“Everyone’s always sorry. Cheap word.” He shook his head. “Hey, that might make a good lyric.” He tapped his fingers on his leg and sang to a hip-hop beat, “Everyone’s sorry. Cheap words. Cheaper hearts.” He eyed me. “Less bebop, right? Maybe more rhythm and blues. You got a pen on you?”
Was he serious? “Uh, you have a pencil behind your ear.”
His eyes flashed surprised as he reached for it and patted his short pockets. “Man, no paper. Make sure you remember that line—it’s a good one. Cheap words. Cheaper hearts,” he repeated. Chiquita let out a noise that sounded like something between a purr and a soft grunt. I guess she liked his word choices.
I shifted my feet. “Right, so back to why I’m here…”
“Maybe you shoulda listened to me back at the playa. Coulda avoided all this wasted time. But no, you thought you had all the answers, and now there are consequences to your inaction.” He opened both palms and blew his breath across them. Instantly, a wall of purple flames rose into the air, engulfing both of us.
The next thing I knew, we were standing in a large candlelit room with barreled stone ceilings and a concrete floor. There were rows and rows of record albums on a tall rickety bookshelf to my left, and to my right was a glass case filled with all types of guitars in every color and sheen. Some even had signatures on them. A stick of incense that smelled like desert rain burned on a glass table nearby. Beyond that were two worn barstools with a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against each.
Antonio followed my gaze back to the case. “Those fine pieces of musical art were touched by the greatest hands in history,” he said. “Hendrix, Cobain, Richards, Clapton, Santana.” Hondo would have flipped if he could have seen all those guitars.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“This is my jam pad.”
A tall, skinny dude with long blond hair and too many nose piercings to count poked his head through a door and said, “Dude, come on. We ain’t got all day.”
“Actually, we do. I’ll be right there,” Antonio said.
The guy glanced at me before looking at Antonio and rolling his eyes in a slow sweep. “If I lose the rhythm because of you…”
“No one’s losing rhythm,” said the Fire Keeper. “H
ave a cerveza while you wait.”
With a huff, the guy slammed the door.
“Who’s that?”
“A new guy in our band. He’s a little skittish. What do you expect? He’s a drummer,” he said. “He doesn’t like to take breaks and for sure doesn’t like anyone new at a jam. Thinks it’s bad luck.”
“Oh, so, like, do you live here?” I thought a little bit of small talk might warm the guy up.
“Nah…I just feed the eternal flame here.”
I studied the place more closely, looking for fire somewhere. Scraps of paper and cigarette butts littered the floor. Tall iron candelabras filled with half-melted candles lit the space. But other than that, I saw nada. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.
“So where is this eternal flame?” I asked, trying to ease into it.
He laughed and patted his chest. “In here.”
I must have given him an are-you-kidding-me? look, because he added, “You think the great fire keepers would let such an important flame burn in the open?”
Okay, well, I’d for sure heard crazier things. Couldn’t think of any in that exact moment, but I had a lot on my mind, like an exact address of the godborns and how to save my dad. It was time to get down to business.
“I need your help.”
“No kidding.”
I explained that the godborns had been taken and the great Hurakan needed rescuing. “I thought that you could tell me where the godborns are and how to stop Hurakan’s execution.”
Antonio swept a loc out of his face, unfazed. “Do I look like your personal nine-one-one?”
Was this guy for real? “My dad mentioned…”
He gave me a sly grin like he knew exactly what Hurakan had said: run. “Yeah, well, your old man is decomposing at the bottom of a nasty prison, and the universe is changing. If you’d come a few days ago, no problem. For a high price, maybe I could have changed some things. But now? You’ll be lucky if I can locate these godborns.”