Ballad and Dagger: Part Two

Not until you’re dressed and ready to go, Aunt Miriam chides from the doorway of her bedroom.

We like who we like, and we love chaos above all else. And anyway, both Maybelline and Maza are gorgeous. Empirical fact.

I break into my best impression of our English teacher, Dr. Kobrick, all hunched over and wizened, and squeak, “Can you cite an example from the text, eh?”

“Just use my natural whimsical charm?”

There’s only so much my brain can hold, and I think I filled it all with musical notes, cadences, chord changes, technique.

Nothing like that toxic combination of body odor, nonsensical physical exertion, and pure malevolent chaos to take all the regular Mateo eeks and aches and ratchet them up 200 percent.

Of course, I can also add another qualifier to that little bio: the guy who just announced that he doesn’t like Chela Hidalgo to a full gymnasium, including Chela Hidalgo.

Now she turns and looks up at me with an inscrutable stare. It’s just blank. Which is terrifying.

Maybelline stands beside her, arms akimbo, and Maza’s there, too, shaking their head.

Maza accepts the money with a magnanimous bow.

“Clearly, the answer is an unequivocal yes.”

“You didn’t say anything untoward to her, did you, Mateo?”
“What? I would nev—”

There’s a glint of ethereal light, and the figure steps out from the bleachers.

Now that I can look more carefully, it’s clear this isn’t a person, and it’s not like the shimmering visage of Galanika I saw last night.

They shamble toward me with a hunched-over, uneven gait.

Maza Alameda has my back. That’s not a statement I’d ever thought would be true. I wish I could revel in it, but there’s a horrific phantom creature heading our way.

It’s one of those little out-of-the-way spots with a playground, a tiny community garden, and a very modest amphitheater for the kids to do little plays in.

I’m rollicking along beneath them, sweating, and Gerval unleashes his mean staccato scat over the thundering chorus—mostly nonsense, but it’s trilingual nonsense and that’s the Galerano sweet spot, so everyone loves it.

Gerval glances back, nods, and raises his fist, and we all let out one final round and hold that last aaaaaaaah for waaaay too long as I run up and down the keys maniacally and then slam it all home on that last, galumphing chord, the beating heart of it all, back to that single note: the one.

She acts like she knows everything. And I blatantly know absolutely nothing.

Legends say that the Okanla Society was a cult of warriors and assassins. They had various tiers and different skills—some were sneaky, others brazen—but they all excelled at murder.

And since I was only around some of the time and my parents are sticklers for me keeping up with lessons, I had to do half that learning from books and crappy 8-bit language-learning games.

“Every word means many things,” he says, leaning all the way into super-extra rabbi mode now. “The meaning we know—or some of us, anyway”—he winks at me, and it’s so corny and avuncular I can’t even be mad that he’s clearly shading my entire existence—“and also the hidden meanings from the many layers of history and mythology it carries with it.”

“Lies and obfuscation! Pretty poems and broken promises. I have had it!”

Outside each place, and all along the street around us, neighbors chatter at each other, voices rising and falling amid traffic and the ambient jumble of city sounds.

Pirates all over the place, some looking scraggily and audacious, others dressed to the nines, cool/calm/collected.

“And no preemptive strikes.”

Up ahead, the old man who was bludgeoned lies still, blood trickling from his open mouth, his chest rising and falling in occasional gasps, his skin paled to a grayish dusty hue.

Then I hum the riff once more, a little faster this time, with blue notes thrown in, some verve, and the song dives below the surface of his skin.

The breath of healing sweeps across each burning filament and cataclysm like a night wind, changing everything I touch, becoming everything I approach, expanding, filling, lighting, lifting.

The melody cycles through me again; it lengthens, contracts, and then explodes. I feel each tiny sliver of it spin outward through the interstitial spaces of his inner workings, take root.

I don’t know if that’s really how it’s done or just a placebo, but it’s working. I feel stronger, clearer-headed.

Even at the near whisper he speaks in now, Tolo’s voice fills the room with its rich and resonant timbre, the pull of a bow across double-bass strings.

He nods, appraising the info thoughtfully.

For a while, we had crews going out to take down slave ships, and many newly freed people would stay, so cultures from different parts of West Africa. Plus, Jews would regularly pop up, escaping one pogrom or another in different parts of Europe.

No one breaks ranks once a quorum vote has been called—it’s decisive, the last word on the matter.

“She says let the people of San Madrigal decide what to do,” Moses adds with open disdain. “She’s already got folks out there blaming you for tonight’s violence and calling for peace.”

Chela is the first to react, swinging her blade in a fierce arc toward it, but the thing has already flashed back into its usual form, a tall, human-shaped creature that seems to be made out of some viscous fluid encased in an expandable skin sack.

Long, rigid tendrils rise from its hunched head, which is mostly just a mouth filled with all those gigantic teeth—the only fully solid part of it.

What just seconds ago looked like a water balloon now fills with muscle; a scaly, cracked, ridged carapace grows in a creaking sprawl over the monster’s entire body.