The air in the compound smelled of ozone and scorched bark. Rain hammered down in thick, blinding sheets, drumming violently against the zinc roofs. Femi dragged Lola into the narrow corridor of their building, both of them dripping wet.
"Are you crazy?" Femi snapped, his usual calm slipping. He ran a hand over his face, wiping away the rainwater. "You could have been struck!"
Lola leaned against the peeling paint of the wall, breathing heavily. The violet glow in her eyes was gone, replaced by a look of profound confusion. She stared at her hands, trembling slightly.
"I... I didn't want to move," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rain. "Femi, I felt it. The lightning. It didn't feel dangerous. It felt... like a greeting."
Femi stared at her. His logical, scientific mind scrambled for an explanation. "It's static electricity in the air, Lola. It messes with the senses. Come, you're freezing."
He reached out, his fingers grazing her damp cheek to brush away a stray curl of hair. The touch lingered a fraction of a second too long. They both froze. In the dim, shadowed corridor, the space between them seemed to shrink. Femi looked at her lips, then quickly snapped his gaze to the cracked floor tiles, his cheeks burning with a hot flush of shame.
She is your sister, he violently reminded himself. Not by blood, but she is your sister.
Lola cleared her throat, stepping back. "I'm going to change." She hurried into her mother's room, leaving Femi alone with the deafening sound of the rain and the terrifying, beautiful rhythm of his own pulse.
Miles away, high above the flooding streets of Lagos Island, a man in a perfectly tailored charcoal suit stood looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows of a luxury penthouse. His name on earth was Chief Adeyemi, a ruthless billionaire logistics magnate. But to the unseen realm, he was a vessel, an earthly agent of Ajé, the Goddess of Wealth.
Behind him, a young boy with unnaturally bright, unblinking eyes—an emissary of Erinlẹ̀, the hunter—squatted on the Persian rug.
"The resonance," the boy said, his voice sounding like dry leaves crushing together. "I felt it in Surulere. A surge of àṣẹ. Unformed, but powerful."
Chief Adeyemi swirled the amber liquid in his crystal glass. "The exile is awakening."
"It was not just him," the boy added, tilting his head like a curious bird. "There was a storm. A violent, sudden tempest. The Sculptor's daughter is with him."
Adeyemi turned, his lips curling into a cruel smile. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of ancient, polished cowrie shells, letting them clatter onto the glass coffee table.
"The Major Gods sent him here to be humbled," Adeyemi murmured, his voice echoing with the distinct, metallic timbre of his celestial mistress. "But if he dies in this mortal realm before his penance is complete... his àṣẹ returns to the earth, not to Obàtálá. We could harvest it. And the girl... Sango would pay handsomely to see the tempest broken."
He pointed a manicured finger at the boy. "Find them. Observe them. Let them ripen in their confusion. When the time is right, we will remind them that even in Ilé-Ayé, the gods demand a sacrifice."
Back in Surulere, the rain had finally stopped, leaving behind the rich, earthy scent of wet dust—the perfect mixture of water and clay. Femi sat on his bed, the chemistry textbook forgotten. He held a small chunk of gray sculpting clay in his hands. He didn't know why he had bought it from the art market weeks ago; he wasn't an artist. But whenever he felt overwhelmed, his hands instinctively worked the mud.
Without him looking, his fingers moved with a furious, unconscious grace. He pinched, smoothed, and shaped the clay. When he finally looked down, his breath hitched.
Sitting in his palms was a perfect, intricately detailed miniature bust of Lola. Every curl of her hair, the defiant tilt of her chin, the wild spark in her eyes—it was captured with a divine, impossible perfection.
Femi stared at his hands, a sudden, cold dread washing over him. He had never sculpted a day in his life. He pushed his thumb against the clay, trying to crush the sculpture, to hide the evidence of his strange obsession.
But the clay would not yield. It had hardened to the strength of steel.