Sully is a fifteen-year-old slave girl who lives with her owners the Missus, the Missus’s daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, and the Missus’s poorly mother Anna. The Missus’s husband Albert is fighting in war. As soon as she hears that Albert has been killed in battle, Sully brutally murders Missus and the rest of her family, who have never been kind to her. Shaken up by this unusual activity in the human realm, the etherworld takes note and decides to restore the balance by making Sully give birth to five more people—a ten-year-old named Miles, a middle-aged woman named Liza Jane, Liza Jane’s twin sister Bethie, an old man named Nathaniel, and Ziza, a whimsical girl around the same age as Sully. While Sully remains cold and unfriendly on the outside, she slowly warms up to her new family, and grows especially affectionate toward Ziza, who teaches her about the spiritual world.

In order to secure her home, the same house that belonged to Missus once, Sully resorts to killing passersby and stealing their supplies. For every person she kills, she births another. After many days, with an army of twenty-six and a wealth of weapons, the friends prepare to defend an attack from the sheriff and his cavalry, who is furious to know that a slave has killed her owners and taken control of their house. Her army is victorious in the battle, but Sully still feels empty and purposeless at heart, and ends up trying to take her own life out of depression. However, shortly after the attempt, she is birthed again out of her own womb buried in the ground.