by Rena Barron
“You’re very brave, Maya.” He smiled up at me. “Braver than you even know.”
“Papa.” I knotted my knuckles against my thighs. “I lost your magic staff.”
For a moment he didn’t say anything as he stared at me. His face was so tired. “Well, someone stole it,” I added. “I’m sorry I couldn’t take better care of it.”
“Maya, honey.” Papa frowned. “There’s no magic in the staff.”
“I know that now,” I mouthed. I hadn’t had time to really think about it since making the wormhole to get into the Dark. It was my magic that hit the darkbringers with so much force that it knocked them clear across a room. It helped us understand their language. It healed our wounds. My magic. “But that was your favorite staff.”
Papa beamed at me, shaking his head, a little of his old self again. “I’ll make a new one.”
“We better go,” I said, sensing the darkbringers near.
“I can’t create a gateway.” Papa’s shoulders dropped. “I’m not sure how, but the Lord of Shadows has done something to block my ability to connect to the veil . . . I think it may be temporary . . . I’ll know once I return to the human world.”
“I can,” I said, grinning up at him.
“That’s my girl.” He laughed, but his smile faded when the darkbringers started to pour into both entrances of the gym. He narrowed his eyes as he lifted his arm out and a staff identical to the one I lost appeared in his hand. I wanted one too, and Papa must have seen it on my face because he conjured another one.
“We need to get out now, Maya,” Papa said. “How fast can you open a gateway?”
Not fast enough, I thought as the darkbringers lined up on either side of us, blocking the two sets of double doors. Commander Nulan stepped forward wearing her usual twisted grin.
“Congratulations, Maya.” Her face turned into a nasty taunt. “You found your father. Now you will die with him.”
I cringed at how I’d left Frankie and Eli to fight her and a dozen darkbringers. Now Nulan had five times as many soldiers with her. “My friends . . .” I said, my voice small.
“Oh, we don’t have to worry about them anymore.” Nulan smiled again. “I’ve taken care of that problem.”
Sweat trickled down my back. Taken care of that problem. No, she couldn’t have. My friends couldn’t be gone. I couldn’t trust anything she said. Frankie had a plan to get back through the wormhole, didn’t she?
“You shame the aziza people, Nulan.” Papa spat her name like there was history between them. A long, dark history. “How could you abandon them, or have you forgotten that your people live in the human world too?”
Nulan laughed, and her voice was like thunder crackling in the gym. “No more shamed than when Lutanga ran away and married you. What good came of that? She and your children died very slow and painful deaths.”
If she was trying to anger Papa, it worked. His whole body began to glow. But it wasn’t my father who struck out at Nulan. I knocked my staff against the gym floor, and a streak of white light shot out. It hit Nulan so hard that she slammed into the line of darkbringers standing behind her. They crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Nulan shoved darkbringers out of her away and climbed to her feet again. Her curly hair stood up every which way and was smoking. She gritted her teeth, and her whole body shook.
Papa turned to me wide-eyed, his face gray. “Maya, the wormhole.”
But there was no time.
“You’ll pay for that!” Nulan screamed, and the darkbringers attacked.
Twenty-Seven
The end of the road
Papa and I stood back-to-back, our staffs twisting as we struck darkbringer after darkbringer. They poured in through the doors on either side of the gym. I ducked to miss a club aimed straight for my face. Before the darkbringer could swing again, I cracked the staff against her knees. When she dropped to the ground, I landed another thrash across her head, knocking her out cold. She was going to wake up with the worst headache ever in a few hours.
Three darkbringers swung their battleaxes, and I thrust out the staff to catch the blows. They were much bigger than me, and I stumbled and almost lost my footing. But I remembered the moves Papa taught me, and instead of falling, I shifted my weight and spun left. That put a foot between me and the darkbringers. I flung out the staff in a wide arc, sending a wave of energy that rippled the space between me and them. Then one after another, the darkbringers disappeared. I stumbled back again, but this time from shock. I looked down at my hands, and the symbols on the black staff glowed as they rearranged themselves.
Papa was too busy dispatching darkbringers with his identical staff to notice. He broke legs and arms and noses, but none of them disappeared or, even worse, died. I’d seen what the orishas could do when the darkbringers attacked our neighborhood. Papa was holding back—keeping them at bay but not killing them. And I thought I understood why. He didn’t want more lives lost because of a senseless feud between him and the Lord of Shadows. So if I made those darkbringers disappear, then what happened to them?
I didn’t have time to think as something as slippery as a snake lashed around my waist and jerked me backwards. My staff fell and hit the floor, then the thing lifted me up high in the air. I clawed at what turned out to be a darkbringer’s tail. It was thick like a rope. As the barb drove toward my heart, I grabbed the darkbringer’s tail, stopping it from striking. I tried with all my might to conjure up my magic without the staff, but it was impossible. Yes, I felt the heat inside me growing hotter, but I couldn’t make it do anything. The staff was a conduit, like Frankie said. Maybe it would be something I could learn to control with practice. That was if I lived long enough.
The tail slammed me to the ground, and pain shot through my body. I cried out as my vision went blurry. There were two Papas and too many darkbringers to count. The impact knocked the wind out of me too, and I struggled to get up.
Papa screamed, and the slippery tail turned into ash and so did the darkbringer it belonged to. Finally when my head cleared, I climbed to my feet. Papa hadn’t only killed that darkbringer; he’d turned them all into ash. Every single darkbringer in the gym. I couldn’t breathe as the new silence echoed in the space. There was no sound except for my heavy breathing.
A brown face and wild hair poked around the edge of the doorway, and my heart slammed against my chest. Nulan had somehow gotten away before my father turned the darkbringers into ash. When our eyes met, she sneered at me and slinked back into the dark like the coward she was. Papa stood there shaking and had to brace himself against the wall under the basketball rim. He’d killed them. Killed them all. If I hadn’t truly understood what was at stake before, I did now. Dread washed over me, and I felt like throwing up. I wrapped my arm around my belly as I walked over to him. Papa shook his head, his eyes wide and filled with soft white light. We’d won, but at what cost? Dozens of darkbringers had died in an instant.
“I didn’t want to do that,” Papa said, his voice streaked with pain. “If we keep fighting, it won’t make things better. The Lord of Shadows won’t stop until he’s driven both worlds to extinction. You don’t know what it was like before. So many deaths. If I don’t stop the veil from failing, it will happen again.”
“It won’t happen if we work together, Papa,” I said, my voice rising. He had to stop treating me like a little kid. “I can help you guard the veil.”
Papa patted the top of my head and smiled, his face sad. He tried to hide it, but his magic was completely drained. He couldn’t even stand without leaning against the wall.
“Maya, open a wormhole,” he said, half out of breath. “I need to get back to the human world to be able to heal, and we need to get you to safety.”
I thought about my friends as I turned to an empty space on the back wall. They had to be okay. My fists shook as the first sparks came to life. The wormhole was growing slower than the one I made in the forest, and I could tell that my magic was exhauste
d too. It would take too long on my own, so I retrieved the staff to help conduct my magic. I drew a line in the air that looked like crooked black lightning. That was the first step; now I had to make the tear grow into a wormhole. But what if I couldn’t close it once we got to the other side like before? I couldn’t let that fear get the best of me. Instead, I concentrated on opening the wormhole in our neighborhood. I picked right in front of the cranky twins’ house, knowing that they would be the first on the scene to help if we needed it.
I tried hard, but it wasn’t growing fast enough. My father put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I looked up at him, and he was beaming again. “No more secrets, okay?” I said, setting my jaw so he knew I meant it. No more me hiding things like I’d done with the cracks in the veil and the writhing shadows. No more him trying to protect me from knowing about the dangers of his job. Besides, I was going to be a guardian of the veil one day too.
“No more secrets,” he repeated.
“Okay,” I said, turning back to the sputtering spark.
The wormhole was growing but taking its sweet time, which was to say, it was so slow that I thought I would age a year before it was large enough for us to fit.
I jumped when the doors slammed shut on both sides of the gym. A warm white light spread across the basketball court, and the walls, windows, and doors glowed.
“Are more darkbringers coming?” I asked, heart racing.
“No,” Papa said, his face somber. “He’s coming.”
There was an unmistakable edge of panic in my father’s voice.
The Lord of Shadows was coming.
Crap.
Twenty-Eight
The Lord of Shadows lives
up to his reputation
A chill ran down my back. He was coming. I could feel the Lord of Shadows’ presence like a cloud that had blocked out the sun, or a sudden chill on a warm day. Papa’s magic shimmered against the walls. He had cast a sort of net that was a smaller version of the veil, but he looked even worse. His eyelids fluttered, and sweat poured down his forehead. He looked like he would collapse from exhaustion any minute.
“It won’t keep him out long,” Papa said, “but it should give us more time.”
More time. His words ran circles in my mind, and my head throbbed like a toothache from focusing so hard. This guardian thing wasn’t easy. I didn’t know how Papa had done it all these years, all these eons. He’d come and gone between worlds, repaired the veil, and kept another war from happening. I squared my shoulders. If he could do that, then I could open this wormhole. My life depended on it. Papa’s. My friends’. Mama’s. The cranky orisha twins’. Everyone’s.
The wormhole grew and grew, a little faster now. My vision narrowed until the rest of the world faded to black. The spark stopped sputtering around the edges just as the gym began to shake. It made my teeth clatter together.
Darkness darker than the blackest night fell in the room. If it hadn’t been for Papa’s miniveil, which was shrinking each second, it would have been completely dark. The temperature dropped fast, and frost shot across the windows and up the walls. I held my breath as the frost spread through the protection net.
“Maya, no matter what happens,” Papa said, his voice a whisper, “I want you to go through the gateway as soon as it’s stable. Promise me that you will, even if I’m not with you.”
“But, Papa!” I yelled as wind whipped from the wormhole and sparks flashed inside it. It was almost stable.
“No buts, Maya,” Papa said, his voice firm. “I’ll hold him off as long as possible while you escape.”
I squeezed my lips together to keep from protesting again, and as soon as I did, the doors flew open on one side of the gym. A gust of cold air slammed into me, and I couldn’t breathe. It was him. His presence sucked up the space in the room like he was bigger than the gym itself. Speaking of which, the gym grew wider and taller until it was the size of a football field.
The Lord of Shadows’ writhing purple and black ribbons snaked into the gym first. They slinked across the floor like pet vipers seeking mice to snack on. A dozen, then hundreds of them, crawling up the walls, slithering on the basketball rim. Fear froze me in place even though deep down I wanted to run. He was really here, alive and in the flesh, not on the crossroads. The dread that settled in my chest was worse than anything that I’d ever felt before.
As the Lord of Shadows’ pale face emerged from the inky black, I grabbed Papa’s hand and pulled him into the wormhole. Before I could take a second step, something wrenched us apart and Papa flew back into the gym.
“No!” I said, snatching myself from the pull of the wormhole. I fell facedown on the gym floor and busted my lip. I was sorry for disobeying Papa again, but I wasn’t sorry for staying behind.
The Lord of Shadows hovered in midair supported by hundreds of writhing ribbons. Some of his ribbons had grabbed Papa by his ankle and dangled him upside down like he was a child. Papa clawed at the shadows, but the color was draining from his face fast. The Lord of Shadows was absorbing him, killing him.
“Let him go!” I screamed, wiping away tears.
The Lord of Shadows laughed, and his voice quaked through the room like an echo that could shatter glass. His face glowed like moonlight, and his violet eyes glowed too. He was more frightening in real life than he’d been on the crossroads. “You get to watch another one of your children die, old friend,” he said to Papa. “You should’ve known that I would find her eventually. You never learn.”
“Hey, Brainiac,” I yelled at him. “I came into your world, not the other way around. So I guess that means I found you!”
Maybe it wasn’t a smart move to taunt an immortal being who could kill gods. But it worked. While his attention was on me, the color stopped draining from Papa’s face.
“That was a foolish act on your part, child,” the Lord of Shadows said with a smirk. “But I’d expect nothing less from a spawn of Elegguá. So self-righteous. Are you as meddling as he is?” Not waiting for me to answer, he added, “I bet you are. You look like a meddler. Did your father tell you the awful thing that he did to my children . . .”
Someone should’ve warned me that the Lord of Shadows liked to hear himself talk so much. I needed to figure out a way to use that to my advantage. My portal was still at my back, so if I could free Papa, then we could escape. The Lord of Shadows wouldn’t be able to follow us if I collapsed the portal as soon as we entered it.
“When he split the earth,” the Lord of Shadows said, “many darkbringers died. If it wasn’t for me they would have been as extinct as the dinosaurs, which by the way died because of the split too. You can’t just split worlds. It’s the same as tearing something in two and expecting that things will not be changed forever. Even if you stitch the two halves back together, they’re not the same as before. He didn’t think about the consequences.”
As much as I didn’t want to listen to the Lord of Shadows, I understood what he meant. It was like when you balled up a piece of paper and then straightened it out again. No amount of smoothing made it like brand-new. A flash of pain crossed Papa’s face. He had lived with this guilt for an eternity, but the Lord of Shadows didn’t care.
“It was a mistake,” I shouted. My whole body shook with anger. “At least he tried to fix it. You’re not trying to fix anything. You just want to hurt people.”
The Lord of Shadows’ ribbons inched toward me, and my father struggled to free himself, but he couldn’t. He screamed and roared and used some curse words I’d never heard come out of his mouth. The Lord of Shadows only laughed until my father switched to the language of the celestials. His words trembled in the room and none of it made sense to me, but whatever he’d said annoyed the Lord of Shadows. Papa cried out as the ribbons tightened around him and encased all but his head in a cocoon.
“Noooo!” I screamed as I pointed the staff at the Lord of Shadows. My tears wouldn’t stop coming now. “Leave him alone!”
“If y
ou are going to beg for your brat’s life, do it in a language she can understand,” the Lord of Shadows said, ignoring me. “Let her see how weak you really are.”
“Please let my daughter go,” Papa pleaded. “This fight is between you and me.”
The Lord of Shadows dropped my father to the floor like he was nothing. I didn’t run to Papa. That was what the Lord of Shadows expected. Papa rolled on his side and struggled to sit up, but he couldn’t. He was too weak.
“I think not,” the Lord of Shadows said.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said under my breath. Heat rose beneath my skin. “You think you’re invincible, but no one’s invincible. I’m not going to let you keep hurting my father or let you and your army invade my world.”
“You no longer amuse me, child,” the Lord of Shadows said, his ribbons lashing out at me. I batted them away with the staff, but they kept coming. If they latched on to me, then he’d drain my powers too. I dove and rolled out of the way. At the same time, the light inside me was getting stronger, more powerful, harder to contain. My magic was growing.
“Hey, why do they call you the Lord of Shadows?” I yelled as I ducked behind the bleachers. “Are you afraid of the light because you have bad acne or something? You know you can get cream for that.”
“You’re as insufferable as your father,” he spat. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”
His shadows writhed through the gaps between the bleachers like vines growing up the side of a house. Instead of attacking him, I tapped my staff to the bleachers, and they snapped closed. His scream shook the room as dozens of his ribbons fell off and shriveled up. I ran from behind the bleachers with more ribbons hot on my trail. I conjured metal spikes behind me to slow them down, but it didn’t help. They were so close now that I could hear them hissing.