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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Victor Piñeiro
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Nicole Hower/Sourcebooks
Cover art © David Miles/Shannon Associates; Barbulat/Getty; d1sk/Getty
Internal design and illustrations by Michelle Mayhall/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks Young Readers and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Young Readers, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebookskids.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Piñeiro, Victor, author.
Title: Time villains / Victor Piñeiro.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Young Readers, [2021] | Audience: Ages 8 and up. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: When a homework assignment and a magic table summon real and fictional people from history, including the bloodthirsty pirate Blackbeard, sixth-grader Javi, his brawny younger sister Brady, and his brainy best friend Wiki join forces to save the world.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021000990 (print) | LCCN 2021000991 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Time travel--Fiction. | Magic--Fiction. | Supernatural--Fiction. | Blackbeard, d. 1718--Fiction. | Pirates--Fiction. | Puerto Ricans--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P559 Ti 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.P559 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000990
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000991
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Wiki’s Pedia
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Evelyn, for everything
1
We found the table in some weird antique flea market. Our old dining room table was busted, so we were looking for a new one, but Dad didn’t want to take us to some regular furniture store. No, Dad loves taking Brady and me to super-boring places on the weekends because he thinks torture is healthy for kids. Mostly it’s museums and the symphony and other stuff designed to make us die of boredom, but when he’s really feeling diabolical, he takes us to antique stores, so we can look at combs and toilets from a hundred years ago. Usually I drag my feet and moan the whole time, and Brady pouts and breaks stuff, but he still keeps taking us. I guess dads are really into ancient toilets?
The only good thing about our trips is that Dad lets me bring my best friend Will Green with us. Will actually loves going because he’s pretty much a college professor stuck in a twelve-year-old’s body. He spends all his free time reading about history and lecturing us about people and places that I forget about five minutes later. My dad calls him Wikipedia Green. I just call him Wiki.
“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, guys, and I’ve made a decision,” I said.
We had stumbled into a quiet, dark section of the store, and it felt uncomfortably silent.
“A hot dog is actually a sandwich. Hear me out. It’s got bread on two sides and meat and toppings in the middle.”
“Not your sandwich theory again,” Wiki said, shaking his head. “Can’t we agree to disagree? A hot dog is definitely not a sandwich. For so many reasons!”
“Not just hot dogs either,” I continued. “I would consider a burrito a sandwich too. Heck, I would consider an ice cream taco a sandwich. Because the ice cream is sandwiched together between the taco shell.”
“That’s infuriating!” Wiki snapped. “Just because something’s sandwiched between two things doesn’t make it a sandwich. And burritos? Where do I even begin?!”
“Guys. Enough. Don’t make me break you,” Brady said, like she was some action hero. Honestly, my sister could be an action hero. She’s in third grade, and her life goal is to become the president’s bodyguard, a professional vigilante, or warrior empress of the world. I think she’ll probably end up doing all three.
“Shh. Listen.”
Purring. Well, it sounded like a six-hundred-pound cat with a deep voice purring, or maybe just burping really slowly. Whatever it was, the sound made my insides shake, and when I looked around, I noticed that Brady and Wiki were also weirded out.
“Um…what exactly is that?” Brady asked, her eyes getting that look that meant she was about to punch something. (She was always about to punch something.)
We hurried toward the sound as Dad studied antique nose-hair trimmers, and there it was. The big oak table that would change everything.
It looked ancient and beat-up but made of good-quality wood (at least that’s what Dad said later), and its sides had intricate patterns carved into them. Most importantly, it looked like the kind of table that would make for some truly legendary dinner parties. Dinner parties with muchos sandwiches. I was sold immediately.
I love to cook. More than love—it’s hands down my number one all-time favorite thing to do, outranking video games, goat videos, and even the internet. What can I say? Cooking really puts me in the zone and I’m pretty good at it. Plus, it relates to my second-favorite thing: eating.
Brady crept under the table, maybe trying to find a cat. Wiki looked all around the room. Then the purring started again, and immediately we all knew it was coming from the table. A normal-looking, antique dining room table was purring at us. Clearly, we were all going a little loco bananas.
“Is this our new table? Do we have a winner?” Dad asked, walking into the room.
“Dad! You hear it right? That table. Purring. At us. You hear that, right?” But the purring stopped the second he got there.
Dad raised an eyebrow. “That’s th
e best prank you’ve got? A purring table?”
“It’s not a prank, Papi!” Brady said, shoving him a little. “Give it a second. He’ll start again.”
“It might sound more like a really slow burp by a sumo wrestler,” I added, to be helpful. I burped extra slowly to show him.
Dad looked over at Wiki. “Why do my kids have such a weird sense of humor? I have a great sense of humor.”
“Sorry, Mr. Santiago, but I heard it too. And there is no feline in sight.”
Dad shrugged his shoulders and walked into the next room, shaking his head. The three of us knew better than to try and convince him, so we did what any normal person would do. We started petting the table. And immediately, the table started purring more loudly.
Brady’s usually the muscle in our trio, but she has a soft spot for animals. She started whispering to the table. Wiki and I turned around and pretended she wasn’t with us. We kept looking back from the corner of our eyes, but Brady just kept petting the table and whispering to it. She eventually realized that we were standing as far away from her as possible and yelled, “Javi, Wiki—get back here and pet this thing before I kick your butts!” We generally do whatever Brady says (even though she’s my little sister), so we got back into it.
Finally, Brady looked at us. “We’re getting this table,” she said firmly. “Go tell Papi.”
“Are you sure you want to buy a piece of furniture that makes us feel delusional?” Wiki asked rubbing his chin nervously.
“We’re going to take good care of you, Mr. Table,” Brady whispered to it, ignoring Wiki.
Wiki cleared his throat. “I think it has a name. See?” A little plaque on the side of the table was mostly scratched out, but what we could see said “Andu” or maybe “Andy.”
“You’re going to love living with us, Andy,” Brady whispered. And then we went off to find Dad, who was staring lovingly at a one-hundred-year-old chamber pot.
On the way home the three of us sat in the back seat.
“Wow, that guy practically gave that table away. You’d think it was haunted or something,” Dad said from the front seat. “I hope you guys didn’t just curse our house—do you know how long it takes to get rid of a curse?”
I knew Dad was mostly joking. I say mostly because we’re Puerto Rican, and in Puerto Rico most people think that curses are a real thing and that ghost stories are true. But I’m pretty sure Dad only believes in Puerto Rican ghosts, not American ones.
“We just blessed the house, Papi,” Brady said. “Just you wait.”
“Well, you know what they say.” He shrugged. “The light in the front is the one that shines.”
Wiki scratched his head and gave me a look. “That doesn’t compute.”
“Just go with it,” I groaned. Dad loves translating Puerto Rican sayings into English because they usually make zero sense. It’s his version of a dad joke.
“Let’s just pray your mom likes the table when she gets back from Ponce next month,” Dad said. “Or back to that kooky store we go.” Then he started whistling to himself, and I turned to Wiki and Brady.
“Not a single word about the table to anyone, right?” I whispered.
“It’s going to be hard to keep it a secret when Andy starts purring at our friends,” Brady said matter-of-factly.
“That was clearly an auditory hallucination produced by that bizarre store,” Wiki said, shaking his head. “The table won’t purr again.”
“Yeah, Brady. Maybe we should pretend this never happened.”
Wiki nodded. “That sounds best.”
2
The next morning, Brady immediately brought it up.
Wiki rang our doorbell and the three of us headed to school like we always do. It’s a short walk because our house is right behind school. Well, the path next to our house leads to a huge football field that’s next to a long soccer field that’s next to the school. But it’s still only a five-minute walk.
“Do you think Andy’s going to get lonely while we’re at school?” Brady asked as we walked down the path. “Maybe he’d feel better if we put a tablecloth and some plates on him. Or I could set up my dolls on all of his chairs. I told Papi we should’ve bought a dog. That would have solved it.”
“I thought we decided that we wouldn’t bring up that strange, impossible piece of furniture,” Wiki said.
“It’s no biggie, Wiki,” I said. “He hasn’t purred since we brought him home, so it must’ve been something weird about that store. Maybe the couches there sneeze and the beds drool.”
“Um, Andy purred all night,” Brady said, giving us a look. “I snuck down after bed and played tea party with him for hours. It was a nonstop purr-fest.”
I groaned. “Seriously? So magic is real, but somehow we’ve ended up with the dumbest magic of all time! A purring table? We couldn’t get a flying carpet or an invisibility cloak or something?”
Wiki shook his head. “I choose to believe that you were merely hallucinating again,” he said. “That’s the only plausible explanation.”
“Oh yeah? Then you should choose to believe that I’m about to punch you in the glasses,” Brady growled at him. “Because I am.”
I tried to change the subject before she went full Brady on Wiki, but by that point we had taken the path up the hill and we could see our school in the valley below.
No matter how many times you see Finistere, it always makes you forget what you were talking about.
Finistere is an ancient castle plopped into an otherwise normal suburban neighborhood. There are normal houses in front of it, normal basketball courts behind it, a normal playground next to it. Everything around it is exactly what you’re used to if you live in the suburbs. Then, smack! Right in the middle of our neighborhood, as if it fell from the sky hundreds of years ago, is Finistere—a full-on, spires-and-everything medieval castle turned into a school. The only thing that’s missing is a moat and a dragon.
According to Maryland history, the castle was built in the 1800s by some geeky millionaire who wanted to impress his girlfriend, but when she wouldn’t marry him he split. Wiki doesn’t buy it, and neither does Dad. “It makes absolutely no sense,” Wiki always says. “It’s clearly not a modern re-creation. It shouldn’t exist here…but I’m glad it does.”
I am too. It’s by far the awesomest place I’ve ever visited. The entrance is two enormous doors (I bet it was once a drawbridge) that lead into a big main room where we have assemblies and special events. Then all the rooms along the first floor are high school classrooms. There’s a big courtyard in the middle where the high schoolers can hang out after lunch. (They don’t call it recess but that’s basically what it is.) The second floor is where the principal’s office and faculty rooms are. And no one’s allowed into the four towers at each corner of the castle, but I hear that there are teachers who actually live up there and never leave the school. Plus, there are rumors of a dungeon under the castle that houses mythical beasts. But that’s just nonsense.
If there’s one awful thing about Finistere it’s that someone thought it’d be rad to tack on a middle school and elementary school and make them boring buildings that look like any other dumb school. I bet it went down like this:
Good Architect: “How about we build another castle?”
Bad Architect: “Nope, let’s just build some boring school buildings!”
Worst Mayor of All Time: “Ooh, that’s a much better idea! Here’s the key to the city!”
So once we get to high school we’ll be living life in style, but for now we have to go to the dumpy middle school and count the days until we get to hang out in the castle. Brady’s got it worse—she’s in the extra-dumpy elementary school.
Back to the history lesson. The castle was already here when the town was settled, and the millionaire was nowhere to be found. They were going to build the downtow
n around it, but then there’s the woods.
Finistere is bordered by big, dense woods on three sides that seem to go on forever. It feels like the school might be sucked in by the forest at any moment, like the trees are just waiting for the school to look the other way and then they’ll swallow it whole. There are completely far-out legends about the woods. Some of the old folks in town say the creepiest things about it—stories of monsters and strange people who lived there and came out at night to cause trouble. No one’s seen anything weird for a hundred years, but the woods still spook everyone, and nobody’s caught dead venturing into them at night. People warn you about the woods when you’re little. “Don’t wander too far into the woods” you’ll hear grandparents say. “You may never return.” When our school has events at night, people pretty much race from their cars into the school, not wanting to linger next to the spooky trees.
But we love the woods. Brady’s never been afraid of them, and she’s forced us to explore them with her for years. You couldn’t pay me enough to walk in them at night, but during the daytime they’re pretty magnificent. They also feel like they’ve been around forever. We sometimes sneak out there during recess because we know no one would ever follow us. And we have some wild forest adventures on weekends. Brady swears she saw a unicorn there once, but she also had an imaginary yeti for a friend back then, so I’m not buying it.
Brady parted ways with Wiki and me when we got into school. She headed to the third-grade hall and we headed to the sixth-grade hall. As usual, we got to science class in the nick of time, and, as usual, we raced onto the ship’s deck to get to our desks before the bell rang.
Yep, you read that right. We were halfway through the marine biology unit in life science, the most legendary class in middle school. Real squids in big jars. An octopus in a saltwater aquarium. A ginormous whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. And class on the reconstructed deck of an old ship. How anyone could cram the deck of a full-sized wooden ship into our classroom was beyond me, but our science teacher could do pretty much anything.
“Everybody aft!” a gruff voice growled. “To your desks at the stern of the ship. Now!” The rest of the class scrambled onto the deck and sat at their desks.
Time Villains Series, Book 1 Page 1
