Shadowshaper Read Online Free Page B

Lázaro muttered. He was sitting up in his chair, eyes watery. His fingers were clenched tightly around a scrap of lined paper.
    “You back to that?” Sierra crossed the room. “What are you sorry about? What is it?” She tried to see what he had clutched in his hand, but Lázaro pulled the paper tighter to himself and turned away.
    “You okay, Abuelo?” Sierra plopped into the bedside easy chair. “Cuz I’m not. I found Robbie like you said but … I don’t know what to tell you. I’m in over my head already. I don’t understand any of this. This guy Ol’ Vernon you usedta know? He showed up last night and chased me and …”
    Lázaro lifted one trembling hand, his index finger extended.
    “What?” Sierra turned and followed an invisible line from his finger to the far wall, where Lázaro’s gallery of family photographs stared back at her.
    “Lo siento lo siento lo siento.”
    She stood up and walked across the room. She had never paid the old pictures much mind. There was Tío Angelo, who’d fought with the Macheteros rebels outside of San Juan. There was Uncle Neville hanging with Sierra’s mom and dad back in the eighties, all three of them looking wildly happy outside some nightclub that had long since burned down. There Sierra’s mom and Tía Rosa stood next to each other outside a skating rink on Empire Boulevard, all dolled up and smiling. Sierra’s grandmother, Mama Carmen, glared out of another photo; she had that look that used to light up her eyes right before someone got beat. Mama Carmen had died a few months before Lázaro’s stroke. Sierra missed her grandmother’s hugs more than anything — it was like a secret world of warmth and love every time they’d embrace.
    But what was Lázaro trying to show her?
    In the middle was a large group photo. Grandpa Lázaro beamed from the center of it, wearing the same creased khakis and guayabera that he’d always worn when he was with it. He was grinning that sweet abuelo grin of his, staring down the camera with an almost fevered excitement. Next to him, a young white man with a pouf of dirty-blond hair stood with one arm wrapped around Lázaro’s shoulder. His eyebrows were arched up, his mouth creased into a surprised half smile, as if he’d been caught off guard by the photographer. Someone had written beside him Dr. Jonathan Wick in elegant, old-fashioned script. On Wick’s other side, a group of about a dozen men stared intently at the camera without smiling. Each had their name written near their head. Sierra knew most of them from around the neighborhood, but a few were strangers to her. There was Delmond Alcatraz and Sunny Balboa from the barber shop, and there was Manny, looking uncharacteristically solemn, and Papa Acevedo … She squinted at the picture. The man next to Papa Acevedo had a black fingerprint smudged over his face. Beside him was his name: Vernon Chandler.
    “What the …” Sierra said out loud. Her voice sounded strange in the quiet room. She looked back at her abuelo. Grandpa Lázaro had slumped over the side of the easy chair, a strand of drool stretching from his mouth to his stained white T-shirt. He let out a high-pitched wheeze, laughed a little, and then snored again.
    Sierra crept toward him, her heart thundering in her ears. Lázaro’s right hand clenched the armrest. She crouched beside him and peered at the edges of his fingertips. There was no ink stain on any of them, from what she could tell. Lázaro snored again and startled himself awake. He looked warily around the room.
    Sierra took a deep breath and studied her old grandfather, the blue veins along his crinkled arms, the deep-brown eyes. “Abuelo, your ol’ buddy Vernon went missing,” she said, “and now there’s a smudge over his face in the picture.” The old man shook his head slowly back and forth; the news hadn’t registered. “And last night he showed up at the party acting like a creepy freak and looking for someone named …