by Rena Barron
Twenty
We get stuck in a hole
We fell through an endless black hole into a place that couldn’t exist without magic. It wasn’t underground, but another crossroads, a place between places—an abyss. I couldn’t see my friends in the dark, but we kept floating into each other like astronauts on a spaceship.
“Well, this is inconvenient,” Eli whispered, “and in the middle of a fight too.”
We had to whisper here because our voices vibrated the space around us like an earthquake. If we talked too loud, the tremors were ten times worse.
“A fight we were losing,” Frankie said, sarcasm lacing her words.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how things had gone so wrong. How could I be the future guardian of the veil if I couldn’t even last a full day in the Dark? We were so close to finding Papa.
I swallowed the bitter taste on my tongue as the memory of the oddly circular city taunted me. Papa was there—only hours away, and we blew it. No, I blew it. I knew the Lord of Shadows wouldn’t just let me waltz into the Dark to get my father back. I should’ve been more prepared.
“What am I going to do now?” I mumbled under my breath.
I said it too low for my friends to hear and quietly swiped tears from my cheeks.
I was mad at myself, but I was mad at the orishas too. Why couldn’t they help instead of waiting for the other celestials to come first? By now Mama, Frankie’s moms, and Nana had to know that we’d found a way into the Dark.
I bit my lip and pushed those thoughts out of my mind. I couldn’t stand around—um, float around—feeling sorry for myself. I had to figure out how to go back into the Dark—and this time get it right.
“This place is like the metal detector at the community center,” I blurted out. “Like the gateway into the Dark too, but somehow different.”
“Yeah, but both of those were very fast,” Eli said. “We didn’t hang out in limbo.”
“What happens when a portal has mechanical problems?” I asked.
“Machines have mechanical problems,” Eli said, “not giant holes in the ground.”
“Maya’s right,” Frankie chipped in, her voice bright. “It’s like we’re stuck on an elevator between floors.”
“What if we can’t get out?” Eli groaned. “Who’s going to take Jayla on piggyback rides and play monster hunt with her in the garden?”
“We’ll get out.” I tried to reassure the both of us. “If there’s a way in, then there’s a way out, right?”
“How did we even get here?” Eli asked.
“I don’t know . . .” I answered, racking my brains. The staff had malfunctioned in the fight against Nulan, but I didn’t remember feeling its magic before the ground swallowed us up.
“I think this might be a wormhole,” Frankie said, oblivious to our conversation. Even in the dark, I imagined her adjusting her glasses, her nose screwed up in her thinking face. “It could be that we’re still moving but at such a slow speed it seems like we’re floating. We could be traveling tens of thousands of light years as we speak.”
“Plain English, please,” Eli said, impatient. I imagined him rolling his eyes.
“A light year is the measurement of how far light travels over a year,” Frankie said. “Which is about six trillion miles.”
“Oh man, does that mean we’re going to end up on top of the Dark’s version of Mount Everest in the Himalayas?” Eli asked, stunning both Frankie and me into silence. He couldn’t be serious. When neither of us answered, he said, “You know, between China and Tibet.”
“We know, Eli.” I sighed. “Frankie meant somewhere in a faraway galaxy.”
“Let me try something,” Frankie said, then shortly after that, sparks of light lit up the darkness around us. Her hands glowed, and she aimed them in front of her into the abyss where her light didn’t reach.
We waited, but nothing happened, and her light dimmed with each second that passed. “I don’t know why it’s not working,” she said, frustrated. “I can feel the magic, but it’s like the darkness is absorbing it.”
Eli made himself invisible. “Welp! I’m still stuck here whether you see me or not.”
“I’m going to try the staff,” I said, after Eli changed himself back to normal and Frankie’s light fizzed out.
I grasped the middle of the staff and held it horizontally against my chest. “Grab on,” I said to my friends. It took a minute for them to find the staff in the dark, but eventually they both clamped down on either side of me.
I focused hard on wanting to be out of the black abyss. Sweat rolled down my forehead and my back as the magic tingled up my arm. We began to fall, slowly at first, then so fast that the staff ripped from our hands and we got separated. I screwed my eyes shut, knowing what it would mean when we landed anywhere at this speed. No human could survive it . . . maybe not even godlings.
Right on cue, the dizziness hit. It always showed up at the most inconvenient times, which was any time lately. As if the spinning in my head weren’t enough, it doubled. It felt like the ground was up and the sky was down, like I was falling and flying at the same time. Then I blacked out.
* * *
When I finally opened my eyes, I was lying with one side of my face buried in dirt. There were no darkbringers peering at me with their battleaxes ready. No Commander Nulan with her ugly smile and her sharp knives. That was good at least.
I waited for the dizziness to lessen and lifted my head to look around. Slivers of moonlight poked through towering green trees. The moon was its usual milky color instead of blue. I swallowed hard, in disbelief. This couldn’t be real. It would mean . . . It would mean that we were back in the human world. We’d left the Dark near nightfall, which would be near sunrise here. If it was night again, then I’d lost a whole day.
“Are you okay?” I groaned as I forced myself to sit up.
I rubbed my forehead as the last of the dizziness faded away.
When my friends didn’t answer, I snapped to attention. I was in a very large forest. Papa’s staff was a few feet away, and my backpack hung off a low tree branch, but there was no sign of my friends. My heart started to race. I had to force in deep breaths so my dizziness wouldn’t come back.
“Where are you guys?” I called with my hands cupped around my mouth.
I yelled at the top of my lungs, and only the sounds of the night answered me. An owl hoo hooooed, then came a low grunt in the bushes nearby. My friends couldn’t have been far. We’d been side by side during the fall, but the speed had knocked them clear of the staff. What if they were more banged up than me and couldn’t reply?
I grabbed the staff and used it to free my backpack. My legs shook as I searched the area around the clearing. I looked behind every bush and tree. No sign of either of them. This was not good.
I stopped cold and leaned against a tree, out of breath. I couldn’t lose my best friends, too. Ever since Miss Ida told me that Papa was missing, I’d tried to be brave. I didn’t back down when things got scary, and I came up with new plans when the old ones failed. My shoulders trembled now, and the night breeze cut through me.
I was alone—really alone—and tired. I thought about how Frankie’s first mom had gone to buy groceries and never come home. How Eli’s parents had left him and his little sister with Nana and hardly ever visited. Tears slipped down my face. It wasn’t fair. It was like the universe had put this impossible burden on our backs—on my back.
With tears still running down my face, I pushed myself away from the tree. I knew nothing about velocity, but maybe it was possible that my friends had fallen farther away from me. They could be miles away or, worse, a dimension away. What if the black abyss had spat them back into the Dark?
“Find my friends,” I whispered to the staff, and it beamed a light due north. I refused to feel relieved until I saw them with my own two eyes. I started walking again, and my legs wobbled, so I used the staff to bear my weight. I trekked what felt like miles o
f endless forest. With each step, the ache in my belly grew. I looked for signs: footprints or a piece of cloth tied to a tree branch. If they were okay, then they’d be looking for me too.
As I walked, it was getting darker and colder. I wanted to rest, to sleep, but I couldn’t. I had to find my friends first. I only paused to drink from my half-empty bottle of water. The sounds of owls and wolves and lizards scuttling in the brush made me jumpy, but they also were comforting. These sounds were familiar to me, sounds of the human world. After walking for hours, I came upon a hiking trail and a sign. It read DANIEL BOONE NATIONAL FOREST.
I couldn’t believe it. I was in Kentucky. I knew it was Kentucky, since Papa and Mama brought me kayaking on the Red River Gorge last summer. So not only was I out of the Dark, but I was in the middle of nowhere and my friends were missing. What else could go wrong?
I wiped sweat from my brow as I looked down one end of the trail, then the other. Even though the temperature had dropped, I still felt overheated like a fire was raging in my belly. The staff wasn’t exactly helping; it kept getting confused. One minute it would tell me to go north, then south. One minute it would say go right, and the next, go left; sometimes it walked me in loops.
I was about to head east on another trail when a voice froze me in my tracks.
“There she is!” Eli said. “Finally. I thought it would take all night.”
Frankie and Eli stood on the opposite side of the trail, a little ways downhill. I sucked in a deep breath. They were okay.
My friends ran toward me, and we met in the middle. Eli was grinning ear to ear. Frankie wiped her brow, leaving a smudge of dirt across her forehead.
“I was looking everywhere for you,” I said, relieved to see them.
“We were looking for you too,” Frankie said, her eyes brightening.
“Guess where we are,” I moaned, still mad about it. “You’re not even going to believe it.”
They had matching puzzled looks on their faces.
Eli raised an eyebrow. “Myrtle Beach?”
“Alaska?” Frankie said.
I laughed so hard that I got a cramp in my side. They laughed too. Frankie usually didn’t go along with Eli’s jokes, but right now, we needed a laugh. My friends were alive and in good spirits after all that we’d been through in the Dark.
When the laughter stopped, I said, “The wormhole brought us back to the human world . . . to Kentucky of all places.”
“And you said that we’d end up light years away on an alien planet.” Eli rolled his eyes at Frankie.
Frankie shrugged, laughing again. “Lucky I was wrong then.”
“I don’t get it.” I frowned. I understood enough about how wormholes theoretically worked to know that Frankie hadn’t been wrong before. “We really could’ve ended up halfway across the Milky Way, though.”
“Relax, Maya!” Frankie slapped my shoulder. “We’re allowed to have a little laugh after surviving an elite army by sheer luck.”
“An army that will crush us humans like flies if it invades our world,” Eli said.
Us humans. This was not okay.
“Humans, yes, but what about your ghost army, Eli?” I said to test my theory.
“What about it?” Eli screwed up his nose into a scowl.
For starters, I thought, but didn’t say out loud, you don’t have one.
Instead, I answered, “I thought you said that they could stand against the darkbringers.”
“If I said that, I was a fool,” Eli snapped, all amusement gone from his face.
“If he said that.” Frankie narrowed her eyes. Was she on to me, like I was on to them? “You knew he was kidding. Ghosts are an unruly bunch to control.”
My pulse echoed in my ears. I didn’t think about how she’d confirmed that ghosts were in fact real; instead, I shrugged like the whole conversation didn’t matter. They bought my act and relaxed too.
One thing I knew for sure. The pair standing in front of me weren’t Eli and Frankie by a long shot. They were still missing somewhere in the forest or, worse yet, still trapped in the black abyss or in the Dark.
The Eli and Frankie standing in front of me were darkbringers.
Twenty-One
I learn to keep my cool
I would play along with the darkbringers so I could get some information out of them. If I was lucky, I could find out if my father was okay. Did these darkbringers know what happened to my friends too?
“So what do we do next?” I asked. “I don’t even know how we got here.”
“We’re here because someone opened an unstable wormhole,” the fake Frankie said. She glared at me like it was my fault, but was it?
The orisha council said the darkbringers couldn’t pierce the veil. They could only slip into our world through tears. Papa traveled between the two worlds by creating wormholes. Hope swelled in my chest. I could have created the wormhole with his staff by accident.
Frankie glanced up at the night sky. “We need to get back.”
“Back to Chicago or back to the Dark?” I asked.
“Back to the Dark,” she replied. “Don’t you want to save Elegguá?”
Heat rushed to my belly at the way she spat my father’s name. There was a deep, seething hatred in this darkbringer’s voice. She tried to cover it with a thin smile, but it didn’t reach her cold, dark eyes.
“Is there anything left to save?” I asked, a lump in my throat. It took everything in me not to burst into tears, but I had to know.
Frankie and Eli gave each other a look before Eli said, “I’m sure he’s okay for now.”
“Think about it,” Frankie added. “If I were the Lord of Shadows, I would want to destroy the Elegguá bloodline so there wouldn’t be anyone left to keep the veil standing. I bet he’ll want to use your father as bait to get to you first.”
“We . . . umm . . . just have to be smarter than him,” Eli said, unconvincingly.
I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth. Even if I didn’t know whether I could trust what they said, their words still gave me hope that Papa was okay. “How are we going to get back into the Dark?”
“Maybe there’s a tear nearby,” Frankie said, craning her neck to peer over my shoulder. Her eyes were eager and greedy, like those of a mouse that’s spotted cheese.
Eli stood next to me, waiting to see if I would follow Frankie as she set off. I flashed him a smile with the staff tucked close to my side. “I’ll take up the rear,” I volunteered, and he grudgingly walked two steps ahead of me beside Frankie.
“I hope we don’t cross a rattlesnake’s path,” I said. “That would be bad.”
Eli smirked. “Why would we be afraid of a snake?”
“Because if a rattlesnake bites you, it turns your insides to mush,” I said.
While that wasn’t exactly true, it was close enough. I needed to keep the darkbringers talking while I came up with a plan. “There are a lot of snakes in the forest. They hide beneath bushes and come out at night to hunt.”
“That’s nothing,” Eli said, but he kept watching where he stepped in case. “Snakes are easy to kill.”
“I guess you’re right.” I shrugged. “A grootslang is definitely worse.”
“What would you know about a grootslang?” Eli rolled his eyes at me as we continued to trek through the forest.
Papa had in fact told me stories about the grootslang, which looked like a cross between an elephant and a snake. It had leathery black skin and ivory tusks that were venomous. He said that one had attacked a wildlife reserve when he was in the middle of a work assignment in Ghana. Now I could guess that the grootslang had come through a tear in the veil.
“Only that they’re not winning any beauty contests anytime soon,” I answered.
The fake Eli frowned in confusion. Maybe they didn’t have beauty contests in the Dark, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing.
As we hopped over a tree root on the path, I cleared my throat. “Rattlesnakes eat their weight
in food every night. I don’t know if it’s possible for a grootslang to do the same since they’re so big.”
I could feel the tear that the fake Frankie had been silently leading us to. It crackled in the air, like static that tingled against my skin. I didn’t have powers of my own, but it seemed that I had inherited the ability to sense the tear from my father. Even Frankie had to stop several times to catch the tear’s trail again. I could only guess that the original tear they came through (if it wasn’t the wormhole with my friends and me) had closed and she was hunting out a new one.
“Do you think a bloodhound could beat a cougar?” I asked no one in particular.
“Will you shut up!” Frankie snapped. “We’re never going to find the tear if you keep distracting me.”
Good. I wanted to keep her distracted until I was ready to make my move. Once I was sure I couldn’t get more information out of them, I’d knock them out and go look for my friends.
The staff tingled against my sweaty palm as we finally reached the tear in the veil. A crooked black scar darker than night stretched in front of us in thin air. It looked like the black lightning, which I now knew was the first sign of a fissure forming.
I touched the edge of the tear, and a shock of warmth shot up my arm. The staff lit up.
Eli slapped my hand away, and it took everything inside me to keep from whirling a blow across his head. “You’re making it worse,” he said, glaring at me. “Don’t touch it.”
“Or what?” I said, almost losing my temper.
Eli stepped in my face, his hands balled into fists. “Do it again, and you’ll see.”
Frankie stepped between us and cut her eyes at Eli. An understanding passed between the two darkbringers. “Both of you, stop acting childish,” she said. “We have a way back into the Dark, time to go.”
