Auntie Bae shook her head and entered the hall, where the cha-cha slide was in full swing now. “Slide to the left, slide to the left,” the song blasted on the loudspeaker. “All right now, this is my jam,” she said as she joined the sliders.

Eli cracked his knuckles. “Jayla and I have bingo to officiate.”

Jayla tried to crack her knuckles, too. “Let’s do this!”

“You are the coolest little sister ever,” Eli said, giving her a fist bump.

Jayla giggled in delight as the two of them headed toward the bingo hall.

Eleni, Frankie, and I left the community center and entered into the frigid Chicago winter. The cold air hit my lungs, but it felt refreshingly normal, and I needed normal right now. A giant snowman sat on the lawn in front of the main building, and icicles covered the trees along the street. It was hard to believe that after finishing up training with Ogun, we’d been to a garbage dump halfway across the country and to the gods’ realm, all before nightfall.

“How are we going to figure out what Nulan was up to?” I wondered out loud.

“Does it matter now if she’s in Alsar?” Eleni asked. “She can’t do harm there.”

Frankie frowned as we picked our way through a fresh foot of snow on the sidewalk. “What do you know about Alsar?”

“Not much,” Eleni said quietly. “Only that it’s a prison run by the Azurian peacekeepers.”

“Charlie told me that my orisha mom was a peacekeeper.” Frankie stuffed her hands in her pockets and drew in a shaky breath. “Maybe someone there might remember who she was searching for before she . . . you know. I already asked the orisha council, and they said that they don’t get involved in Azurian affairs. So maybe the other peacekeepers might know.”

Charlie was a two-faced kishi, meaning he literally had two faces. He had a human face on the front of his head, though a very hairy one, and on the backside, a hyena face with yellow eyes and sharp teeth. We met him at the start of the school year when Papa took us to see Sky Father. We’d been in a crowded market, and Charlie thought that Frankie was her orisha mom because they looked so much alike. He told us that Frankie’s mom was the head peacekeeper in Azur for centuries. She hunted down rogue magical creatures across the universe. Most were out to seed chaos or incite wars.

I rocked on my heels when we reached the intersection. Frankie’s house was three blocks east, and our house was two blocks north. “Maybe you should talk to Charlie again,” I suggested.

“He hasn’t been answering my calls.” Frankie stared down at her boots. “He said he would help, but so far, he’s been ghosting me.”