Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: A Monster Visits Suburbia
Chapter 2: The Princess Curse
Chapter 3: Tricks, Not Treats
Chapter 4: A Demon in the Front Yard
Chapter 5: Home and Abroad
Chapter 6: The Transit Corridor
Chapter 7: The Transit Officer
Chapter 8: The Bizarre Bazaar
Chapter 9: The Motivational Motion Device
Chapter 10: The Merchant of Shadows
Chapter 11: The Royal Stables
Chapter 12: Tuntuni’s Tale
Chapter 13: A Costly Mistake
Chapter 14: The Gold and Silver Spheres
Chapter 15: Stepmothers
Chapter 16: The Moving Map
Chapter 17: Flying Fangirls
Chapter 18: The Kingdom of Serpents
Chapter 19: The Python Jewel
Chapter 20: A Change of Plans
Chapter 21: The Serpent King
Chapter 22: A Princess’s Tears
Chapter 23: The Ruby Red Sea
Chapter 24: The Land of Demons
Chapter 25: To Grandmother’s House
Chapter 26: The Maya Mountains
Chapter 27: A Well of Darkness
Chapter 28: The Thirsty Crow
Chapter 29: The Baby Demon
Chapter 30: The Demon’s Mouth
Chapter 31: The Man Behind the Baby
Chapter 32: But How?
Chapter 33: Home Again, Home Again
Author’s Note
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Preview of Book #2
Copyright
To immigrant parents and children everywhere—
who imagine an idea called home into being
through the telling of stories.
And to my own immigrant parents—
who told me stories, believed in my stories,
and keep helping me imagine my way home.
The day my parents got swallowed by a rakkhosh and whisked away to another galactic dimension was a pretty craptastic day. The fact that it was actually my twelfth birthday made it all that much worse. Instead of cake or presents or a party, I spent the day kicking demon butt, traveling through time and space looking for my family, and basically saving New Jersey, our entire world, and everything beyond it. Not that I didn’t have help. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll tell you that part soon. First, let me back up a little.
My life pre-rakkhosh incident had been pretty ordinary—I spent most of my time at school, hanging out with my best friend, Zuzu, at her family’s diner, and helping at my parents’ store. There were Zuzu’s grandma’s spanakopita and Baba’s stockroom inventories, doing homework and avoiding my next-door-neighbor-slash-archnemesis, Jovi, and her giggly gang of popular girls. Regular old sixth-grade stuff. Nothing that really prepared me for interdimensional demon slaying.
I guess Ma and Baba had tried to warn me, in their own goofy way. Ever since I was a little girl, they’d told me awesome stories about rakkhosh: these carnivorous, snot-trailing demons who liked to speak in rhyme while chomping on innocent villagers. Ever heard of Jack’s giant, the one who wants to grind Englishmen’s bones to make his bread? Well, add some horns, fangs, and talons to Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, and you’re getting close to picturing a rakkhosh. But no matter how real giants or demons or goblins seem in stories, nothing can prepare you for seeing one on your doorstep, right?
But that’s exactly what happened to me on my twelfth birthday. Which, because fate clearly has a twisted sense of humor, also happens to be Halloween.
I’d always hated having a Halloween birthday. When I was younger, it was because everyone was so busy gearing up for trick-or-treating, they usually forgot it was my special day. Worse still, my parents never let me hide behind a superhero or monster mask. No matter how much I tried to be like every other witch or zombie or caped crusader in the neighborhood, my parents always had other ideas.
“Maybe this year I could be a pirate,” I’d suggest, holding out some scarves and gold hoop earrings.
“Or a ghost?” I’d beg from under an old bedsheet.
But every year, my parents insisted on the same costume. A costume that made me stand out more, not less.
“Darling piece of the moon, you must be an Indian princess!” they would enthuse. “You are, after all, a real Indian princess, and here is the single day that you can actually look like one!”
When I was in the first or second grade, the other kids thought the shiny silk saris my mom wrapped me in on Halloween were cool. They believed me when I told them the bangles and necklaces I wore were made of real emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. But there are only so many years you can fool your friends—or yourself—into thinking you are a real Indian princess, banished from your fairy tale and hiding out in a suburban split-level in northern New Jersey. No matter what your crazy parents insist. Pretty soon, the rest of the world starts catching on.
“Doesn’t your dad own the Quickie Mart on Route 46?” Jovi asked one day when we were about nine. “What kind of a king owns a Quickie Mart?”
She’d been snapping her gum and tossing her perfect blond hair and giving me this look like I was less than dirt. I had wanted to disappear into the floor right then and there.
When my mother heard, she gave me some typically loopy advice. “My royal daughter,” Ma had singsonged, “none of us is just one thing. Life is a process of learning to recognize our many faces.”
“Besides which, your friends are right; no king worth his throne would own a Quickie Mart!” Baba had boomed from behind our store’s Giant Gulpie fountain. “Go tell your classmates that even kings and queens have to work hard when they move to a new country. And remind them, your father does not own a Quickie Mart; he owns a Royal Farms Convenience Emporium!”
“And if they still don’t believe you,” Ma added from the aisle where she was restocking the meat-flavored jerky, “tell them we’re not your real parents. Tell them you’re the daughter of an underworld serpent king and we found you when you were a baby floating in a clay pot down the River of Dreams.”
I guess every kid whose family is from somewhere else thinks their parents are weird. But with mine, it wasn’t just their language or their clothes or their food. It was something more—like my parents never really appreciated the distinctions between fact and fiction, science and mythology, dreams and reality. But it wasn’t until that fateful twelfth birthday that I really understood why.
The day began just like any other October morning in Parsippany, New Jersey. No ominous portents of doom, no noticeable rifts in the time-space continuum, not even a multicar, tractor-trailer pileup on the Jersey Turnpike. Just an autumn sky ribboned with tangerine clouds that tumbled in and over one another, like a bunch of orange-flavored cotton candy. But if you were looking carefully (which I wasn’t) and had watched enough sci-fi television to know (which I probably had), you might have seen a tornado-shaped shadow hidden in all those clouds, something that looked like an intergalactic wormhole.
But like any Dorothy at the beginning of her adventure, I was pretty clueless back then. I had no idea that soon I wouldn’t be in Kansas anymore (okay, New Jersey, but you get where I’m going with the metaphor).
The morning of my twelfth birthday, I totally slept through my alarm. It was Zuzu’s phone call that woke me up.
“Feliz cumpleaños! Joyeux anniversaire! Most felicitous of birthdays, Princess Kiran!” The voice shouting over the house phone was way too c
hipper for that early in the morning. Not to mention the extra chipperness of her shouting in multiple languages.
I made a little gagging sound. Zuzu knew perfectly well that I was allergic to anything remotely princess-y. It was probably because of my parents’ obsession, but I couldn’t stand princesses of any culture. Whether in saris and bangles or tutus and tiaras, the thing that really got to me about princesses was all that self-righteous, Pepto-Bismol-pink-coated prettiness. And of course all that waiting: waiting for princes to come, waiting for fate to change, waiting for rescue to swoop in. Just thinking about it made my throat feel like it was closing up.
“It’s my birthday, and you’re going to make me choke on my own bile.” I squinted my eyes against the morning sun, wishing for the quadrillionth time that my mother would let me have curtains on my windows. But she’d somehow gotten it into her head that it was healthier for young people to sleep in the moonlight.
“Oh, I think you’ll survive that, Princess Pretty Pants.” I imagined Zuzu pushing her hipster-red glasses up her pert nose. “But Ms. Valdez might impale you with her protractor if you miss the math test today.”
Gah. I finally registered the time. “Oh, man, I’m totally late!”
“Ahde! Schnell! You better hurry, babe!” Zuzu chirped. “But don’t you fret, this is going to be the wildest birthday ever!”
I had no idea then just how right she would be.
Forget a special birthday outfit; I threw on my favorite pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, and quickly braided my dark hair so that it covered the weird scar I had on the back of my neck—one of the two that my parents swore were nothing more than big birthmarks. I tied a bandanna over the even uglier scar, the one on my upper arm that looks like a pair of saggy glasses, and then, for double protection, threw on my favorite black hoodie. I ran down the stairs, ignoring the odd expressions on my parents’ faces, their strained birthday greetings, even the elaborate breakfast of puffed luchi bread and potatoes Ma had made for me.
“Kiranmala—” Baba began, but I cut him off.
“You know …” I snuck a few chocolate cookies from the pantry into my pocket. “I was thinking, tonight, for trick-or-treating, I might go as a vampire.”
“There is not enough fiber in that, darling.” Baba’s sharp eyes hadn’t missed my contraband breakfast. “Roughage is very necessary for good digestion.”
Ignoring Baba’s worries about my digestive system, I shoved a cookie in my mouth, then slipped on my favorite shoes—bright purple combat boots Zuzu and I had found at the thrift store. I threw my backpack on my shoulder and hoped Ma wouldn’t yell at me too much about not eating the food she’d made.
“You don’t have to buy me a vampire outfit, maybe just some fake plastic teeth?”
My mouth was all thick with chocolate, and I wished I had time to pour myself something to drink.
“What is this vampire-shmampire?”
Ma handed me a glass of lactose-free milk as she asked this. I was expecting the milk to be accompanied by a “you better eat a proper breakfast” death-glare, but Ma seemed too tired to scold. There were circles under her caramel-colored eyes, and the normally tidy bouffant on her head was a bit lopsided.
“Oh, you know what a vampire is.” I bared my teeth, doing a bad impression of an old movie monster. “I vant to suck your blood.”
Baba shook his finger in mock jocularity. “A vampire is a second-rate monster, if you ask me. Now, a rakkhosh—that’s a monster with some chutzpah!” My father loved using expressions he learned from his customers. “Suck your blood? A rakkhosh will suck the very marrow from your bones and then use your finger as a toothpick!”
His laugh, which jiggled his paunchy belly as usual, seemed a little forced. While this all struck me as weird at the time, I just chalked it up to my parents’ baseline weirdness.
“My piece of the moon, my garland of moonbeams,” Ma began as she took my empty glass. “There is something …”
She was going to start in on the whole Indian princess routine, I knew it.
“Don’t worry about the vampire thing, Ma, it was just an idea.” I turned the front door handle, ready to jet. “I’m going to be late for school.”
“Kiranmala, wait,” a voice called, but I didn’t respond.
I stood on our porch, looking out over our totally bare front yard. The contrast between our rickety fixer-upper and all our neighbors’ McMansions hit me. Everyone else on the street had manicured lawns with pruned hedges and flower beds. Us? Barely skeletal hedges and raggedy trees. I blushed, remembering how Jovi had once asked if lawn maintenance was against our religion.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the school bus turn onto the street.
“Princess …” Baba called.
“In the name of the Garden State Parkway, how many times do I have to tell you guys?” I jogged down the front steps. “For the last time already, I am not a princess!”
Ma looked stricken and I wondered if the words had come out harsher than I intended.
The regret nipped at me, but I didn’t have time to make nice like a good daughter now. “Look, I have to go, okay?”
That was when I heard the bus door open behind me with a whoosh. I sensed more than saw the kids on the bus taking in my family scene—Baba in his ratty, too tight kurta; Ma in a blinding, bright yellow-and-green sari, her bare, ringed toes peeping out from beneath the frayed hem. I felt the heat of mixed emotions flood my cheeks. Why couldn’t they just be like everybody else?
I rushed to get on the bus. But in my hurry, I tripped in the snake ditch—the long, shallow trench that Baba kept dug around our yard to protect us from Parsippany’s nonexistent cobra population.
I could hear kids on the bus snickering and kept my head down as I took my seat. I only looked up as the school bus pulled away to see both my parents standing in the driveway. I couldn’t hear them, and through the thick pane of glass, their faces looked strange and distorted.
All day long, the guilt churned in my stomach. I couldn’t shake the memory of my parents’ anxious expressions. What had they wanted to tell me? Well, maybe this would convince them to let me have a cell phone, like every other twelve-year-old kid in the universe. I planned my argument all day at school with Zuzu, who was obsessed with languages and loved using long, complicated words to get her way.
“Mobile telecommunications are a critical component of modern society,” I rattled off as I opened the front door that afternoon. But I stopped mid-argument. The house was strangely still.
Ma and Baba never both worked on my birthday. At least one of them was usually waiting inside the door to ambush me with food and presents. Where were they?
I took off my boots and crossed into the kitchen, noticing the back door was propped open at an odd angle. I knew that the hinges were old, but this was ridiculous. One more item to add to the list of things that needed fixing. I shut it the best I could behind me, and stepped back into the house.
That’s when I noticed that Ma’s normally spotless kitchen was a mess. The kitchen chairs were this way and that, with one upside down near the door, like someone had knocked it over as they ran.
My heart started beating so loud, my head felt like a drum. I’d seen way too many television crime dramas not to think that maybe someone had broken in.
“Hello?” I called, my voice cracking. I eased a knife out of the countertop butcher block.
But as I took a quick turn around our small house, there was nothing else out of place. Even Ma’s small jewelry box was where it should be on her bedside dresser. I returned to the front hall, confused.
Where were my parents? How had they forgotten about my special day?
What I saw by the front door made me feel a little better. On a rickety folding table rested a covered tray of homemade rasagollas and sandesh with a note that read:
For the dear trick-or-treaters
(gluten-free, nut-free, and made with lactose-free milk obtained humanely from
free-range cows)
Classic! I laughed shakily, putting down the knife. I was letting my imagination get the best of me. Nothing could be wrong if my mother had remembered to make homemade Indian sweets for the neighborhood kids. It was one of her Halloween traditions. The problem was, cloth grocery bags and old pillowcases aren’t made to carry around the syrupy, round rasagollas or molasses-sweetened cakes of sandesh she handed out to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. But it would never have occurred to my parents to just give out store-bought candy. Another example of their overall cluelessness.
I was about to grab a sticky rasagolla myself when I spotted something else lying on the floor. A birthday card, half in and half out of an envelope. It was Baba’s typical sense of humor—a bright neon pink and sparkly card meant for a baby. On the front was, what else, a crown-wearing princess under the words Daughter, you’re 2! Only, Baba had taken a Sharpie and written a number 1 before the 2 so that it read 12. Har-dee-har. Again, typical Baba. But why was it on the floor like this? Wiping my syrupy fingers on my jeans, I picked it up.
Inside the card, under the words Have a Spark-a-licious birthday!, was a scrawled message, so unlike Ma’s normally precise handwriting.
Take heart, dear daughter.
We were hoping for the last dozen years that it would not come to pass. But it has happened—the magical spell protecting us all has been broken on this, your twelfth birthday. Forgive us for trying to shield you from the truth. Now there is too little time to explain.
Whatever you do, do not let any rakkhosh into the house. Trust the princes to keep you safe, but more importantly, trust yourself. We leave here some extra rupees and a moving map in case you find them of use.
But I beg you, do not try to find us. It is far too dangerous. We go now to that dark and terrible origin place where all spells meet their end.
(Oh, and make sure to take your gummy vitamins every morning.)
Darling piece of the moon, the first thing you must do is to find—
The note broke off there with a big, ugly inkblot, as if she’d been startled by something into stopping mid-sentence.
The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1) Page 1
