The House Of Black Pearl

By Jennifer Morrigan

An African child witch is trafficked to South Korea and forced into a life of crime. There, she meets two best friends, a cop and a killer-for-hire, who need her help as much as she needs theirs.

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Do broken children become broken adults?

After being disowned by her family and discarded by society, an African child witch (Blessing) follows a mysterious man (Ekwueme) across the ocean. Her journey takes her from Lagos, Nigeria to Seoul, South Korea, where she is forced into a life of crime. As a shaman (Black Pearl), she must turn a blind eye to the present in order to foresee the future and make—not tell—the fortune of the man who betrayed her. . . .

A retired policeman (Woo-sung) investigates the The House of Black Pearl as a favor for an old partner and an even older friend (Jung-min). At The House of Black Pearl, he uncovers crime after crime and discovers a young woman (Black Pearl) who leads him down a twisting path where every decision he makes determines who lives—and who dies. . . . 

As the old saying goes, every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. More sinner than saint, a hitman (Ji-chul) helps his childhood friend (Woo-sung) investigate The House of Black Pearl, the heart of Nigerian organized crime in South Korea. However, he's no stranger to what, or who, is inside, and he has his own reasons for huffing, puffing and blowing it all down. . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Morrigan
• Release date: Jun 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386548034

Book preview

The House

Of

Black Pearl

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By Jennifer Morrigan

Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Morrigan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, places and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

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Prologue: All Roads Lead To Rome

Chapter 1: The Target

Chapter 2: The Perfect Partner

Chapter 3: An Invitation

Chapter 4: A Twisting Path

Chapter 5: Black Pearl

Chapter 6: The Chase

Chapter 7: Two Faces

Chapter 8: The House Of Black Pearl

Chapter 9: Dead End

Chapter 10: Blessing

Author's Note

Jun-ho: A Short Story

Dedication

For Jun-ho.

Prologue: All Roads Lead To Rome

Onitsha, Nigeria

2002

Horns honked, loud and angry, as two-story buses, outdated cars and small, speedy motopeds bottlenecked on the River Niger Bridge. It seemed unstable and unsteady underneath so much weight, and Blessing was worried. It could collapse beneath her at any moment, plunging her into the dying, polluted river below.

As beads of sweat dripped down her face, she sat quietly in the passenger seat and thought, The taxi driver will faint from heat, and I will faint from fear. According to her taxi driver, the A/C was broken and couldn't be fixed. According to her family, she was broken and couldn't be fixed.

The bridge shook, but it didn't collapse. The taxi sputtered, but it didn't break down. Although, along the way she prayed for the taxi to break down. She prayed for anything and everything capable of ending her sad coming of age story before it began, but she wasn't surprised when her prayers were met with silence again.

As for her, she would shatter, but she wouldn't die. She would live, writing her sad coming of age story without a pen, pencil or pieces of paper. It would write itself. It would tell itself. It would be read in her scars, both seen and unseen.

Nine hours passed in heat and fear and silence, but she wasn't sure whether the heat or the fear or the silence was suffocating her. Maybe her memories were suffocating her.

As the concrete bridge finally became a dirt road, she remembered a pair of soft hands pressing a hard pillow cruelly over her face and a pair of strong hands wrapping tightly around her neck.

She was a witch, and she left her home in Lagos at the age of twelve after her mother and father tried to kill her.

***

Blessing wasn't welcomed into the world when she was born.

As soon as the midwife left, her mother cried and scrubbed her dark brown skin with holy water. Her father cursed and cut her shocking white hair with dull scissors.

Unwanted, she was born out of pain and into it, her soft dark skin rubbed raw and thin white hair hacked off haphazardly. Her mother and father left wounds on her body (and heart). They would become her first scars.

After hearing a rumor about the birth of a powerful witch, a traditional healer paid her family an unexpected visit. He poured sap from a palm tree into her dark brown, almost black eyes, a vulgar, violent healing ceremony that almost made her go blind.

Nothing healed her.

Stigmatized, she was shunned by her community and separated from her family from birth.

The Catholic priest who baptized her also named her. He thought naming her Blessing would remove the sin—the curse—marring and marking her eyes and hair, but her family attended church every Sunday (without fail) without her, anyway.

They were afraid of what people would say and, worse, do if they saw her: her white hair, her big dark brown eyes sitting in a small dark brown face like two deep, bottomless wells.

Her eyes were too old and too wise to belong to a newborn baby, but they did. She was too strange and too unusual to belong to them, but she did.

Her mother didn't sing to her. She prayed for her. Her father called her witch, not Blessing, as if no one (not even the priest) had named her. Her brother, the firstborn, refused to hold her while her sister, the middle child, ran away from her.

When she was old enough to walk and talk, she was forced to eat leftover food and sleep outside on the dirt and grass like a dog. When she was old enough to run away and ask for help, she was forced to return home.

No one helped her, either.

Hurt and helpless, the awe of youth quickly became the fear of old age. Even though she was just a child, she was afraid of the world—of the people in it. Although she was hurt and helpless, she wasn't hopeless.

A small nursery and primary school across the street was a window into a world without fear. When she grew tired of spying on the bright and cheerful students sitting inside of the school, she stole several worn and torn textbooks shriveling outside of it. She taught herself how to read and write. She learned how to dream, escaping the world around her and entering the world inside of her.

She made her greatest escape after fashioning a makeshift home for herself on the rooftop of a small abandoned two-story building nearby. A shoddy yellowed staircase crept up inside of the building's skeleton like a spine. It was the only way to access the rooftop, a cluttered but clean expanse of concrete.

A young and eager but inexperienced carpenter, she scavenged around and settled on brown cardboard (the walls and the roof) and a bit of carpet (the floor). She disappeared there for long periods of time, but her absence always went unnoticed by her family.

To survive, she stole food and water from the school. She stole books from it, too. Out of sight, she could slip into the pages of a book and pretend to be someone else. She became someone with family and friends who loved her. She became someone with a future—a future as bright as the sun, who said hello and goodbye to her everyday.

She left her cardboard and carpet home on days and nights when the skies cried, drenching her and what few belongings she had in their tears. Sometimes, she cried with them.

Year after year, she existed somewhere in between earth and