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Back Maya and the Lord of Shadows Save as PDF
Chapters (34)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Acknowledgments
  33. About the Author
  34. About the Publisher

Last summer, Miss Lucille had told Frankie, Eli, and me about how the darkbringers came to exist. Obatala and Oduduwa made the darkbringers along with other magical creatures. But the universe had already seeded life on earth in the form of sea slugs, and the darkbringers were accidentally destroying it. The celestials hadn’t anticipated that. Then again when Papa created the veil, it had devastating effects on the darkbringers. The celestials hadn’t foreseen that either.

“I don’t understand, Papa.” Eleni frowned. “It doesn’t matter if you change humans if you can save their lives.”

“I think I do,” I said quietly. “If the celestials change humans, we don’t know what will happen. They might end up repeating the same mistake they made with the darkbringers.”

“We haven’t ruled it out,” Papa said. “We’re saving it as the last option, although I can’t say for certain that the Lord of Shadows will not follow us no matter how far we go.”

“Why would he follow us if all humans, celestials, and godlings alike left earth?” Mama asked. “He’ll have what he wants.”

Eleni stabbed a potato with her fork. “The Lord of Shadows is the king of pettiness.”

I stared down at my plate. We were back to the same problem. The Lord of Shadows would break out of the library soon, and no one knew how to stop him.

Seventeen

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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.