“Ah!” Sierra gasped and spun, throwing her back against the closet.
Robbie jumped to his feet. “What happened?”
They were alone. No shadow claws, no screaming wraiths. Sierra shook her head. “Waking nightmares,” she said.
“What was it?” Robbie asked. “The thing that attacked you?”
“I don’t know,” Sierra said. “It was like … it was like the shadow I saw inside Kalfour, but bigger and with long horrible arms and … there were mouths all over it. Screaming faces.” She shook her head. “And when it spoke, it was like a dozen voices speaking together, but all off-key and awful. Ugh.”
Robbie looked pale. “A throng haint.”
“A what?”
“It’s like a … It means … wow.”
“Make sentences, man. Complete ones.”
“I’ve just heard about them in rumors and lore and stuff, but a throng haint is when someone — someone powerful — uses binding magic to enslave a group of spirits and then fuses them together into one huge shadow. From what it sounds like, the one you saw tonight was still a shadow, right? But if it ever gets into an actual form, I mean … if someone shadowshapes it … I can’t even imagine.”
“What you mean, binding magic?”
“See, shadowshapers, we work in tandem with spirits. We unify our purposes with theirs, and it’s like a give-and-take, a relationship. When we’re creating, we attract spirits that are like-minded. And then when we shadowshape: They align with us.”
“I think I get it.”
“But with binding magic, you’re basically enslaving a spirit. Like the corpuscules? Someone with binding magic captured a spirit and then shadowshaped it into Ol’ Vernon’s corpse and sent it to do their bidding. And the person binding can see and speak through the spirit and its form. With a throng haint, it’s like that times ten.”
Sierra started pacing across her room. “So it would have to be someone who could shadowshape … and how does one get this binding magic?”
“It would have to be given by a more powerful spirit worker … or spirit.”
She looked at Robbie. “Ever hear of the Sorrows?”
Robbie cocked his head. “Once or twice, I think. They’re some old crew of powerful phantoms. Supposed to have, like, a golden glow. No one knows too much about ’em. Why?”
Sierra stopped pacing. “Golden glow?”
“Yeah, why?”
“There were three other spirits there tonight when the throng haint attacked me. They glowed — made the whole world glow golden, actually. And they told the throng haint that it’d failed. Said it was too late.”
“Sierra, you saw the Sorrows? And you’re still alive … Do you even know —?”
“Could they give someone the binding magic?”
“From what I’ve heard, absolutely.”
Wick. He had wanted to save the shadowshapers by taking over Lucera’s powers. Sierra could understand it now: A few days after the last journal entry she’d read, Wick had gone to talk to Lázaro about finding Lucera. But something had gone wrong, and Lázaro had never been the same again, rendered useless when Wick tore his power of telling stories from him. Wick was a shadowshaper, but the powers he received from the Sorrows had given him a one-up over the others.
This man had come in and destroyed everything. Everything.
“Sierra,” Robbie said. “What is it? You’re just walking back and forth and squinting at nothing at all. You okay?”
She stopped right in front of Robbie and looked him in the eyes. “You remember I told you I was researching that guy Wick?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I only saw him a few times. Seemed like a nice enough dude. Had a lotta questions about shadowshaping.”
“I bet he did,” Sierra growled.
“You think he’s mixed up in this?”
Some stranger had shown up and gotten inducted into a family legacy that Sierra herself had been kept from her entire life. And now he wanted to destroy it, and he had almost killed her abuelo to do it. Joe Raconteur, Vernon Chandler … who knows who else? All wiped out at the whim of this one man. “Robbie?”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to make me a shadowshaper.”
Robbie shook his head. “I don’t know how.”
“What?” Sierra stepped back from him and crossed her arms. “But I thought …”
“I mean, I can do a lotta stuff. But initiating someone as a shadowshaper, that’s like … that’s on the heavy-duty elder tip. I’m just not there yet.”
Sierra’s shoulders slumped. “This is some …”
“But …”
“But what?”
“I wonder. There’s a chance that … You know what? Lemme see your hand,” he said. “Your left one.”
She held it up, and he put his against it and closed his eyes. He smiled.
“What? What’d you do?”
“I can feel it,” he whispered. “It’s alive in you. The shadowshaper magic. You’ve already … Someone already gave it to you.”
“But … how?” Sierra looked at her hand. It wasn’t glowing or anything.
“Does it matter?” Robbie grabbed her hand and pulled her along beside him. “C’mon.”
“Wait …” Sierra remembered the impossible nothingness of the throng haint rearing up over her, blotting out the suburban Flatbush streets, all those screaming mouths and the searing iciness creeping along her left arm. “What you just did there — the thing tonight did it too.”
“What?”
“The throng haint. I felt it inside me, inside my left arm.” She shuddered. “It was checking. It wanted to know — Wick wanted to know — if I can shadowshape.”
Robbie nodded. “It makes sense in a horrible way.”
“Wick knew about my powers before I did.” She shook her head.
“Sierra. Come with me.” He put his shirt back on and shoved on his shoes.
“Where we going?”
“You’re a shadowshaper, Sierra! We gonna try it out!”
“Okay,” Robbie said. “Try to relax and take some deep breaths.”
Sierra closed her eyes. They stood at a bend in the paved road that wound around Prospect Park, directly beneath a lamppost. Around her, the urban wilderness churned with cricket calls and the gentle swoosh of trees. Somewhere, a river flowed. The park was like a wooded city inside a much larger world of concrete. The sun wouldn’t be up for a few hours yet.
“Okay?”
Sierra opened her eyes and nodded. “I’m ready.”
“Look,” Robbie said, “it all starts with an act of creation.” He pulled a piece of red chalk out of his pocket, crouched, and started to sketch out something on the ground.
“Do you always walk around with chalk in your pockets?”
“Of course. I mean, think about it.”
“Wait … that why Mr. Aldridge stays whining ’bout he ain’t got no chalk in the classroom?”
Robbie stopped drawing and shot Sierra a sly smile. “I plead the Fifth. Now look.” He returned to his picture, a rough sketch of a mean-looking guy with a metal pipe. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, okay? You just want some semblance of what you’re thinking.”
“Does it have to be me that draws it? Can I … shadowshape your drawing?”
“The magic is stronger if you draw it yourself. Because you’re like, more connected to your own picture, and the spirits grow strong off that connection.”
“I think I get it. Kinda.”
“In shadowshaping, two things matter most: material and intentionality.”
“Feel like I should be taking notes,” Sierra said.
Robbie laughed. “I’ll try and keep it simple.” He pulled out a stub of blue chalk and shaded in some areas of his drawing. “A painted mural is gonna be a more powerful vessel than a little chalk sketch.”
“Got it.”
“Both because the material itself is stronger — chalk is just dust, right?” He blew away a se
ction of the guy’s pipe to demonstrate. “And because a mural is generally gonna be a higher quality of work. Gives the spirit more to play with.” He redrew the part he’d scattered. “Like, you’re going to a knife fight — do you wanna show up with a toothpick or a machete?”
He filled in the last section of the guy with the pipe, then added some wings and sharp teeth. “Intentionality matters because that’s what the spirit connects to, what attracts them. I’m drawing this so you can shadowshape it. If I wasn’t drawing it for you, you could still use it, but it wouldn’t be as strong. The spirits respond to emotion. Since we’re friends, they’ll react to that when they enter the drawing. If I was scared of you and I was drawing it for you, it’d be powerful too, but a different kind of power. The strongest is when I draw a picture of the spirit that’s going in it, like the mural I did for Papa Acevedo. But you can’t usually do that; it’s hard if you didn’t know the person in real life. So we get creative with it.”
“Like the mermaids and them at Kalfour.”
“Right!”
“So it doesn’t have to be, like … my dead relatives that go into my pictures, right?”
“Nah, it can be any spirit. Like I said, you’ll attract like-minded ones with your intentionality. Anyway, since this is just practice, all the details don’t matter much. You wanna get a feel for it. Now, you see any spirits around?”
Sierra looked up and down the two-lane road. The forest stretched along either side of it. A little farther along, the road sloped up into darkness. If it wasn’t for the sounds of traffic whooshing down Flatbush, you could almost pretend you were deep in the wilderness. “There were a bunch around at the club earlier,” Sierra said. “Man, don’t tell me spirits are like cops …”
“Look again. Sometimes you gotta go all soft eyes to see ’em, even though you’ve already seen ’em.”
She let her vision blur and almost immediately saw a tall figure slow-stepping toward them down the path. “Whoa … Yeah, one’s coming.” Sierra tensed. It didn’t look anything like the throng haint, but still …
“It’s okay,” Robbie said. “It’s not going to hurt us.”
“You say that,” Sierra said. She concentrated on relaxing as the shadow loped closer.
“Now, look.” Robbie held up his left hand.
“There’s your hand.”
“Thank you, Sierra. I realize that. Now you do it.”
“Oh. Wait, you want me to. But …”
“Sierra.”
Sierra shuffled her feet and looked up at Robbie’s determined face. “Alright, alright.” She put up her left hand. The air shimmered where the spirit had been; she squinted her eyes. The shadow was barreling toward them. “It’s … Robbie, it’s running.”
“I know. Touch the picture.”
“But how do you know …”
“Do it, Sierra. Now.”
Sierra dropped to one knee and touched her right hand to Robbie’s drawing. She closed her eyes, bracing for the spirit to dive into her.
“Don’t move,” Robbie whispered.
A rush of coolness burst through her; it streamed along her raised left arm, past her chest and down to her right hand. Sierra’s eyes flew open as the chalk man shuddered against the pavement and then scattered into nothing.
“Whoa!” Sierra stood. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen, right?”
Robbie was smiling. “It’s alright, you’re just starting out.” He took a step toward her, closing the distance between them. “You’ll get it. Try again.”
“What happened to the spirit that tried to get in there?” She scanned the forest.
“Prolly wandered off,” Robbie said. “You’ll see — different spirits show up, and most are real down for the cause, because that’s why they here, you know?”
“Not really.”
“I mean — it’s an exchange. You give them form, they work for you — with you, ideally, toward your goal. And they know that, so they show up ready to work. But sometimes you might come across some that just wanna be a nuisance, jump in whatever form you got for ’em, and do what they feel. Just ignore ’em and keep it movin’.”
Sierra tried not to gape. “Okay, man.” She took a piece of green chalk from him, crouched, and sketched a girl in a ninja outfit.
“Nice,” Robbie said, peering over her shoulder.
She pushed down the flush of pride at his compliment, closed her eyes, and then opened them halfway. A small shadow glided across the path toward her. She raised her left hand and waited a beat, and just as the shadow reached her, she smacked her drawing with her right hand. The coolness slid through her faster this time, a rushing stream that burst out her fingertips. Then the ninja girl shivered and stretched.
“I did it!” Sierra yelled. The drawing twirled a circle in the pavement, bowed to Sierra and placed one gloved hand at her feet, then danced off. “Robbie, did you see that?”
Robbie smiled. “It was saluting you.”
“C’mon, man! I wanna see where it goes!” She jogged along the road, watching the glint of green dash in and out of sight.
“Where do you want it to go?” Robbie said from behind her.
“Up a tree!” Sierra said. The green ninja slid off the road and disappeared in the dark grass. A second later, it flashed along the trunk of a nearby oak tree.
“Robbie, this is amazing!”
Robbie was laughing. “That was great, Sierra. You don’t have to say what you went ’em to do out loud, though. You’re connected. It’ll respond to your thoughts.”
She turned and found Robbie a few paces behind her. Her smile felt like it was going to burst off her face and float away. “Do they always stay close to the ground like that, flat? Or can they lift up and be 3-D like us?”
“They can,” Robbie said. “But it takes a lot of work to get there. And it takes a powerful shadowshaper. The spirits only have so much energy, so you wanna use it wisely. Gettin’ all 3-D like that drains ’em.” He took a step toward her.
“Can other people see them? Like … regular people?”
“If they look.”
She took a step toward him. “They usually don’t look, do they?”
“No.”
The park suddenly seemed very quiet. Sierra wasn’t sure if all the cars had just vanished from the road and all the night animals had agreed to shush at exactly the same moment, or she was making the whole thing up. Robbie’s face was very close to hers. She felt his breath on her forehead. He wasn’t smiling anymore; he looked serious, almost sad. She felt like if she put her hand against his chest, his heart would be beating a thousand times a minute and so would hers and maybe they’d both explode.
She opened her mouth to speak, and then something rustled in the tree branches above them. They both looked up. A few stars twinkled beyond the leaves. A bright green shape flashed past, and then the branch shook again and a flurry of leaves cascaded in a slow, circular downpour around them.
Sierra looked back at Robbie. She took in all the little details of him: the beginnings of a beard reaching down the line of his jaw, his wide nose and long eyelashes. For a few seconds, there was no Wick, no phantoms, no weird family history, no murals. Just Robbie’s peaceful face and the leaves on their gentle night sojourn, buffeted by the summer breeze.
She opened her mouth again, but whatever was going to come out got caught in her throat.
“What?” Robbie asked.
“What happens now?”
He closed his eyes and slowly opened them again, now grinning. “We practice.”
“Practice shadowshaping?”
“Combat ’shaping,” Robbie said. He walked past Sierra down the path and then broke into a run. “Come get me.”
“Robbie, what? Wait!”
But he was gone.
Sierra swallowed a wave of panic and squinted at the dark trees around her. “This dude just loves disappearing,” she muttered, crouching. She placed the green chalk against the pavement,
took a deep breath, and drew three sets of eyes. Then she looked up. The road was empty. “Come on, spirits. I know you out here.” She squinted, and for a few seconds all she saw was the muted star shine of the night lanterns. Then three small, plump shadows emerged from the darkness and swayed toward her. “There you go.” She steadied her trembling hand, raised it to the air, and gulped as the figures launched into a run. The icy swirl poured through her; Sierra slapped her right hand against the eyes, and they sprang to life, each set swerving across the pavement into the night.
Sierra smiled. “Find Robbie,” she whispered. All three pairs of eyes swung off the path into the forest. She rolled her own eyes. “Really, dude? You just had to go right into the creepy forest, huh? Ugh.” She steeled herself and stepped into the woods.
Sierra had never known such total darkness. She put her hands forward and moved quickly between the trees, trying to ignore her thundering heartbeat. A flash of green glinted across a tree stump a few feet ahead, and she made her way toward it. “I’m seriously going to have a talk with Robbie when I find him,” she growled. “Seriously.”
When Sierra first heard the humming, it wasn’t because it had just started then; it sounded as though it had been going on for a while. It was like when she’d be sitting in class for forty-five minutes and finally get so bored she’d notice the stupid heater had been clacking and smashing away the whole time. The voices grew around her in a cloud of sound.
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh …
It sounded like the choir at Bennie’s church — both beautiful and haunting. The voices ranged from low and mournful to high and exultant; they blended together in rising and falling harmonies that filled the night. Sierra stopped walking and glanced to either side, but the forest’s darkness was unyielding. She wanted to yell out “Who’s there?”, but that was too much like what the chicks in horror movies did right before they got ate, so she kept quiet and stayed perfectly still as the hum rose and fell in harmonious waves.
It was too late to turn back. The noise was all around her, seemed to well up from inside her. “Nice,” Sierra said. “Got myself lured out here to this stupid forest.” She took a step back toward where she hoped the wide-open field was. “In the middle of this stupid, stupid situation.” Another step. The humming kept getting louder. “After this stupid week full of stupid weirdo things happening.”
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