The Shadow Crosser (The Storm Runner 3)

I nodded slowly.

A terrible silence pressed against us, against our breath and hope and confidence.

My uncle ran a hand over his long hair. “We have to stop them.”

“We will,” Ren said, touching his arm gently.

“How?” Hondo asked.

“Nothing is impossible,” Brooks said. “If we can pool the godborns’ powers and work together, we can fix this. Right, Zane?”

Her determined amber eyes softened as she looked my way, and I found myself nodding, making a silent promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.

“Can any of the godborns travel through time?” I asked hopefully.

Hondo quickly told us about the godborn gifts. They ranged from being able to talk to animals and bending like a rubber band to walking through solid surfaces and having supersonic hearing. “No time traveling,” he said.

Brooks twisted a strand of hair around her pinkie. “But Marco has off-the-charts super strength.” She said it with so much admiration I felt a stab in my chest. I know, I know, bad time to be feeling jealous. But give me a break—he couldn’t be that strong.

“And Adrik,” she went on, “he…uh, got a new skill when he hit his head.”

“Alana said something about that,” I said. “What is it?”

But I didn’t get an answer, because Itzamna gasped so loud I thought it was his last breath. “That’s it!” he shouted.

“What’s it?” Ren said.

Itzamna posed a question none of us had thought to ask: “How could Zotz and Ixkik’ lock the gods in time?” He paused, like he was waiting for one of us to say what he already knew. “The time rope!”

Ren practically jumped out of her skin. “But I thought no one could take the rope from Pacific!”

“They would only need a single strand for a one-way ticket,” he said. “Zotz and Ixkik’ must have found a way to steal it before the devouring, and they used it to send the gods back to 1987.”

My mind buzzed with one part hope and another part horror. “But how could they send them across time all at once? There’s, like, a couple hundred of them.”

“Do I have to do everything on this quest?” Itzamna sighed. “I don’t know where the enemy would get that kind of power.”

“Power isn’t always what you think it’s going to be,” Marco said as he waltzed onto the scene with a scowl and a puffy black eye. I didn’t bother asking. His eyes darted from face to face. “What? Did I say something wrong? Who wants to fill me in?”

Ren grabbed his arm and must have told him everything telepathically, because his eyes (even the puffy, half-closed one) went wide.

“Man,” Marco said, rubbing his chin. “1987? A hiding spot your enemy can never get to? Wish I’d thought of that. But why that year? Seems kind of random.”

“Perhaps it was as far as they could go with so many gods all at once,” the moon god said.

“Itzamna,” Ren said, drawing closer to me, “you said that Zotz and Ixkik’ only needed a strand of my mom’s rope to trap the gods in time.”

And then Ren’s logic seemed to hit all of us at the same time.

“The watch!” someone said.

“The watch,” Brooks echoed.

“Ren!” Hondo lifted her off her feet, spun her, and set her back down. “You’re my favorite bruja godborn, you know that?”

In the labyrinth, Ah-Puch had told me Ren was the key. This must have been what he meant!

“We can go back in time, too!” Brooks said.