Time Villains Series, Book 1

by Victor Piñeiro

  That did the trick. “Brady! Why?! Ugh, I hate getting wet! You know that’s my pet peeve!”

  “Who are you, the Wicked Witch of the West? Wake up. You better have the perfect plan cooked up or else we’re all dead meat. Dead. Meat.” Brady’s finger was practically wedged in Wiki’s cheek.

  “Guys,” I said. “It’s too late.”

  Brady and Wiki followed my bulging eyes to the other end of the hallway, where who else was making his way toward us but one Edward “Blackbeard/Beardo/WeirdBeard” Teach. And he was wearing the most demented smile I’d ever seen. His eyes were squarely on our trio as he lurched toward us. Did I see a glimmer of steel under his belt? Was that a dagger?! I wanted to scream “Guess what, folks? Our new groundskeeper is a pirate whose hobbies include murder and dismemberment!” but I couldn’t do anything but stare.

  “If he doesn’t kill us, I’m going to kill you,” Brady said through clenched teeth to Wiki.

  Then I noticed that Wiki was whispering something so quietly it was almost impossible to hear. “Come on… come on…come on…”

  Blackbeard got closer. We stared dumbly at him, frozen. He was three classrooms away. Two classrooms. One. Here it comes—our untimely death…

  “Mr. Teach.” Principal Gale walked out of the classroom right in front of us. Blackbeard jumped. “I’m so glad I finally found you. It appears that Ms. Tsogyal sprained her ankle, and we need a substitute yoga instructor for the next few months. I’ve heard that you’re very flexible.”

  “Flexible?” Blackbeard coughed, confused.

  “Come with me, let me introduce you to the class. You can wear Ms. T’s tights—she left them in the classroom. How familiar are you with downward dog?”

  “What kind of a dog is that?”

  The principal led him back down the hall, and then they disappeared around the corner.

  The three of us looked at each other. Looked down the hall. Looked at each other. Looked down the hall. Looked at each other.

  And ran.

  19

  My lungs were on fire, and my side was cramping, but that’s what running for your life feels like, and I’m a pretty big fan of not being a corpse. The three of us were tearing through the woods at what felt like the speed of light, and I just kept my mind focused on the quadruple-decker sandwich I could make now that I wasn’t living underground at the local cemetery. The yoga teacher prank was part one of Wiki’s secret plan, and it was so brilliant and perfect and hilarious I didn’t even ask about part two.

  Wiki led us deeper and deeper into the woods and it kept getting darker and darker. Soon my sandwich dreams were interrupted by the memory of Blackbeard’s Smile of Death, which was 100 percent going to be etched into my soul for life. A shiver ran down my spine, which is a super weird feeling when you’re running at full speed.

  “There’s no such thing as a Smile of Death. There’s no such thing as a Smile of Death,” I kept repeating to myself, closing my eyes and trying not to trip.

  “Oh, there absolutely is,” a gruff voice in front of us said. “Here it is again.”

  I opened my eyes to the ultimate terror. Blackbeard?! Impossibly, he emerged from behind a big tree trunk, his whole beard smiling cruelly as we skidded to a stop.

  “But…but…” Wiki said, the sadness and fear in his face mixing weirdly.

  “I postponed the class.”

  “Run!” Brady yelled, and we took off like a shot.

  Blackbeard laughed. “Yarrrrrrrrr!” he yelled as he started chasing us through the dense woods. “Avast, mateys, you’re headed for Davy Jones’s locker! Ye’ll be walking the plank in no time!”

  “Why is Blackbeard suddenly talking like a TV pirate?” Brady asked breathlessly while we sprinted, dodging trunks and roots.

  Another moment where I would’ve laughed if we weren’t about to be killed.

  “Ye can’t outrun me, ya scurvy landlubbers!” Blackbeard yelled. “My legs be twice as long as yours.”

  He was absolutely right. He was gaining on us quickly, and there was no way we’d make it another minute without his endless beard tackling us. Suddenly I cared a whole lot more about what Wiki had planned for part two.

  “By the way, how’s my pirate talk, ya hairy bilge rats? Convincing? Yarr-harr-harrrrrrr!” he cackled. “I’ve been practicing all afternoon!”

  “Very…convincing! A+ for effort!” Wiki yelled politely. Blackbeard smiled proudly. But he was probably still going to kill us.

  “Okay, stop!” Wiki yelled, turning around quickly. The rest of us tried to stop on a dime and fell over, including Blackbeard. He shot right back up, though.

  “Well, that was unnecessarily awkward. Now, hand me that bell,” he said in a voice dripping with venom, as he drew his sword and pointed it down at me. My whole body went stiff. This was it. I was about to be sliced up into a human-sized enchilada.

  “Watch out, Mr. Teach,” Wiki said. “Or I’ll summon your archnemesis. Do you seriously think the table’s our only magic portal? Behold!” Wiki pulled out his dad’s smartphone, pushed a button, and held it up to Blackbeard.

  A video started playing. It was a close-up of a man’s face. Wait, was that Wiki’s dad? It took me a second to recognize the voice, but it was definitely Wiki’s dad. “Blackbeard! Robert Maynard here. I’m looking forward to cutting your head off.” Wiki must have told his dad this was for a school project. “But first, I want to introduce you to my associate. You might have heard of him. He’s called…the Kraken!”

  The Kraken, of course! The one sea monster that all pirates feared. The video cut to some terrifying movie footage of a giant squid attacking a pirate ship. If I were a pirate and I thought that was real, I would’ve ruined my pants.

  Blackbeard looked confused, and maybe scared? It was hard to read his face through the endless beard.

  “Now leave us alone or I’ll summon them both and you’ll meet your grisly fate.”

  For a good five seconds I was sure Wiki had won. It was a decent plan, and that giant squid raised the hairs on my neck. Then Blackbeard smiled like he was honestly amused. “There are three flaws with your plan. One, I see your illusion. I spent the whole day learning about your technologies, and I’m a fast learner. That’s no portal. That’s what they call an Intelligent Telephone, correct? You can make it show me whatever you want it to. Doesn’t mean it’s real.”

  He walked around the three of us like a shark circling its prey, his sword pointed at us the whole time.

  “Two, nobody tricks a pirate. We spend our lives being dishonest for profit. We can smell a trick leagues away.”

  He stopped in front of Wiki, putting his sword less than an inch from his nose.

  “And three, Blackbeard fears nothing.” He stopped for dramatic effect. “Now, you have three seconds to produce the bell or I’ll have your head. Three. Two. One.”

  “You counted too fast!” I screamed. “I don’t know how pirates did it back then, but you’re supposed to pause between each number—it builds tension!”

  Blackbeard shrugged and raised his sword.

  “We don’t have the bell anymore!” Brady yelled. Blackbeard froze. “It’s with Principal Gale now. It was waiting for her on her desk this morning, wrapped up extra nicely with a curly bow.”

  “What?!” the rest of us yelled at the same time. Brady smiled defiantly.

  “You think I was going to trust my life to your plan when you had nothing by 8:00 p.m. last night?” She shook her head at Wiki and looked back at Blackbeard. “The bell is with your boss. Good luck trying to get it without ruining your cover at the school.”

  “Queen of Pirates,” Blackbeard said through gritted teeth. But then he nodded approvingly. “Again, you impress me. I won’t harm my future first mate, but here’s a reminder not to cross me, ever—” He swung back his sword without warning, aiming his stri
ke right for Wiki’s neck.

  I shut my eyes and was waiting for the worst, when we heard what sounded like an elephant crashing through the woods. I peeked one eye open. The elephant was getting closer. We could see the bushes and trees crashing around the beast, but we couldn’t make out what it was. Blackbeard turned around, his eyes trying to follow the noise as it came closer, closer. Then, when it must have been just ten feet away, it stopped behind a huge tree next to us.

  “The…Kraken?” Blackbeard whispered to himself. For a second I thought he might be right.

  Then a shadow peeked out from the huge tree, impossible to see in the dark. Wait, not a shadow. The shadow.

  “Mr. Teach,” it said in woman’s voice with a deep Caribbean accent, “perhaps I am seeing things, but it seems to me that you are threatening these three children.”

  Was Blackbeard getting nervous? Did I see sweat on his brow?

  “These children are friends of the woods. Doing any harm to them would make the woods very angry. Were you going to hurt them? Were you going to anger the woods?”

  Blackbeard mumbled, “Um, no. No m’lady, I was not.”

  “Wonderful, Mr. Teach. I thought not,” the voice said, kindly but firmly. “Now please let us be. These friends of the forest no longer have what you seek.”

  Blackbeard awkwardly put his sword back in his belt and stomped out of the woods. “Oh, one more thing, Mr. Teach,” the voice said as Blackbeard turned his head, not doing a good job of masking his anger. “The table will not listen to you. The table only listens to the Chosen Ones.”

  Blackbeard gave us a look, then stomped off. (Did she just call us the Chosen Ones?)

  The shadow emerged from the tree. I held my breath, terrified at what the creature might look like in the light of day. My money was on glowing red eyes, a flaming skeleton for a body, and a mouth that sucked in people’s souls. She took another step, then another, and then fully walked into the clearing with us. I shut my eyes until I could barely see out of them. But then I realized that the shadow’s shape looked awfully familiar. I opened one eye fully.

  Aunt Nancy?!

  “Hello, my friends.” She nodded casually, then turned around and walked deeper into the woods. Our brains were so fried by her presence that we were frozen completely in place. She might as well have turned us to stone. We just watched her, hypnotized. After a few steps she turned to us.

  “Coming?”

  20

  The three of us walked deeper into the woods with Aunt Nancy, still too stunned to speak after what just happened. It was getting darker and quieter as she led us farther into a part of the woods I wasn’t sure we’d ever seen. The trees were taller and wider, and this part of the forest seemed very old. And, as weird as it might sound, kind of magical.

  “Aunt Nancy? What? You? Here? Why?” Wiki couldn’t even put two words together. I didn’t blame him. Neither could I. Aunt Nancy just giggled to herself as she walked a few feet in front of us.

  “What Wiki means,” Brady said, “is how did you find us in the woods, how do you know about Mr. Teach, and how in the blue blazes do you know about our table?”

  Aunt Nancy seemed to ignore us, whistling happily to herself. Usually this would annoy Brady to the point of explosion, but we were all superfans of Wiki’s aunt, and she was always this mysterious. She would talk when she wanted to talk. She always did eventually.

  Finally we came to a clearing and we all sat down on the trunk of a massive fallen tree. “As you know, I am old friends with many teachers in your school.” It was true. Wiki always got super embarrassed at parent night because Aunt Nancy would come too and schmooze it up with our teachers. “And you know I am always taking my afternoon walks in these woods. Well, it was lucky I ran into you during today’s walk.”

  Everyone nodded, but I raised my hand. “Aunt Nancy? You didn’t answer the million-dollar question. You know about the table, and you called us the Chosen Ones. How? And why?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “First I must ask you a question. I believe it is my turn. Is mean Mr. Teach the only visitor you invited to dinner?”

  “We invited three people total, but only Mr. Teach escaped,” I said.

  “Well, that is good news,” she answered.

  She stood up and walked over to a huge tree in front of us with long branches. Then she took a casual hop to the lowest branch. Except the lowest branch was almost ten feet in the air. It wasn’t a completely impossible jump, but I’m guessing only people in the Olympics could have pulled that off. How old was Aunt Nancy anyway?

  “As for your charming new table,” she said, dangling her legs playfully from the branch, “his name is Brocéliandus.”

  So that’s what all the scratched-out letters along his side spelled. I was going to stick with “Andy.”

  “His story is a long one. Full of tragedy. Full of adventure,” she continued. “And it began not far from here, in a vast meadow in these very woods, when he was planted as the first tree in this forest. However, that is a tale for another day. What’s important is that he had been missing for a very long time until now. Some thought he was hiding or sleeping, but it appears that you found him and woke him up! Now, he is a wise and wonderful spirit, but as you’ve proven, his powers can be very dangerous when misunderstood.”

  Wiki and I nodded, taking it in. (Magic tree. That would’ve been slightly cooler than a magic table.)

  “It was wise of you to give the bell to the principal, Brady.” Brady smiled, blushed, and curtsied. Wiki looked at her dubiously but then conceded. Brady’s plan was better. “He is tricksy, that one,” Aunt Nancy said as she looked in the direction of Finistere. “He charmed everyone else in that school, and they didn’t suspect a thing. Of course, I knew better. No one is as tricksy as me.” She was almost talking to herself. After a few seconds she turned back to look at us. “Don’t worry about the pirate—he won’t threaten you anymore.”

  “How did you spook one of the most fearless people in history?” I asked.

  “Javi, everyone is afraid of the unknown. A forest like this is a scary place to a seafarer. I’m guessing he thinks I’m a forest witch.” She chuckled.

  “Well, what about the rest of the world?” Brady asked. “He’s a threat to the entire planet, not just us.”

  Aunt Nancy shook her head kindly. “Ah, of course you haven’t realized this yet. This is important.” She paused to make sure we were paying attention. “Anyone summoned by Andy may not leave the town. They are trapped within it. There is a wall around it that we can’t see or feel, but they cannot venture past.”

  She must have seen the question in our eyes, because she went on: “The woods used to be much larger than they currently are. The school and the town surrounding it still have ancient trees lining them. Brocéliandus still considers that the woods.”

  She let us digest that for a second.

  “How…how do you know all of this?” Wiki asked, looking at his aunt like she had ten heads.

  Aunt Nancy smiled and shrugged. “I have lived in this town for a long time, Wiki. Much longer than your parents. Wander through the woods long enough and they begin to tell you their secrets. That is all. Now, I will talk with Gale about what happened here, and we will decide how to proceed.”

  Wait, what did she say? “Gale?” I asked. “As in, Principal Gale? What does she have to do with Andy?”

  “Everything,” Aunt Nancy said, and winked as she hopped down from the branch and started walking deeper into the woods. After a few steps she turned around and bowed. “Apologies for the quick exit, but I need to go fix our dinner, Wiki. Follow the path ahead and it will lead you home. Good night, Javier. Good night, Brady. Wiki, see you soon.” And with that she practically disappeared into the woods.

  “Wait, I have a multitude of questions,” Wiki called out, waving his hand. “How does a piece of furniture
break the laws of temporal physics? Are Andy’s purrs related to the summoning, and, if so, does that mean he’s using vibrations to alter the space-time continuum? When these characters are sent back in time, are their memories erased, or do their memories from the future forever alter the past? Are you really my aunt?!”

  The woods were silent for a second, then there was the familiar sound of an elephant crashing through the woods, except this time it was moving away from us. Then it was silent again.

  “Nothing makes sense anymore,” Brady said, looking intently into the woods. “Let’s go home and talk this out.”

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I could definitely use a grilled cheese right about now.”

  “Oh, we’re not going home yet,” Wiki said. “Follow me.”

  21

  “Everything… Everything… Everything…”

  Wiki had been muttering the same word over and over for the past hour like it was the sound of the engine in his brain.

  We were deep in the high school library, huddled over a table that had books strewn all over it. Wiki was so lost in his head that he didn’t explain why he was pulling out books that all seemed unrelated to each other, and not really related to anything that seemed important. When Wiki gets like this we mind our own business, so Brady was finishing her book on Blackbeard and I was copying recipes from cookbooks while I tried not to fall asleep.

  Finally Brady finished her book, slammed it closed, and walked up to Wiki, snapping her fingers in his face. “Okay, Wiki, wakey-wakey. We’ve been waiting patiently for approximately forever now, and these books are nonsense. What are you doing?”