I stood outside my office's building waiting for the auto-rickshaw I called to arrive. Using the building's ledge for shade, I leaned on the wall and observed the surrounding area. The sound of passing cars, the smell of food from the shops and restaurants, and the sight of people working or walking past me made me smile. The city was alive and thriving. Changes used to scare me more than normal people, but I learned to embrace them.

A road stood between two sidewalks. Each side had buildings with two or more floors. Mobile communication corporations inhabited most of the upper floors, while the lower ones had electronic stores like Samantha's. Few of them were single-floor buildings like mine.

Whistling from the other side of the road caught my attention. A curvy woman in a plain blue dress and blue sunglasses passed a cobbler as he was cleaning shoes on the sidewalk while staring at her. She gripped her handbag close to her chest, her head facing the ground, not wanting to look at him or else he'd think she wanted him to approach her.

I had seen this situation many times on that same sidewalk, forcing me to deal with it. The cobbler was new around here, so he needed to be taught a lesson.

Crossing my index finger over my middle one, I activated my puppet magic and flicked them downward. A white magical string—only visible to me—shot out from the tip of my index finger and coiled around the cobbler's hand. And with the flick of my wrist, I broke his.

He yelped in pain before falling from his stool and on to his knees. Tears streamed down his face while he held his broken wrist. His friends rushed to his side, consoling him while glaring at me.

I hardly used puppet magic. It was intoxicating, making it dangerous to me and others. Over-reliance on it would lead me down a dark path I wouldn't come out of. So I used it sparingly—when the moment called for it. Otherwise, it stayed at the bottom of my bag of tricks.

The auto-rickshaw arrived, stopping in front of me.

"Boss, I'm here," Hussein said with a smile, revealing the gaps between his teeth. As my go-to driver when I was in Posta, he charged a fair fee, knew when to talk and when not to, and had a fun personality.

I entered the auto-rickshaw.

"Boss, where to?"

"Mbezi Chini—home of Joshua and Nuru Bendera."

"The Lutheran preachers?"

"You know them?"

"I go to their church every Sunday."

"Good for you."

"Thank you." He looked at me through the rear-view mirror. "Boss, you should come with me to their church one day."

"The clergy don't like occult detectives. If I show up, they'll say I brought the devil with me and burn down the church."

He chuckled. "You're right."

Mbezi Chini wasn't far. Thankfully, it was midday and there wasn't heavy traffic. Soon I'd see what kind of nightmare the preachers had welcomed into their home.

Hussein turned on the radio, and the voices of two female hosts filled the auto-rickshaw. Apparently, they had found a skin-whitening product that'd help lighten their dark skin and make them approachable.

My chest tightened, and the fresh lump in my throat made it hard for me to swallow my saliva.

Colorism was one of the biggest issues in Africa. There was no way to deal with it. You couldn't run away from it. And if you tried fighting it, you'd lose. Its gaslighting nature mentally crippled Africans, and its marriage to prejudice left us vulnerable to outside influence.

There were so many places in Africa where they looked at someone with dark skin negatively, while they admired and worshipped those with light or white skin.

Growing up with dark skin was tough for me. The constant gaslighting from my light-skinned relatives—especially my aunts and uncles—mentally tortured me. They had said no man would want to marry a girl like me, no one would want to be friends with me, and that I brought shame to the women in our clan for looking different.

I never understood why they treated me like the ugly duckling. I took after my father. But they had no problem with him. Dark-skinned men had a privilege women didn't. But if you said something about it, then all hell broke loose.

As a child, I used to run to my father with tears in my eyes, begging him to use magic to make my skin lighter. Thankfully, he never knew such a spell. Thinking about it now, even if he did, he wouldn't have done it. He loved how I looked, and he wanted me to do the same. It took me many years before I felt comfortable in my skin. But even now, when I heard the hosts talk about skin-whitening products, it got me in my feelings.

"Boss, are you alright?" Hussein looked at me through the rear-view mirror.

"Yes. Why?"

"You're crying."

"Oh." I rubbed the tears from my face and sniffled. "No worries."

He said nothing else.

We passed an accident where two public buses had collided, causing heavy traffic behind them. There was no sign of dead bodies, but blood smeared the buses' sides and broken windows. People surrounded the buses, talking and pointing at the damage.

"I heard there were no survivors," Hussein said.

Life was fragile: humans were fragile.

One little misstep and death had us.

I never met Death—the entity. Whenever I tried summoning them, I failed. They were always too busy helping grim reapers and soul reapers defeat revenants. One day I'd make them appear before me.

"Did anything weird happen or was it a normal accident?" I asked.

"The bus drivers were dead before the collision."

I licked my lips. Excellent. If the drivers were dead, then someone or something made them collide. This wasn't an accident: it was a murder. My occult detective senses tingled.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"No. Sorry."

"That's fine." Just because he didn't have the answers didn't mean I reached a dead end. There were many sources of information around me.

When we stopped at a traffic light, I looked outside and spotted a crow standing on an electric wire, staring at me. "I want to talk to you," I said, then moved to the side. Before getting moon magic, I had other magic abilities. One of them was communicating and understanding any living thing.

The crow flew into the auto-rickshaw and stood next to me. "Binti Nasra, it's nice to finally meet you. I'm James. How may I be of service?"

His forwardness took me by surprise. Crows were tricksters whom you had to be careful around. Usually, I'd have to give them food or something valuable in my possession before they spoke to me. But James looked eager to talk to me, not caring about how his peers acted.

"You're different, James." He smelled different too—purer than other crows. "Who were you before being cursed?"

The question seemed to strike a chord in him. He looked away from me and cleared his throat. Having dealt with many crows, they had a hard time talking about their time as humans.

The first time my father told me crows were cursed sorcerers serving time after committing heinous crimes terrified me. The length of their sentences depended on how bad the offense was.

"I used to be James Michael, the leader of CHADEMA," he said. "While running for the presidency, I tried to expose the current regime's corruption and involvement in human trafficking. There's an underground network that kidnaps and sells homeless men, women, and children into slavery around the world. But because they are homeless, nobody cares about them."

"But you did."

"It didn't matter. When those involved found out that I knew, they turned me into a crow."

The Supreme Leaders—a group of sorcerers who governed other sorcerers in Tanzania—were the only ones allowed to use curse magic. Any other sorcerer capable of using it had to report to them so they could take it away.

To my knowledge, they never cursed magicless humans.

Had something changed and I wasn't aware of it?

"Didn't people notice you were gone?" I asked.

If The Supreme Leaders had become the thing they fought against, then the current members had to step down and let others take over. But that was easier said than done. It was a crow's word against theirs. And no sorcerer would take James seriously when they realized I backed him. I had a lot of enemies at the top of the sorcerers' food chain.

"They hired a shapeshifter to take my place until after the election. Then they said I died in an accident a month later."

"Why didn't they just kill you?"

"I don't know."

This sounded like a big mess, and I had a necromancer to deal with. Leaning back in my seat, I took a deep breath. If I dipped my toes into this mystery, it would be my word against The Supreme Leaders'. I needed enough evidence before speaking to the Tanzanian Sorcerers' Court.

"Do you know any other crow in a similar situation?" I asked.

"Yes. There are so many of us."

"How many?"

"I'd say in the thousands."

Thousands? Wow. For how long had The Supreme Leaders been turning magicless humans into crows?

"Do you have designated leaders among yourselves?"

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Four."

"Do you know where I live?"

"Yes."

"I want the four of you to come to my place around 8 pm, and we'll discuss this further. Understood?"

"Yes."

"Moving on: what do you know about the recent accident?"

"Did you notice the buses' route was from Kawe to Makumbusho?"

"Yes." That was another odd part about this whole thing. The buses had no business coming to Posta. It only proved my point that this wasn't an accident. And if I figured it out, then the occult detectives on the scene did too.

"I was talking to the other crows earlier, and they saw the buses stop in Mwenge for ten minutes before coming to Posta. The drivers left the buses and entered Brenda's Boutique together."

Every sorcerer and their mother knew Brenda. She was a sorcerer, an information broker, and sold magic-based weapons. The boutique was a cover for her weapons operation. But what James said made little sense. Why did the bus drivers go to Brenda? What did they want from her?

"Anything else?" I asked.

"When the bus drivers entered the boutique, Brenda and Bahati walked out. They started talking about a necromancer from China."

Clue number two: Chinese. "What else did they say?"

"Brenda said, 'if any crow sees Binti Nasra, tell her to see me.'"

"Why didn't you tell me that from the start?"

"I thought you knew and were heading there."

He was right. Brenda's Boutique was on the way to Mbezi Chini. "Thank you for the information, James. You may go now."

"Is tonight still on?"

"Yes."

"See you tonight." He bowed, then flew out of the auto-rickshaw.

"Hussein," I called.

"Boss?"

"Take me to Brenda's Boutique."

"Yes, Boss."

I leaned back in the seat and smiled. If Brenda wanted to see me, it meant she had information she wanted to share. Finally, I was about to know more about the necromancer.