“Ow! You made me break a nail!” yelled the ex–Principal Chen, her wiggling teeth and giant mouth making it hard to understand her. “And I just got a manicure!”
“Ned!” I yelled again as I pushed the metal lid out against the Gorgon’s body. Her flailing snake-hairs and tentacle-teeth snuck around the top and sides of it, snapping at me, taunting me. “Some help, like, now would be perfect!” I looked up long enough to see that the blond boy had finally nocked an arrow in my bow and was aiming at Principal-My-Teeth-Are-Alive.
I held up the still flaming hockey stick. “Here!” I shouted.
“Flaming arrows coming right up!” yelled Ned. “Princess, you might want to take some cover!”
“UGH! Flaming arrows!” shrieked Stheno. “I hate those!”
Ned’s eagle flew down close enough so that he could light each arrow from the flaming hockey stick before he shot it at the Gorgon. Where the flaming arrows hit her, they burned her skin, hair, and teeth, making parts of her begin to shrivel like pieces of burning paper.
Okay, so Ned was probably more than an ordinary sixth grader. But then again, so was I. I gave a loud whoop of victory. To be perfectly honest, the only other person I’d felt this sense of heroic teamwork with was Neel. It felt strange to experience the same emotion with a totally different boy.
“You tween troublemaker!” the Gorgon groaned, trying to hold the now-falling-apart parts of her body in place. “You Norse nincompoop! Why couldn’t you just leave this dimension thief to me? You’ll pay for this, you Scandinavian show-off!”
And with that, Stheno-slash-Principal-Chen seemed to disintegrate into a pile of ash on the snow. Before I could even fully put down my garbage pail lid of a shield and investigate, the eagle swooped down, landing on top of one of the giant dumpsters. The force of its beating wings made a swirl of ice and snow dance all around us, and the Gorgon’s gray ashes caught the breeze and floated away.
“Well, thank goodness for that!” I tossed the burned-out hockey stick and garbage lid aside with a clatter, then rounded on Ned. “Who are you, anyway? She seemed to know you!”
“Aw, shucks. I’m just a guy.” He shrugged, turning the force of his smile in my direction. “Just a guy saving a girl from a Gorgon.”
“Saving!” I sputtered. “How about following her suggestions and plan, a little late, but still successfully while she got the stuffing beat out of her?”
“That doesn’t have quite as romantic a ring to it,” he said with a heart-stopping grin. I was going to snap off a fast response, but as he tossed me the bow and still-full magic quiver, the spells my moon mother had filled them with seemed to radiate into my skin, soothing me. Okay, yes, things were a little bit off and I just had to fight a monster disguised as my middle school principal. And yes, Ned had taken a while, but he’d come through with the flaming arrows in the end. Plus, I was alive, so that was a thing.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said sincerely. “But seriously, you owe me some kind of explanation. Where are you really from?”
“Don’t you of all people find that question annoying?” Ned asked, his blond brows arching above his perfect eyes. His eagle kind of arched its nonexistent eyebrows too, so they both wore the same expression. “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?”
The mocking way that Ned asked these questions made me give a short laugh. “Yeah, I guess I do find those questions annoying, but I don’t mean it that way. I know you’re not just a regular sixth grader from Parsippany. So who are you?”
Instead of answering, Ned got off the bird’s back and walked toward me. He reached his hand out toward my ear, like he had before. This time, though, instead of pulling out any loose change, he simply tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.
“Hey there,” he said in kind of a growly way. He was looking at me so weirdly, so intently, I had two totally conflicting feelings: (1) totally gooey and flattered and (2) like I wanted to punch him in the nose.
I decided to go with the second emotion. I mean, who did this guy think he was? Plus, I was a Jersey girl, and so I had a reputation to uphold as not so easy to impress. “Get your hands off me,” I snapped, even as I felt my cheeks heating up and heart thumping kind of offbeat.
Ned didn’t have a chance to answer, though, because just then the cafeteria double doors behind us banged open, and somebody yelled, “You heard her, creep—back off!” while someone else cried, “En garde!”
I whipped around to see Jovi and Zuzu in fighting stances, their fencing foils drawn and pointing at Ned.
“You giant jerk!” Jovi yelled. She turned panicky eyes toward me. “Kiran, are you okay?”
“Ladies, relax! Relax! I think you have the wrong idea …” Ned began, reaching out an arm like he was going to wrap it around my shoulders.
“Get away from her!” Zuzu flourished her sword in Ned’s direction. “Now!”
“Hey there, ho, there.” Ned put his hands up and backed away a little from Zuzu’s pointed foil. The sword made little zipping sounds through the air as she waved it at him.
“What did he do to your face?” Jovi pointed at the cuts bleeding hotly on my injured cheeks. I touched my sore jaw. I was definitely going to be black-and-blue there.
“Enough talking, Jovi, move aside so I can cut this patriarchal pig to ribbons!” Zuzu yelled. “How dare you hurt her?”
As weirdly unnerving as Ned was, I knew I had to stop Zuzu from attacking the guy. “Hang on, I know what this looks like, but Ned didn’t hurt me, he was helping me. It was actually …” I gestured to the pile of ashes, but then I realized Principal Chen was no longer exactly a piece of material evidence. I’d have to explain that part later. “Someone else,” I concluded, adding, “Wait, what are you two doing here?”
“We heard you were in trouble and that you needed help!” Jovi explained. “I mean, I was surprised, I admit, to have a gecko talk to me at first, but I figured it must be an emergency for you to send it.”
It was only then that I saw what was sitting on her shoulder. Or rather, who. It was Tiktiki One, looking all pleased with itself as it absentmindedly boing-boinged its tongue in and out of its mouth. Oh man, the lizard-gram had totally malfunctioned. I had sent Tiktiki One off to get Mati and Neel, not Jovi and Zuzu. But I was really touched by how worried both of them looked.
“I’m okay, but thanks for coming.” Even if Ned hadn’t been the one to attack me, I was relieved Jovi and Zuzu had come right when he was getting all suave and weird.
“If you say so.” Jovi lowered her sword, but she took a little “fake-out” punch-step toward Ned, who gamely backed up. “But watch it, pretty boy!”
“Do I even want to know what’s going on with that giant bird?” Zuzu pointed her sword at the eagle.
“Let’s just say it’s been an interesting day,” I sighed.
After Jovi and Zuzu had finally lowered their fencing foils, Ned raised an eyebrow at me. “Shouldn’t you stop fooling around and be getting on with your heroic agenda?”
“Heroic agenda?” I repeated, my teeth chattering from the cold.