by Rena Barron
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Guardian in training
No more secrets, except one
I go toe-to-toe with a bully
There goes the neighborhood
I ride a horse made of starlight
A case of mistaken identity
Where do lost souls go?
I hash out a plan
Rules are meant to be broken
The orisha council calls for a vote
I get an unwelcome visitor
Operation Go Dark
The great escape
We need a new distraction
We take a mud bath
Get in and get out
Is one map worth the trouble?
We get a makeover
Why is curfew a thing?
My second-worst nightmare
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy
Something’s not right
Friend or foe: Is there really a difference in the Dark?
We get lost in a creepy forest
What could be worse than hungry shadows?
As luck would have it, we become food
We stumble upon a graveyard
We break into the Crystal Palace
Hey, that girl sort of looks like me
We make a splash at school
We get a fresh start (sort of)
The League of Godlings returns to school
Acknowledgments
Discover More Books Featuring Black Voices
Travel to Another World
About the Author
Connect on Social Media
Copyright © 2021 by Rena Barron
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Cover illustration © 2020 by Geneva Bowers
Cover design by Andrea Miller
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
ISBN: 978-0-358-10632-6
eISBN 978-0-358-10623-4
v1.0821
To the future storytellers, never give up.
This book is dedicated to you
. . . and to my family.
ONE
Guardian in training
Training to be a guardian was hard. Harder than when I forgot to do my math homework for a week straight and Ms. Vanderbilt dropped a pop quiz. Harder than when I had to dust the house from top to bottom and clean the basement. Even harder than corndog day in the school cafeteria, when I had to pick off the mushy cornbread . . . ew.
Sweat streaked down my forehead and stung my eyes as I stood in front of the tear in the veil in the middle of Daley Plaza. It was six o’clock in the morning on the first day back to school, and I hadn’t even brushed my teeth yet. I had startled awake thirty minutes ago when my version of Spidey sense kicked in. Anytime a tear happened, there was a ripple in the fabric of space. If it was close enough, I could feel a tingling sensation across my forearms.
“Do you need help, Maya?” Papa asked. His voice rang out clear as a bell in the plaza. “It’s okay to ask if you do.”
“I’ve got this,” I said through gritted teeth.
I drew my staff across the Picasso sculpture in the plaza, which looked like a donkey with a jagged slash in its chest. This tear was stubborn. Some tears healed by themselves like a scab growing over a wound, but others needed Papa or me to close them. It didn’t matter how small or big it was. What mattered was the depth of the tear. Meaning: did it stretch all the way to the Dark? Those were the ones that couldn’t fix themselves.
Last week, Papa and I closed a tear over a swamp in Florida. It wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the alligator who thought I looked like a tasty snack. He’d tried to sneak up on us, but Papa waved his hand and put the gator to sleep.
A couple of weeks before that, we braved the crowds at Lollapalooza, a music festival in Grant Park, only a few blocks from here. When we arrived, two guys were about to swing a third guy into the tear in the veil, thinking that it was an illusion. We got there in time to save their friend, and as soon as we closed the tear, no one remembered it had been there.
That was the weird part. Outside of my friends and some of the people in my neighborhood, no one really knew the veil existed. Sure, some humans had seen it, but they didn’t know about the darkbringers, the Lord of Shadows, or the Dark. Ignorance was bliss, but not when there was a revenge-thirsty god out to destroy your world. I understood why the orishas wanted to keep the threat secret, but more tears in the veil cropped up every day. It was hard for Papa to keep up with them, even with my help. Did I mention that this guardian-in-training business was hard?
“Mama’s going to skin both our hides if I don’t get you back in time for school,” Papa said, leaning against the Picasso. He had a black staff with symbols etched in white paint identical to my own—except his staff was taller.
I changed my tactics and moved my staff around the edges of the tear, making a wide arc. “If I’m going to be late, it might as well be because I’m saving the world.”
No one else in the plaza could see the tear or feel the cool breeze that whipped out from its mouth. Papa had cast a veil over the black hole, so we’d look like two hapless tourists checking out the Picasso. It was the perfect cover when we had to close tears in big cities or crowded areas.
Of course, being a guardian of the veil wasn’t without problems. Papa and I had almost died in the Dark, and it was all my fault.
I wished that I could forget the whole thing, but I thought about the Dark a lot. I had struggled to make a gateway in time to escape, and the Lord of Shadows had been hot on our trail. Not to mention that the bridge of god symbols in my gateway had collapsed beneath our feet. Instead of running, we, um, fell through the gateway, but we made it back home.
It wasn’t my first gateway, but after the battle, my magic was depleted. My magic. I still couldn’t believe it, even as heat crept across my skin and a faint blue light traveled down my arms to the staff. The blue light was a new thing.
Thankfully, the Lord of Shadows couldn’t enter our world through a tear. The veil prevented anyone with immense magic from passing through from either side. Although we’d found out the hard way that darkbringers who had little magic could still cross over. Having sharp horns and barbed tails didn’t count toward the magic quota.
There were only two ways the Lord of Shadows and his army could cross into the human world. One: through an ancient gateway. The orishas had to destroy the one at Comic-Con after I . . . um, accidentally revealed the location to the Lord of Shadows. Two: if the veil failed. That was why Papa and I had to work around the clock to patch up the holes.
Before there was a veil—some five hundred forty million years ago—the darkbringers were destroying humans by accident. We were still sea slugs at the time, crushed beneath their feet. At first, the veil didn’t work well, and many darkbringers died. Eshu, the orisha of balance, fixed it so that the human world and the Dark could both flourish. But the Lord of Shadows wanted revenge against my father and the orishas for what they’d done. Scratch that: he still wanted revenge. That part hadn’t changed.
“See? It’s almost done,” I said as the veil began to shrink. This was the eighth hole since we got back from the Dark. A month of training, and I still took forever and a day to close a tear when Papa could do it in seconds.
“Keep this up, baby girl, and you won’
t be a guardian-in-training for long,” Papa said, beaming at me. “You’ll be a full guardian before you know it . . .” Papa’s voice cracked and trailed off. His eyebrows pinched together as sweat beaded on his forehead. When he caught me watching him, Papa smiled again, but it was a weak smile, one that held a secret.
“Are you okay, Papa?” I asked, ignoring the tear that hadn’t fully closed yet. The Lord of Shadows had drained his powers in the Dark, and it was taking time for him to recover his strength.
Before he could answer, something whipped out of the tear and snatched my legs from underneath me. Not something . . . writhing shadows.
I hit the ground hard on my butt, and the staff spun out of my hand. It rolled outside of the bubble of illusion that Papa had cast around the tear. The staff collided with a leather shoe belonging to a man in a gray suit.
The man reached down to pick it up and frowned at the glowing symbols. “What the bleep?”
Okay, he didn’t say “bleep,” but Mama said that I better not even think of cursing.
“Maya!” Papa said, lunging for me, but his legs buckled, and he stumbled instead. He reached for the place between his chest and stomach, his face twisted in pain.
He was getting worse, but I couldn’t think about that now. The shadows still had my ankles and were dragging me into the tear. I needed to act fast before the darkness completely swallowed up my legs, and the rest of me with them.
Magic tingled in my hands as I reached for my staff. I yanked it free of the man in the gray suit, and it flew back to me. I hadn’t thought about doing it—it was instinct. I knew that it would come back.
“Did you see that?” the man asked, looking around him, but no one answered. This was Chicago, after all. Most of the time, when someone said or did something weird, people ignored them and kept walking.
Papa stepped into the mouth of the tear. His dark skin glowed silvery-white and pushed back the darkness. The shadows hissed as if they couldn’t stand the light and let go of my legs. I whacked one with my staff before they fled back into the Dark.
My face burned with shame as I climbed to my feet. How could I let that happen after all the times Papa said to be careful? I should’ve heard the shadows coming.
Papa stared into the Dark, not moving a muscle. His face was grim and sweaty. Come to think of it, I’d never seen him break a sweat. Ever. That would’ve been weird before I found out that he was a god, a celestial, an orisha. What my father was had many names.
“Papa?” I swallowed hard as a cold chill ran down my back. The noise from the pedestrians and the traffic faded away. Even the roar of the tear in the veil sounded muted as I caught sight of what had Papa’s attention. Darkness without start or end, without shape, without form, stood on the other side of the tear. I froze in place too, not seeing anything, but I could sense him there. The Lord of Shadows. I imagined his purple and black ribbons writhing around him.
My heart slammed against my chest, and my palms were slick against the staff. His presence loomed over us like a storm cloud. All around the edges of the tear, the color drained from the world. The brown metal of the Picasso faded gray. The gray stone beneath our feet turned almost white. The veil wouldn’t let the Lord of Shadows cross into our world, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid.
He said something in Sekirian, which I’d learned was the celestials’ first language—the language of the universe. The ground trembled beneath my feet as his songlike whispers filled the air. Papa answered him, and the whole plaza shook. People almost lost their balance, and everyone asked if it was an earthquake.
“What’s he saying, Papa?” I asked, after swallowing hard.
“Nothing of importance,” my father said, gritting his teeth. Then he nudged me away from the tear with a hand on my shoulder. “That’s enough practice for today. It’s time to go home and get ready for school.”
“I haven’t finished fixing the veil,” I said, but I was thinking about the Lord of Shadows. This was the first time that I’d sensed him on the other side of the veil since we escaped the Dark, and it sent ice down my veins. Papa had taught me how to avoid the crossroads, so I didn’t see the Lord of Shadows in my dreams anymore. That was a huge relief—nothing like falling asleep and facing an angry god with a grudge against your entire species.
“You’ll have other tears to practice on later,” Papa said.
I didn’t miss how tense his voice was as his magic swiveled toward the tear and closed it in a split second. I wished that my godling magic worked that fast. I could close a tear on my own without the staff channeling my powers, but it took me too long. With the staff, I still was much slower than Papa. He once told me that he’d patched up 2,057 tears in one day, which seemed impossible to me. Papa sometimes exaggerated, but I was starting to believe him.
Papa had transported us to Daley Plaza by bending space, a handy little trick that I had yet to learn. Bending space was different from what happened when we opened gateways. Gateways were more like cutting a temporary path through existing space. But Papa said that bending space was something else altogether. It required finesse to rewrite the rules of physics.
I could open a gateway to get us home faster, but I hadn’t mastered the art of disguising mine. I didn’t think people would respond well to a roaring, giant black hole in the middle of downtown Chicago. It was way too early in the school year to incite panic.
Today was the first time Papa had been too tired to transport us back home, so we took the Orange line. He was breathing hard after we climbed up the steps to the train platform high above Lake Street. Here was the thing: Papa was not human, no matter how hard it was for me to wrap my mind around that. He didn’t need to breathe or sweat. He shouldn’t have been tired, not in the way humans or godlings got tired. He leaned against the railing overlooking the street below.
“There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there?” I asked as tears spilled down my cheeks.
Papa inhaled a deep breath, his big shoulders shaking. He didn’t have to say anything. I saw the answer written on his face.
TWO
No more secrets, except one
By the time the train circled the Loop on the elevated tracks downtown, Papa had started to feel better. He gave me a big smile as he stood up and stretched his back. I stood up too, resting my staff on my sneaker instead of the sticky floor. Like always, the train smelled worse than an old, dirty shoe.
Papa stepped close to the sliding double doors. We still had plenty of stops before we got to Ashland Avenue, then we’d have to take a bus home. I could feel the static in the air as his magic spread like a fine mist around us. He was bending space on the train in the middle of rush hour. I nodded my approval—breaking the rules of physics was much faster than taking a train—but I wished that I could do it for him so he could rest. Real Talk: Papa did not come to play.
Almost everyone on our car was looking at their phones, but no one would notice us. Here was the thing about magic: most people wouldn’t see it even if it smacked them right on the forehead. The key word being most. Some humans could perceive magic, so we still had to be careful. I found out at the beginning of summer that you couldn’t even catch it on camera.
“The next stop is Roosevelt,” the train’s recorded voice announced. “Doors open on the left at Roosevelt.”
The space in front of us shifted. It was subtle at first, like a cool breeze against our faces, but everything looked the same. When Papa was trapped in the Dark, the Lord of Shadows had stopped him from connecting to the veil to return home. He could fight to keep himself alive there, but he couldn’t open a gateway or create a portal.
According to Papa, bending space across great distances could damage the universe. You make one mistake, and boom, you’ve wiped out a moon or a whole solar system. That was why gateways were much less risky for traveling across worlds or dimensions. They created a temporary bridge without changing the fabric of the universe. But for short distances, he said it
was more convenient to create a portal by bending two points in space. Before I understood the difference, I used to think that gateways and portals were the same. I was still learning so much and having a hard time keeping up.
“We can’t have you late for school,” Papa said as the train’s double doors slid open at Roosevelt. A man moved to exit, but he walked to the other set of doors, ignoring the ones that Papa had commandeered for his portal. The people on the platform waiting to board frowned at the open doors and did the same. This was wacky. To everyone else, the doors were out of service.
“How do you make the outside of your portals an illusion like that without even trying hard?” I asked.
When we passed through the doors, the train and platform faded away. I had to blink a few times to wrap my head around it. Here was the other difference between gateways and portals. When Papa or I built a gateway, it always had god symbols to connect two places together. My gateways were giant black holes on the outside and a bridge of spinning god symbols on the inside. Papa’s gateways looked different every single time. He made a gateway once that reminded me of one of those moving walkways at the airport. Another time, we floated across an ocean on hoverboards shimmering with god symbols. Portals might’ve been faster than gateways, but they were also far less fun. When Papa bent space to create a portal, there was no bridge and no travel time.
“How do you know that I wasn’t trying hard?” Papa asked as we stepped from the train platform onto the sidewalk on Ashland Avenue. I jolted forward from the force of the portal, which felt a little like being stuffed into a giant slingshot and propelled through space. The trip had taken a few seconds.
“You make it look so easy,” I said as a woman startled next to us. She clutched her purse tighter and rushed away, glancing over her shoulder the whole time. From the way the woman ran off in terror, I had an idea of what she was thinking. She saw a Black guy with long locs and likely thought he was going to snatch her purse. I shook my head and rolled my eyes.
