by Rena Barron
“After last night,” Eli said, “we need to do a better job of keeping out of sight.”
After breakfast we broke camp and set off. It took some practice to navigate with the compass, especially through the forest. Once we were out, we ran into more farmlands. We did a lot of circling back to avoid them and hiding when we heard a sound.
“This is going to take longer than seven hours,” Frankie said, once we cleared a stretch of farmlands. Her leg had healed completely, and she looked almost back to normal.
Now we were walking on the shoulder of a gravel road—and I wondered what type of transportation the darkbringers had here. We hadn’t seen any vehicles since we started our trek.
“I may have miscalculated,” I said, embarrassed. “I didn’t think about all the time we would waste hiding from the darkbringers.”
Eli pointed toward the city. “But we are getting closer.”
He was right. If we kept going, we could be there by nightfall. From here the city appeared to be a perfect circle with a ring of shorter buildings around the edge. Each inner ring of buildings was a little taller than the ones before it. This went on until the buildings in the middle of the circle were the tallest of them all. I squeezed the staff and pushed down my fears. No way we’d be able to avoid every single darkbringer, so maybe night was our best chance. But I remembered what Papa said: The enemy is strongest under the cover of darkness. It was yet another risk we had to take.
I saw something coming our way fast. It was some sort of helicopter that had left the city. The shape of the craft was weird, and it flew too close to the ground. As it drew closer, an annoying buzzing sound filled the air.
“Hide!” I shouted, and we ducked into the tall, neon-green weeds beside the road. Not the best cover by a long shot, but it was all we had. We couldn’t get caught now, not when we were only a few hours from the epicenter.
The sound grew louder, and I gritted my teeth, ready to use the staff, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
“Don’t see us,” Eli whispered, his voice desperate as the craft flew over our position. “Keep going.”
Bugacopter was the perfect name for the thing. It looked like an overgrown fly. It had two gigantic eyes, metal wings, and a glass dome where the body would be if it were a real insect. The annoying buzzing sound was coming from its wings. And the worst part was the darkbringer in the glass dome at the controls had his eyes pinned on us.
I guessed a day without fighting was too much to hope for. The bugacopter stopped above us—its wings kicking up grass and dirt that stung my eyes. Frankie was still too weak to call her energy. It was Eli who reacted first. He whipped out the prods he took from the darkbringer at Comic-Con and slammed them into the glass dome. An electrical current flickered down the length of the prods, then shot through the craft. Long cracks spread across the glass.
“Watch out!” I shouted as the craft wobbled.
The pilot yanked at the controls as the wings flapped wildly. He pulled up but didn’t get very far before the craft crashed a few feet away.
We gasped in horror as the craft burst into flames. Eli stuffed the prods back in his backpack with shaking hands. It was either the darkbringer or us. Knowing that we had no choice didn’t make the knot in my stomach go away.
“We have to go.” Frankie nudged Eli’s arm, and he snapped out of his trance.
We hurried toward the city again, staying as far away from the road as we could. After the accident, none of us was in the mood to talk. I couldn’t get the image of the helicopter crashing and bursting into flames out of my head. Eli slipped into a blank stare, and Frankie did too.
We had only walked another hour when we almost ran straight into three darkbringers near a farm. Before they could spot us, we ducked behind an old shed. From the looks of them, they’d just finished searching the grounds. Unlike the darkbringers who’d attacked us back home, these darkbringers spoke in a language that was efficient and clipped with sharp edges. I hadn’t thought about it before, but some of them had to know a lot about the human world while we knew nothing about their world.
I squeezed the staff and wished that we knew what they were saying. The symbols on the staff pulsed, and I could feel my ears and tongue tingling like when I ate Pop Rocks. Suddenly we could understand the darkbringers’ language, and the news was not good.
“We’ve quarantined this sector, sir,” came a gruff voice. “They will not escape.”
The darkbringers hurried north, and we dodged them on our way south. Every few minutes we had to drop to our bellies to hide in the tall grass to avoid being caught. They were everywhere. In avoiding one group, we ran straight into two burly darkbringers. The men startled when they saw us. Instead of attacking, they gawked like we were some exotic species. We stared at them too.
One of the darkbringers raised a shell to his lips and blew. It echoed across the field, as loud as a bullhorn, and turned my blood cold. He was calling for backup, and that realization snapped me and my friends out of our daze. Frankie and I both sent a powerful force that knocked the darkbringers on their butts. We ran, our legs pumping hard, but there was nowhere to go. Darkbringers were coming from every direction.
This was the exact thing we’d been trying to avoid. Another confrontation. It was too late for that now as dozens of darkbringers stomped through the high grass, hot on our trail. Out of options, we stopped to catch our breath before the impending fight. I shifted so the staff crisscrossed my body, ready to strike the first darkbringer who got too close. I wouldn’t let them stand in my way of finding Papa.
“I need a distraction,” Eli said, his hands balled into fists.
“I don’t think a distraction is going to help us right now,” I said as the darkbringers closed in. “We have to fight.”
Eli bit his lip in concentration. “Maya, please, just do it!”
Frankie and I glanced at each other. I thought that Eli was finally about to lose it, but there was a look of pure determination in his eyes. I raised the staff over my head and asked it to call a storm. As soon as the first lightning bolt struck the ground, the darkbringers paused. Some turned to look at the sudden dark clouds rolling across the already dusky sky.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shush,” Eli said as his skin began to shimmer.
Frankie gaped and stumbled back a step. “Is he . . .”
Before she could finish speaking, Eli turned semitransparent. We could see him and see through him. Then he completely . . . disappeared.
“Ummm, Eli?” I whispered.
He replied with a low snicker, then I felt a tap on my shoulder. A blue shimmering light settled over me and Frankie too, and we began to become transparent. We were able to see Eli again—he looked like a ghost out of a horror flick with that twisted grin on his face.
“Where did they go?” one of the darkbringers snarled.
When another one ran straight past us, oblivious to our new state, Eli whispered, “Told you so.”
It figured that a boy obsessed with everything paranormal could turn us invisible. Eli had discovered his godling power.
Nineteen
We meet our match
Had we still been at Comic-Con, these darkbringers would’ve fit right in as the latest super soldiers built in Dr. Z’s lab. They looked like thick-necked wrestlers without the spandex or the cool catch phrases. They wore black uniforms, vests laden with knives, and battleaxes across their backs. Too bad we didn’t have Oya to put an end to them.
Eli’s magic held as we quietly continued our trek toward the city. It shimmered across our skin, making us invisible to the darkbringers. They stalked around the field with their eyes narrowed and their weapons in their hands. My friends and I could see each other, except we were semitransparent. It might not have been the ghost army that Eli wanted, but I was grateful that his magic finally showed. It gave me hope that my magic would come someday too.
“The commander is on the way,” w
hispered one darkbringer to another.
It was a boy not much older than us talking to a girl who looked around the same age. “Oh no, she’s in a bad mood,” said the girl looking to the sky.
“How do you know?” asked the boy, sounding like he had a lump in his throat.
The girl leaned closer to him and said, “Her wings are only that color when she’s mad.”
“Oh.” He looked as scared as I felt when I saw the commander flying toward our position.
I couldn’t figure out where her wings began or where they ended. They spanned the sky, like a colorful hang glider mounted against her back. A rainbow of colors danced across them as she dipped and adjusted her flight path. If a butterfly’s wings were beautiful, then hers were a word I’d never used but had heard: exquisite.
“She sawed off the last rookie’s horns for giving her the stink eye,” the girl said.
Eli and Frankie winced beside me. I winced too. We’d gone from bad to worse again. I was beginning to think the universe was playing a dirty trick on us. Two dozen darkbringers stopped searching for us in the field to wait for the commander to land. We couldn’t risk someone hearing our footsteps in the dry grass, so we had to stop too.
As much as my knees shook, I couldn’t help but be a little amazed. The commander moved like she owned the sky, and even a flock of birds got out of her way. Before I could release the breath pinned in my chest, she landed on the ground. She wasn’t blue and didn’t have horns either. She was brown, not dark like me or Frankie, or light like Eli. She was golden.
It took me a minute to figure out that she was from the aziza people Papa mentioned in one of his stories. The aziza were faeries notorious for not interacting with outsiders. I hadn’t expected to see one running a darkbringer army. I hadn’t expected a lot of things that seemed commonplace in the Dark. Papa had said that the aziza were so lovely they enchanted you with their songbird language. One had enchanted him once, but he didn’t tell that story.
This aziza spoke the darkbringers’ language, and her voice was musical.
“Report,” she demanded, looking at no one in particular. I wondered how she’d come to be in the Dark. “Where are they?”
The two dozen darkbringers stood stiff. They all looked like they could crack stone with their teeth or cut you in two with their barbed tails. But they also looked scared of this aziza, who had a face that said mess with me and die a slow, painful death.
“Commander Nulan, sir.” One of the older darkbringers with bright blue skin fell in step beside her. Nulan had folded her wings against her back and now strolled through the ranks of soldiers. “No sign of them yet, but we have the valley completely barricaded, and we’re bringing in hounds.”
The commander wrinkled her nose. “You need hounds to do your job for you, is that it?”
“No, sir.” The older darkbringer answered too fast to be as calm as he pretended. “We aren’t trackers; we’re foot soldiers, first on the line,” he explained. “With that said, we’ve picked up their scent, but the wind has spread it across the valley.”
“I don’t want excuses,” Nulan barked. “Our lord felt them enter our world, and he wants them found now. They couldn’t have gone far.”
The words our lord rang in my ears, and my heart leaped against my chest. The Lord of Shadows knew that I would come. He’d dared me to, so that was no surprise. Still, it made me realize that no matter what, eventually I would have to face him. Not on the crossroads—in the flesh. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill me and my friends like he’d done to Papa’s previous family. I didn’t know how I could defeat an enemy so powerful, but I knew I had to be ready for anything.
“Find them!” Nulan said through gritted teeth.
Frankie twitched next to me at the fire in Nulan’s voice. I didn’t like this woman one bit, and she was standing between us and the city where my father was being held captive. At her command, the darkbringers started searching the field again. We had to escape, while Eli’s invisibility magic still held.
I tapped my friends on their shoulders and pointed out a path through the darkbringers. Frankie and Eli nodded back to let me know that they understood the plan. We fell into a single line with Frankie in front, Eli in the middle, and me bringing up the rear. We only needed the magic to hold a little longer, until we cleared the field and left the darkbringers behind. I clutched the staff hard as we took one careful step after another. The city was so close now. Only an hour or two away at the most. I’m coming, Papa.
Even though the field was huge, we had to zigzag a lot to avoid the darkbringers. One would’ve barreled right into Frankie if Eli hadn’t pushed her out of the way. Another one was sweeping his long tail in the air and almost struck my arm. This was not easy, and it was slow.
“We found evidence that they were sleeping in a cave in a forest,” the older darkbringer reported to the commander. “We found these little black seeds.”
Black seeds? I tried to think of what they were and remembered that Eli had eaten an apple. He shrugged as we crept further away, almost clear of the darkbringers. Almost.
“I don’t care about where they were sleeping,” Nulan shouted. “I want them, and I want them now!”
“Are you sure those are not their droppings?” Another darkbringer laughed.
And I thought Eli had bad timing with his jokes. This guy was worse.
We had made it through the last of the darkbringers when Frankie stepped on a twig, and it snapped. Several darkbringers spun around, and we froze.
“Halt!” Nulan yelled.
Frankie winced, and Eli mouthed a curse that would’ve gotten him grounded for a month had Nana been here.
Nulan elbowed her way to where the darkbringers stared in our direction. “What is it?”
“A sound from over there, sir,” one of them answered.
Nulan smiled. It was an ugly, twisted smile that destroyed any pretense of beauty. “So, it seems the intruders are right under our noses.”
We stood there shaking, me with Papa’s staff shimmering with magic. Frankie with her palms facing out, ready to send a blast of power. Eli with his invisibility cloak still in place.
The commander turned her back and whispered something to the older darkbringer. He made a gesture, and the other darkbringers moved until they had surrounded us.
Without warning, Nulan whirled around and blew on her hand. Flecks of gold and silver spread across the valley. To our horror, they landed on us too, and the commander smiled again.
“There you are,” she said.
The darkbringers pulled their weapons. Eli grumbled and released his invisibility magic. It was time to fight.
The darkbringers stared at us with wide eyes. Even Commander Nulan looked surprised. Frankie, Eli, and I had felt the same when we saw the darkbringers in the park in our neighborhood. This was probably the first time that some of them had seen humans, or well, godlings.
It made no sense that they wanted to wage war on people they didn’t know or understand. Yes, humans and darkbringers looked different, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t they see that the Lord of Shadows only wanted revenge?
“We’re not here to make trouble.” I forced my voice to sound strong, but I didn’t think they were buying my act. “We’re sorry about the cornfield. That was an accident.”
“The other darkbringers attacked us first.” Eli frowned. “At least I think they did.” He didn’t look so sure, and I wasn’t convinced anymore either. The fire had gone after them before the girl sent rocks hurtling at us.
“What he means is that,” Frankie added, “this is all a big misunderstanding.”
Anyone with half a brain could see that we were stalling for time to come up with a plan.
“Elegguá’s spawn”—Nulan spat out, ignoring everything we’d said—“and her friends. So pathetic.”
“Kill them.” One of the darkbringers reared back his ax, and the others followed.
“No, you fools,” Nulan
hissed. “We’ll take them—”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the same darkbringer flung his ax at me. It soared through the air, hissing as it did. Without thinking, I lifted the staff vertically and spun it across my body. The white symbols glowed, turning the ax into ashes, which fell to the ground only a split second from hitting me.
Nulan reached into her black vest and removed a slim knife of her own, her eyes on Papa’s staff the whole time. She flipped her wrist so fast that the knife was a silver blur. Eli gasped, and for one horrible moment, I thought he was hurt. Then I saw that Nulan had aimed the blade for the darkbringer who went against her order. He stumbled and fell to his knees with the knife lodged in his chest. She’d killed him—one of her own men. I had no doubt that she’d do the same to us if we couldn’t get out of this situation, and fast.
“I said that we’ll take these little godlings to the Lord of Shadows alive,” she said, her voice slippery sweet. “Does anyone else have an objection?”
The darkbringers growled and spat on the ground. Some cursed, glaring at me with murder in their eyes. They hated my father, and they hated me too. How could I make them understand that he made a mistake the first time with the veil? That now, this war the Lord of Shadows wanted was wrong? It could only bring about death for both our worlds.
“Good,” Nulan said, satisfied when no one answered her.
“We’re not going to let you take us,” Frankie said, her palms aimed at Nulan.
The commander tilted her head to one side, her face contemplative. “On second thought, I don’t need all of you.” Nulan removed another slim knife from her vest and sent it flying straight for Frankie’s heart. I lifted Papa’s staff to counter her attack, but nothing happened. The symbols didn’t glow, they didn’t move. Nothing.
Frankie sent balls of light at Nulan that dissipated midair. One of the darkbringers must’ve been countering our magic. Just as the knife was inches from my friend, I leaped in front of her. Everything was a blur as I raised the staff to deflect the knife. But before I could, the ground shook hard beneath our feet, then it opened up and swallowed us whole.