by Rena Barron
There was something different about them that I couldn’t put my finger on. On the surface they looked the same. Their eyes burned with their usual mischief like they were hungry for trouble. But there was an extra layer of malice on their faces. Not like they just wanted to bully us—like they wanted to do much worse. I straightened up, my eyes sharp. I wasn’t about to take crap from them, especially after standing up to the werehyenas.
Before I could say anything, Eli spoke up. “Winston, you were brilliant in the final quarter against the Raptors. I can’t believe you hit that three-pointer at the buzzer.”
Frankie and I flashed each other a look, and I swallowed a snicker. Winston was an awful basketball player and a terrible rapper. He had videos on YouTube, but only his friends followed his channel.
“Shut up, little godling,” Winston said.
That word again: godling. That was not something Winston would say.
Candace pounded her fists together. “Let’s teach them a lesson for being half-breeds.”
“That’s an offensive term.” Frankie scorned her. “You should know better than to use it.”
“Who is beanstalk talking to?” Candace asked, casting a glance at her friends.
I glared at them. “Why don’t you guys get lost.”
“You snot-nose godlings don’t have any idea who you’re dealing with.” Winston gritted his teeth. “You think because you scared away a couple of werehyenas you’re tough now?”
I shivered at the thought that he and his friends had been out that night too and done nothing to help Frankie and me. Not that I expected bullies like them to ever do the right thing. The fact that they knew about the werehyenas didn’t sound like Winston and his crew either.
“Are you talking about those chicken werehyenas who tucked their tails and ran?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Eli interjected, his voice high-pitched. “You’ve seen the werehyenas too? How could a bunch of losers like you get to—”
Eli cut off midsentence. He probably shouldn’t have said that losers part out loud.
“I meant losers in the most endearing way,” Eli blurted out through a half-sorry, half-goofy grin.
“It’s time to put an end to these parasites,” Winston said, stepping closer.
“Fight, fight, fight,” someone else yelled.
In some neighborhoods when kids yelled fight, people gathered around to see the carnage. In other neighborhoods, people ran because fights meant someone could die. The people in our neighborhood split right down the middle. Half ran and half stood around to watch.
“Now would be a good time to use your powers,” Eli whispered to Frankie.
“I already told you I can’t,” she shot back.
Winston charged first, and I sprang to action. With Papa’s staff, I blocked his path. Something happened then that I didn’t expect. The staff started to glow, and a warm tingling shot up my arm. The glowing shocked the bullies too because they froze for a moment. Papa didn’t tell me that the staff had magic, but that must have been why he wanted me to keep it. To protect myself.
“You better leave before you get your butts kicked,” I said in my meanest voice.
Winston and his cronies laughed. Them laughing like cackling hens only made me madder. Papa always said, Never strike unless absolutely necessary. I thought it was necessary to wipe that smug look from Winston’s face, but I held myself back. That turned out to be a mistake. Winston shoved me in the chest so hard that I almost lost my balance.
I twirled the staff fast and hit him across his knuckles. He yelped and drew his hand back, but I wasn’t done with him. Not by a long shot. I pivoted forward on my right leg to distract him as I thrust the staff into the soft part of his left shoulder. I didn’t hit him with my full force—just enough to warn him that he was messing with the wrong girl. Winston stumbled back, and I pushed down a grin.
He growled at me through clenched teeth and threw a punch so fast that I barely ducked out of the way in time. Then there were flying fists and screaming and bodies rushing at us. I knocked Winston and Candace on their butts, but more kids joined the fight. Kids who never got in trouble. Priyanka shoved Frankie to the ground. Tay came to finish the job, but Eli rammed his shoulder into the bigger boy and knocked him aside. Janae tried to lock me up from behind, and I rammed my elbow into her stomach.
Before we knew it, we were fending off more and more kids. No one was acting like themselves, and even with Papa’s staff, I got kicked and punched more times than I cared to admit. Eli and Frankie weren’t faring any better.
We knocked them down, and they kept getting back up. The magic in Papa’s staff didn’t do much more than glow. A dozen kids surrounded us, and Frankie, Eli, and I stood back-to-back. None of this made sense. These weren’t kids who hung out together, let alone fought side by side.
“This is highly illogical, you know,” Frankie said, half out of breath.
“Ha!” Eli laughed. “You both thought my ghost possession story was impossible.”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
One by one, their skin faded from tan, brown, and black to cerulean, cobalt, and azure. The deepest blues and purples. They grew long, curved horns and barbed tails.
My heart slammed against my ribs, and the staff vibrated in my hands. These were not kids from our class. They weren’t kids at all.
“Time for you to die, godlings,” the one who had looked like Winston only a moment ago said, now in a voice as slippery as a snake. “Then we’ll take your bodies back to our master.”
Darkbringers.
As soon as the thought hit me, the sky darkened, and storm clouds settled over the park. There was no time for a snappy comeback as they closed in. Frankie’s power hadn’t shown, but she and Eli didn’t back down either.
I attacked again with the staff, batting away barbed tails that stung when they tore into my skin. I couldn’t worry about that now. I’d never fought against anyone but Papa, and there were a dozen darkbringers at our throats. I had to pay attention so I didn’t hit one of my friends by mistake. I slammed the staff into shoulders, chests, and ribs to keep them back.
The darkbringer who had pretended to be Winston stepped away from the others and raised his arms. To my utter dismay, he sprouted the largest pair of wings I’d ever seen. Wings that were a shade lighter than his violet face and stretched over knotted bones. I didn’t have time to be shocked for long before he took to the sky and the rest of the darkbringers followed his lead. He whipped his tail around as fast as lightning, and the barb sliced deep into my hand. I yelped and dropped the staff. Triumphant, the fake Winston smiled, then he dove headfirst, straight for me.
Nine
I see my life flash before my eyes
By some stroke of luck, I leaped out of the way in time to dodge the fake Winston’s attack. He was fast, but I was a fraction of a second faster. When I ducked, his claws raked across empty air instead of my throat. I was glad for that, but this was no time to celebrate. Winston halted midair and turned around, his wings beating hard. We stared each other down, then I glanced at Papa’s staff at my feet. Winston gave me a conniving smile, daring me to go for it. I cracked my knuckles to distract him, and it worked. As soon as he looked at my hands, I lunged for the staff. The wood felt warm and comforting in my hands again.
Winston grimaced, and his eyes were full of pure hate. But before he could attack, a loud screech rang out that shook the ground. I almost lost my balance, and my friends stumbled too. A sudden gush of hot wind swept through the park. It reminded me of the first night the shadows attacked me.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Frankie shouted, looking around for the trouble.
But the answer wasn’t around us; it was above. I glanced up to see a vortex of clouds and swirling indigo opening in the sky. It formed a wind tunnel that sucked up all the air, and the darkbringers were caught directly in its path.
“What the . . .” Eli said as the darkbring
ers tried to flee.
My friends and I backed away before we got caught in it too. This was something straight out of my comic books. In volume 62, Oya created a storm that sucked up the nuclear weapons on Dr. Z’s secret island and sent them into space. This would’ve been exciting, had it not looked like an angry tornado about to destroy everything in its path.
A giant bird made of blue light circled the edges of the vortex. It was fast—too fast, enough to make my head spin. From what I could tell, it was causing the disturbance. Some of the darkbringers tried to escape, but it was no use. One clung to a stop sign with her feet and tail whipping desperately against the wind. Another one held on to a fire hydrant. The three who had pretended to be Winston, Candace, and Tay hugged a park bench for dear life. One by one the wind plucked them up. I could feel its pull on me too, until Frankie dragged me to the tree that she and Eli had ducked behind. The lightning bird rounded up the darkbringers like cattle.
Eli had whipped out his cellphone and was recording the whole thing. Once the last darkbringer disappeared into the vortex, the hole closed. Then the bird swooped down from the sky and landed on the ground in front of us. It stood ten feet tall, and its wings were huge. Now that it was closer, we could see that it was made of swiveling mist that never stopped moving. I wondered if it had come back to finish what the darkbringers started.
“If you were planning to take a selfie,” Frankie said to Eli, “right now would be good.”
“In trouble again, I see, Maya,” said a disembodied gruff voice that floated from the light. A voice I’d heard so many times fussing at kids for stepping on her grass. The light shrank to the size of a human and turned solid.
One half of the cranky Johnston twins stood in front of us. Miss Lucille’s pink bonnet sat too far to one side, and her white hair poked from underneath it. Her eyes blazed with the last of the blue light before she blinked and they turned normal again. Scratch that: the blue was normal, and the human face was her cover.
I crossed my shaking arms. If Miss Lucille was what I thought, then that explained a lot.
“Are you kids okay?” she asked, winded, looking us over.
“Are you?” Eli replied, tilting his head to the side. “You were just a swirling blue light.”
Miss Lucille rolled her eyes and shook her head at him. But Eli was too busy angling his phone while he and Frankie posed for a selfie with her in the background. There was still a bit of the blue light around the outline of her body.
“You’re an orisha, aren’t you?” I asked, pointedly.
“Like from your comics?” Frankie frowned. “That’s—”
Eli laughed. “Better than your genetic experiment theory.”
Miss Lucille didn’t answer my question, but she didn’t deny it either. My cranky neighbors were orishas. The guardians of the universe. They were . . . gods? I gaped at her in shock.
“Come with me,” Miss Lucille said. “It isn’t safe here.”
“Are there more of these darkbringers?” I peered around. The park was empty now.
“Come,” Miss Lucille said again, and we didn’t protest as we followed her.
When we reached my street, I saw Mama pacing back and forth in front of our house. She pulled me into a hug. Her tears wet the top of my head as she inhaled a shaky breath.
“I’m okay, Mama.” She was treating me like a little kid, and in front of my friends at that.
“Let me get the first-aid kit,” Mama said, looking over the three of us. We all had bruises and cuts. My T-shirt was ruined, too.
Miss Lucille stepped closer to me. “There’s no need.”
She tapped my forehead, and a tingling feeling spread across my skin. Within seconds, my injuries healed. She did the same to Frankie and Eli.
“How did you do that?” I asked, amazed.
“We have a lot to talk about, Maya,” Mama said. “You three come inside. Miss Ida is on her way to get your grandmother, Eli, and we need to tell your moms, Frankie.”
If Mama knew about the orishas, then Papa wasn’t just the guardian of the veil, he was . . . I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I felt giddy and scared, but also I couldn’t help but feel like my life had flipped upside down. There was another world out there hidden from plain sight, and I wanted to know everything about it.
My friends and I exchanged glances as we climbed up the steps to my house. Frankie fiddled with her glasses, and Eli bounced on his toes with excitement. None of us said a word as we plopped down on the couch in the living room. I was still in shock.
Mama paced back and forth again while Miss Lucille peered out the window like she was looking for more trouble.
“I’m not sure how to tell you this, Maya, but your father isn’t like other people,” Mama said finally when she stopped pacing. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “Neither is Eli’s grandmother, or Frankie’s first mom.”
When Mama said first mom, Frankie’s back went rigid. Before she came to live in our neighborhood with her new moms, she had another mom. Her biological mother died in an accident when Frankie was little. She once told me that she remembered her mother’s voice, which sounded like sunshine. She remembered the warmth of her brown skin and her smile, too.
“What about her?” Frankie asked, and I felt a flutter of heat in my belly.
“She was very special, dear,” Mama answered. “She was a spirit goddess.”
Frankie’s lips trembled as she said, “Oh.”
“You mean, oh snap!” Eli interrupted. “You’re a goddess!”
I blinked once, then twice. “Frankie is an orisha?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Mama said. “Her mother was an orisha, and her father was human. She’s half orisha like you, Maya.”
“A godling,” I mused, finally figuring out what the word meant. The werehyenas and darkbringers called us that . . . They called us godlings with an s. My mouth fell open when I realized what Mama had said. “Half orisha like me?”
“Eddy—Papa—is an orisha too, Maya,” she said, searching my face for a reaction. Even if I figured it out before she told me—it was still overwhelming. If my father was an orisha like Oya, then did that mean she was real too?
Wait. Let me try that again.
My father was an orisha—a spirit god, a celestial, and not human. That thing I said about being overwhelmed—well, I might’ve understated that a bit.
“Your father’s old name is Elegguá,” Miss Lucille added.
“Elegguá,” I said, trying the name out. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” I’d already heard Papa’s side of the story, now I wanted to hear it from Mama, too.
She wrapped her arms around her shoulders, her face worried again. “Eddy was trying to protect us from his enemies—those who would harm us to hurt him. But I see that not telling you was a mistake.”
I remembered the man from my dreams again. The Lord of Shadows. He had smiled at me and shaken his head while his purple and black ribbons drained the color from the world. Some people never learn, he’d said. He was talking about Papa. “He’s protecting us from the Lord of Shadows.”
Miss Lucille drew in a sharp breath that she held before exhaling. “There’s a lot to cover, but your father and the Lord of Shadows have a long history,” she said, stepping away from the window. “To understand, we have to start at the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?” I had another bad feeling.
“The beginning of the beginning.” Miss Lucille sat down in Papa’s recliner. “The universe started as a vast blank slate. It existed without space, time, mass, or depth. It was endless and boundless and void. No one can say how long it remained that way before becoming aware, but soon after, it grew restless. Once the first sparks of matter and antimatter cropped up, the universe found its purpose. It would create. The universe birthed planets, moons, comets, asteroids, black holes, and stars. The things it made hummed with energy, and in their song came the universe’s first and oldes
t name, Olodumare.”
“You’re talking about the Big Bang theory, aren’t you?” Frankie said, frowning.
I was speechless as the news tangled in my mind. My head throbbed, and I massaged my temples. This was like taking a history class in five minutes. It was hard not to question everything I knew about my family, my neighborhood, even myself. But I soaked it all in, piece by piece. Now that the darkbringers had entered our world, I needed to catch up fast.
“That’s what you call it nowadays.” Miss Lucille shrugged. “The first orishas, Obatala and Oduduwa, sprang from the universe. Together they created the darkbringers and gave them magic. But they didn’t stop at that. They made hundreds of magical creatures from the microscopic to the gigantic, too. Obatala and Oduduwa left their creations for a time while they explored the vastness of the universe.”
“Is that why the darkbringers can shapeshift . . . because they have magic?” I asked.
Miss Lucille nodded. “The Lord of Shadows, who lurked in the shadow of a planet, took the darkbringers under his charge while the orishas were away. He was one of the first celestials that the universe created, older than the orishas and time itself. He helped the darkbringers to develop at an accelerated rate. But the universe had already seeded life on earth in the form of what would become humans. The darkbringers consumed the resources from the ocean meant to sustain the seeds. Without that sustenance, the seeds couldn’t grow, and many died by the masses.
“Once the darkbringers could survive on their own, the Lord of Shadows went back to the shadow of a planet and slept for a long time. While he was sleeping, other orishas were born and began to understand the nature of the universe too. The darkbringers flourished during that time, but the seeds of humankind suffered greatly. Obatala and Oduduwa saw that the seeds wouldn’t develop if the orishas didn’t intervene. They asked your father for a solution that would let the darkbringers and the new life coexist. He wove a veil upon the earth separating it into two worlds. That way, the seeds had a chance to evolve into something more than sea slugs.”