Her legs tingled and shuddered as she slowly walked toward her water bottle. She bent and picked it up, unscrewed the top, and took a deep, deep pull. The water washed into her parched body like rain on dry cracked earth. During the gliding lessons with Sugar Cream, she and Sunny never moved fully into the wilderness. Sunny was far from ready for that and to go in unready meant a quiet peaceful swift death to your physical body. However, Sugar Cream took Sunny “in and out,” where she was in both the wilderness and the physical world, and instead of seeing one place, she saw two layered over each other. Sugar Cream described it as similar to looking at the world through an aquarium.

Learning how to go “in and out” or between was not so hard. Sunny had gone between naturally on her own when she’d first snuck out of the house through the keyhole thinking she’d worked her first juju. It was going into the wilderness completely that was extremely difficult. Whenever Sugar Cream had her do preparatory exercises for going into the wilderness, Sunny always found herself desperate for water afterward. “That’s because water is life,” Sugar Cream had said. “The body doesn’t like for its soul to even consider entering the wilderness.”

Sunny took another gulp and felt a little better. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be human,” she called out. “You should have crushed the water bottle. Humans need water more than food.” Despite her fear, she smiled at her own words.

“I was never human,” the djinn said.

As she drank, she looked around. More red spiders on the books feet away. The djinn’s voice was still coming from the other side of the room but that didn’t mean anything. Her eye went to one of the books in the fallen case in front of her. She pulled it from between two dusty hardcovers. Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X. A Lamb book. “What’s that doing here?” she muttered. Beside it were several volumes on Leopard medicine and even more on Leopard world alliance law.

“Sunny!” She jumped. The voice was right behind her.

“Eep!”

She was yanked back. There was a bright flash in her mind and a metallic sting so intense that she couldn’t tell where she felt it. Then she was plunging into cool water. There was a splash. It was like her initiation when she burst into the river and was pulled along, except this felt like she was being pulled down, down, down instead of horizontally. She felt her body struggling for breath. She couldn’t breathe! The cool water pressed in on her as she descended into the deep blue. She could see the dull basement light above her, slowly pulling itself away as she sank.

She thrashed and clutched her neck. Her lungs burned. Water rushed into her mouth, down her throat, into her chest. Even then she fought, but she was growing weak. She was dying. The djinn was drowning her.