I shook the envelope, and out fell a small wad of colorful, unfamiliar bills—the rupees Ma had mentioned. But the other thing in the envelope wasn’t a map at all—just a yellowed piece of blank paper.
That was it. They had always been odd, but now my parents had totally gone off the deep end. I called their cell phones and the phone at the store. When I got only voicemail, I started to really panic. If this was some kind of a bizarre Halloween trick, it wasn’t funny. All that stuff about princes and rakkhosh—what planet did Ma and Baba think we were living on?
I felt myself start to tear up, and bit the inside of my cheek to stop the waterworks from spilling out. Along with dressing and acting in ways that were unnoticeable, it was another of my self-imposed rules for making it through middle school. There was no crying. Not ever. Tears were like a door to a scary room inside myself I’d most definitely rather keep closed.
I took a big breath and tried to calm down. Weeping is for wimps.
I was about to call Zuzu at her parents’ restaurant when the doorbell began to ring nonstop. It was the little kids—dressed as fairies and animals and superheroes—out with their parents before it got dark. In a daze, my head still swirling, I handed out the messy sweets.
“Gee, thanks!” said a little boy dressed as Robin Hood. “This is a lot better than the dentist lady next door. She’s giving out toothbrushes!”
I shut the door with shaking hands, my heart tight in my chest. Dusk was settling onto the neighborhood. Where were my parents? What had happened to them? Why had they told me not to try and find them?
Just then, the doorbell rang again.
Standing on the front porch were the strangest trick-or-treaters I’d ever seen: two boys, about my age, maybe a little older. They looked like brothers. The smiling one was so handsome he almost melted my eyeballs. The other one was taller and broader, and looked a little bored. The funny thing was the way they were both dressed—in flowing shirts and pants in the same sparkling fabrics as Ma’s saris. They were wearing silk turbans and shoes with curling-up toes. Each had what looked like a jewel-encrusted sword tucked into the sash around his waist. The handsome boy’s sash and turban were red, and the taller boy’s were blue.
“Blast you, little brother; she’s probably been eaten already,” the boy in blue was saying as I opened the door. “You just had to stop for that Giant Gulpie, didn’t you?”
“That Giant Gulpie is the only reason we made it here at all,” argued his brother. “You never want to ask for directions, you stubborn rhinoceros.”
But I didn’t have time to make sense of all that, because at that moment, the boy in red looked straight at me with his movie-star eyes.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those boy-crazy goobers whose rooms are wallpapered with posters of floppy-haired boy bands. And I don’t fill my school notebooks with my initials and the initials of some cute boy surrounded by a goofy heart. It’s not that Zuzu and I don’t have a few celebrities whose pictures we like to look up on websites like Cute Boys Do Dental Hygiene Too. (I mean, who doesn’t like to see their favorite TV star flossing his teeth for the cameras?) But until that moment when I opened the front door, I’d never met someone so handsome in real life.
“Are you ready, my lady?” the boy must’ve been asking, but something had gone all wonky with my hearing, so he just sounded like one of the teachers in a Peanuts cartoon—“Waa waa waa waa waa.” Boy, was he good-looking. I felt a shiver, the kind I might describe in a note to Zuzu with little asterisks around it. *shiver*
The boy looked at my dark jeans and black sweatshirt, furrowing his brows. Not that it made him any less pretty. “Brother Neel, I don’t believe the lady is ready.”
Then the other guy—whose name was Neel?—reached out for the tray of sweets in my hand. He popped at least two rasagollas in his mouth, not even worrying about the sticky sauce dripping down his chin. Gross.
“You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat,’” I said primly, then immediately wanted to kick myself. Two cute boys come to my door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat’”? How uncool was I?
“It must be like a costume, Lal.” Neel winked while licking syrup off his fingers. “No one wears boring clothes like that for real.”
An uncomfortable heat rushed over my face. “What are you, the fashion police?”
Even though I amazed myself by coming up with a smart answer in time, the tall boy’s statement stung. Here was another rich kid with fancy clothes, I thought, making me feel bad about what I could afford to wear. And what about them—Lal and Neel? Weren’t those the Bengali words for red and blue? And they were dressed according to their names? How fashion forward was that?
When Neel reached out to pick up more sweets, I slapped his hand away. Hard.
“Yo, easy, Prin-cess!” The way he said it, all sarcastic and dragged out, made me think he was making fun of me. Obviously, I was the furthest thing from a princess in his mind.
I felt a pricking behind my eyes and I blinked the moisture away like crazy. Then, as if the atmosphere was reflecting my mood, the air became filled with a putrid, garbage-y smell. What was that?
I turned my back on Neel and his mocking eyes, and appealed to the handsome Lal. “Am I ready? Am I ready for what?” I put my hand on the door.
But the boy in red didn’t answer. Instead, he took out his sword—which suddenly didn’t look like a costume sword at all. It looked shiny. And sharp. Before I could react, he grabbed my wrist and tried to yank me out of the house toward him.
Now, if I wasn’t as streetwise as I am (I’ve been to Manhattan five times and ridden the subway twice), I might have made the mistake of thinking this was some kind of dream come true. But I’m a Jersey girl, and Jersey girls are no dummies. I knew perfectly well that no matter how handsome someone is, you can’t let them start grabbing at you. Seriously, I’ve seen a lot of made-for-TV movies in my time, and those serial killers are always super good-looking.
“Get off me!” I said in my loudest anti-attacker voice. Every muscle and nerve in my body felt taut—ready to fight. I shook him off, and pulled myself back into the house. I weighed the serving tray in my hand, ready to clobber him in his gorgeous head if I needed to.
“That, my dear lady,” Lal finally said. “Are you ready for that?” He pointed at something behind me.
It was then that I realized that Lal wasn’t the one I had to worry about.
Someone in a snarling monster costume had slammed through the half-open kitchen door. The creature was at least ten feet tall, with warty green-black skin, enormous horns and fangs, and beady eyes that squinted as if it couldn’t see very well in the light. It drooled a stream of thick saliva on Ma’s clean floor. The costume was freakishly good. Too good. My hand went loose and a bunch of sweets slid to the floor. Neel grabbed the falling tray before it crashed down.
My heart hammered so loudly in my ears, Lal’s next words came from miles away.
“It’s a rakkhosh, my lady! Come for tricks, I fear, not treats!”
A rakkhosh. A rakkhosh? Not somebody in a costume, but a real demon—straight out of one of Baba’s folktales? Right here, in my kitchen, in Parsippany, New Jersey?
I tried to scream, but the room had gone all wickety-wockety, like one of those paintings of melting clocks. My bones were molasses.
The monster crashed blindly around the kitchen, ripping off the refrigerator door with its razor-sharp nails, crushing the cabinets with its huge feet. It was kind of hunched over, but its horns gouged long holes in the ceiling, and plaster flaked down on its already beady eyes.
“My parents told me not to let a rakkhosh in the house,” I heard myself squeak.
The demon was tossing back dinner plates like they were pieces of popcorn. It then started chomping on the still-plugged-in toaster, making sparks fly everywhere.
“Hate to break it to you, but it’s too late now!” Neel took out his
sword too, but he looked less worried than his brother. He filled his pockets with the sweets that I’d dropped on the floor.
I barely had time to grab my birthday card, with the money and map, before the brothers shoved me out of the house. The last thing I saw before they slammed the front door behind them was the demon emptying my fruit-flavored gummy vitamins into its ginormous mouth.
Finally, I shrieked.
“Oh, man, my mom is going to kill me!”
Things got seriously weirder after that. I ran out of the house, my feet barely shoved into my untied boots. The first thing I saw were two winged horses standing in a corner of the front lawn, snuffling at the few lone strands of grass Baba hadn’t killed. There was a medium-sized white one with snow-colored wings and a larger, dangerous-looking black one with feathers the color of a raven. Their wings were muscular and wide, sprouting right out where you’d imagine their shoulders would be. Both horses pawed the ground near Baba’s snake ditch. They whinnied nervously. Apparently, they didn’t like snakes either.
Some little trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk gaped at the winged horses, giggling and pointing, but their parents ignored the animals—as if the horses had some kind of grown-ups-can’t-see-me spell on them. Even as the adults sauntered by with their little ghosties, firefighters, and goblins in hand, a group of high schoolers dressed as punk-zombie-rockers stopped in front of the house to squint at the winged horses, blinking as if they weren’t really sure what they were looking at.
“Wicked horse costume, man!” a boy with mascara and a nose ring shouted as we came rushing out of the house. “Hey, who’s in there?” he yelled into the white horse’s nose.
“Unhand our horses, sir!” Lal yelled as Nose Ring tried to pull one of the midnight feathers off the stallion’s wings.
The pack of costumed boys broke out laughing. “Check out the loser! Look at that getup! Fresh off the boat!”
Lal stopped in front of the boys, growing as red as his turban. “You uncouth hyenas!”
“Enough already with the posh accent!” I thought I heard Neel mutter. In a louder voice, he called, “Let it go, Lal!” Neel and I hadn’t stopped running, and now he shoved me onto the back of the black horse, which snorted and shifted under me. “We’ve got more important things to worry about right now!”
The crashing sounds coming from the house were getting louder. For a second, I thought about how upset Ma would be at the mess when she came home. But then I remembered I had no idea where she and Baba were. Had the rakkhosh taken them before I got there? What was it that Ma wrote? Something about a protective spell being broken on my birthday? Was all this really happening? My stomach clenched, and I felt my tear ducts doing something suspicious, until I reminded myself: Blubbering is for babies.
Lal put away his sword and rolled up his sleeves. He circled Nose Ring with his fists raised, like an old-fashioned boxer. “We are the princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal—guests in your land from the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers. You have insulted us, and I must ask for satisfaction.”
Princes? Ma’s note said something about trusting princes. The truth was, I guess I’d already decided to trust the boys—right after I’d figured out they probably weren’t serial killers. Why else would I be sitting on the back of a winged horse, waiting for Lal to finish his duel with a teenage zombie?
The horse under me whinnied and stamped its feet, and I was grateful that Neel had its reigns firmly in hand. But Lal wasn’t paying either of us any attention.
“You are unarmed, so I challenge you to fisticuffs! Hand-to-hand combat!”
Lal’s dark eyes glinted at his opponent, as if he had nothing better to do than fight a mascara-wearing high schooler. As handsome as he was, I had to admit, Lal wasn’t the most practical person I’d ever met. And why did he talk like an old-fashioned hero when his brother didn’t? It was like he was playing some movie version of a prince. I almost expected a little glint of light to cheesily spark off his front tooth. Like: *ching*
“Hello? Could we move it along? Being chased by a demon here?” I muttered. Neel gave me a sideways glance.
“Haoo, maoo, khaoo!” The crashing sounds were louder now, and I could hear the demon’s cries very close to the front door of the house. The horses skittered and neighed, and I held on as tightly as I could, but kept my attention on Lal and his opponents.
“Man, that’s a wicked scary haunted-house tape!” Some of the high school boys looked nervous and started backing off.
Only Nose Ring stayed. He hacked and spit at Lal’s feet. The goober hung on a lone blade of grass, shimmering like a disgusting jewel.
“I demand satisfaction!” Lal yelled. He circled the boy, his fists still up. Despite how ridiculous he was being, anger only made Lal more hair-meltingly handsome. While I got my fill of Lal-flavored eye candy, Neel swung himself up on the ever more agitated black horse.
“Hold tight,” he ordered over his shoulder. “I bet you don’t know how to ride and I don’t want you rolling off and getting pancaked.”
My skin prickled at Prince Neel being so close. Not just because he was a boy, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever sat that close to a boy, but because he was an obnoxious boy. A boy who thought he was all that and a packet of samosas.
“Why can’t I ride with Lal? I bet he’s more of a gentleman!”
“Oh, sure, he’s more of a gentleman, and better at being royal too.” Neel raised a dark eyebrow. “But you better believe I’m the better rider.”
Uck! Obnoxious and an egomaniac! I was about to zing off a good response, when I heard a cracking noise—like an iceberg breaking off a glacier.
I looked up just in time to see the entire wall around my front door collapse. The horse flapped its wings and bucked in fear. I had no choice but to hang on to Neel’s waist for dear life.
“Time to go, little bro!” Neel hollered, barely keeping the animal on the ground.
The rakkhosh pushed through the wall of my house as if it were tissue paper and held one of the pillars from the front porch in its hand. Bricks and mortar fell on the demon’s shoulders, but it brushed them away like raindrops. When its beady eyes finally focused on the far end of the lawn, the demon lumbered in our direction, the pillar raised like a club over its head. Each step made the ground shake.
“Mommy!” Nose Ring was halfway down the street, running at full speed behind his already disappeared crew.
To my left, I heard a thin, high-pitched voice. Oh no!
“Look at the scary monster costume, Daddy!” A little mermaid approached the house with her suit-wearing father.
“Run!” I shouted at the dad, since I was pretty sure he couldn’t see the rakkhosh.
The father stood frozen, as if he wanted to run but wasn’t sure why. I shouted at him again, and by some instinct, he grabbed his daughter and started sprinting down the sidewalk. The girl’s smiling face bobbed over her father’s back, her tiara hanging crookedly from her head. “But I want to see the monster eat the prince, Daddy!”
Lal was paying no attention to the rakkhosh that was gaining on him by the second. Instead, he shook his fist at Nose Ring’s departing form.
“Run, you lily-livered lamprey! Run from my wrath!”
Even with a looming demon, a near-eaten neighbor girl, a spooked horse, and a rude riding companion on my mind, I noticed that some of Lal’s dark curly locks had come loose from his turban. *sigh*
The advancing rakkhosh was drooling so much goo from its mouth now that strings of the frothy stuff were sticking to the tree stumps and bare bushes it passed. It eyed Lal, licking its lips.
“Dirty socks and stinky feet!” the demon screeched. “I smell royal human meat!” Bristle-like hairs stood up on its arms and nose.
Wow, rakkhosh really do rhyme! I thought in passing, before my mind became more appropriately preoccupied with my imminent death and dismemberment.
Handsome or not, this royal wack job was going to get us all killed. Trust t
he princes, Ma had said, but we’d all have to survive first.
“Come on, Lal!” I yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”
The white horse was just as scared as the black one. Its eyes were big and its breath came out in audible whooshes through its nose. But it wasn’t going anywhere without Lal. The loyal animal opened its wings and took a few steps toward its master. It shook its mane, as if asking him to get on its back. The black horse bearing Neel and me shuddered, dashing this way and that, barely under Neel’s control.
The demon’s black tongue lolled from between his fangs. “How he’ll holler, how he’ll groan, when I eat the mortal prince’s bones!”
“Seriously?” Neel mused. “That’s the best meter he could come up with?”
The horses whinnied in fear and warning.
“Lal!” I screamed. The rakkhosh’s fingernails were inches from his head.
But just then, Prince Lal did something fairly high on the Richter scale of stupidity. He launched himself off a tree trunk, did an Olympic-level double back somersault in the air, and landed on the demon’s head, gripping its two horns like motorcycle handle bars.
“Me thinks, sirrah, you need to go on a diet!” Lal announced. He tried to stab the monster with his sword, but the rakkhosh’s thick skin stopped the blade from going in too far.
“This prince is like a little fly!” cried the demon, swatting at Lal. “Me thinks it’s time for him to die!”
“Aren’t you going to go help him?” I yelled at Neel. He just sat there in front of me, watching the spectacle.
“Aw shucks, he’s just showing off.” Neel reached into his pocket and scarfed down a couple more of Ma’s rasagollas.
I shrieked as the monster’s fist managed to connect with Lal’s head. The prince slumped forward, unconscious, and then began to slip off the rakkhosh’s neck. Only his red sash, which had gotten tangled up in one of the demon’s horns, saved him from crashing down to the ground. Prince Lalkamal hung upside down from the thrashing monster, his perfect face deathly still.
The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1) Page 2
