Shadowshaper (6 page)

“Look, I really don’t normally don’t talk about this stuff with, like … anyone.” Robbie had his hands shoved into his pockets. They stood at the edge of the scaffolding where the Tower formed a corner with the back of the old brick building.

“Well, this is a special occasion,” Sierra said. “Everything’s falling apart.”

He laughed weakly. “Well, that is special. It’s just that people tend to think you’re crazy when you talk about this stuff, you know? And we’re, you know … sworn to secrecy.”

“You’re a shadowshaper too? I knew it!”

Robbie smiled. “It’s kinda hard to explain.”

“Alright,” Sierra said. “I can’t promise I won’t think you’re crazy.”

“Thanks.”

“But I’ll still be your friend and help you finish the mural anyway.”

“It’s your mural! I’m helping
you
finish!”

“Man, I’m kidding! Lighten up, my dude.”

Robbie pointed to Papa Acevedo’s sad face. “Okay, look. I made this.”

“Right.”

“Papa Acevedo — Mauricio — he was my teacher before he died. I was just a kid, twelve, when I met him, but he knew I had something in me … and he trained me.”

“Trained you to what?”

“Both in painting and … to work with spirits. Shadowshaping.”

About a hundred contradictory confused thoughts crowded Sierra’s mind at the same time. She ended up pushing them all away and just nodding. Yes, it sounded crazy. It was one thing when someone was telling her stories about some weird old professors, or even her own family members. But Robbie was only a few months older than Sierra and he was absolutely serious.
To work with spirits
. Something about it sounded so true. Part of Sierra knew he was going to say it, had known it was what he’d been talking about since … well, all along.

Robbie exhaled, watching Sierra. “But they’re not like evil spirits. These ones aren’t, anyway. The ones we work with, I mean.”

“Spirits like … dead people? Like ghosts?”

“Yeah, some of ’em are the ancestors of us shadowshapers, some are just other folks that passed on and then became spirits. But they’re like our protectors, our friends even. And they just look like shadows, until …” His voice trailed off.

“Until what?”

“Until we ’shape ’em. Look.” He pointed to the now barely visible face peering out of the brick wall. “Papa Acevedo’s spirit is …
was
in the painting.”

“That’s why it was crying!”

He nodded, that slight grin creasing his lips.

“I thought I was losing my mind …”

“You’re not, Sierra.” He was smiling, but he also looked like he might shatter at any second. “It’s just that people don’t usually see it. Their minds won’t let them, so it just looks a regular painting, not movin’ or nothin’. Papa Acevedo always used to say people don’t see what they’re not looking for. It’s like that.”

Sierra gazed at the old man’s sad face. Robbie had captured his essence perfectly: that big nose and the way his salt-and-pepper mustache had turned upward at either end to make room for his old-man smile. He had on the same brown cap Sierra remembered him wearing every time she went to visit her abuelo and the domino warriors at the Junklot.

“Anyway, he started fading — both his spirit and the actual painting — when Lucera disappeared, more than a year back now. It was slow at first, barely noticeable. Then it got faster and faster. And now —” Robbie put his hand on the wall and closed his eyes. “I can’t feel him there. Can’t talk to him. He knew he was gonna be gone soon. And … the last time I talked with him …”

“He could talk to you like … through the mural?”

Robbie nodded. “He said there were forces gathering against us. He didn’t know what, exactly — just that we should paint more murals, even if they kept fading, and that we were in trouble. The shadowshapers, I mean.”

He gave the painting one last glance, and then they climbed the rest of the way down the scaffolding. Sierra locked up the Junklot, and they strolled along Marcy Avenue together. “But why’d he fade, Robbie? I don’t understand.”

“There was a fight. Your grandpa and Lucera. This was before I was coming around. No one knows whatall it was about or what happened, but Lucera disappeared.”

“Hold on. Who is this Lucera anyway?”

“Lucera, she was … is … a spirit.” He shot a sideways glance at Sierra. She nodded at him to go on. “But a really powerful one. They say she was the one first gathered the shadowshapers, that her power was in everything we do. But I guess no one realized just how crucial she was until she vanished, not long before your grandfather had his stroke. And then people just scattered. Some moved on to other traditions, some folks just went back to, like, normal, old, non-shadowshaping life.”

They passed an all-night hair salon and then a fancy new bakery with dainty cupcakes stenciled on the window.

“Damn. All of you disappeared?” Sierra said.

“Pretty much. ’Cept me, I guess.”

“The last shadowshaper.”

Robbie laughed, a good hearty chuckle that made Sierra grin. At least he’d lightened up a little. “I mean, you don’t have to make it sound like a bad kung fu movie, but yeah, something like that. We been looking for her, but there’s no clues, no sign, nothin’ …”

Sierra dug into her pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper her grandfather had given her that morning. “
Where lonely women go to dance
,” she said aloud.

“Come again?”

“My grandpa gave this to me today.” She handed it to Robbie. “Said that’s where Lucera was.”

“Whoa!” He held it close to his face and squinted at the letters. “We’ve never had anything to go on before. I don’t even know what to say.”

“Mean anything to you?”

Robbie shook his head. “Nah, but … look, there’s more, somewhere.” Little lines of ink could be seen at the torn top edge of the paper. “I bet if we had the rest of it, we could figure out where Lucera is.”

“Yeah but … where we gonna get that? My grandpa ain’t trying to give up nothing else. If he even has it …”

Robbie handed the paper back to her. “Well, it’s a start, at least. Everyone had pretty much given up hope on ever finding Lucera. I’m not even sure where the other shadowshapers ended up. The only one I was tight with was Papa Acevedo. And now things are getting really dire.”

“What was up with that guy at the party — Vernon? He was still looking for her.”

“That wasn’t Vern.” Robbie shook his head, frowning. “That was a corpuscule.”

“Alright now, Sierra!” a heavyset woman in a colorful dress called. All of Sierra’s neighbors were out on their stoops, taking in the warm summer night.

Sierra waved back to the woman. “Hey, Mrs. Middleton.” She looked at Robbie. “A corpus-who? What is that?”

“It’s … it’s like, when someone dies, their body is an empty shell with no spirit, right?”

“I guess?”

“A corpuscule is a dead body with someone else’s spirit, like, shoved into it.”

“A … a dead person? Ugh!”

Robbie nodded. “I know. It’s not something shadowshapers would ever do, not the ones I know anyway. Takes someone really messed up to force a spirit into a dead body. I didn’t know Vernon well, but whoever did that to his body is controlling him. That’s who’s looking for Lucera.”

They walked in silence, Sierra remembering the corpuscule’s icy grip, its foul smell. She shuddered as they walked up to the Santiagos’ four-story building. “This is me.”

Robbie looked up at it. “I love brownstones.”

“So … we gotta find Lucera, huh?”

“Only Lucera can turn this around. I didn’t even think she still existed, but if someone’s corpuscule is out looking for her, man … Yeah.”

“Alright. Hey, you know some cat named Wick? I picked up some of his files at Columbia today.”

“Oh, that random white dude that used to roll with your granddad? I didn’t see a lot of him, but I remember meeting him once or twice.”

“Yeah, I’ll see what I come up with. Maybe he knows something …”

Robbie looked up and met Sierra’s eyes. “Sounds good. Hey, thank you. For listening, I mean.”

“You’re welcome. Thanks for telling me all that.”

He smiled. “Listen, I could … I can show you how shadowshaping works better than I can explain it.”

Sierra raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Meet me tomorrow night at the Church Ave stop on the Q. If you’re free, I mean.”

“Yeah, I could do that.”

“Cool.”

They stood there for a few seconds. Sierra felt an invisible thread of possibility hanging in the air between them, but she didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. “See you tomorrow,” she said finally, and walked up the steps into her house.

The next morning, Sierra crept into Lázaro’s room. The rising sun played across the Bed-Stuy rooftops, glinted against windowpanes, and cast stark shadows down the avenues and walkways.

Her grandfather lay with his mouth wide open, a trickle of dried saliva crusted against his face. For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was even alive. She was about to cross the room to check when the old man’s nostrils flared and he let out a colossal snore.

Who was this man?
He’d always been sweet to her when she was a little kid: piggyback rides and stupid magic tricks with that cigar-stained hacking laugh of his. But then she entered that awkward preadolescence stage, all pimples and big glasses and brand-new curves, and Lázaro acted like he didn’t know what to make of this new creature. Mama Carmen had remained quietly firm and occasionally ferocious, but there was never any doubting her love — it came through in every small move she made, the way she’d absentmindedly adjust Sierra’s clothes and do her hair for her, or lay her wrinkled old hand on Sierra’s shoulder. She didn’t pay much mind to small talk or banter, but when she asked Sierra a question, she meant it. Grandpa Lázaro, on the other hand, just drifted further and further away as time went on, and Sierra had never figured out how to get him back.

Then came that terrible day with the phone ringing endlessly, the police showing up at the door, Sierra’s parents hurrying their shoes on and rushing out to Brooklyn Hospital, where Lázaro lay comatose. Liver cancer had taken Mama Carmen a few months before. It had been a sudden and devastating death, and everyone said it was grief that had sapped the old man’s ability to make sense anymore.

Sierra had gone to visit him in the hospital the next morning. Her grandfather’s face had been frozen into an open-mouthed mask of terror, like one of those poor souls who glimpses Medusa and turns to stone. Tubes and cables snaked across his body, coiled into his flesh, and wound in a tangle up to an incomprehensible mesh of blipping waveforms and drip-dropping fluid pouches. Sierra hadn’t found it in herself to cry — the shock seemed to knock away all emotion and just leave her with a dull, vacant throbbing — but her brother Juan had been inconsolable. Lázaro looked only slightly better now, a full year later.

Sierra took a deep breath. She wished she could just stand there and take in the view of the neighborhood, the peacefulness of her sleeping abuelo, the new day. But she was on a mission. She soft-stepped past Lázaro to the wall of photographs. Láz still smiled and Mama Carmen still glowered from their faded Kodachrome world. In the shadowshaper portrait, Ol’ Vernon still had a black fingerprint over his face. Everyone else seemed …

Sierra almost let out a gasp. Another face had been smudged out. It was a tall, slender man standing behind Delmond Alcatraz. He had light brown skin and a pin-striped suit on; beside him was written
Joe Raconteur
.

Sierra sat in Lázaro’s bedside easy chair and pulled the Wick file out of her bag. She found the page she left off on.

I feel so close to something. Something huge. It’s in me, I tremble with it — both the knowledge of what’s to come and the power of being so close, so close. Close to what? I don’t exactly know, I admit. Is it spirit? Ancestors? The dead? Those quiet murmurs I’ve heard throughout my life, the ones that I never trusted, buried inside myself, in fact, for all these years? Perhaps.

Sierra sat back. Here was someone, a professor no less, treating her abuelo’s crazy ramblings with total seriousness. Lázaro’s own daughter didn’t want to talk about his secret life, but this Wick guy was all in. She tied her hair back with a scrunchie and kept reading as her grandfather snored on.

One world’s schizophrenic is another’s medicine man, no? Whatever we shall call it, I want only more. More understanding, more knowledge. More … power. Because that’s what it is, power. It rises inside me, unabated by the dim pettiness of university politics or mind-numbing everyday rules. I am brand-new. I would never say this out loud, of course, but I think, thanks to my extensive knowledge of other cultures and cosmological systems, I could benefit in far greater ways than anyone could foresee from L’s magic. If I can combine the powers I am developing under the guidance of the Sorrows with the shadowshaping magic … the possibilities are almost unimaginable. There is no horizon. But only if Lucera can be found. Without Lucera, shadowshapers will soon scatter and all their work will fade. The only clue to her whereabouts is this single line:

… where lonely women go to dance.

“Where lonely women go to dance,” Sierra said out loud. Lázaro had passed on the same clue to Wick.

This comes from an old shadowshaper praise song. Laz becomes almost impossibly disdainful when speaking about Lucera — there was apparently bad blood between them before she disappeared. When I pressed him about the rest of the poem, these were the only other lines he would give me:

Come to the crossroads, to the crossroads come

Where the powers converge and become one.

Two more lines of the poem! Wick had circled the word
one
again and again. Sierra scribbled the lines onto a piece of paper and kept reading.

It refers, I think, to the unified powers within the spirit of Lucera herself. As the keeper of a magic that connects the living and dead, Lucera signifies a kind of living crossroads. Imagine what this means, to hold all these converging powers within a single entity.

Imagine …

Sierra’s phone buzzed and she almost yelped from surprise. It was Robbie.
We still on for 2night??

“Crap.” She put her palm to her forehead. She’d forgotten all about meeting up with Robbie later on, and she still had to swing by the Junklot to get some painting in. She texted back
Yep
, and stood.

Lázaro wrapped around one of his pillows and snored quietly into it.

“Oh, Abuelo,” Sierra sighed. “What have you done?”