Maya and the Lord of Shadows, page 1
Dedication
To the dreamers and storytellers
who never stop believing.
This book is for you
. . . and for my little boy.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?
ZERAN KNOCKED ME on my butt for the third time in a row. I growled while he stood there grinning like he’d won already. He was enjoying beating me way too much. Not saying that I had an ego or anything, but if I did, it would seriously be (a) bruised, (b) smashed, (c) deflated, or (d) all of the above. Definitely d plus enough humiliation to last me the rest of the school year. It didn’t help that most of the godlings at Jackson Middle were on the sidelines or the bleachers watching our match, along with several other matches happening at once. The gym was enchanted so that sparring partners and their magic stayed in their designated space.
After two close calls with the Lord of Shadows, the orisha council had decided that we should be ready when the veil between our world and the Dark finally failed. Now that Ogun, the orisha of iron and war, was teaching us how to defend ourselves, I didn’t have to go to math tutoring anymore. Nor did I have to endure watching Gail Galanis doodle on her paper after solving an equation in record time while I struggled to remember the order of operations.
I glared at Zeran. “Lucky shot.”
“Face it, Maya,” he said, flashing his pearly white teeth. “I’m better than you.”
I pushed myself up from the gym floor. “Keep telling yourself that.”
I will admit this much: he did have more training. Before Zeran switched sides, he had been a part of the Lord of Shadows’ army of darkbringers. He—the Lord of Shadows, not Zeran—had commanded that even kids prepare for an all-out war against the human world. Like me, Zeran didn’t believe that darkbringers and humans should be fighting. But the Lord of Shadows wanted revenge ever since my father and the other orishas imprisoned him in the Dark. And he wasn’t the kind of supreme evil overlord who changed his mind or backed down. Ever.
So what if Zeran had more training? I was good with my staff—better than good. I spent hours practicing with Papa in our backyard before Ogun gave up his disguise as Jackson Middle’s crossing guard and started self-defense classes after school. I glanced longingly at the staff propped against the gym wall. The god symbols carved in the black wood pulsed faintly. Have you lost your mind, Maya? the staff seemed to say. We’re a team. You need me!
Together we’d kicked more darkbringer butt than I could count. The staff was a conduit that helped me direct my magic. But Ogun said it gave me an unfair advantage over the other godlings, so he never let me spar with it. Staff or not, I wasn’t going down without a fight.
Pivoting on my right foot, I lunged at Zeran and jutted out my elbow. I had intended to hook him in his side, but he was ready for my move. When he predictably stepped back to dodge my attack, I shoved my palm into his chest and concentrated hard on drawing out my magic. It was so much easier with the staff. I could snap my fingers, and BAM . . . it was there. This was like trying to pull a loose tooth that still refused to budge. Instead of the big bang I was hoping for, sparks of magic lit up my hand for a hot second, then quickly fizzled out.
“Ouch!” Eli cringed on the sideline, where he, Frankie, and Eleni stood watching our match. “Come on, Maya! You’ve got this!”
Winston and another group of kids on the bleachers burst into laughter, and I cringed in embarrassment. Tay whispered something that made Winston laugh even harder. Candace yawned like Zeran and I were boring her to tears. Despite everything that went down last summer and at the beginning of the school year, some of the godlings weren’t taking the threat from the Lord of Shadows seriously.
Ogun stood underneath the basketball rim with a clipboard in his hands, wearing a blue-and-white tracksuit. General, his massive bloodhound, slept at his feet with one floppy ear draped over his eyes. Ogun scribbled something down. He was always taking notes. I wondered what he’d written about me today. Maya Abeola continues to struggle to call her magic without her staff. How disappointing.
A knot was growing in my stomach just thinking about it. I had to get my head right. My very reputation was at stake. Zeran and I had a bet to see who won the most matches whenever we were paired up. Best of three. I’d won the first round, but this second match was not going as planned.
“Is that all you got?” Zeran asked mockingly, as he went on the offensive.
When he came at me, I ducked and swept out my leg. This time I connected, and he hit the floor, landing hard on the mat. He grimaced as he pushed himself up again. “Who’s lucky now?”
We circled each other, both looking for the upper hand. Before my eyes, blue bled across his brown skin until he was the color of cobalt. Small horns grew from his forehead and spiraled away from his face. A barbed tail shot out from his backside. Jet-black wings sprouted from between his shoulder blades through the slits in his sparring uniform. He’d dropped his human mask and transformed into his true self—the darkbringer. Several kids swooned, which only made me roll my eyes. He was such a show-off.
Only last summer, darkbringers had attacked our neighborhood. Now I was friends with one. So much had changed in only a few months. I went from not knowing about magic to being a guardian of the veil in training. I found out that the Lord of Shadows had killed Papa’s first family over a thousand years ago, all except my half sister, Eleni. He’d put her in a deep sleep and used her godling power to tear the veil. This evil-overlord thing was serious business.
Zeran whipped out his tail, catching me off guard. It sliced through the air an inch from my face. “Hey, no fair!” I said, diving out of the way. “I can’t use my staff, so why should you get to use your um . . . extra limb?”
“You’ll have to deal with plenty of extra limbs when you fight the other darkbringers,” he retorted, his voice annoyingly calm. “And they won’t go easy on you.”
I didn’t know why he had to sound so sinister about it, like I didn’t already know that. And news flash: I didn’t expect or want him to go easy on me. I turned to Ogun, who glanced up from his clipboard. “I’ll allow it as long as you’re careful with your barbs, Zeran.”
“Careful with his barbs,” I murmured under my breath. The same barbs could cut through my uniform and rip the skin from my back. Okay then, but I wasn’t about to give up. I swallowed hard. Now that Zeran was in his true form, he would be faster and more agile, but maybe I could use that against him.
Underneath the basketball rim, General’s floppy ear fell from over his eyes and he let out a long howl. Ogun shook his head, looking particularly annoyed. “It seems that a godling at the high school has accidentally turned everyone, including himself, into guinea pigs. August, please officiate while I sort things out.”
“Nice,” someone remarked, followed by a bunch of snickering.
August, an eighth grader with a face that screamed straight A student, stepped forward when Ogun disappeared into thin air. “Carry on with your matches, godlings!”
When I hesitated, Winston blurted out, “Little Maya is a loser like I’ve been saying all along.”
Frankie shoved up her glasses, which had slipped to the tip of her nose. “She’s already lasted longer than you did against Zeran.”
“Get your eyes checked, dork,” Winston countered. “I went toe to toe with that freak.”
“You will refrain from name-calling, Winston,” August said, clearly taking his job seriously, “or I will have to report you to Ogun.”
While I was distracted by the side conversation, Zeran took flight and slammed into me. We both hit the floor this time and rolled. First, he pinned me to the ground, then I had him. Another roll and he was on top of me again, his knee pressed against my chest. “Do you yield?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.
I wanted to scream in frustration, but I could hardly breathe. “No!”
Zeran threw up his arms. “Why do you have to be so stubborn all the time?”
“It’s one of my best qualities,” I answered, forcing a smile.
Ogun reappeared and walked over to where we were sprawled on the floor. From this vantage point, he was so tall that it was like looking up the length of a skyscraper. “The match goes to Zeran.”
“But I haven’t yielded!” I protested, keenly aware of the indignity of my situation. Here I was, flat on my back with a darkbringer’s knee crushing my chest.
“In all these months of lessons, you have yet to learn how to accept defeat gracefully, Ms. Abeola.” Ogun clucked his tongue. “You must know that you
It wasn’t that I wanted to win every fight, but I couldn’t afford to lose. How could I help protect our world from the Lord of Shadows if it still took me so long to call my magic without my staff? It wasn’t enough to be a guardian of the veil in training. If it weren’t for my mistake, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Zeran stood up and offered me a hand. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. I wasn’t mad at him—not really. I was angry that I still wasn’t good enough. When the darkbringers came, they weren’t going to take pity on me or anyone else. We all had to be ready.
“Are you okay?” Zeran asked once Ogun moved on to call the match between Jaylani Carmichael and Nate Townsend. “Sorry if I was a little rough on you.”
I sighed. “I need to be better.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Zeran said. “You don’t think I got better overnight, do you?”
I pursed my lips, feeling my anger disappear. “Thought you said that you were born good.”
“You do have a point.” Zeran laughed, then he shifted on his heels awkwardly. “I have to leave training early. I’ll catch up with you later.”
I frowned at him, and a nagging uneasiness edged at the back of my mind. I hadn’t forgotten that at the beginning of the school year, Tisha Thomas had a vision that Zeran would betray me. “What’s going on?” I asked, trying my best not to sound nosy and failing.
“Are you my babysitter now?” Zeran rolled his eyes, although there was no bite to his words. He grinned. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I swallowed my doubt and smiled back. “I’ll beat you next time.”
He was free to leave whenever he wanted. It wasn’t like training with Ogun was mandatory, especially not for a darkbringer who knew more than the rest of us combined. As he turned to go, his horns, wings, and tail vanished, and his blue skin changed back to brown. In his human form, he could have passed for Lil Nas X’s younger brother. I watched as he walked out of the gym without looking back.
By the time I grabbed my staff from against the wall, the god symbols had stopped glowing. I could have sworn the staff shuddered beneath my grip. Eleni came over to where I was still sulking after my crushing defeat.
“How do you explain Zeran disappearing yet again?” I asked. “What if he really is a spy?”
Eleni shook her head as if I had just told her that cornflakes grew on trees. “He helped you save Papa’s soul and rescue me from the Lord of Shadows. That sounds very un-spy-like.”
“But Tisha Thomas said it, and her godling gift is foresight,” I said, pitching my voice low so no one else could hear. “She can see into the future.”
“Why would you listen to Tisha Thomas?” Eleni crossed her arms. “She can’t hold water.”
I frowned. “What does holding water have to do with anything?”
“I mean that she tells everything she knows.” Eleni glanced over her shoulder at Tisha, who was chatting with her friends.
Eleni wasn’t wrong about that. Tisha was the gossip queen, but ever since she came into her godling power, she’d been different. It wasn’t like before, in fourth grade, when I told her about one of my father’s fantastical stories. She had called me a liar and by the end of the day, the whole fourth-grade class was cracking jokes at my expense.
“Usually, I would ignore her, but she knows things,” I said. “She asked me about the Dark before the celestials told the other godlings the truth.”
“Maybe it would be better if you asked Zeran outright, Maya,” Eleni suggested. “See what he says.”
“Of course.” I crossed my arms. “He’ll admit that he’s a spy for the Lord of Shadows. A double agent. And he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids?”
Eleni tilted her head to the side. “Is that a reference to that old cartoon about a dog and his human companions?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. Even though I was still getting to know her, it was nice to have a sister. She always listened when I was worried about something.
I bit my bottom lip. This was the third time this week that Zeran had excused himself from practice early. Something was up, and I couldn’t keep waiting for the right moment to talk to him. Eleni was right. I had to be straight with Zeran. “I might as well get this over with now.”
Eleni and I left the gym just as Ogun started the next round of matches. Both Frankie and Eli were in the second group to go. Frankie squared up against a godling twice her side. I didn’t see who the kid was, but I knew they were going to lose. She was the first of my friends to show a gift for magic, and she excelled at it. Not to anyone’s surprise. She was a genius, after all. Eli had already dropped into ghost mode and his opponent was throwing wild punches.
“Hey, Zeran!” I called after him.
He stopped and turned around stiffly. “What is it?”
“Well, I wanted to ask you something . . . something important.”
I felt a tingling along my forearms, like static, only a hundred times worse. It snatched my breath away, and I forgot all about talking to Zeran. Dread climbed up my throat, and Eleni and I exchanged a knowing glance. Her face had gone blank.
“Another tear,” we both said at the same time.
Eleni grimaced. “It feels far.”
“Like on the West Coast far?” I guessed.
“Yeah,” she answered.
Zeran glanced at his watch. “The other thing I have to do can wait. I’ll come with you.”
There was no time to get Frankie and Eli. The recent tears in the veil were big enough to let through hundreds of darkbringers at once. Papa had already been gone for hours with Eshu, fixing up tears across the world, so it was up to Eleni and me to close this one. I might have lost my match against Zeran, but this I could do.
Time to get to work.
Two
HELLO, MY LITTLE NIBLING
OF ALL THE rotten places to find a tear in the veil, this had to be the worst. Literally. After Eleni insisted on opening the gateway, we ended up falling above a garbage dump. I plunged toward a pile of decomposing trash that smelled a hundred times worse than my old sweaty gym shoes. The symbols glowed on my staff again, shifting their positions quickly. The lion with raised paws was suddenly leaping across the sun, and the leaves on the tree pulsed like Morse code.
Mayday. Mayday. Death by trash pile at six o’clock.
“Wings!” I shouted at the staff as the massive pile of garbage soup grew closer. Was it my imagination, or was the trash sinking in the middle like it had opened its mouth to eat me? “Um? Hello, staff!”
I could feel the symbols shudder underneath my palms, but instead of wings, the staff let out a low hum. Was it still mad that I hadn’t been able to use it in the sparring match against Zeran at school?
I was about two feet from the pile when a blur of black wings and blue skin fluttered across my vision. Zeran grabbed my arm to keep me from hitting the trash pile. The staff finally sprouted wings at that exact moment and smacked him in his face. Its purple feathers flew everywhere. Tell me that wasn’t on purpose. I dare you.
Zeran winced and let go, and the staff melted into a harness that latched on to my back with ease. He spat out feathers and glared at me. “Do you have to be so rude?”
“I didn’t do that!” I said, defending myself. “The staff has a mind of its own.”
“No self-respecting thirteen-year-old I know would let their magic be so unrefined.” Zeran landed on a strip of ground free of garbage. “I mastered my magic when I was like eight.”
The like eight part was his way of rubbing it in my face that he was much better at magic than me, as if kicking my butt on the mat weren’t enough.
Eleni hovered over our heads, looking angelic with the way flecks of gold shined in her curly amber ’fro. Six months ago, I thought the aziza—the forest fairies known for their beauty and for being notoriously wary of outsiders—were only something from Papa’s stories. That was before I found out that I had one for a sister.
“It’s very inconvenient that you don’t have real wings, Maya,” she said in her singsong voice, her own iridescent wings shimmering blue, purple, and pink under the fading afternoon sun. “We can’t always expect to land on our feet, you know.”
