by Rena Barron
I wouldn’t let my racing heart stop me from doing the right thing, which was find my friends first. “I’m not going back with you,” I said, holding my ground.
“You don’t have a choice, little godling,” Eli said as both his and Frankie’s skin faded to matching shades of steel blue. Horns grew out of their heads. Even though they changed, they still had the same face shapes as Frankie and Eli. I cursed, stunned to see the darkbringer versions of my friends. But soon their faces narrowed, their cheeks moved higher. They appeared older now, like college kids.
I dropped my backpack and kicked it aside. “Where are my friends, my real friends?”
The fake Eli shrugged. “Probably dead.”
I clenched my teeth so hard that my jaw hurt. Tears pricked in my eyes.
“Awww, is the little baby going to cry now?” Eli said, making sniffling noises.
A single tear rolled down my cheek. “Where has the Lord of Shadows taken my father?”
“Do you think we’d really tell you?” Eli said. “Lead you there?”
“When I’m done with you, you’ll wish you had.”
I spun the staff, and the symbols flashed a bright white, which only made the darkbringers madder. The fake Frankie sprouted wings and flew at me with outstretched claws. I jumped out of her way, but not fast enough—her razor-sharp nails raked my cheek. Papa’s warning from the last time we practiced with staffs ran through my head. Don’t get too cocky. Now my face was on fire and bleeding.
In the attack, I lost my footing and hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs. Dirt stirred at Eli’s feet until it grew into a windstorm that headed straight for me. I climbed to my knees in time to flip the staff in front of my body before it hit. The staff inhaled the dirt, sucking it into the wood like a great whirlpool in the middle of the ocean.
I didn’t have to direct the staff anymore. It was a part of me, an extension of myself, and I was an extension of it. I could feel my mind stretching and reaching beyond my body. My senses sharpened. Every sound around me amplified. I could smell the odor of the forest, the grass, and something more feral, like animal musk. But I could smell the Dark too, the tartness of the air. The tear in the veil burned my nose.
Before I got distracted by these new, deeper sensations, I sent the dirt back at Eli. It knocked him through the tear in the veil. I spun in time to block Frankie’s claws, inches from my back. The force of her attack knocked me to the ground again.
When she came hurtling for me, her claws outstretched, I slammed the staff into her gut. Then I did something I wouldn’t have believed in a thousand years. I lifted the darkbringer up on one end of the staff and threw her through the tear in the veil right into fake Eli. In the gloom of shadows inside the veil, I could barely make them out as they struggled to untangle themselves. I drew the staff across the tear and the fissure started to close.
“No!” the darkbringers screamed as they raced toward the closing rift, trying to get at me. Their outburst of magic struck me square in the chest and sent me flying backward. I hit the ground for the third time. But the darkbringers were too late. The tear had completely sealed, trapping them on the other side. I hoped there were no more tears nearby large enough to let them through. I’d find another way to save Papa.
Twenty-Two
I catch a break
Lying on my back, I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, Frankie and Eli stood over me frowning. The universe had to be getting a kick out of this. I banished two darkbringers who almost got the best of me, and now my friends decided to show up. If they were in fact my real friends this time.
“Are you okay?” Frankie asked, squinting at me.
I wasn’t about to deal with more darkbringers and their games, so I asked, “Tell me how we know that dark matter exists.”
She flinched. “What?”
My heart thundered against my chest. Only weeks ago, Eli had asked her the same question after she said he didn’t have proof that ghosts were real. She hadn’t hesitated to answer then, but now she looked perplexed. Please don’t let this be another trick.
“Observable matter in the universe can’t explain the motions of stars and galaxies.” Frankie nudged up her glasses, which had slipped to the tip of her nose. “So scientists think there must be unobservable matter that’s affecting gravitational forces.”
I fought off the feeling of relief—not trusting it yet. “What’s your favorite pie?”
“Pecan!” Frankie exclaimed. “But if it’s the holidays, sweet potato!”
I blew out a breath. She was definitely Frankie. No doubt about it. “Eli, tell me your favorite ghost website of all time.”
He frowned. “Maya, you’re acting really weird.”
I winced and bit the inside of my cheek. “Just answer, Eli.”
“Well.” He scratched his head. “Hands down, Ghost Sightings. They always have the most up-to-date theories, and Al and Carl Davis, the brothers who run the site, upload videos of their ghost hunting trips once a month and . . .”
My shoulders relaxed. “I needed to know that you were my friends and not imposters.”
“Imposters?” Frankie said. “What did we miss?”
“Oh, just some darkbringers kicking my butt,” I said as they both stuck out a hand to help me up. I came to my feet and touched the place where the darkbringer had cut my face. It wasn’t bleeding anymore. “Where were you guys?”
“Looking for you,” Eli said. “We got knocked away from the staff and landed in the middle of the forest. We were starting to think you were stuck in the wormhole until we saw the lights. I guess it was the magic from your staff.”
“Maya.” Frankie’s eyes were shiny and round with concern. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t ask because of the half-healed cut on my face or the battle with the darkbringers. She meant was I okay that we’d gone into the Dark and left without rescuing my father. I couldn’t answer, so I shook my head instead.
After catching up, we decided that we were in no shape to try to find a way back into the Dark until after we’d gotten some sleep. We laid out our sleeping bags between two trees under a tarp that Eli had brought for the trip. Frankie sat with her knees drawn against her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Eli was trying to get his phone to work, but his battery and backup battery had both gone dead in the Dark.
“This sucks!” He flung the phone onto his sleeping bag. “All I want to do is call Nana and check on Jayla. Is that too much to ask?”
I sat slouched over with my elbows digging into my knees. I missed Mama. She was probably worried sick and plenty mad. I felt bad that I hadn’t left a note, but I had to do something. I’d admit this much: I should’ve come up with a halfway decent plan so I didn’t almost get myself and my friends killed. The bright side: we were still alive. The not so bright side: so far we had failed.
“When are the other orishas going to come?” Eli threw up his arms in defeat. “I know the council said it takes time to cross the universe, but this is ridiculous.”
“I agree.” Frankie grimaced. “We need their help.”
“Are you sure you’re our Frankie and not a darkbringer?” Eli grinned. “Because our Frankie never agrees with me.”
She poked out her tongue at him.
“We can’t wait for the orishas to show up,” I said, “but we do need a new plan.”
“Starting with controlling our magic better,” Frankie added.
My cheeks warmed as shame twisted my belly in knots. “You mean, you two. The best I can hope for is controlling the staff better.”
Frankie stared as me wide-eyed. “Are you serious? You’ve been kicking darkbringers’ butts with that staff. I think you may have opened that wormhole too.”
Her tone was so direct that she might as well have been pointing a finger at my chest. I hadn’t mastered all the powers of the staff. In fact, I didn’t know the extent of its powers. I hadn’t known that it was capable of repa
iring the veil, but it made sense now that I was thinking about it. Papa never left for work without it. I thought it was some silly tradition, but it was important to being a guardian.
“I suppose I could’ve opened the wormhole,” I said, more to myself than to her. “The staff has a mind of its own. I don’t always have to ask; sometimes it acts on my emotions or wants.”
Frankie stared at Papa’s staff with her nose scrunched up and that look again, but she bit her bottom lip.
Eli gulped in a deep breath. “When I turned invisible on the battlefield, I couldn’t stop thinking about finding a place to hide.” He paused, staring at his hands. “I couldn’t stop thinking about that darkbringer in the helicopter either . . .”
In the worst of times, Eli always had a sense of humor—it was what got him through being scared even when we were little. Sometimes we had to face the thing bothering us. Sometimes it was easier to pretend that everything was okay. Like with him, it was getting harder for me to pretend.
“Eli . . .” I started, but I didn’t know what to say to make him feel better.
“I’ll take first watch!” he blurted out, cutting me off.
I didn’t press him. I wasn’t ready to talk about the accident either.
Eli may have volunteered for the watch, but he fell asleep first. Sleep was like an infection. Frankie fell asleep not a full ten minutes after. I listened to my friends’ soft snores, which were like a lullaby that made my eyes heavier. We were safe, and soon we would get Papa back. I couldn’t let myself believe otherwise. I lay down, thinking that I would only close my eyes for a few minutes, but soon I was asleep too.
Twenty-Three
When we become the
main course for dinner
I slept like a baby until the sound of tiny bells slipped into my dreams. The bells made beautiful music that danced in my head and made me want to do anything to find the source. When my eyes flew open, I thought about the elokos. Papa said that they could enchant you by ringing little bells. My second thought was to cover my ears, but it was too late as I bolted up in my sleeping bag. Frankie was gone, and Eli was shuffling out of our tent with a goofy smile on his face.
No! I shouted in my head, but my legs only pitched forward, step after step.
Soon I was stomping through the forest with my friends on the way to becoming dinner. I tried to fight the compulsion to follow the bells. There were two warring wants—no, needs—inside me. First was the desire with all my heart to follow the bells, to find the beautiful music that made my soul dance. The feeling reminded me of my favorite family vacation, when we went to Florida and rented a hotel by the beach. I remembered being afraid that Papa would get called away for work, but he didn’t, and the vacation was perfect.
At the same time a little alarm was going off in my head. It was enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, but not enough to snap me out of the trance.
Vines whipped around my ankles, stones dug into my bare feet, and I stubbed my big toes on tree roots as we marched deeper into the forest. It was the pain that snapped me out of my half-dreamy, half-awake state. But it didn’t give me enough strength to break free.
Frankie, Eli, no! I screamed. Don’t listen to the bells.
As much as I struggled to get the words out, only a whimper came from my lips. I tried to remember what Papa had done to escape the trance, but I couldn’t get it straight in my head. The chiming bells were scrambling my thoughts.
Frankie was the first one who got a word out, although I wouldn’t call it exactly coherent. “St . . . op . . . can’t . . .” she stumbled. “Can’t . . . sto . . .”
I got the point. We all did. Eli didn’t say anything, but the erratic jerks in his shoulders meant that he was trying to escape too. The bells were so beautiful and serene that they drew my mind back to the memory of Florida. Back to the ocean. The beach. The warm sand. The pineapple slushies served in real pineapples. The best banana splits and mac and cheese in the world. The smell of warm fudge mixed with cold vanilla ice cream was so powerful that I smacked my lips. Somehow the bells were making me relive my favorite vacation to keep me in a trance.
When I snapped out of the daze this time, we were in a dense part of the forest where no stars or moonlight reached. We marched through the bushes in a straight line. The bells didn’t just enchant us, they also painted a roadmap in our minds. I knew exactly where I was going, like I’d been there a hundred times before.
The smell of fish and salt on the air drew me back into my memory of our vacation in Florida. Papa and Mama lay in beach chairs next to each other. Mama was reading a book with a woman with a fancy dress on the cover, the sort of dress you only saw in movies. Papa flipped through a sports magazine. He was wearing another one of his bright, multicolored shirts, but for once, he fit in perfectly at the beach.
“Why don’t you both come swimming?” I asked them in the memory.
“I’m coming, honey.” Mama turned a page in her book. “Let me finish this chapter first.”
I’d heard that yesterday too, and I didn’t think a chapter took an hour to read, but that was how long it took her. Then when she came, it was only up to her waist because she didn’t want to get her hair wet. Papa and I didn’t care about getting our hair wet, though. We went deeper, and I wasn’t afraid when he was with me.
“Did you know that the ocean was where Olodumare seeded humankind?” Papa said. “The universe wanted humans to one day evolve into a great species. And though humans have come far, there is much work to be done to realize the universe’s true dream.”
When I snapped out of the memory again, my world had turned upside down. The elokos had bound me between two trees—my feet to one tree and my wrists to another—like meat on a skewer. I craned my neck to see Frankie and Eli tied to trees too. The three of us were in netted hammocks filled with herbs.
I wriggled, but I couldn’t get free. The ropes were too tight.
“Is this some sort of payback for talking too much?” Eli yelled to the sky. “Next time I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”
“The bells have stopped,” I said, straining to hear over Eli’s complaining.
The elokos were shorter than us, with green, scaly skin and a lot of teeth—a double row on the bottom for good measure. I swallowed hard when I saw them going about their business in the clearing. Bringing in firewood, scrubbing pots, crushing herbs into pastes. I couldn’t help but think that they looked like really scary elves.
When one set a fire underneath Eli, he shouted, “Hey, don’t be a jerk, let us go. You know cannibalism will get you jail time.”
“They’re technically not cannibals,” Frankie said, “and you’re not helping.”
I still couldn’t remember what my father said he’d done to free himself from the elokos in his story. And even worse, I was starting to feel dizzy from craning my neck to see them setting a fire beneath me.
“I don’t suppose we can try reasoning with them?” Frankie asked.
“They don’t seem like the reasoning type.” Eli lifted his body up to gnaw at the thick vines that bound his hands. An eloko in a grass skirt swatted him with a stick. “Ouch,” Eli yelped. “Is that any way to treat guests?”
“You mean guests they plan to eat,” I said. “I doubt there’s any etiquette for that.”
“Well, there should be,” Eli retorted. “They’re rude!”
“I think they’re telepathic,” Frankie said, observing them like a hawk. Her glasses were lopsided but luckily hadn’t fallen off. I wondered if the elokos knew that things like glasses and clothes were inedible. Or maybe they’d pick around them to get to the rest of the juicy meat. The thought turned my stomach. “None have said anything,” she added, “so they have to be communicating through some other means. Mind to mind seems the most obvious.”
I didn’t care whether they were telepathic or not. It didn’t matter. They were going to eat us, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I wanted things to
go back to the way they used to be. Deep down, I knew that they never would. I had been so happy on our vacation in Florida, with not a care in the world. Now those days where gone, and I would never get them back. Papa had tried to warn me about this side of the world, and I wished I’d listened to him.
A song he used to sing to me popped into my head.
From the morning’s glow to the evening’s low
There’s much work to do and many places to go
But no matter how far I travel or the people I see
There’s nowhere in the whole world I’d rather be
For though I must fight to hold the beasts at bay
No mountain or storm or foe will keep me away
For I’ll cross raging rivers and bend hyperspace
Just to see a smile on my sweet baby girl’s face
The song. That was it. Papa had outwitted the elokos by singing.
“From the morning’s glow to the evening’s low,” I sang off-key. “There’s much work to do and many places to go.”
“Are you singing?” Frankie asked, still working to free her hands.
“Shhh,” I hissed at her, then continued my off-key song, “But no matter how far I travel or the people I see, there’s nowhere in the whole world I’d rather be.”
It wasn’t working. Some of the elokos shook their heads at me. Was my singing voice that bad? But it wasn’t my imagination that the elokos stoked the fires and added more wood to speed up the process. They moved with the determination of creatures who’d done this a thousand times. How many hikers or campers had fallen into their trap over the years, or centuries, or millennia?
“Why isn’t it working?” I said between gritted teeth.
“Why isn’t what working?” Frankie said. “I’m so confused.”
“The singing,” Eli said. “You thought it would do something.”
I told them about my father’s run-in with the elokos and what he’d done to escape. “I don’t understand why it isn’t working for me.”