Maya and the Lord of Shadows, page 6
I stared at Tisha, speechless. I hadn’t expected her to give me a rundown. If Zeran had asked, I would have helped him find his little brother without a second thought. That was what friends did for each other. Instead, according to Tisha, at some point in the near future, he’ll go straight to the darkbringers to offer me up in exchange for his brother. I was more than a little hurt.
Now I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to confront him about it. Would he tell me the truth or lie to cover his tracks? Either way, it was going to be extremely unpleasant for both of us.
When the first bell rang, Tisha adjusted her Hello Kitty backpack. She gave me a sympathetic look before she turned on her heels and left the lab. She’d been right—or at least her mom had been when she’d warned her: people shouldn’t know their futures, especially if there was nothing we could do about them. This really sucked.
Nine
A WORD OF ADVICE
I COULDN’T ACCEPT THAT there was nothing I could do to change what Tisha Thomas saw. Zeran would betray me, but he hadn’t yet. If every action we made impacted the future, couldn’t I convince him of another way to rescue his brother? I let out a frustrated sigh. This was an impossible situation.
“Well, this explains a lot about what’s going on at JMS, Abeola,” someone said from the far side of the lab. It wasn’t just someone. It was Gail Galanis, the new girl from upstate New York who started at Jackson Middle this year. The same Gail who sported a different temporary tattoo on her forearm every week even though it was out of dress code. She was also in after-school math tutoring with me, even though she clearly didn’t need the extra help. She just liked to show off. “I should’ve realized that you’d be at the center of the weirdness at school.”
“You have no clue what you’re talking about.” I rolled my eyes as she lifted her head from a desk. I couldn’t believe that she’d been here the whole time. “Also, news flash, eavesdropping on other people’s conversation doesn’t go over well here at JMS, not sure how things are in upstate New York.”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping.” Gail yawned. “I was sleeping before you two rudely barged in and woke me up, gossiping about Zeran and all. So he’s a darkbringer? I should have known he was too perfect to be true.”
“We were not gossiping.” Wait, hold up. Did she say he was too perfect to be true? “We were . . . um making stuff up for a play we’re writing.”
“You’re an awful liar, Abeola,” Gail said. “I know all about the Dark, the darkbringers, the Lord of Shadows.”
“Is that so?” I mouthed. There were technically only two ways Gail could know the truth: one, she was a godling, or two, she was one of the rare humans who could see magic. “Please enlighten me.”
“First of all, the godlings at school aren’t very good at keeping secrets.” Gail stretched her arms over her head in a calculated way that reminded me of a cat circling a mouse. “I hear them whispering about their new powers all the time. They also say things like, ‘What happens if this Lord of Shadows really comes to our world?’ ‘He must not be too tough if Maya fought him and survived.’ ‘I bet he’s a punk.’ Stuff like that.” Gail paused for dramatic effect. “You know?”
I laughed, and it was one sharp note. “You really shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“Cut the crap, Abeola,” Gail said as she stood up. “I know your father is a celestial, and Eli’s grandmother is one too. If I had to guess, probably a third of the kids at our school are godlings.”
I crossed my arms. Part of me wanted to keep denying it, but it was clear that she already knew the truth. “Then you must know that the Lord of Shadows isn’t a joke, and when he comes, the kids making fun of me will see that for themselves.” After going into the Dark and squaring up against him twice, I still didn’t get any respect at school. Not fair.
“Oh, you’re admitting that it’s all real, good.” Gail slipped on a devious smile. “You’re all right, Abeola. Another kid might have kept on lying about it.”
“If the celestials find out you know their secret, they’re going to erase your memories,” I told her. “They’re afraid that people will panic if the human world discovers the truth.”
“I’m immune to magic.” Gail waved her hand dismissively. “My cousin is a demigod and tried to turn my brother and me into toads when I was ten. It worked on my brother, but I was unaffected.”
“Oh.” I had so many questions. She had a demigod cousin, as in he was part god too? How was she immune to magic? Papa had told me there were celestials all over the world, representing every people and culture. “So your brother is a toad now?”
“My uncle turned him back into a pimple-faced brat, which is his usual state of being.” Gail laughed and headed for the door as the second-to-last warning bell rang for first period.
“You can’t tell anybody, especially the part about Zeran,” I said, feeling uneasy. “It’s . . . complicated, you know? I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“A word of advice, Maya.” Gail stopped and turned on her heels. “Demigods, or in your case godlings, can have very limited perspectives, especially if they have the sight like Tisha Thomas.” Gail cupped her hands around the sides of her face. “Sometimes they only see what’s right in front of them and not the whole picture.”
I thought about what Gail meant. Tisha Thomas saw Zeran betray me in a warehouse sometime in the future. But she didn’t know why or what happened to lead to Zeran offering me up to the darkbringers. Not that anything I would ever do should result in that level of betrayal, thank you very much.
At that, Gail and I slipped out of the science lab. She jetted down the hall and stepped into her class right before the final bell rang. I wasn’t as lucky.
“Miss Abeola, you’re tardy,” Ms. Taylor said as I entered first period. She opened a notebook on her desk and scribbled down my name. JMS had a strict code. For every three tardies, you got a day of detention—either regular detention or the yoga room, where you had to reflect on being a better student.
“Sorry, Ms. Taylor,” I said, shrugging off my backpack and heading for my seat. Eli had the same first period as Tisha Thomas and Gail Galanis, but Zeran and Frankie were already at our table. Frankie was arranging her notepad next to a copy of The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman. To her left, Zeran leaned back in his chair, twirling his pencil between his fingers.
“The so-called guardian of the veil just walked in,” Winston whispered to Candace and Tay, who unfortunately sat one row over from us. He had one of his hands under the table, where little blue flames danced on his fingertips. “More like the guardian of the forever losers club.”
Usually, I would have had a comeback, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with Winston and his cronies this morning. How could any of the celestials think they would ever lift a finger to help save our world from the Lord of Shadows?
Tay laughed at Winston’s very unfunny joke, and their table shook slightly. His godling power was to control seismic waves, but he didn’t quite seem to have it under control.
“Will you cut that out?” Candace said, her nose in a chess book. “I can’t think.”
“You know there’s such a thing as overpreparing,” Tay said, dismissing her.
Winston slapped Candace on the back. “Chess queen of the Midwest.”
Candace smiled, but she didn’t stop looking in her book until Ms. Taylor announced, “Good morning, class! Don’t forget that this week, we’ll start voting for our winter break book club read. Get your picks in by Wednesday. I’ll announce the winner on Friday.”
I sank into the seat next to Frankie and tried and failed not to look at Zeran. He quirked an eyebrow as if to ask why I was staring at him, and I quickly turned away.
Zeran let out a frustrated sigh. “Are you still being weird?”
“No,” I blurted out so quickly that it was obvious that I was, in fact, still being weird.
I attempted to focus as our English teacher dove into her lesson, but there was so much on my mind. Captain Nulan’s appearance at the garbage dump. The arrival of Yemoja from the edges of the universe. Not to mention that she had disbanded the orisha council. Tisha Thomas’s vision of Zeran delivering an unconscious me to the darkbringers. Oh, and Gail Galanis could not only see magic, she was immune to it. Add all that to the fact that the veil was failing and the Lord of Shadows despised everything to do with the human world.
“So what do you think?” Frankie asked, her voice pitched low. Ms. Taylor carried on about the three-act structure in storytelling. She was saying something about setup, confrontation, and resolution. If I had to plop our lives into the three-act structure, I’d guess we were nearing the confrontation act if we couldn’t figure out how to stop the Lord of Shadows.
“Huh?” I hadn’t been entirely paying attention to either Frankie or Ms. Taylor.
“Going back to Azur.” Frankie frowned. “I think we’ll get more information about the people in the photo with my mom if we start there.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” I said. Technically we could go during lunch. Time worked differently on Azur. We could be there for hours and only a few minutes would’ve passed on earth.
A crash rang out in the hallway outside of our classroom. “What the heck?”
Frankie glanced over my shoulder. “Oh no.”
Zeran pushed back his chair so hard that the legs scraped across the floor. Ms. Taylor was standing still with one hand gesturing to the chalkboard. A cloud had fallen across the window, and the lights flickered overhead. All around us, our human classmates had frozen in place. Some were in the middle of passing notes, some listening to Ms. Taylor with glazed-over expressions, some looking sleepy eyed. But I hadn’t gotten that usual tingling across my forearms when there was a tear in the veil.
“What did you do now, little Maya?” Winston spat. “I’m sure this is your fault.”
Ignoring him, I jumped to my feet along with the rest of the godlings. “Darkbringers?”
Zeran morphed into his true form: winged, blue, horned. Someone squealed in delight at the back of the room, and I cringed. He nodded somberly. “Yup.”
Sparks of energy crackled on Frankie’s fingertips. Blue flames flickered on Winston’s arms. Candace grew to twice her size, the chess book forgotten. Wind whipped through the room as another godling changed into something otherworldly. She floated in an aura of purple mist, and her skin had become almost translucent, her braids glimmering.
I slipped off my ring, and it turned back into a staff. “We have to protect the school.”
Winston stormed to the door. “Maybe you got lucky in the Dark, but this is my neighborhood. Nobody’s going to come in here and start something.”
As soon as Winston stepped into the hallway, a black tentacle latched itself around his waist. “What the . . .” he growled as he hit the floor hard on his back. Tay and Candace were stunned as I pushed past them, but it was already too late. The tentacle dragged Winston, screaming, into the chaos.
The hall was swarming with darkbringers. Godlings were trying to fight them off and losing.
Ten
YOU MUST BE THE GHOST BOY
WINSTON LET OUT another high-pitched scream as the tentacle dragged him down the hall. He slammed into other godlings and darkbringers alike, taking some down with him. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered in and out until they died, plunging JMS into darkness. Sparks of magic lit up sporadically, revealing flashes of blue, barbed tails, curved horns, and wings. By my count, there had to be at least two dozen darkbringers in the hallway.
We learned months ago that darkbringers had been sneaking into our world through tears in the veil. There’d been so many tears that Papa, Eleni, and I couldn’t close them fast enough. How many had crossed already? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? The Lord of Shadows had a sleeper army right under our noses. Was that why Nulan had come—to join them? The bigger question was, why had they attacked JMS of all places?
“We gotta save our boy!” Tay shouted.
He and Candace charged around me. Candace bulldozed through darkbringer after darkbringer like a bowling ball knocking down pins. Tay leaped over the carnage left behind her. Soon they turned the corner where the tentacle had disappeared with Winston in tow.
Nearby, three darkbringers had cornered a group of sixth graders who hadn’t mastered their godling magic yet. “Not so fast,” Frankie said as she sent balls of crackling energy that slammed the darkbringers into the lockers.
Eli had shimmered into a semi-invisible state down the hall. I could never get used to seeing him and seeing through him at the same time. “The OGs to the rescue!” he shouted.
“OGs?” one of the godlings near him asked.
“Original godlings,” he announced proudly.
I knocked back the darkbringers who had surrounded me, but the one wearing a skull-and-bones T-shirt dodged my attack. He wasn’t much taller than me, lanky, with hair shaved close to his scalp. His barbed tail whipped out and almost caught me across the cheek, but I ducked and jabbed the staff into his belly. That didn’t stop him for long, though. He doubled over for a split second before his wings melted into writhing, black shadows that seared against my skin. I yelped in pain. “Time to die, guardian,” the darkbringer snarled.
“Not today,” I said through gritted teeth.
Real Talk: I was putting on a brave face, but I was scared. I swung my staff wildly, and it passed straight through the skull-and-bones boy’s shadows. These darkbringers were much stronger than the ones we went up against last summer. How were we supposed to defeat them when most godlings were only just exploring their magic for the first time?
I concentrated all my energy on the staff, and the symbols grew brighter until several of them peeled off the wood and smacked the darkbringer square in the chest. That stopped him in his tracks. Literally. He fell flat on his back.
I barely had time to catch my breath as Frankie, Eli, and I ducked another attack. We fought back-to-back-to-back, just like old times. In the middle of the fight, I realized that Zeran was nowhere in sight. I glanced up and down the hallway, but he was gone. I tried to swallow my doubt as a darkbringer with three tails attempted to take off my head. I ducked, but one of the tails raked against my shoulder. RayShawn, a godling in eighth grade, sent a jet stream of water from the fountain, which hurtled the three-tailed darkbringer through the air.
“Thanks,” I yelled, but I was still thinking about how Zeran had disappeared as soon as we left the classroom.
“Where are the celestials?” Frankie lassoed two darkbringers together with an energy rope. “We could really use some help.”
She was right. Shangó, Ogun, and Principal Ollie protected the school. If they weren’t here, that meant more trouble.
“That’s a perfectly reasonable question,” I shouted.
Three dozen ghosts swept into the hallway, and Eli clapped his hands. “Ah, finally, my backup is here.”
The ghosts advanced on the darkbringers, but a girl with bright-blue skin and white wings floated up from the floor. She had neon-pink hair that flowed around her shoulders. One by one, Eli’s ghosts stopped. They were suddenly frozen in place like the rest of the humans. “They belong to me now,” the girl said.
“Oh, heck naw.” Eli cracked his knuckles. “Who do you think you are . . . snatching control of my army?”
“You must be the ghost boy I’ve heard so much about,” the girl said, her voice low yet easily carrying over the chaos of the hall. “I am Carran, your self-proclaimed sworn enemy.”
Eli grinned, looking proud of himself. “Too bad I’ve never heard of you.”
Carran glared at him, her eyes blazing with fury. The ghosts grabbed godlings by their collars and jacked them up against lockers. “You have now,” Carran spat.
“Help a fellow out, Eli,” one of the ghosts begged in a paper-thin wisp of a voice.
“Are you going to let her show you up, man?” said another ghost.
“Come on, Eli,” demanded a third. “Show this blue chick who’s boss.”
Eli scoffed with his fists on his hips, a trickle of sweat gliding down his forehead. “Well, Car-ran, you officially have an archnemesis.” Blue magic swiveled around him and threaded through the ghosts’ semitransparent forms. They suddenly went limp at that, and the godlings slipped out of their grasps.
“Nice try, E-li,” Carran drawled. The ghosts all turned on him at once, their faces morphing into bloody eyes and sharp fangs. “I am the true master of the dead; you are only an amateur.”
Eli took a step back. “Let’s not be too hasty here.”
“Leave him alone!” Frankie sent an energy ball at Carran, but the darkbringer didn’t even blink. One of the ghosts leaped in front of her and absorbed the blow. Frankie was about to try again when Zeran snuck up behind her and twisted her arm behind her back.
“I’ve got this one,” he called to Carran, then he pointed at me. “Take care of her and ghost boy.”
My heart could’ve flown straight out of my chest, but Zeran angled his face so Carran couldn’t see him and winked. Was Zeran really on our side, or was he pretending? I shook the cobwebs out of my head. It didn’t matter whether Zeran was a double or a triple agent right now. We had to stop Carran from controlling Eli’s ghosts before she did some real damage.
Carran squinted at Zeran. “And who are you? You’re not a part of my squadron.”
“Of course not,” Zeran said, jutting out his chin. “Your squadron couldn’t get the job done, so our lord sent me. I’m part of an undercover unit.”
