“Upstairs,” she said between pants. “Fourth floor.”
“Damn,” the man said. “Maybe I do need a hand.”
“I definitely do,” a raspy voice called from behind him.
María glared at her daughter. “Sierra, ¿qué carajo pasó, coño?”
“I can’t … not right now, Mami, I’m sorry! Juan, help with Mort. We’ll get started on the stairs.”
“Who the hell is Mort?” Juan asked, walking over to the doorway. Then he froze. A tall, slender guy with the hood of his hoodie pulled low over his face was hauling yet another unconscious person in the door. Except Juan knew this one too. It was the random creepy white guy who had knocked him out and almost drained all his shadowshaping power the night of the West Indian Day parade. Juan whirled around, ready to demand Sierra explain what this … this fiend was doing in their house. But Sierra was already clambering Tee up the stairs with Caleb.
“Can I get a hand?” a familiar voice asked. Pulpo stepped inside and pulled the hood away from his face.
The door to Lázaro’s old apartment slammed shut, and for a few blessed moments, everyone just stood there panting.
Tee, Izzy, and Mort had been laid out on the bed beside each other. Rohan had dropped off his load and made a hasty, mumbling retreat.
That left Juan, María, Caleb, and Anthony, who now formed a small half-moon around Sierra.
Here it came.
“What is this traitor doing here?” Juan demanded, just as Caleb growled, “Where the hell were you?”
María got up in Caleb’s face just in time to cut off Anthony. “Don’t you come into my house and talk to my daughter that way, jóven!”
“Yeah,” Anthony said, over her head.
“You don’t get a say in this, iron boy,” Caleb snapped.
“Hey!” María grabbed Caleb’s pointing finger and pulled it down to her face like she was about to bite it off. Caleb flinched. “I am espeaking to you!”
Caleb threw both his hands up, took a calming breath. “My apologies, Mrs. Santiago. It’s just that —”
“I still want to know why this traitor is allowed in this house!” Juan wailed.
“I’m not a traitor,” Anthony growled, whirling around, but there wasn’t much fight left in him.
“Sure look like one from where I’m standing,” Caleb said.
“Jóven.” María menaced, backing Caleb up. Then she turned to Sierra. “M’ija. What is happening?”
“I’m not a damn traitor!” Anthony yelled this time, just as Sierra said, “He’s not a traitor.”
Everyone looked at her. “He’s a spy.”
Caleb eyed him, fists still clenched. “Oh word?” he muttered.
“I don’t believe you,” Juan said, staring down Anthony with wide, watery eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
Who’s a spy? a creakily old voice tingled as the bathroom door flew open and a gold light poured out into the dingy fourth-floor apartment.
“Oh, here we go.” Sierra sighed. She’d completely forgotten about Septima.
“Sierra María Santiago,” María seethed. “Why is there a Sorrow in my house?”
Suddenly nobody had a damn thing to say, not even Septima.
“Ah,” Sierra said. “Thing is —”
“Sierra María Santiago,” María said, reeeeeal slow and quiet, and Sierra knew at that moment she was basically dead. “Let me rephrase that question.”
“Hoo boy,” Juan whispered.
“Why is one of the vile desmadrosas hijo de puta comemierda de la sinvirgüenza chocha de la pinga hermanas de mierda en quien me cago hasta la muerte” — she smiled sweetly, then snarled — “in my goddamn house?”
Technically, I am also a member of this fa — was all Septima could get out before María pulled off her shoe and hurled it across the room, then launched after it in an unstoppable tornado of coñazo and puta madres.
The shoe caught Septima smack in the forehead, a direct hit, and to Sierra’s surprise, it sent the Sorrow hurling back as everyone else jumped into motion to hold off the oncoming slaughter.
“¡Jamás! ¡Pendeja hija de la gran —!” María was yelling when Juan, Caleb, and Anthony finally got their hands on her and pulled her away from where Septima was cowering.
“Mami!” Sierra yelled. “Mami! Listen to me! Jeez! Just —”
“No, you listen to me, Sierra! I want her out! Now!”
“Seriously,” Caleb said, stepping between María and Sierra like a man who didn’t mind dying. “This woman tried to destroy all of us.”
“She unleashed Dr. Wick on this family,” María said. “The reason your grandfather was in the state he was in, and you have her up in this very room, Sierra? The nerve!”
Sierra felt a tiny part of herself crumble. She knew how it looked, she knew it was dangerous, but the truth was, she hadn’t considered that little tidbit of tragic irony. Mostly because, if she was being honest with herself, it didn’t matter that much to her. Lázaro was dead, and his ghost certainly hadn’t shown up anywhere, so he didn’t care, and even if he did, Sierra was long past giving him a say in things.
And anyway, Septima had more information than anyone else about how the Deck of Worlds and the houses worked, and that took precedence over everything else.
Still, she hated hurting her mom.
“Look,” Sierra said calmly. “I’m sorry that —”
“No apologies,” María said. “I don’t care. I know that tone, young lady. You’re about to apologize but try to explain something to me about why it’s necessary, etc. etc. And I don’t care. She goes. She goes, she goes. Que se vaya. She cannot —”
“No,” a voice said from the other end of the room.
Everyone looked to the bed, where Izzy was sitting up eerily straight, blinking rapidly. “No,” she said again.
Caleb reached her first, then Sierra. “Iz, you alright?” Sierra asked as Izzy used Caleb’s arm to help herself stand.
She looked … different, but Sierra couldn’t place what it was. Neither of the other two on the bed stirred at all.
“No what, Isake?” María demanded shakily.
“No, she doesn’t go.”
“And what makes you think you can tell me who stays and who goes from my own house?”
“Because we need her on our side if we want to win,” Izzy said. She stepped forward, away from Caleb and standing on her own in the middle of the room. When she looked up, her eyes flashed with a strange kind of fire. “And believe me, we want to win.”
Coño, Septima whispered. She’s a Hierophant.
A smooth line, curving around and looping back up.
“I still don’t like her being here.”
“No one likes it, María.”
“But if I have to, then I have to.”
“Well, I don’t like him being here.”
Then small scratchy lines along the inner coil, giving it depth and girth.
“Juan, I told you, I’m not … I’m sorry, man. I’m so, so sorry. You have to understand —”
“I don’t have to do anything, Pulpo.”
“Hey, both of you. We gotta focus.”
Then a wider line ranging around the first one’s circumference and stretching above and past to wrap down and outward into a jagged nozzle. More scratches along the inner wraps, growing longer toward the center.
“Look, nobody’s happy about any of this, okay? But like Izzy said, we have to … we have to … Argh! This is ridiculous!”
I would just like to say that I am pleased with the outcome so far.
“Shut it, Septima. Nobody asked.”
Desgraciado.
The gas mask was coming together. Sierra added a thick splotch of a line along the top to give it some shine and then sketched a quick, heavy body beneath it and wrote: FORTRESS.
“That what — he? she? they? — Fortress looks like?” she asked Izzy.
Izzy, her back against the wall beside Sierra, arms crossed over h
er chest, appraised it with narrow eyes, nodded. “We have no idea what gender Fortress is, but yeah. Give them straps and utility belts and big galoshes. It’s part of the whole getup.”
“Cool.” Sierra drew in the gear and then moved on to the spot next to them. “And you said the River’s like a tall Rasputiny dude, yeah?”
“Mmhmm. No pupils. Narsty-as-shit-type beard. Sallow cheeks.”
Sierra got to it.
“I don’t even know what we hope to solve with this. It’s too many enemies in one place, too much distrust.”
“We don’t have much of a choice.”
Sierra’s mind slid into that sweet trance state she loved so much as the tip of her Sharpie described the River’s long gangly arms and scraggled beard. Drawing was peace. That was all there was to it. There could be a whole battle royale erupting around her — there basically was — and she’d still manage to be there drawing away with a pleasant smile on her face. There, with a marker in her hand and the quiet joy of an anchor to keep her mind focused just enough so that it could wander freely through her thoughts without trying too hard — Sierra greeted bliss like an old friend.
“I just worry … I don’t know. How will we —”
“We wait to see what Izzy has to say, and then Tee when she wakes. That’s all I got. Then we figure out what the move is. Feel me?”
“I guess.”
Everyone else’s conversations rattled on like the rumble and howl of a distant train passing in the night. Sierra knew eventually she’d have to face whatever they were bantering about, but right then, there was nothing to figure out except how to show the way the River shoved forward his liquid weapons with that sorcery of his. It was corny, but she switched from black to blue and drafted waves flushing out to either side of his towering frame.
“Who that, Moses?” Juan asked, suddenly taking his attention away from being mad at Anthony just in time to razz Sierra. “Moses a Hierophant now? That’s wild. We’re really screwed, huh?”
“It’s the River, jackass,” Izzy scowled, and Sierra was relieved to hear her friend sound a little bit like her old self again. She’d been on that straight-up faraway ethereal trip since she woke, talking like she was receiving dictation from some long-gone phantom, and Sierra hadn’t liked it one bit. Everyone had started yelling at once when they realized what Izzy was. It was chaos, and Izzy herself had remained uncharacteristically chill throughout it all. Hauntingly chill. Now, twenty loud minutes later, she seemed to be getting back to baseline Izzy, at least a little.
Sierra had finally given up trying to calm everyone down and gone to her room to get a huge roll of white paper she’d borrowed (stolen) from the Butler High art studio. They didn’t need it, not really, and anyway, it was for students, right? And what was she? Exactly. No harm, no foul.
She’d come back up and had Anthony help her cover one whole wall of Lázaro’s old apartment with the paper. Then she’d popped the cap off a Sharpie and gotten down to it, mapping out all the information they had about the Deck of Worlds and the Hierophants in quick sketches and interconnected lines.
It was the only way she knew to make sense of all this mess, and anyway, she couldn’t be bothered to waste time arguing with anyone anymore.
She didn’t like hurting people’s feelings, but the truth was Izzy was right, and Sierra was just glad someone else had said it, someone with the newly invested authority of being a Hierophant, no less — they wanted to win. Needed to, really. It was a question of survival. And if that meant that feelings got hurt, well, better that than people getting hurt.
She would do what she had to do to get them over the line intact. To win. She’d already made peace with the fact that it was impossible to do that without anyone getting hurt. She just had to figure out how to protect her loved ones as much as she could and come at the Iron House with all she had. And then see about taking apart the whole damn thing.
“You ain’t mad at me?” she quietly asked Izzy as the conversations bristled and flowed around them.
“Mad? For why, Si?”
Back to the black Sharpie and filling in the errant bristling hairs of the River’s narsty beard; Sierra exhaled and raised her eyebrows. “Cuz I wasn’t there when shit went to hell. Caleb was pissed, before you woke up and everything got weird … er, weirder. And I get why.”
“Why? Because you’re supposed to be perfect?”
“Uh …”
“Didn’t you call Tee back like forty-seven times? She said you probably were mad after she called you and then hung up and then ditched her phone.”
“I mean, yeah. I could’ve —”
Izzy shook her head. “Si, stop. Sure, we coulda gotten wiped out, no question. But that’s not on you. That’s on the corny metal-heads who tried to wipe us out. And those two Hierofreaks.”
“Are you, like, allowed to talk that way about your fellow —”
Izzy scoffed. “I just did, didn’t I?”
The River done, Sierra wrote his name underneath and then wrote LA CONTESSA ARAÑA under a blank box she’d drawn beside him, and then THE REAPER beside that.
“Do you know how, ah, how it all works yet?”
She shrugged, her eyes still glistening with that strange faraway fire. “Nah, give it time, I said.”
“How much time do we have? Before the other guys get their shit together enough to wipe us out completely.”
Izzy gave a noncommittal shrug. “Wish I knew. Not much.”
Sierra drew another empty box, looked at Izzy. “Got a name, Hierophant?”
Izzy opened up her wide Cheshire Cat grin. “Just call us Air.”
“Oh? I like it.” Sierra scrawled it in elegant handwriting. “Wait, us?”
Izzy nodded over at where Tee was still knocked out on the bed. “Just wait till my better half wakes up, boyyyy.”
“Okay,” Sierra said, stepping back from the messy little galaxy she’d etched across the wall. “Let’s see how things are looking.”
“Looking like you’re trying to catch a serial killer,” Big Jerome said. He’d shown up with Bennie and Nydia a few minutes before they’d all settled down to get started and Caleb had done his best to catch them up while Sierra finished the drawings. “Which might not be so far off from the truth.”
Sierra snorted. He wasn’t wrong. She’d lined up the five Hierophants in the center of the paper: Fortress, the River, La Contessa Araña, the Reaper, and Tee and Izzy, aka Air. She’d circled the La Contessa Araña in purple and written Doña Teresa etc. etc. beneath her and then Sierra and Juan’s great-great-great-grandmom.
Then she’d drawn a brown-skinned girl with a big fro off to one side with a loose approximation of the House of Shadow and Light around her. Mina had the word Spy below her and a question mark below that. After tons of phone calls and texts, no one had any idea where the hell she was, and Mina didn’t really have any friends that they knew of. She lived with her grandmother out in Staten Island, but that wasn’t much of a lead.
A red line connected Mina to the tattered remains of Bloodhaüs at the bottom of the page, indicating that’s where she’d been embedded.
On the other side of the page were Krin, Fraz, Bak, and Trank, all looking like the busted skinheads they were, and Axella with the word Queen under her and a big X over her face. Finally, Dake, who was connected by another jagged line to the top right corner, where the Iron House was looking appropriately surly and overconfident. Sierra had drawn Ol’ Crane a mess of silverware in the middle and a picture of the priest with another big X over it. Then came Anthony, Officer Grintly (dressed in his corrections uniform), and a couple random folks that Izzy could remember from the night before.
“Sooo,” Sierra said. “Let’s start in the middle. What do we know about La Contessa Araña here?”
Everyone shifted in their seats so they could turn and look at Septima, who hovered in a far corner in her little golden haze. ¿Qué?
“Your mother,” Sierra said. “And don’t
hold out on us, Septima.”
Hold out on you? I don’t know what you’re —
“Failed to mention that Mort was a Hierophant, didn’t you?”
Ah, bueno, es que …
“Save it,” Sierra said. “Just tell us about your mama.”
Septima swooped in little half circles for a few moments, then conceded, shoulders slumped. She lives in a crumbling palace in the —
“Wait, hold up,” Jerome said. “Lives? As in, is currently alive now and today?”
In a manner of speaking, jes.
“Is she a ghost?” Bennie asked.
In a manner of speaking, jes.
“Septima,” Sierra warned. “No games.”
No, it’s that what she has become, from what I know, is not something that is so simple as alive or dead, ghost or not. Ask the Hierophant, she can explain.
Izzy rolled her eyes when everyone looked at her. “I know what she means, but I can’t really explain either.” She gave a dismissive wave. “She exists. That’s all we need to know. Just keep going.”
“She built the Deck,” Sierra said. “And she did it to —”
Bring balance and order to a broken world! Septima insisted.
“Yes, the Deck and everything that goes on around it seems very orderly and calm,” Caleb snorted. “No chaos at all.”
Septima deflated some. She did not know it would cause this much problems.
“She felt the need to create order,” Sierra said, sketching a quick arrow leading down and away from La Contessa, “because she was worried about” — she wrote María Cantara at the other end of the arrow — “my great-great-grandma.”
Y su comemierda padre, Septima added.
“Don’t disrespect my ancestors in this house,” Sierra said before her mom had a chance to. “Name.”
¿Qué?
“What was my great-great-great-grandfather’s name, Septima?”
The glowing spirit seemed to almost fizzle out entirely before finally rallying. Santo Colibrí.
“Saint Hummingbird?” Juan piped up. “That’s amazing.”
Shadowshaper Legacy Page 18
