her fingers. Her toenails twitched in the simple black sandals she wore. Agbe focused on those little things, the straps of her black sandals, its silver buckle. Her long skinny legs, the darker patch of her slightly exposed knees. Her toenails weren’t manicured, but her fingernails were. He could make out the glossy shine of clear nail polish, but there was no varnish over it. Her nails were well tended, they looked neat. She had no bangles or necklaces, just simple pearls in her ears. Single piercing, no tats that he could see, her face was bare, no makeup, but she didn’t need it, she had her sister’s beauty, except on her it seemed more natural, more welcoming than it had on the ancestry bitch. The ancestry bitch’s beauty was loud, the kind that demanded attention, but her sister’s was more understated. Agbe ran out of ways to avoid the silence, and a feeling of dread crawled up his spine.

“You’re not going to give it to me.” He said, when her silence made that much clear. “You have no intention of taking me to my uncle.” His chest tightened. It shouldn’t hurt that he would never see them, but it did, it just felt like one more loss on a day already filled with them.

“I will,” she snapped her head up and stared at him. The despair he saw in her eyes startled him. “I will, I just need something from you first.”

Ah. Agbe stared down at the wallet that his grandmother had given him, then his gaze flicked to the sack full of bijous. The God-born had trusted this woman, she’d been wrong. Agbe had avoided thinking of his mamin so far and he hated that the ancestry bitch’s sister had forced him to stop avoiding. He’d just left her. She’d ordered it, but he’d obeyed, he’d left his grandmother to die. He blinked and swallowed, then forced himself to look at the extortionist. “How much do you want?”

She reared back as if insulted. “I don’t want your money.”

“Then what do you want?”

She bit into her bottom lip and looked away. The canoe kept moving, going at the same pace that it had from the start. It didn’t go too fast, or too slow, just alright, the perfect speed. He felt the wind, as if he was outdoors, rowing on a lake, except he wasn’t.

A deep rumbling sounded behind them. It started and it went on for a long time after. Agbe closed his eyes. ‘Goodbye mamin.’ He couldn’t hold back the tears anymore, they fell in warm, wet, streaks down his face. The rumbling continued, Agbe knew it was the leveling of ancestral grounds which the InCoSeM rep, Paul, had promised. The InCoSeM rep who’d killed his mother. He was responsible for so much loss in Agbe’s life. His mother, his friends, Ehimen, and now his grandmother. The rumbling grew louder, as if the tunnel they were in was crumbling behind them.

“Ivie!”

Agbe snapped his eyes open. The ancestry bitch’s sister looked terrified. She pointed behind him and he turned and saw the cause of her concern. The tunnel had closed up behind them. The curved tunnel walls moved together, swallowing up the water, leaving nothing but a single clay wall. A moving wall, which was probably the source of the ancestry bitch’s sister’s hysteria. The wall was coming right for them, as if it was going to swallow them up the same way it did to the water. He turned back around, nonplussed.

“We’re going to die!” She screamed. “Oh God,” she started shaking, her legs, her arms, like she was convulsing. Tears raced down her face. Agbe wiped away the remnants of his. “We’re going to die!”

She was blackmailing him. She wanted something from him in exchange for the address to the last remaining family he had, the last people he could turn to. Agbe should have been okay with letting her suffer in fear. He should have enjoyed watching her cry, but he didn’t, he couldn’t. For some reason he didn’t want the pretty devil to be afraid.

“The tunnel is not going to close up fully until we’re out. We’re fine, you don’t have to worry.”

She calmed, sniffling, and wiped the tears from her face. “How do you know that?” she asked, pouting.

Agbe shrugged. “The same way I knew that mamin wouldn’t hurt me. It’s just a feeling.”

“Enikaro blood,” she giggled and Agbe’s lips twitched. He felt lightened hearing her giggle again. “Do you ever wonder what your life should have been like?”

The question irritated him. “My life was what it should have been. Stop stalling and tell me what you want from me. I want to go to my family.”

She seemed so hurt by the words that Agbe almost wished he could take them back. “I’m your family too.”

He sighed. “What do you want from me?”

“You,” she replied.

He frowned. “What?”

She nibbled on her bottom lip, and glanced at the closing tunnel behind them, as if confirming that it hadn’t started moving faster. “I’m going to be all alone in the unmarked world Ivie, I’m scared. Just stay with me for a bit, help me settle into it, and I’ll tell you your uncle’s address, I promise.”

Agbe watched her face. She appeared sincere, honestly afraid, honestly willing to give him the address if he did what she wanted. “Or I could just leave you and my uncle and make a life for myself.” Thanks to mamin, he could afford it.

She lurched forward and grabbed onto his hands. Instinctively, Agbe tried to pull his hands away, but she held fast. “Please,” she begged, “just help me settle in. I’m scared, Ivie, I’ve never been outside the Community, I’ve never lived on my own. I’ll give you the address, I swear, I’ll even take you there. Please.”

Agbe wanted to say no. If he was stuck with his biological family then he’d choose the side of the family that had welcomed him in with hugs over the side that had abandoned him and whipped him when he dared to confront them. He wanted the God-born’s side, not the ancestry bitch’s, and he didn’t owe the ancestry bitch’s sister anything. Not one damn thing. “You can come with me to my uncle’s.”

She shook her head, panicked. “My sister tormented your uncle’s wife. Uwa was so jealous of Itohan, jealous that Itohan got everything Uwa wanted, so jealous that every chance Uwa got Uwa belittled Itohan. Itohan might let me stay if your uncle forces her to, but she’ll hate it, and she’ll hate me. I can’t live like that. Please, Ivie, don’t make me.”

‘Please, don’t make me’? Was she serious? She was okay with making him do something he didn’t want to but she wasn’t willing to do the same. “You can live with us until you get settled, used to the unmarked world, then you can find somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be permanent.”

Agbe’s eyes widened when she dropped to her knees in front of him. The space between seats in the canoe was so narrow that her chest pushed into Agbe’s knee. “Please, I beg you, Ivie, it would be a nightmare. You don’t understand how mean my sister was, how terrible she could be to people. She treated Itohan like dirt and schemed to have her and her daughters killed. Itohan would hate having me under her roof.”

She was wrong about one thing, Agbe knew exactly how mean the ancestry bitch could be. He’d been eight years old, her own son, and she’d had him whipped. If she could do that to him, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to others. It didn’t even surprise him that she was capable of plotting murder.

“Fine,” Agbe gave in, “please get up now, it’s weird, you kneeling there like that.”

No one had ever looked at Agbe the way she did in that moment. Smiling, she gazed up at him, awe-stricken, as if he was larger than life. He imagined it was the way that he’d looked at Ehimen when Ehimen had saved him from the ancestry bitch. He’d never been a savior to anyone, it made his chest swell. He smiled back at her.

She placed her palms on the seat behind her and pushed herself back onto it. “You’ll stay with me for a year?” she asked hopefully.

“A month.” He said flatly.

“Nine months?”

“One.”

“Seven?”

“One.”

She pouted. “Three?”

“One month, Osaretin, take it or leave it.”

She nudged his knee with hers. “Fine. Thank you!” She darted out of her seat, kissed him on the cheek, and then fell back into her seat. “Thank you so much, Ivie.”

“You could have just asked, you know, you didn’t need to blackmail me into it.”

“I know that now,” she said, but she didn’t offer up the address now either. Agbe chuckled.

“Call me Titi, Osaretin is so long.”

He nodded. Then he looked at the canal, into the blue water, and exhaled. He’d waited sixteen years to find out he had cousins, he could wait another month to meet them. Besides, Titi was right, she was his family too, and unlike him, she’d been sent out of the Community with nothing. Titi, he was starting to think of her as her own person and not the ancestry bitch’s sister.

“Is Itohan really that petty?” Agbe asked. Did he want to live with someone like that?

“She’s a good person, really she is, but my sister went out of her way to be cruel to her. It’s only human nature to react to that.”

“What of my uncle, Ejehmen?”

She smiled, a warm open-mouth smile that showed off all her teeth.

“Wow,” Agbe teasingly whistled, “that good, huh?”

She giggled and he chuckled. “The very best. Omonoba Ejehmen is the best descendent of the Enikaro I know. He’s humble, where all the others are proud and arrogant. He’s kind, generous, goes out of his way to make you smile. Don’t get me wrong, the descendants of the Enikaro are not all bad, but Omonoba Ejehmen is a cut above the rest.”

For some insane reason the glowing testimonial made Agbe proud. He was proud of a man he’d never even met. “And Ovie Omoruyi?”

She took a deep breath, crossed her hands on her lap and then exhaled dramatically. Agbe rolled his eyes. “Let’s just say, he loved his family.” She said at last.

Agbe snorted. “That’s all you can say for him?”

She shrugged. “He was arrogant and entitled, but he wasn’t cruel. He liked fancy cars, beautiful women, expensive mansions, he was a descendant of the Enikaro. A prince in the clan of rulers, the world existed to serve him. But he did love his family, he was devoted to Ehizokhae blood.”

Had this whole conversation been leading to this one question? Was that why he brought it up in the first place? Did he still really care? Agbe thought that the ancestry bitch’s wielder had whipped it out of him the day he met her, but he was wrong, and now, with her sister sitting in front of him, he had to ask. “So, if Ovie Omoruyi was so dedicated to his family, then why did your sister give me up? Why didn’t she tell him about me?” He hated himself for asking, for needing to know why. He’d thought he didn’t care, but it was still there, the part of him that wondered why the ancestry bitch hated him so much. She could have given him to the God-born if she hadn’t wanted to raise him, why did she want him dead, why had she left him as Varmint chow?

“I didn’t even know you existed until about three months ago, when I heard her friends gossiping about you. And even then, they were so terrified of what my sister would do to them if she heard, that they spoke in whispers and didn’t even mention your name. But from what they said, it sounded as if Uwa really wanted you. Ovie Omoruyi was devoted to Ehizokhae blood, and she knew that he would do anything for his child. So, she went out of her way to make sure that she got pregnant for Ovie Omoruyi, that she bore the God-born’s first grandchild.”

Agbe frowned. “Then what went wrong?”

“She wanted to be the mother of the God-born’s great, powerful, grandchild.”

The answer hit Agbe like a boulder. Why was he surprised? It all came down to it in the end. “But I was unmarked.”

She nodded gravely. “Uwa didn’t want an unmarked child, and she didn’t want Ovie Omoruyi to ever know that he fathered an unmarked child through her. I’m sorry Ivie.”

It hurt. He didn’t want it to, he didn’t want it to matter at all. The ancestry bitch had already taken flesh and blood from him when she’d had her wielder whip him. She’d already caused him so much pain, how could he allow her to hurt him more? But he couldn’t help it, it fucking hurt. She’d left him to die because he was unmarked.

“I want to lie down,” he said, suddenly exhausted. He was about to ask Titi to move to the side so he could lay across one side of the wooden beams. Before he could voice his request, the seat he’d been perched on vanished, and he dropped to the ground. The surface he landed on was soft, like foam, though it looked like wood. Agbe looked up and saw that the canoe had been reshaped around him. It was much wider now, leaving enough room for him to sprawl out on.

“Ehizokhae blood. I’m so jealous of you right now.”

Agbe didn’t respond, he couldn’t. He just turned his back on her, rested his head against the foam and let out all the tears he’d been holding. He wasn’t sure exactly why it was hearing Titi’s words that broke the dam. He should have suspected that was why the ancestry bitch abandoned him. He should have known. Being unmarked had always been a sore spot for him, but today, it felt a million times worse. If he was a healing witch, he could have saved his mother. She’d been too weak to save herself, but he could have saved her, she would still be with him now if he had the power. Or if he was a commune, he could have attacked the InCoSeM reps before they could attack them, or he could have teleported them out of the room before the InCoSeM reps had a chance to attack. If he was an augur, he could have gotten into a bond with Ehimen and saved him from InCoSeM’s attack on that building. But he was nothing. Unmarked, useless, and so everyone he’d loved was dead. He felt like a failure.

Arms wrapped around his body. One arm went around his waist and the other tucked underneath his neck. Breasts pressed flush against his back and knees nudged at the back of his. “It’s okay, Ivie, let it out, let it all out,” she said. And he did.

He let himself fall apart in her arms. He wept for all the people that he would never see again. His mama, Ehimen, his friends, his grandma, his chest felt like it was tearing, and his eyes burnt, but he cried. His world, his life, it was all gone, and Agbe had no idea what came next. He wished he could go back in time and see his mama just once more. He would give anything to borrow his head into the crook of her neck just one last time. To tease her, laugh with her, to know that he was loved.

He cried until the tears stopped flowing, until there was no more salty water to bleed out through his eyes. Then face itching, eyes swollen, and hollowed out inside, Agbe fell asleep.

When he woke up, they were out of the tunnel. There were no stars in the sky that he could see, just a faint banana moon. Throughout his life, he’d never looked up into a moon that didn’t glow almost as bright as the sun, into a starless sky. The air smelled putrid, polluted, and it was so unbelievably dark. Where were the streetlights?

“Ivie?” Titi’s sleepy voice sounded behind him.

“We’re here,” he said and tried not to shudder. Now, seeing the unmarked world, Agbe could understand her fears of having to navigate it alone. He was afraid too, he wanted to return to the comfort of the Community. But he couldn’t, it wasn’t his home anymore.

Thanks for the update

OP take note: the title should be a song unsung. u n s u n g.

goodness4ever:
OP take note: the title should be a song unsung. u n s u n g.

she had given reasons why the title is the way it is. Pls do not derail the thread any further. Thanks

I logged into nairaland and I thought in my mind that I might just see a new Obehid's story. I clicked the literature section and scrolled down a bit and this story is staring me in the face.
Thanks obehid I'm here for the ride like always.
BTW I got a new single out you can pls check it out thru the link below. You can listen to it on any streaming platform of your choice. I'll be expecting your review of it too. Thanks. https://onerpm/332033291105

Lordfave98:
she had given reasons why the title is the way it is. Pls do not derail the thread any further. Thanks

Thank you

Chapter Eleven

It was good to feel the wind on his face, like endless splashes of freedom. It made him feel as if he could fly, like he could soar up to the skies where nothing would ever bother him again. He dug his knees into the horse’s flank, urging it to move even faster, run, fly, flee. Spurred on, the horse thrust forward in the air, like an arrow flying free from the bow. It lunged and the sense of freedom deepened.

Agbe wished that it could last forever.

He wished that he could stay on his horse, riding through the back acre of the land he’d bought, and never have to return to his new reality. He really struggled to believe that it had only been three weeks ago when he’d left the Community.

Darkness loomed, and with it, came the bright yellow lights from the globe lamp posts around the compound. Agbe took a turn around the mansion, saw the brightly waxed blue Audi still parked in front of the house, and decided to keep on riding. How long would they stay? He didn’t know and he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with Titi’s friends.

Five more days.

He’d promised her a month and he only had five more days to serve. There were times he wondered why he still put up with her. The sweet, giggling, ancestry girl he’d left the Community with had disappeared almost as soon as they’d gotten to Lagos. A part of him wondered if that girl had ever existed, or if she’d just conned him into believing she had.

Just as he was contemplating the state of his life, the yellow lights went off. “NEPA,” he heard the irritated hiss, and answered that with an annoyed hiss of his own. It wasn’t yet dark enough that he couldn’t see, so he kept riding and deluded himself into believing that NEPA taking the light wouldn’t affect his ride.

The unmarked world was a strange place. It had taken less than an hour to realize that the unmarked world had power outages. Agbe struggled to fully grasp this. The Community didn’t use magic to make electricity and they’d never had power outages, so why couldn’t the unmarked world do the same? The sound of generators roaring to life had become so commonplace that Agbe just accepted it as normal. No wonder the unmarked air smelled so polluted when they were forced to release so many toxic fumes running their generators. Nothing in the unmarked world felt the same. The air smelled different, it was dirty and thick, and one of the hardest adjustments had been learning how to breathe it in without gagging. And it was always so noisy in the unmarked world, generators, there were always generators on.

Then there were the people. Growing up in a brothel district had pretty much put Agbe in the lowest class of a highly classed society. He’d grown up poor by Community standards, but compared to the standard of living he saw in the unmarked world, his feelings of childhood poverty had practically been royal bliss. There was real poverty here, poverty to the point of having beggars on the street. Agbe had never seen a beggar before stepping foot in the unmarked world. But the beggars weren’t the worst of it, as far as Agbe was concerned, that was the corruption. Policemen on the street stopping cars unless they gave them money. Bribery was so rampant he’d just had to flash some cash and he’d gotten Ivie and himself legitimate unmarked identification. It was so unreal. Money moved this world. It wasn’t as if money hadn’t ruled the Community, but no amount of money in the Community could help a person evade justice…unless they had Enikaro blood. He sighed, perhaps the Community had been corrupt too, maybe there was no avoiding corruption, but the unmarked world felt so much worse off. Maybe it all came down to homesickness.

Agbe missed the Community. He missed the smell of it, the feel of the clean air, the texture of the pure clay soil underneath his feet. He missed his life, waking up everyday knowing what his place in the world was. Now he was rich, richer even than he’d imagined when he’d seen the sack of bijous mamin gave him, yet, even with all those riches, he felt lost.

“Ivie!” Agbe ignored her. “Ivie!!!” This time there was a chorus of female voices screaming out his name. “Ivie, the gen!” He tipped forward, leaning more into his horse. “IVIE EHIZOKHAE!”

Agbe sighed, abruptly jerking the reigns back. “I’m coming,” he yelled, not even trying to hide the resentment in his voice. Ehizokhae. Why wouldn’t she just tell him where his uncle was so he could go and be with family? He was tired of being nothing more than a walking ATM. He rode the horse back into the stable at a trot and then dismounted, leading it past the stalls for Titi’s horses. The first was smaller, a pony because Titi missed the pony she’d had in the Community. But then she decided ponies didn’t ride fast enough and she wanted a racehorse. Of course, she’d decided the racehorse was too fast, so she needed one with a calmer disposition. Agbe led his horse into its stall, sweeping hay out of his way with his feet. He stroked the horse’s mane to calm it, smiling when it turned to face him, and large brown eyes stared questioningly at him.

“Five more days, Peace, and I’ll take you to my real family.”

The horse whinnied as if it understood what Agbe said, and then ducked its head. Agbe took off its girdle and saddle and then put out some hay for it to eat. He’d always wanted to own his own horse. In the Community he hadn’t been able to afford one, but now he could. It was actually surprising how much he’d taken to the horse. All Titi’s horses had been bought new, for her, but this horse came with the mansion. He wanted to rub it down, but he knew Titi wasn’t that patient.

Titi’s never ridden racehorse neighed threateningly at him as he walked by its stall. He rolled his eyes, “I don’t know why you’re angry with me, I’m not the one who bought you only to keep you locked in.” The horse reared up on its hindlegs as if it had taken offense with what Agbe said. He just ignored it and walked out.

The generator house was a fifteen square feet cement building, with nothing but the huge generator in it and the mostly empty diesel-jerricans. Agbe checked to make sure that the generator had enough diesel in it to run then he turned it on. Their generator was insulated, covered with a white metal sheet that suppressed most of the noise the engine made. He walked over to the wall and pushed up on the metal lever, switching the power source from NEPA to generator. The single yellow light bulb on the roof of the generator house came on, signaling a successful change over. Agbe walked out of the open doorway, past the two-story, two thousand square-feet gateman’s house which was currently empty. He walked by the large black metal gates with the loops of barbed wires seated at the top.

The garden in front of the house was one of Agbe’s favorite things about it. He loved looking at the white calla lilies, and the river of green leaves surrounding each flower. He stretched out his hands and ran his fingers down the blades of the pink Cordyline petals. Then he plucked a red ixora flower from the shrub and sucked at its stem. The juice wasn’t as sweet as it was when grown by the verdant witches in the Community.

“Oga, I dey greet you oh!” Sunday stretched out his hairy arm and then bent a little at the waist. His off-white shirt looked more cream than white and he swam in his black trousers. Agbe almost lauded his stitched together belt for being capable of holding his trousers up. The bottom of his trousers were folded, exposing much more of his leg than Agbe wanted to see. “Eh ehn, oga, you want make I come pick the jerricans tomorrow? I dey go fill up for madam, if you want make I carry your own join.” Sunday was driver and gateman to one of Titi’s friends. Whenever they came to visit, he was always left sitting in the driver’s seat of the blue Audi for hours. He’d tried inviting the man in once and Titi had thrown a fit. Later she’d said it wasn’t what the unmarked did, and that if he acted too ‘strange’ they would get caught. Agbe was starting to wonder if getting caught and having to go back to the Community wasn’t better than this.

Five more days, he just had to wait five more days.

Agbe smiled at Sunday. “Yes, that would be nice, thank you.”

The man grinned, and nodded, chuckling. Sunday always chuckled or laughed when Agbe spoke. Titi’s friends said it was because he spoke with a funny accent, like oyinbo, but they could never place the accent because it didn’t sound like any foreign one they’d heard. “Okay sah, I go come pick am early tomorrow morning.”

Agbe nodded and then continued walking. He was seventeen, pretty much, and Sunday was in his thirties, but he always called him ‘oga’ and ‘sah’, it felt weird to be honest, but there really wasn’t anything about Agbe’s new life that didn’t feel weird. Agbe was just about to walk into the house, when something black caught his eye. He walked back to the parked cars and found a sleek black Corvette parked in front of the blue Audi, between the Jeep and Mercedes Benz Titi insisted on having, even though she’d barely driven the Benz. Agbe bent to a squat beside the hood and ran his hand over the smooth surface. Wow. He didn’t know how to drive, there really hadn’t been any motivation for him to learn in the Community, but he’d always enjoyed looking at cars, and this one was a looker. He’d never seen this car before, which meant Titi had made another new friend. Great.

Agbe made his way back to the door. On one hand, he knew that Titi’s friends had been helpful, they were the only reason that him and Titi had been able to settle down so quickly. They’d gotten them out of the hotel they’d lived in for the first few days in Lagos, into this mansion, they’d hooked them up with the connects for the new identities, but Agbe still didn’t like them. He couldn’t help it, especially when they’d turned Titi into someone he didn’t even recognize anymore. He exhaled, had he really known Titi before though? She was the ancestry bitch’s sister, her behavior shouldn’t come as a surprise to him.

Soaked in the yellow lights from the dangling bulbs hanging off the plaster roof in the entrance, Agbe climbed the three steps up to the front door and twisted the doorknob. He opened the door, stepped into the stone foyer, and quietly closed the door behind him. He heard the blast of music coming from the living room, and relaxed slightly. Now he just had to make it past the foyer and up the stairs without being seen, then he could go into his room and lock the door until Titi’s friends left.

Agbe had just about made it halfway across the foyer, when the living room door swung open. The smell of cigarette fumes mixed with weed, drafted out from the living room, and crept unbidden up Agbe’s nostrils. He coughed in response and cursed himself right after.

One of Titi’s friends stood at the now open door, she stared at him and smiled wide. “How far, little brother? Come and join us now.” Her gaze crawled sickeningly over his body. He hated the way Titi’s friends looked at him, as if they were starving and he was their last meal. This one was twenty-one, one of the younger women in the group. She wore a tight sleeveless white leather dress that showed a lot of cleavage, and ran down to just below her ass. She wasn’t bad looking, there was just something about the hungry way she looked him over which he found completely repulsive. Agbe didn’t understand why the unmarked reacted this way to him. It wasn’t just Titi’s friends. Everyone he’d seen since he left the Community had gaped at him, sizing him up, staring at him as if they’d never seen anyone that looked like him before. Yes, he’d attracted attention in the Community, but it was a sly attention, some people looking back to check him out a second time, not the way the unmarked just stopped dead in their tracks and gaped at him. It was really unsettling.

“Ivie, is that you? Come, I want you to meet somebody.” Titi’s voice was barely audible over the blaring music.

“Maybe later,” Agbe replied. There was no way he was walking into that room. The smoke in there was so thick he could see the white fumes in the doorway.

“Come now,” Titi again, “please.”

“Later.” Agbe walked past the woman in the doorway. Arms wrapped around his back and sharp heavily manicured fingernails stroked down his chest. The hold stopped him and the smell of her sweet perfume fought with the nauseating smell of the smoke fumes.

“Come little brother,” she whispered into his ear, “come and play with us, we won’t bite,” warm lips enveloped his earlobe and teeth nibbled gently against his skin, “unless you want us to.”

Agbe felt sick. He hated the smell of the fumes. The cigarettes he didn’t mind, but the weed was cheap, it was worse than the gutter weed he’d smoked in the Community. Every time he whiffed it, it just reminded him of his friends, of Prisca taking a drag and blowing the fumes into his mouth. Mama hadn’t been the spanking type, she just grounded when she was annoyed, and she’d grounded him over smoking bad weed. Smelling the fumes just brought back all the memories and it didn’t matter that it had been weeks since she’d died in his arms, every time he remembered, his chest ached, as if he was living it all over again.

“Ooh, what’s this?” The crooning voice tickled at his ear while its owner’s wandering finger circled the ring beneath his shirt.

He grabbed at her hands and pulled them away. Then he stepped out of her hold and glared at her. How dare she trace his mother’s ring? She wasn’t fit to touch it. Agbe placed his hand over his mother’s engagement ring, the outline digging into his palm, and pressed it into his chest. Mama, his heart cried out for her.

“What’s going on here?” Titi’s words were slightly slurred. She eyed her friend and then shoved her away with her shoulder. “Are you okay Ivie?”

Chapter Twelve

Agbe hated her. He was sure of it. He hated her. He hated the weave she wore now, hated the expensive clothes, hated the excessive jewelries, hated, hated, hated. And he especially hated the way she pretended to care about him. He pushed the ring even deeper into his chest. He could feel the sharp cut of the bijou stone tearing at his flesh.

Titi’s eyes were slightly reddened, and she swayed a little on her feet. Agbe only had to glance at her to know that she was on something stronger than weed. LSDs, coke, maybe something else. He turned around and started walking away.

“Wait, Ivie, what’s wrong?”

He’d gotten to the foot of the stairs when he felt her restraining hand on his shoulder. He gritted his teeth and kept looking ahead, at the marble steps, the dove sculpture on the first landing.

“This is your little brother?” A distinctive deep voice called out from behind him. Agbe had never heard anyone make so much of an effort to mimic a British accent, and fail that spectacularly.

He turned around. The man was in his mid-twenties, finely dressed, expensive wristwatch, fitted designer jeans, frosty white shirt. His hair was dreadlocked, it actually looked cool. He was attractive, Agbe grudgingly accepted, attractive in that square jaw, rigid cheek bones, way. He had light, sandy brown skin. Agbe could see this man driving around in the Corvette that was parked outside.

“Yes,” Titi stared up at him, and nodded. She smiled, gazing adoringly at him the way she’d looked at Agbe when he’d agreed to stay with her. Titi was obviously very into this man. Agbe found himself scowling at the stranger. “This is Ivie, my younger brother. Ivie, this is James.”

The man’s teeth were white. He smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Ivie.”

Agbe didn’t say anything.

James turned back to look at the woman who’d been feeling Agbe up before Titi came in, and jerked his head to the side. She made a quick retreat, back into the living room, and shut the door behind her. Agbe frowned at the handsome stranger. He’d never seen any of Titi’s friends react that obediently to anyone.

Titi’s eyes sparkled. She bit into her bottom lip, still gazing adoringly at James. She took a step back, swayed on her feet, and would have fallen if Agbe didn’t immediately reach out a hand to steady her. She clutched at his arms and laughed. She hiccupped as she was laughing, then she gasped, put her hand over her mouth and then giggled. It had been a long time since Agbe had heard that little girl giggle.

“So, Ivie, your sister tells me that you both just lost your parents?” James asked.

Agbe nodded. It was their cover story. Their parents had just died leaving them with a small fortune, which they’d spent on this house. The house had cost one of his mamin’s wrist bracelets. He hadn’t wanted to use her jewels but that was the only way they could afford it. He’d cashed in two more beads from a second bracelet, so that Titi could have spending money. Ten million naira, that was the bank rate for one of the God-born’s bijou beads. Ten million naira, and his grandmother had been wearing two bracelets on each wrist with longer strings on her neck and around her hair. A fortune. But Agbe wasn’t going to spend any more than those two wrist bracelets. The rest would go to his female cousins as the God-born wanted.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Agbe just nodded. Titi had wrapped her arm around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. He realized he’d done the same, wrapped his arm around her waist. He told himself he was only doing it to keep her steady since she was clearly high, but apparently not too high to gawk at James.

“It’s been over a year now, James, but thank you,” Titi said.

He smiled and winked at her and she chuckled. James swiped his tongue over his bottom lip and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ll just get to it then,” he turned his gaze on Agbe, “your sister tells me that you inherited some bijous?” He quirked an eyebrow.

Agbe clenched his jaw so hard that he felt the strain all the way to his temples. Was she insane? It was a struggle not to react, not to turn his attention on Titi and just yell at her. “We’ve sold all the bijous we inherited. It went into buying this house.” Agbe tried to keep his voice calm, emotionless. He didn’t clench his fists, didn’t glare at Titi, didn’t pull away from her, he just looked straight into James face and even managed a close-lipped smiled. He was going to kill Titi.

The man’s smile broadened. His eyes gleamed wolfishly. “That’s not what Titi said. She said you have a whole sack of them.”

Agbe couldn’t help it this time, he pulled away from Titi and glared at her. She swayed on her feet and then grabbed onto the wooden stair railing for support. Then she had the gall to tilt her head to the side and smile at Agbe. “James is going to help us sell them at a great rate, isn’t that perfect? We won’t have to keep going to the bank and selling the bijou beads off one at a time.”

Agbe dug his fingernails into his palm. They were too short to really cause any pain, but he was so angry, he had to do something. It was either clench his fists or punch a wall. His blood boiled. Why would Titi do this to him? Hadn’t he done enough for her? He hadn’t wanted to sell any of the God-born’s beads, it had felt wrong, but she’d begged him, reminded him that she didn’t have any money and so he’d sold them. He’d given her twenty million naira, bought a hundred million naira mansion with her name on the deed and that still wasn’t enough for her? Now she was telling strangers, strangers, that they had a fortune in bijous. Was she insane? Didn’t she understand that they had the kind of money people would easily kill for?

James clasped his shoulder and squeezed. “Relax Ivie, you can trust me, Titi knows that I won’t do anything to hurt her. Right?” he darted a look at Titi who immediately began nodding like a puppet whose strings he pulled. Then he turned back to Agbe and squeezed his shoulder again. Agbe was really starting to hate this guy. “Look, the black-market rate for bijou is thirty percent higher than the bank rate. If you give me the bijous to sell for you, I’ll give you what you would have gotten from the bank, plus twenty percent of the profit. I keep the rest.” He bent low so that his face was on the same level as Agbe’s and he kept smiling, trying to appear open and honest. It didn’t matter how hard he tried, because Agbe just didn’t trust him. But Titi had tied his hands, she was obviously too infatuated with this guy to think like a human being with a brain in her head, so it was his fucking job to protect them both. Nothing new there.

Agbe forced a furrow onto his forehead as if he was thinking deeply. Then he nodded, slowly, to make it appear as if he liked what he was thinking. And then, for the final act, he smiled. “That actually sounds like a great idea, but just give me about a week to think it over.” ‘More like give me a week to get the heck out of here,’ Agbe thought, but he just kept smiling and trying to return the earnest look that James gave him.

James smiled. “That sounds like a plan.” He released his hold on Agbe’s shoulder and stretched out his hand. Maintaining eye contact, and smiling, while he shook that hand was one of the hardest things Agbe had ever had to do. He wanted to be anywhere else. He didn’t want the responsibility of safeguarding his family’s heirlooms.

They released each other’s hands, and Agbe nodded and began climbing the stairs. He didn’t look back, just took it one step at a time up the spiral staircase, till he’d gotten to the second floor. He heard the slight footsteps behind him, but he refused to turn around. Instead, he gritted his teeth and kept going until he was safely within the walls of his room.

He’d just closed the door when it opened back up behind him.

“Isn’t he great?” Titi’s wistful voice was the last straw.

He picked up the glass cup on the side table in his room, whirled around, and threw it at her.

Her reddened eyes widened. She dodged out of the way. “Are you insane?”

“I was going to ask you that! Since when did my family heirlooms become yours to trade away? Did I tell you that I wanted to sell them off?” He yelled so loud that his throat hurt.

“I was just trying to help you out. What good are bijous in the unmarked world? The money is better. We need the money.”

Agbe shook his head. “The bijous are my family heirlooms. The God-born gave them to me to give to my cousins. And we don’t need anything. There’s not going to be a ‘we’ in five days.”

She teared up. “Five days. Five days!” She yelled back at him. “You’re counting down? Well let me tell you, I can decide not to give you that address in five days and there’s nothing you can do about it! ‘We’ will be stuck together whether you like it or not!”

“That’s where you’re wrong, you crazy bitch, give me the address or don’t, whatever you choose, in five days, me and you are done!”

“Then why wait five days? Just leave now!”

“Fine!” Agbe threw his hands in the air. “Fine.” He shook his head. “I can’t live like this anymore anyway. Watching you get high out of your mind every day. Cleaning up your vomit. Putting you to bed. I didn’t sign up for this crap. You wanted to get settled in the unmarked world, you’re settled. I’m done.” He turned his back on her and headed straight for his walk-in closet. It felt as if a weight had been lifted. He’d been carrying her for three weeks and he’d felt every second of that time. Worrying about her, feeling sorry for her, feeling responsible, well he’d had enough. He grabbed a suitcase, opened it up, and started throwing clothes into it. He would get on a bus back to Edo state, to Benin city, the same way they’d left, then he’d stay in a hotel until he could find a place for himself. He started putting together the plan he’d already been making. Hire a private investigator to find his uncle Ejehmen and the rest of his family. He’d have to use more of the bijou beads, but it would just be for himself and he didn’t need a mansion, just a small hotel room, then a one-bedroom apartment until he could find his family. He wasn’t going to throw away money that didn’t belong to him. Not anymore. It felt so unbelievably good to have a plan of action, a way forward. He felt as if he’d been stuck since he left the Community with Titi, now he was finally setting himself free.

He should have done this a long time ago.

“You’re really going to leave me, just like that?” her voice shook. She was crying, he could tell, and he didn’t care, he couldn’t. He didn’t want to turn around and see the tears streaming down her face. He wasn’t sure exactly how she did it, but she always found a way to make him inconvenience himself for her benefit. He was sick and tired of it.

“I’m sorry, Ivie, I didn’t mean what I said. Of course, I’ll give you the address, in five days, like I promised. I’m sorry.”

No, Agbe’s chest tightened, he wanted to beg her not to do this to him again. Even not knowing where in Benin he was going, it felt better to be free and on his own.

“Do you even care about me Ivie? Just a little? If you did you wouldn’t just leave me like this.” He heard her approach, but he couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move away, he just stood there, paralyzed, while she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned her head against his neck. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“I’ll change, I’ll do whatever you want. You may not care about me, but I love you Ivie, it’ll kill me to see you go. Please.”

“I don’t like your friends.”

“They won’t come here anymore.”

“I can’t stand seeing you passed out from drugs. It scares the shit out of me, and it’s beneath you.”

“You won’t ever have to see me like that again, I promise.”

“Fine,” Agbe turned around and hugged her back, “it’s okay, stop crying.”

“You’ll stay?”

“For five more days, like we agreed, then I’m going to my uncle and his family.”

She pulled away and stared up at him, her eyes still wet from crying. He could see the tear streaks on her face, they’d messed up her make up. “Why don’t you love me as much as you love them? You’ve never even met them, but you want to leave me for them. Why?”

Agbe frowned at her. How could she understand the emptiness he felt inside? He used to have a life. He used to have a mama who loved him more than life itself. He used to have friends he played and bleeped with. He’d had Ehimen. And right when he’d been about to have it all, a family, mother, father, him, living together in harmony, it had all gone away. Now he had no one who loved him, no one to love. He needed to fill the emptiness, to have a purpose again, a purpose greater than supplying her with money whenever she needed it and taking care of her when she couldn’t take care of herself.

In the end, he didn’t answer her question.

She pulled away and Agbe didn’t try to stop her. He just stood in the walk-in closet and watched her leave. Then he stripped, went into his bathroom, filled up the bathtub and soaked in a lavender bubble bath. Tears fell freely from his eyes as he drank in the lavender fragrance. It had been the smell of his mother’s favorite bath oil. Mama. Feeling hollow inside, he leaned his head back against the porcelain rim of the bathtub and closed his eyes. In his mind he saw himself seated on the ground while his mother and father sat on the sofa behind him. They were watching a wielder movie and teasing Ehimen because he couldn’t stop pointing out the flaws in the wielders’ fighting techniques. Then mamin, seated on the sofa to their right, said the movie was excellent and Ehimen stopped speaking because no one overruled the God-born. Ovie Omoruyi and Uncle Ejehmen would chuckle then, and his cousins, lying on the floor around him, would laugh. They were all one big family in his dreams, together and happy, and alive.

Later that evening, after Titi’s friends were gone, Agbe went downstairs to make himself dinner. He found her passed out on the living room sofa. His gaze swept over the streaks of cocaine on the center table, the pills scattered around them, the smattering of weed leaves, and the bong tipped over on the floor by the foot of her chair. He checked to make sure she was breathing, then he picked her up and took her to bed.

obehiD:


Thank you

The pleasure is mine ☺️. Thanks for the update

Chapter Thirteen

Agbe was walking back from his morning ride when he saw the black Corvette parked between the Jeep and the Benz. He gritted his teeth. Two more days, Titi just had to hold out for two more days, and she couldn’t even do that. She’d promised him that she wouldn’t let her friends come around anymore, of course she couldn’t keep the promise. Sometimes Agbe hated her so much, he almost wished she’d just OD on the pills she couldn’t stop herself from taking. The black Corvette meant that it was James in the house.

He struggled with controlling his temper as he made his way towards the front door. He kicked a pebble that was in his way, and then turned around and slammed the side of his fist into the wall. James! Of all the creeps she’d brought around, why did it have to be James returning, the only one who knew about his bijous. He stopped walking and stared longingly at the looming black metal gates. He could just go into the house, grab his bijous and leave. Why did he stay? Why couldn’t he leave Titi to her own devices? Why did his heart feel like it was ripping to pieces whenever she cried? Why did he keep going to take care of her when she passed out? Why was he doing this to himself?

He couldn’t come up with an answer and that was what hurt the most. He couldn’t leave, even though staying was hell. There were only two days left, why couldn’t Titi hold up her own end of the deal for two fucking days?

Agbe stomped angrily into the house. He slammed the front door behind him, and marched determinedly through the foyer, past the open door to the living room.

“Ivie, come join us.” The faux British accent only goaded at Agbe’s temper. It made him want to run over to that man and rip his head off his shoulders. He just couldn’t understand why Titi would do this to him. After everything he’d done for her, why couldn’t she care about him just a little, and keep her friends away like he’d asked?

“Ivie!” Titi screamed, “come! James wants to talk to us! He has an amazing offer for the bijous!”

“Bleep you!” Agbe screamed back at her. He was done. This was the last straw. He was going to go up the stairs, pack up his stuff and leave. He’d find his uncle and his cousins another way.

He kept walking.

He’d just gotten to the foot of the stairs when he heard that sickening attempt at a British accent again. “Now is that any way to talk to your older sister? If you were my little brother, I would slap that dirty mouth of yours clean.”

Agbe had a number of choice words he wished to say to that creep, but he refrained from speaking. Go up, pack up, leave. It was his plan and finally, he was sticking to it. Titi could go and Bleep herself as far as he was concerned. He’d had enough. She just had to keep her friends away for five days, and she couldn’t even do that.

The sound of the gunshot took Agbe by surprise. He froze when he heard it, he stopped on the third step in the staircase, and couldn’t bring himself to move forward. It was like his mother’s death was happening all over again. He lived it all, heard the boom of the bullet being released from its chamber, felt his mother’s wrist slipping out from his hold. Mama. He blinked, back in that room, staring at her corpse, the bloodstain on her chest. Mama.

“I’m not Titi, boy, don’t ignore me when I’m talking to you.”

“Baby, what’s going on? Why do you have a gun?”

Agbe was still in the past, still stuck in that room in Madam Celia’s, watching his mother die.

“Ivie?” Warm arms wrapped around his waist, forcing him to move, to turn away from his dying mother. “Ivie, are you okay?” A lean dark face met his gaze. She looked odd in Madam Celia’s, she didn’t belong. She had too much make-up on her face, Madam Celia would never allow any of her whores to be dressed like this. “Ivie, you’re scaring me.” He blinked and the paralysis from the gunshot faded away. He could see Titi clearly, could see the psychopath standing in front of them, holding a silver pistol with the nozzle pointed at the ground.

“Put the gun away, babe, you’re scaring him,” Titi scolded.

The man’s eyes narrowed on Agbe. “He needs to understand how things are going to be from now on. I won’t let him disrespect you.”

Agbe’s eyes were trained on the pistol. He watched it tapping against navy blue jeans, saw the sand brown fingers wrapped tightly around the pistol’s black grip, watched the forefinger that stroked teasingly along the surface of the black trigger.

Titi giggled. She rubbed her hand consolingly down Agbe’s upper arms. “Put the gun away, Ivie won’t be any trouble, will you?”

Agbe forced his eyes away from the gun. He looked at Titi. Her eyes gleamed, she was smiling wide, looking happier than Agbe had ever seen her. He didn’t know what to think. “What’s going on here?”

“Your sister has kindly invited me to stay with her. I’m moving in.”

The reply came from James, but it was Titi that Agbe looked at. He watched her face, watched as her upturned lips flattened when her gleaming eyes turned away from James, falling on him instead. She glanced at the ground guiltily and then she looked back at him. “We need someone to take care of us Ivie, someone to look out for us, make sure our wealth is protected. James knows people, his brother is the Lagos State Police Commissioner. We’re safe with him.”

Agbe wondered if this had been her plan all along. He felt like the biggest fool on the planet. Of course, she wasn’t willing to let him go. Of course, she’d lied to him. Of course, she would do anything to keep his mamin’s bijous for herself. Of course. How could he still be surprised by the depths of her insincerity?

He just shook his head and stepped out of her grasp. He took one last long look at her, at the smiling eyes that begged him to trust her. At the way she appeared hurt when he denied her touch. How could a person that showed her emotions so plainly be so duplicitous?

“I’m doing this for your own good, Ivie,” she pouted, “because I love you. You don’t understand what the world is, I’m just trying to keep us safe.”

An eerie calm fell over him. He flicked his gaze away from Titi’s lying face, uninterested. James smiled at him. Agbe supposed the look was meant to be reassuring. “I won’t hurt you Ivie, I know you’re just coming out from the Community, you don’t understand the unmarked world. I’m going to teach you how to navigate it, how to rule it. I’ll take care of you, I swear.”

Agbe snorted. He stared flatly into James’ cunning eyes. “The only way you’re going to get my grandmother’s jewels is over my dead body.”

James’ jaw clenched. The hold on the pistol’s grip tightened. “Don’t tempt me boy.”

Titi gasped. “Ivie, you don’t mean that. You’re not selfish, I know you’re not, you can share your wealth with us, you have more than enough for the three of us to live well. Why are you trying to keep it all for yourself?”

Agbe didn’t even look at her. “Stop talking to me, crazy bitch, I should have known you’d be just as heartless as your sister.”

The gun went off again and this time Titi screamed. Agbe glanced at the bullet hole in the ceiling, and watched as James lowered the gun till it was pointed at him.

“If you don’t start showing some gratitude, the next bullet will be in your head. We don’t need you boy, keeping you alive is a mercy.”

The truth of those words ripped Agbe’s calmness to shreds. The bijous were there, in a sack, anyone could take them, they didn’t need him. His lower lip trembled. He just couldn’t understand how Titi could do this to him. What had he done to deserve this? He wanted to scream at the unfairness of the situation, but he couldn’t. The fact of the matter was, from this moment on, they would practically own him. They would take his bijous and he’d be lucky if they ever let him leave. Agbe knew he couldn’t live like that.

“Do it then,” he stared James in the eye, “because there’s no fucking way I’m going to be your slave.”

The look of warm affability faded from James face. He steadied the gun on Agbe and the finger on the trigger pulled back slowly. Agbe’s heart pounded, sweat pooled on his upper lip and trickled down his back. His lips trembled and his eyes, opened wide, teared up, but he clamped his teeth shut, swallowing down the urge to beg for his life.

“No!” Titi yelled. “No, it’s not supposed to happen like this! James stop!”

James flicked his eyes in Titi’s direction. “Don’t worry darling, we’ll do better without him.” Then the gaze darted back towards Agbe. “This is how I wanted it anyway.” James’ finger pushed back on the trigger.

“No!”

The gunshot rang out.

It took Agbe a while to process that he was still alive and that it was James who fell. Agbe blinked, stunned. His heart was still racing, pounding so hard he heard the beat in his ears. Once he saw James crash into the ground, he started shaking. He couldn’t stop himself. This was the second time that a muzzle had been pointed at him and he’d narrowly escaped death. Blood mingled with a white frothy substance and dripped from James’ nose and mouth. Agbe wished he could take the credit for James death, but he knew he couldn’t. Titi’s red eyes wept. Agbe was still shaking, he tried to steady himself, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. He’d thought for sure he was dead.

He collapsed into the steps and held his hands down on his lap.

Titi moved over to James, cradled his body in her arms and rocked it, crying. Her eyes were still red, all red, no iris, no pupil, just a red sclera.

It took him a while before he found his voice. “You’re a commune,” he stated unnecessarily. She was a commune still in her mark, in the mark she’d gone into to save him from James. She’d killed James for him. Agbe knew this, knew that he should be processing this, knew that he should feel some gratitude, but all he felt was an even deeper sense of betrayal. She’d lied to him pretty much from the start of their relationship.

“Don’t look at me like that, I read the paper before I swallowed it, I have your uncle’s address memorized.” She’d said.

“And that’s supposed to be comforting?” He’d asked.

“I’m an omem,” she’d said, “I couldn’t forget it, even if I wanted to.”

And he’d believed her. An omem, a sage with photographic memory, one who could glance at a sheet of paper and remember every detail of it on her deathbed. But she wasn’t a sage, wasn’t an omem. She was a warlock, a pain commune who could end a life with a single glance. A commune not an omem.

“I’m leaving.” Agbe’s shaking had finally stopped. He pulled himself to his feet.

Her red eyes snapped up to him. She was still in her mark. Normally, communes frightened him, he would have been terrified to have a commune who’d just killed staring at him with crimson red eyes. But he knew she wouldn’t hurt him. She would drive him to the point of delirium, but apparently, she couldn’t let him die.

“I just killed the man I love to protect you, and you’re leaving me?”

Agbe turned his back on her. “I’ll leave the rest of mamin’s bracelet with you. Eighty million naira, should be enough to show my gratitude.”

“I want you, not your money!” She yelled after him. “Don’t do this to me Ivie, don’t leave me alone. Please, I love you. Don’t leave me. I’m scared.”

Lies, Agbe reminded himself, Titi was nothing but a liar. She spouted pretty lies but that’s all she had to offer. A part of him wanted to stay with her even knowing that she’d been lying to him from the start, knowing that she’d enlisted her boyfriend to rob him at gunpoint. That part of him was satisfied that in the end she’d killed James for him. He’d gotten so used to settling for scraps of Titi’s affection that what she’d just done seemed like a feast. She had to love him, if not why would she kill for him? Agbe couldn’t believe how hard it was to convince himself that he didn’t need Titi’s brand of love. He’d been with her for under four weeks and she already had him this twisted inside. Hating her, loving her, wishing her dead, wanting to keep her safe, he needed normal. He needed normal so bad his chest hurt from the longing.

So, he kept walking, one foot in front of the other, climbing up the stairs, ignoring her whimpers, her cries for him not to leave her. The messed-up thing was, if he’d thought she was still an omem, if he could talk himself into believing that she would eventually take him to his uncle, he probably would have turned back around and comforted her. But he couldn’t delude himself anymore, she was a commune, commune’s couldn’t glance at a piece of paper and remember the address. She didn’t have it memorized. She didn’t know where his family was, which meant she was of absolutely no use to him.

As soon as Agbe walked into his room, he headed for the walk-in closet. He’d never unpacked the bag he’d started packing when they’d fought two days ago. The bag was still there, with the sack of bijous buried at the bottom. All he had to do was finish up the packing. Agbe pulled out the drawer with his earphones and picked up the small black wireless ones with the plastic bits that crawled over the back of his ears. He tapped on the earphones and let the familiar notes of the Marked band drift into his ears. He’d spent about two million naira on the touchscreen phone in his pocket. It was the cheapest kind that the Community sold, it would cost two hundred comnai, but the prize rose exponentially because it was smuggled out of the Community and sold in the unmarked world. The unmarked world was so far behind, they didn’t even have flip cellphones commonly available. Agbe longed for the Community for the world that he knew.

‘If I had just one more year to live,
I’d be in you,
24/7,’ clap,
‘365,
Knocking on your door,
We’ll be up all night.’

The lyrics swirled around in Agbe’s head, reminding him of the concert he’d been to with his friends, how Prisca had grinded against him while he grinded into Larry. The feel of the ground shuddering against the sole of his feet, the screaming, everyone belting out notes, trying and failing, to harmonize with the rock band. Their lead singer had been a stag werejackal, with silver eyes and short curly black hair dyed blonde. Tears filled Agbe’s eyes. The concert hadn’t ended till 4 am the next morning and the three of them had to sneak back into Madam Celia’s without his mum finding out they’d stayed out all night. They’d snuck past all the doors, creeping on tiptoes past the rooms of whores who were still working, until finally they reached theirs. Then they’d walked in, congratulating themselves, only to turn on the light and find his mama sitting on his bed, waiting for them.

Agbe was so absorbed by thoughts of the past, it took him much longer than it should have, to hear the loud thuds coming from outside his gate. He frowned. It was a banging sound, like someone was repeatedly battering into metal. The shriek of metal grinding against stone followed that banging.

Agbe tore the earphones out of his ears and flung them on his bed, as he raced towards the balcony connected to his room. He twisted the key in the hole, jerked down on the doorhandle and pulled the door open. Then he ran barefooted out to the stone balcony that looked out at the front of the compound. There were seven black police pickups outside of his gate, and six policemen in front, jabbing into his gates with a battering ram.

Agbe’s heart pounded. He gripped the stone railing for dear life. His gate was wobbling badly. Another jab and Agbe’s eyes widened. The gate tore free of its hinges and came crashing loudly into the cement pavement of his compound. The policemen ran back into the back of their pickups and five of those cars drove right into his compound, unannounced and uninvited. They drove over the fallen metal gates, flattening the loops of barbed wire under their tires. Agbe’s wide eyes darted around for possible help. There were only two other compounds close by. People came up on balconies like he did, but they glanced at the police vehicles and went back into their houses.

Agbe ducked when he saw the policemen climbing out of their cars. He raced back into his room and closed the door behind him. Then he sunk to the ground, leaning heavily on the door, and stared in a daze ahead. The police had broken into his house. What could they want? His heart continued to thump madly in his chest.

He tried to think of a plan. There’d been two cars left parked outside his gate, he couldn’t just make a run for it if even if he wanted to. Maybe he could hide up here and pray they’d leave? No, he shook his head, he wasn’t a criminal, he hadn’t done anything wrong. This was his house, bought lawfully and he had the deed to prove it. They were the ones who were wrong, barging into his house without a warrant. What right did they have? In the Community no guard would have dared break into any house without just cause. Maybe it was a misunderstanding?

Agbe decided his only recourse was to confront them. It wasn’t like there was anything else he could do, he couldn’t hide forever, and they’d blocked all the exits to the house, so he couldn’t run away. If only Titi had turned out to be an anger commune instead of a pain one, she could have teleported them out of here. Titi! Agbe sprang to his feet and darted out of his room. He ran to hers, hoping that she would be in her room. He burst through the door and found the room empty, the bed made, just the way he’d left it. Titi was downstairs.

Chapter Fourteen

Agbe was running down the stairs before he even had a chance to come up with a plan of action. He was midway down the staircase when he realized what most likely drew the police. The gunshots. It had to have been that, James firing bullets all over their house. One of their neighbors had probably been frightened and called the police. That made sense.

Agbe descended the stairs more calmly now. The first thing he noted when he got to the first floor was that the front door had been burst in. Two policemen in black uniforms with rifles in their hands, stood just outside the door. They didn’t turn around when Agbe went down, which probably meant they hadn’t heard him. Good.

He kept going, opening the side door to the living room, slowly. He walked in and found at least ten policemen standing around the living room. There were three hurdled around the main sofa, the one Titi normally slept on whenever she passed out.

“See the way the breasts soft and firm.”

“See yansh, skin smooth like say na omomo.” The sound of flesh striking softly against flesh sounded and then male voices rose in joined laughter.

Agbe pushed between policemen, too enraged to think through his actions, and burst into the living room. “What is the meaning of this?” He yelled.

Titi lay passed out on the sofa, vulnerable, while male hands fondled her. “Leave my sister alone! Get your filthy hands off her!”

They laughed at him, but they took their hands off and transferred their holds to the rifles hanging from straps around their necks. Agbe kept walking until he was standing in front of Titi, blocking her from their gaze. His gaze dropped to the lines of white powder on the center table. What if this time she wasn’t breathing? A cold terror seized Agbe, gripping his heart and making it hard for him to breathe. He covered his fear by glaring at the policemen.

They stared right back at him. Gaping mouths revealed a boundary of browning teeth around an island of white-pink tongues, and wide eyes showed off yellow-stained eyeballs with traces of red veins pulsing out. Agbe loathed how the unmarked gaped at him. He tried to increase the potency of his glare to compensate for their rude staring. He was generous with his wrathful look, transferring it from the policeman standing closest to him, to the one who leaned against the single-seat couch, and then the one that stood closest to the Community smuggled widescreen TV. His fuming glare continued its irate perusal, drifting past the TV, to the policeman with broad shoulders, wearing a white shirt that poked out from beneath his black uniform, then to the much shorter one standing beside him, to the man in blue seated on the chair, then to the…

Agbe’s eyes darted back. There was a man in blue seated on his living room chair. This one didn’t wear black like the other policemen, didn’t stand at attention carrying a terrifying rifle, he just leaned into the chair, making himself at home, his left hand flung over the back of the chair and his right hand tapping against his potbelly.

There was something familiar about this man. He wore a light blue uniform, with black shoulder pads and had medals hanging above the breast pocket of the shirt. Agbe had never seen the man before, but he felt a vague sense of resemblance staring at the sand brown skin of the man’s face.

Agbe cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” He directed his question at the man who was seated, guessing that he was the one in charge.

The man cleared his throat. “We are here to enforce a foreclosure.” His voice was deep and low. It boomed a little when he spoke, echoing off the walls. Agbe had never encountered anyone who looked quite so severe. Agbe could tell this man was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. He had that no-nonsense kind of countenance.

Agbe gulped. “I…” he cleared his throat and tried again, “I don’t understand sir.”

The man turned slightly to his left and Agbe watched the rolls of fat on his neck as he moved. The man jerked his head at the short policeman beside him, and that one made a hand-to-the-head, feet-stomping, gesture Agbe assumed was meant to be a salute, then he took his right hand from the rifle he’d been holding and reached into his shirt. He pulled out a sheet of paper and then marched, more like stomped, towards Agbe. He handed Agbe the sheet.

Agbe wasn’t sure what was going on, but whatever it was, he could already tell that he didn’t like it. He took the paper from the man, unfolded it, and read over the black typed words. The more he read, the worse the twisting feeling in his stomach became. According to the paper, the person they’d bought the house from had put the property up for collateral in getting a loan and then proceeded to default on the loan. As a result, the bank was seizing the asset.

He gaped at the sheet, darted a terrified gaze at the man in blue, who continued to lounge completely relaxed in the chair, and looked back at the sheet. He couldn’t believe what he was reading. His head hurt, it hurt so bad he rose his fingers to his temples and gently massaged them.

“I paid for this house in full,” Agbe said, “I have the deed.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you this young man, but you were cheated.”

Agbe shook his head. “I have the documents. Legally signed and witnessed and everything. Let me go and get them.” He took a step to the side, towards the side door, but was forced to stop when a rifle was extended in front of him, blocking his way. He looked desperately at the man in blue.

“How do we know you’re not going to get a weapon? Young man like yourself, how can you afford a house like this? You have to be a criminal.”

That was absurd! “Send policemen with me, they’ll make sure I don’t get any weapons.”

“Hmm,” the man in blue leaned his head to the side and stared at Agbe, sizing him up. He rubbed his right thumb and forefinger against the beards under his chin. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s too dangerous, I won’t risk the lives of my men. You have to leave the house now, we’ll search you and then escort you out.”

Agbe frowned. That didn’t make any sense! He stared at the man in blue, at the forbidding expression on his face. He seemed serious enough, a man who meant business, why wouldn’t he let Agbe bring the evidence that could show the house was his? Agbe looked around the room, at the men and the rifles in their hands. They were past their gaping, now they just looked mean and far too serious for Agbe’s comfort. He hated how close their hands were to the triggers. Seriously, what was up with this day? First James, now these men. As soon as Agbe thought of James, it was as if a light went off in his head. He looked back at the man in blue, his sand brown skin, skin the same complexion as James.

‘James knows people, his brother is the Lagos State Police Commissioner.’

No wonder he’d looked so familiar, he was James’ brother, he had to be. Had he planned this with James? First James would secure the bijous and then they would come in here with this bogus claim to kick him out of his own house. Agbe wondered if the man in blue knew James was dead. James’ body…it hadn’t been in the foyer when Agbe ran down the stairs. The foyer had been empty. What the Bleep happened to James’ body? Had this man seen it, did he carry it out? Were they about to kill Agbe and Titi?

Agbe took a step back, eyes wide and heart hammering. What was he going to do? He didn’t want to die. Why was it that he’d been eager to go with James pulling the trigger but not now, not like this? James had been different, and he’d been pissed at Titi at the time. Maybe in a way he’d hoped his death would haunt Titi. But this, being gunned down in the living room Agbe had spent the last month avoiding, with Titi passed out, at the mercy of these men, he just couldn’t go like this.

“I understand sir, you’re just trying to do your job,” he said, forcing his eyes to stay on the man in blue. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking. “If you need me and my sister to leave now, we’ll leave. Just let me pack up a few of my things first, please.”

“I’m afraid we can’t let you do that son,” the man in blue said, even-tempered. “I understand that this is all coming as a shock to you, you paid for a house, and lived in it, thinking you owned it. It’s 419, what was done to you, very fraudulent. So, we’ll put you up in a hotel for a month while you try to fight this in court. In the meantime, we’ll pack up your belongings for you and send them along to the hotel, tomorrow.”

“This isn’t right, and you know it. All I’m asking is to go upstairs and pack up my things. If you’re here lawfully, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be okay with me doing that?” Agbe tried to appeal to the man in blue.

A ring of metal jabbed painfully into his right side. Agbe pulled away from it, rubbing at the sore skin. The policeman kept the muzzle against his skin, close enough that Agbe would know it was there, but not so close that it poked into his flesh a second time.

“You should be thanking our oga, instead of running your mouth. Haba, he’s treating you like his son, telling you that he will put you in a hotel sef. If you no want go hotel, make we throw you for inside cell na.”

It was about the bijous, probably about this property too. The man in blue was James brother and James knew they were alone in the unmarked world, thanks to Titi, he knew they’d just come out from the Community. He knew they had no one, no protection, nothing, and he’d made a plan with his brother to take advantage of that. Agbe wasn’t certain what emotions to feel. He wanted to cry from the unfairness of it, wanted to yell at the top of his lungs, raging out insults and curses. He wanted to kill them, every single corrupt one of them, he wanted to end their lives.

He remembered the InCoSeM rep, the commune Paul. Remembered the fear that had been in the man’s eyes when he looked at him, ‘What are you?’ and his mamin, his mamin had said he was special, something even she couldn’t see. He’d killed the other InCoSeM rep with commune magic, Agbe knew it, he knew he’d done that. He had to be a commune, he had to have magic, it was in him somewhere. All he had to do was find it and unleash it on these people. He could kill them all.

Communes needed emotions to start their magic. Agbe tried to draw on his, he had so much pain, the pain from losing his family, the pain from being betrayed and backstabbed over and over again by Titi, the anguish of being treated so unfairly by James and now his brother. Agbe had so much pain and all he wanted to do was let it out. Kill. Destroy. He could do it, he knew he could. And he tried, he reached for his pain, reminding himself of all the ways he’d been wronged. Heck, he’d been wronged from the moment he was born, he’d been left in a forest to die. He hurt so much his chest felt like it was ripping to shreds.

But nothing happened, there was no red in his eyes, no one fell to the ground dead, nothing. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t force magic out when he didn’t have any. Wishful thinking didn’t make him marked, if it could, he would have been marked a long time ago.

Agbe’s head dropped in failure. They wanted his bijous, they weren’t going to let him pack up. All he could do was hope that they didn’t mean to get rid of him and Titi in the process. “Thank you, sir, for your generous offer,” Agbe forced himself to say, “we’ll wait in the hotel for our things.” Tears filled his eyes and his heart ached. He couldn’t remember when exactly his life had turned into this. He was useless, he couldn’t even safeguard his family’s jewels. Completely useless.

“Search him, make sure he’s not carrying any weapons.”

‘More like make sure he doesn’t have any bijous.’ Agbe knew, but he said nothing, just stood still while hands reached out to him and groped at his body. He gritted his teeth, forcing himself to take it, endure. His breath caught in his throat when hands patted over his mother’s ring, hanging from a rope beneath his chest, but then the hands moved down without stopping and he could breathe again. They pulled out his cellphone and wallet.

“Just this sir,” one of the policemen held up the cellphone. The policeman stared at it oddly, as if he couldn’t figure out what it was, “and this,” he held up the black wallet the God-born had gifted Agbe.

“We’ll have to confiscate the phone,” the man in blue said.

“This one na phone? Which kind phone be this?” The policeman was in awe, but the man in blue knew exactly what it was. He knew its value. Apparently a million naira was too much to pass up. Agbe was being robbed. They coated it in legal terms, pretended as if they had a right to foreclose on his house, when really all it was was theft. And he had no way to stop it.

“How much is in the wallet?” The man in blue asked.

“Five hundred naira, sir.”

“He can keep it,” the man in blue replied. Agbe got his wallet back.

“Do you still want to pack up your things, son?” The man in blue asked.

Agbe’s head shot up. A burst of hope came alive in him like a tendril of warmth crawling through his veins. “Yes, please sir.”

The man in blue nodded. “I’m willing to help you out small, for a price. Agree to leave your sister here with us, and you can go and pack whatever you want. If you have any precious items, or anything like that, we’ll take half and leave you with half.”

Half of his family jewels was better than nothing. He would still feel like a failure but not a complete failure, he would have something to give to his cousins at least. But something about the man’s phrasing struck him as odd. “What do you mean leave my sister with you? You mean while I go and pack?”

The man in blue shook his head.

Agbe’s chest clenched. They wanted him to leave Titi to them, forever. “She’s just an innocent girl, what do you want with her?”

The man in blue didn’t even have the conscience to look ashamed. He just sat there, stealing from Agbe, asking Agbe to save himself and leave Titi with them, all the while he sat there nonplussed, as if what he was doing was right. How could anyone this evil exist? Agbe struggled to process it.

“Do you want to pack your things or not?” the man in blue asked.

“Bleep you! You’re crazy if you think I’m going to leave my sister with you, you pervy old creep!”

A hand clamped onto Agbe’s arms, holding them fast behind him, while a policeman walked in front of him. The policeman lifted up his rifle, then started lowering it, the butt of the gun first, poised to strike hard against Agbe’s head.

Then the man in blue laughed. “Leave him alone,” he ordered. The policeman lowered his gun and the one holding his arms let him go so roughly that Agbe fell to the floor and bruised his hip. When he got up, the man in blue was standing in front of him.

He looked just as somber as he had during their entire conversation. “You love her far more than she’ll ever love you,” he said to him, “she’ll come back of her own free will. The moment you tell her it was me who kicked you out, she’ll be back here, begging us to take her in.” Then he stepped out of the way and jerked his head to the side. “Take them to the hotel.”

Agbe didn’t know how to react to the man in blue’s words. He was James brother, maybe he thought that Titi would come back for James. Which meant he didn’t know that James was dead. Did he know that James had come to their house before him? Agbe didn’t have time to ponder on his thoughts. He slapped away the hand that reached for Titi. “I’ll carry her myself,” as if he could forget that they’d been groping her when he walked in.

The policeman just shrugged and returned his hands to his rifle.

Titi was still passed out, but she was breathing. She had streaks of dried up mucus underneath her nose. Agbe put one arm underneath her knees and the other under her back. He’d picked her up so many times like this, carried her to bed, taken care of her. All the while she’d been telling their secrets to James, planning with him to take everything that Agbe had. Agbe wondered if Titi knew about this part of James plan, getting his brother involved, using the Nigerian police to force them out of their house. At the end she’d chosen him over James, she’d killed James for him. She’d lied, from the very beginning, everything she’d ever said to him had been a lie, but she’d killed to protect him. She looked so innocent when she was asleep. Even with her mascara running down her face, and half off the fake eyebrows hanging off her eyelids, she still looked innocent.

Agbe walked out of the house he’d bought with his mamin’s bracelet, carrying Titi in his arms. The policemen led him to a pickup truck and held the doors open for him to get in. They were left alone in the backseat. Agbe cradled Titi in his arms, resting his forehead against hers. He could have gotten half of his mamin’s jewels if he’d left Titi with them. He hadn’t even considered it. The car jerked as they rode over the black metal gates. Agbe looked to the side, staring at his garden, at the sea of green leaves and the white cala lilies rising up from them like lighthouses in the middle of a deep, vast, ocean. They drove out of the compound and the outer wall cut off Agbe’s view.

He wanted to cry, to weep at his own ineptness, but he was sick and tired of crying. He was tired of the pain, tired of how much everything hurt. He should never have gone with Titi, he should have gone his own way once she’d shown her insanity, swallowing up his uncle’s address. Even with everything that had happened, Agbe knew he would make the same choice. He couldn’t have let Titi enter into the unmarked world alone and without a kobo to her name. It would have been cruel, and mama hadn’t raised him to be that heartless.

Agbe closed his eyes against the passing scenery, the sight of mansions and hefty gates. It had been a long time since he prayed but he had nothing else now. All he had was his blood, he was a descendant of the Enikaro, and the faith in Duraya taught that the elements listened to descendants of the Enikaro, whether they were elemental witches or not. This he could do, marked or unmarked, and so he did.

“I am Ivie Ehizokhae, so named by my grandmother, Ehizokhae one, the God-born, daughter of Duraya, Nature’s own, Uhonmon the first, Omoye.” Agbe mouthed the words, whispering them too low for the policemen to hear, but not too low for the elements, he hoped. “I am of you, born of Edo soil, and I beg you, you who are of me who are of you, if you so hear me, seal off my grandmother’s jewels. Let no one not of Ehizokhae blood ever be able to claim them. I ask this humbly of you, you who are of me who are of you. Please hear me.” There was no response to his plea. Elements were very territorial, they liked to stay on their own soil, Agbe didn’t know if it was a longshot hoping that even an iota of Edo elements had followed him, but in the case that they had, he hoped they would hear his prayer. The window of the pickup was rolled down, so he felt the wind against his face, slapping him, reminding him that he was still alive, even if he didn’t know for how long.

He kept his eyes closed, even when the pickup’s siren began to blare. There was so much noise, hawkers on the street, bus drivers screaming their route, car horns beeping, and underneath it all was the continuous ‘wee-waw’ of the police siren. The truck lurched upwards and downwards underneath him and the poorly cushioned metal poked into his butt, through the car seat. Agbe had no idea where they were taking them. He wouldn’t be surprised if they drove them to a ditch somewhere and shot them.

When the car finally came to a stop, it was in front of a hotel. Agbe was stunned, they’d actually brought them to a hotel. It was a cheap hotel, but it was a hotel nonetheless, not a ditch, not a police station, a hotel. That actually frightened Agbe more. He carried Titi out of the truck, took her into the lobby and then sat on a couch while the policemen arranged for their room. He just stared at the bustle of the lobby, the solicitous smiles of the people at the front desk, the yellow light bulbs, the picture of the unmarked president and state governor hanging on the wall. How many years had he spent staring at pictures of his grandmother without ever knowing who she was to him? The policemen returned. They led him to a room on the second floor and then left with assurances that they would be back the next day with his stuff. Not that Agbe believed them.

He waited till he was sure they’d left, then he went back down to the lobby, ducked out the side door, and hailed the first taxi he could find parked outside the hotel. There was no way he was going to stay like a sitting duck, waiting for the man in blue to come finish him off at his own leisure.

He still had his wallet, the one that his mamin gave him, and he’d only spent a hundred thousand from that secret money. He still had nine hundred left, more than enough to get him and Titi back to Benin, away from the reach of the Lagos State Police Commissioner.

The sun had already started to set when Agbe carried Titi into the back of the taxi. He asked the driver to take them as far away as he could and sat in the back of the taxi for two hours, watching behind him to make sure they weren’t being followed. They weren’t. The man in blue had thought he’d only left them with five hundred naira, of course he expected them to stay put. Agbe didn’t relax until he’d gotten himself and Titi into a non-descript room, in a hotel right out the outskirts of Lagos City. First thing in the morning they were getting on a bus and getting out of Lagos State.

“Ivie?”

Agbe swiveled. He’d been staring out the window, watching the cars and making sure a black police truck didn’t suddenly appear. The hotel he’d found was decent. Two clean beds, twin size, a bathroom with a shower and tub, toilet, a desk in the room, small closet. It was for a night, it would have to do.

Agbe walked back to the bed he’d laid Titi out on. He sat beside her. “Hey.”

She blinked. Then frowning, she ripped off the fake eyelashes, and swiped the back of her hand over her eyes. “Where are we?” she asked, blinking.

Agbe told her all of it. There was no point hiding any detail and so he didn’t bother. She cried for a long time after that, silent whimpers that tore at his heart and made him feel guilty when it was really all her fault. How could she have told James about what they had? How could she have trusted that man so easily? Agbe didn’t understand it, but he was tired of hating her. It hurt too much, so he snuggled into bed with her and stroked her back, trying to calm her. Tomorrow they’d be in Benin, he promised her, they’d be out of the Police Commissioner’s reach. She didn’t have to worry, he still had enough money to get them to Benin and put them in a nice hotel, Benin was cheaper than Lagos. Nothing he said consoled her, so after a while he just stopped speaking and held her while she fell apart.

He fell asleep minutes after she did.

When he woke up the next morning, he was alone in the room. Titi was gone.