by Rena Barron
THIRTY-ONE
We get a fresh start (sort of)
I slept in late and woke up to Eleni digging through my closet. She was throwing my clothes over her shoulder onto the floor. I sucked in a deep breath, trying to keep from screaming at the top of my lungs. Who did this girl think she was, going through my stuff without asking? I cleared my throat to get her attention, but she ignored me and kept flinging clothes left and right.
“Um, hi,” I said.
“Maya, yes?” Eleni spun to face me. Her voice was lyrical, and her words slid into each other like a song. She held up a blue pair of corduroy jeans. “Do you think these will be right for me?” She cocked one eyebrow. “They might be short, but according to the woman on the TV, ankle length is in style for this century.”
“You’ve been watching TV?” I asked, scratching my head.
“Yes!” she said. “I was up all night with Papa. He showed me the wonders of the internet. The human world has come so far. It was so mundane before.” Eleni turned to the mirror on the wall and pressed the pants against her waist. “They didn’t have electricity and phones back in my time.”
That sounded so weird coming from a girl barely older than me. I thought that Eleni was talking about all these things so she could avoid the hard stuff. She’d woken up from a thousand-year nap and found out that most of her family had died. The Lord of Shadows had faked being her friend, and her own auntie had helped trick her into opening the gateway. That was a lot to process. “Are you okay?”
Eleni stopped admiring herself and looked at me through the mirror with tears in her eyes. “No,” she answered. “Your mother says that I’m in shock, but if that’s true, why does my heart hurt so much?” She swiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I can’t stop thinking about how Kimala used to braid my hair and how Genu chased butterflies in our forest. Mama, she . . .” Her voice choked up. “I miss her singing and her smiles and her pudding.”
“I’m sorry, Eleni,” I said. I couldn’t tell her that things would be okay, or that she’d get better. Sometimes people just needed you to listen to them—not try to solve their problems. I could do that, even if I couldn’t do anything else.
“My father has a new family now,” Eleni said, lifting her chin. “He has a new life without me, so where do I fit in this world?”
“I know this doesn’t fix things, but you’re not alone.” I bit my lip. “You have me, Papa, and my Mama. We’re your family now.”
Eleni brushed tears from her cheeks. “You never answered my question about the pants.”
“They’re going to look good on you,” I replied, raising an eyebrow. “That is until Mama takes you shopping for your own clothes.”
“Oh, I already bought clothes online and got two-day shipping,” Eleni said. “Apparently, you only need a credit card, and Papa’s card was already saved on his laptop.”
I swallowed hard, knowing that she was going to be in big trouble. Also, she’d learned how to use a laptop, the internet, and credit cards fast. “How much stuff did you buy?”
“Let me see.” Eleni tilted her head to the side. “Ten dresses, a dozen pairs of jeans, twenty shirts, fourteen pairs of shoes . . .”
I zoned out after she got to bracelets and earrings. I fell flat on my back with a dramatic flair, feigning mental overload. She started to list out all the things she still wanted to buy.
“Let me get that for you,” I heard Zeran’s voice drifting in from the open window. I jumped out of bed and ran to see what he was doing. Was I the only one who decided to sleep in after everything we’d gone through in the Dark? Eleni and Zeran were making me look bad. No chance that Eli was already up, though. Frankie might be.
I didn’t see Zeran, but another boy was helping the twins carry groceries up the steps to their greystone. The boy looked familiar. He was tall and lanky with curly hair. Wait a minute, that was Zeran looking like Lil Nas X. If I had to guess, the Johnston twins had already introduced him to the internet, too.
“Tell me, Zeran,” Miss Ida said. “Do you like gardening? My sister and I win awards for our tulips every year.”
“I have quite the green thumb,” Zeran answered with a big grin.
“He’ll be moving in with Ida and Lucille,” Eleni told me. “Papa is going to let me have my own room, but I can stay here with you if you want.”
“Oh, no, by all means,” I said, rushing my words. “You should have your own room.” I belly-flopped back on the bed. “I need more sleep.”
“Who can think about sleep right now?” Eleni spun in a circle on her tiptoes. Her hair sparkled with light when she did. “We have a conference with the orisha council in an hour, and I don’t know what to wear.”
My heart fluttered against my chest. The council was going to be mad that we broke the rules again. Never mind that my friends and I put an end to the Lord of Shadows’ evil plans for the second time in, like, three months. They were going to be furious when they found out that I helped set the veil on fire. “They don’t waste any time, do they?”
“I’m not pleased about seeing them either.” Eleni hugged the corduroys to her chest. “I messed up and started a war.”
“First of all, you didn’t start a war,” I said. “The Lord of Shadows did that on his own, and second, I’ve got your back. The orisha council has to see reason. It wasn’t your fault—the blame belongs to the person who actually is responsible.”
Eleni flounced across the room like a butterfly and threw her arms around me. It caught me off-guard at first, so I seized up with my hands at my sides. I had always wanted a younger sibling, and now I had one almost my age. I didn’t dare think we’d end up being best friends, but this was a nice start.
I hugged Eleni back, and she started to cry on my shoulder. I knew what it was like to make a mistake and to feel like I’d let everyone down. It was time for me to own up to my mistake, too—the one that sealed the fate of the human world.
* * *
The orisha council called an emergency meeting, and this time we didn’t have an audience or bleachers. Mama and Papa brought Eleni and me. Frankie’s moms, Pam and Dee, were with her, and Eli came with his little sister, Jayla. Miss Ida and Miss Lucille had stayed at home with Zeran to await the council’s decision. We stood across from the orishas in the gods’ realm. Shooting stars passed so close to the open chamber that they shook the floor. My knees shook, too, but that was for another reason.
Even after seeing this place a few times, I couldn’t get over how wonderful it was. But I pushed that thought aside as the council members stared us down: Nana Buruku, Ogun, Eshu, Shangó, and Oshun. Well, scratch that. Ogun, the war god, and Shangó, the lightning god, were looking pretty smug.
“You children continue to break the rules that we put in place to keep you safe,” Nana said after a deep sigh. Her eyes had dark circles underneath them, and she looked tired. “Furthermore, when asked to pledge your alliance to this council, you refused.”
I opened my mouth to interrupt, but Frankie’s mom Pam beat me to it. “With all due respect, Nana,” she said, glancing at her wife, who nodded. Frankie stood between her moms with her chin up. “Dee and I aren’t exactly happy that Frankie went back to the Dark, but we’re proud of her. We’re not going to deny her the opportunity to live up to her full potential. If she’s meant to save the world, who are we to stop her?”
“This council does not deny the children their birthright,” Oshun, the goddess of beauty, chimed in. “We only want them to stay safe.”
“These children stopped the veil from failing again,” Mama reminded the council. “They put everything on the line to act while you’re still waiting for the other celestials to arrive.”
Okay, Real Talk. I didn’t expect our parents to come into the gods’ realm and go all the way off. Mama was wrong about the veil part, though. We brought Papa’s soul back and rescued Eleni, but the veil was in a much worse state because of me.
“Some of us didn’t
sit around,” Ogun said, stroking General’s head. The dog howled at his feet, looking peeved at Mama’s accusation. “We helped within the confines of our allegiance to this council.”
“Be that as it may.” Nana redirected the conversation. “We must hand down punishment for breaking the rules.”
“Oh, come on, Nana,” Eli whined, with Jayla clinging to his back. “Go easy on us. We did stop the Lord of Shadows for now.”
“Yeah!” Jayla butted in. “Go easy!”
Nana sighed and rubbed her forehead. “These kids are going to be the death of me.”
“They remind me of the fire you used to have back in the day,” Shangó said, which earned him a scowling look from Nana.
Eshu raised his hand in a truce. “Now, now, let’s come to the point of this meeting before we get too far off topic. The council has voted to postpone deciding your punishments for disobeying our rules.”
“Yes!” Eli said, turning a circle while Jayla bounced up and down.
Nana had that look—the one that told me that we hadn’t heard the last of this. Our punishments would come, and they were going to be bad.
“For now, we must discuss the veil,” Shangó said. “The other celestials will be in our solar system in a few months if all goes well.”
“Which it never does,” Frankie groaned under her breath.
“Elegguá, with you whole again, can you keep the veil up longer now that the Lord of Shadows can’t use Eleni’s magic?” asked Oshun.
Papa was already frowning, his forehead creased in deep thought. “That should be the case, but I sense that there is something else greatly wrong with the veil. It feels like brittle paper that could crumble at any moment.”
“How could that be possible if Eleni’s here with us?” Nana asked, leaning on the edge of her throne. “The Lord of Shadows shouldn’t have a way to tear the veil anymore.”
The room fell silent as everyone looked at each other in various states of resignation. War was coming between our world and the Dark, and we all knew it. I cleared my throat, and it echoed in the chamber as all eyes turned to me. It was now or never. I couldn’t live with the secret of what had happened in the Dark. As much as I felt terrible that I let the Lord of Shadows trick me, I wasn’t going to lie about it.
“I know why the veil is worse,” I blurted out. I told them about the stasis pod—what the Lord of Shadows called an amplifier. How, when I touched it, the pod combined my magic with Eleni’s to set the veil on fire.
“I remember a girl in my dreams,” Eleni mused, her eyes wide. “That was you!”
I glanced down at my feet. “I’m sorry this happened—I was just trying to help.”
“We tried to warn you, didn’t we?” Oshun said in her high-pitched voice.
“Now is not the time, Oshun,” Nana snapped at her, which surprised me.
I met Papa eyes, ashamed of my mistake. “The Lord of Shadows said we couldn’t patch up the veil anymore because it was burning.”
I expected him to be mad that I let the Lord of Shadows trick me, but he said, “You can’t blame yourself, Maya. You did the right thing, but the Lord of Shadows continues to prove that he has no honor. To use children to fuel his war is a new low. Now that I know how he’s making the veil brittle, I can see about figuring out if there is another way to stop it.”
“And if you can’t?” Nana asked.
“You already know the answer to that,” Papa said, his voice heavy.
“I’ll keep training the children,” Ogun offered. “They’ll need to know how to protect themselves and the humans.”
Oshun tapped her long nails against her throne. “As for the matter of the darkbringer . . .”
“His name is Zeran,” I reminded her in case she’d forgotten. “He helped rescue Papa’s soul and free Eleni.”
“Yes, we know,” Oshun said. “Yet, we do not feel that humans are ready to know of another world. If he is to remain in this world, he must glamour his appearance. We can make it so that only godlings and orishas can see his true appearance, and humans will see him as one of them.”
“We’ll have to do the same for you, Eleni,” Nana added.
“Um, I guess.” Eleni frowned. I didn’t think she was happy about hiding her wings. I wouldn’t be either.
We weren’t off the hook with the orisha council, but we had a little time before they handed out our punishments. I already knew that they were going to be brutal. No way the council would let my friends and me get away with breaking their rules yet again. Papa was better, and Zeran could stay in the human world. I would take any punishment they dished out to keep things that way.
The Lord of Shadows was still a threat, but I would train hard, and we would be ready for him when the veil finally failed.
THIRTY-TWO
The League of Godlings returns to school
I couldn’t believe that it was only the second week of school. Zeran, Eleni, and I met up with Eli and Frankie on the way to Jackson Middle. Zeran was nervous about starting school with a bunch of strangers, but it didn’t seem to bother Eleni. Also, to our horror, our parents had worked it out so that we could do catch-up work on the weekend at school. Meh.
Ms. Vanderbilt found it in her heart to give me another week to finish my math workbook. She thought I had taken sick, and that was why I had missed so many days in tutoring already. The Johnston twins made sure the human teachers and students had no clue about the godlings, but I didn’t think that would work forever. Someone was going to slip up and get caught.
As we crossed Ashland Avenue, I looked up at the sky and saw thin vapors of gray smoke seeping through to our world. I tried not to worry, but I couldn’t help it. Eleni saw it too, and she squeezed my hand as if to say that things would be okay. No, things wouldn’t be okay—not for a long time.
“I’ve missed a year of school,” Zeran said, pulling my attention back to the conversation.
“That’s nothing,” Eleni retorted. “I’ve been asleep for a thousand years, so I’m sure that I’ve forgotten everything.”
“I can tell you that the way we do math changes about every two months,” I grumbled.
“I can tutor you.” Zeran clutched the straps of his backpack. “I’m pretty good at math.”
Eli and Frankie exchanged a look, and Eleni laughed for no good reason. I frowned. “Why are you guys acting so weird?”
“Oh, no reason,” Eli said. “Something’s in the air.”
The first day back at school passed in a flash. Kids came in groups to introduce themselves to Eleni and Zeran. They were instant hits, but we weren’t the same dorks like Winston said we’d be. People were talking to us, too. They pitched their voices low so the human teachers wouldn’t hear them asking about the Dark.
“Zeran, I really like your horns,” said one boy.
“And your tail,” added the girl with him.
“Um, thank you,” he replied. “I like your . . . um . . . shoes.”
He didn’t specify which shoes he liked, but both kids blushed. I grabbed Zeran by his arm and pulled him away. “I’m sorry people are such a pain,” I said. “They’ve never seen anyone like you before, but soon you’ll be old news.”
Zeran grinned. “I don’t know if I want to be old news.”
A lot of things still bothered me. Especially the last words the Lord of Shadows said: I’ll be seeing you soon, Maya. The fact that there were darkbringer spies already in the human world. I couldn’t help but think that I was missing something else.
We stopped in front of Zeran’s locker, except Eleni got swept away by a group of godling girls admiring her wings. Miss Mae had glamoured her so that humans would see a normal girl, no wings, shimmering golden skin, or pointed ears. But godlings would see her true form.
There was a note crammed into Zeran’s locker. Probably a love letter from one of his new admirers. Half the school wanted to be friends with him and Eleni. I shuddered at the thought.
Zeran read the message
, and his jaw went slack.
“What does it say?” I teased. “Who’s confessing their love for you?”
“It’s nothing,” Zeran said as he balled up the paper and tossed it into his locker. He slammed the door shut. But I could tell by the way he tried to play it off that whatever was in that letter was not good.
Winston stepped in our path with his friends at his side. Sparks of fire lit up on his arms. Candace grew to pro-wrestler size. Tay cracked his knuckles, and the floor shook beneath our feet. He’d finally found his godling power. Why did the universe have to be so unfair? I slapped my forehead. “Don’t think because you have a new freak friend,” Winston said, “you’re not still number one on my hit list.”
“News flash, Winston,” I said, waving my arms, “we’re on the same side.”
Winston jabbed his finger into my chest. “We are not on the same side.”
Zeran grabbed his hand and twisted. Winston fell to his knees, and Tay sprang into action. Frankie flung out an energy lasso that smacked Tay on his nose. He winced as he grabbed his face, looking annoyed. Candace tripped over Eli’s invisible foot again, but this time she kept her balance. With the bullies disarmed, Zeran let go of Winston and shoved him back.
Principal Ollie bustled into the hallway. “My office, now! The whole lot of you.”
“But Winston and his cronies started it again,” I protested.
“March,” they said, straightening their tie. “You know the rules . . . no um . . . horse-playing in front of the other students.” Translation: No using magic around humans. But the kids who weren’t godlings didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. They walked down the hall, chatting with their friends on the way to class. It wasn’t like a few days ago when I opened a gateway at school. Some of the human students saw that, but Miss Ida and Miss Lucille had erased their memories.
We passed by Tisha Thomas, who leaned her back against a locker with her books hugged to her chest. She had an empty look in her eyes. “So many secrets and so many lies,” she hissed. “He will betray you.”
