“What is my name?” the old witch doctor asked.

“Sula.”

“And where does my name come from?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure I care.”

“Sula is the name of the god of death,” the old man said past his twisted grin. He waited, as if that should bring her horror. “Sula is the most powerful spirit on earth. All the witches before me took his power and his name. And I, too, have. That is why I am called Sula.”

Shannon had stepped aside and was watching the man with something that hovered between intrigue and humor. He looked at Tanya and winked.

“You might think it’s funny,” she’d snapped at Shannon. “But I don’t!” She faced the witch doctor, suppressing an urge to pick up a rock and throw it at him.

His eyes had narrowed to slits and he’d simply slipped into the forest.

She’d never told her father about the episode—a good thing because he might have come unglued over it. The Yanamamo tribe was known as “the Fierce Ones” for good reason—they were perhaps the most violent people on earth. And the source of their obsession with death was clearly spiritual. So her father insisted, and she believed him.

One month after the incident, Sula had died, and with him, Shannon’s curiosity of his power. The tribe had buried him in the forbidden cave to three days of wailing. None in the tribe had yet worked up the courage to become Sula. To take on the spirit of death. To take on Satan himself, as her father put it. The tribe had been without a witch doctor for one year now, and as far as Tanya and her parents were concerned, that was good.

Tanya shook the memory off. It was over. Shannon was back to his old self. With Shannon still at her heels, Tanya broke from the jungle and pulled up at the cliff ’s edge, overlooking a waterfall that plunged twenty feet into a deep aqua pool below. Their pool.

She spun, panting. His body rushed by her, stretched out parallel, and soared over the cliff. She caught her breath and watched him fall in a swan dive before he could even see the water. If he ever miscalculated, he’d break every bone in his body on the rocks below. Her heart rose to her throat.

But he did not miscalculate. His body broke the surface silently and disappeared. For a while he didn’t reemerge, and then he shot from the water and threw his long locks back with a flick of his neck.

Without a word, Tanya spread her arms and fell toward him. She broke the surface and felt the welcome chill of mountain water wash up her legs.

In that moment, free-falling into the pool’s deep, she thought she had indeed come to paradise. She had been taken by her God, plucked at a young age from the suburbs of Detroit, and deposited in a jungle haven where all her dreams would come true.