Maya and the Lord of Shadows by Rena Barron

Author:Rena Barron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

SWEET DREAMS

AFTER DINNER, I had a hard time falling asleep. I lay in bed thinking about how everything had gone terribly wrong. The Lord of Shadows was always one step ahead of us. He might be stuck in the library for now, but he must have a bigger plot brewing. That was why he’d sent Captain Nulan through the veil ahead of time. Luckily, we’d been there to stop her.

I kept imagining the Lord of Shadows in his cocoon, wrapped in layers of writhing shadows that thrashed around on the library floor. He was biding his time, waiting patiently. Papa’s words replayed in my mind: When he breaks out of the library, he will attempt to destroy everyone and everything in his path.

When I opened my eyes again, I was standing in front of the old house on Fiftieth Street. My friends and I passed it every day on our way to school. It has been a sprawling mansion once; now it was covered in vines and mold, and all the windows were boarded up. The boards had been spray-painted over so many times with street art that it all blended together.

No one had ever lived in it that I could remember. Even squatters avoided it like the plague. I had stood here once before, in what I had thought was a dream, with Eli and Frankie, but it hadn’t been a dream. I had been on the crossroads—the place between worlds, where dreams intersect with reality.

I clutched the rusted gate, feeling the grit underneath my fingers. The yard was blanketed in fog that completely covered the grass. My ring pulsed, and the symbols vibrated. I was frozen in place, my eyes glued to the darkness now spilling from the open door. The house began to rattle and creak like a monster waking up from a long slumber.

“You have such a wandering mind, Maya” came a low, slippery voice. “Your father should’ve done a better job of teaching you how to protect it.”

I squeezed the fence harder, and the metal glowed underneath my hands. Papa had taught me how to keep the crossroads at bay if I concentrated hard enough, but it wasn’t working now. Instead, the yard between me and the old house was shrinking.

“You’re not really here,” I said through gritted teeth. “You can’t be.”

Purple and black ribbons clambered out of the door—at first a few, then a dozen, then two dozen. The Lord of Shadows’ violet eyes shined bright against the darkness like satellites in the night sky. “I am tired, Maya,” he said, and he sounded very ancient, like he was glass on the verge of shattering. “This war must end now for me to truly rest.”

“This war doesn’t need to happen,” I said, doing my best to sound brave. “The darkbringers are okay now. Why start another war that will kill countless people when you could let the past go?”

“I cannot fault you for being so naive,” the Lord of Shadows said, his ribbons climbing across the porch and down the stairs.

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