“Where?” I turned my head, pretending to believe him, but turned back fast enough to see the dragon boy’s hands on the two goblets. He’d obviously switched them yet again, but I didn’t let on that I knew that.
“Okay, drink up!” he said with a totally creepy smile. His sharp teeth glistened in the winter light.
I picked up my soda and made a little “cheers” motion, and then started to drink. I noticed that he didn’t put his lips to his goblet until I did. And then he downed his Thumpuchi with one long, loud slurp.
“Hah, you fool!” he yelled as soon as our goblets were down. “I switched the sodas when you weren’t looking! It’s such a classic mistake!”
“Oh, really?” I wiped my sticky lips with the back of my hand.
“Yes, the first being never get involved in a firefight with a bunch of plucky villagers who own a dragon-piercing crossbow! But only slightly well-known is this—never go in against a mythical Norse dragon masquerading as a middle schooler when death is on the line!” Nidhoggr laughed so hard, he almost choked.
When he fell off his stump, I looked over casually. “Hey, are you all right, dude?”
“Oh, my stomach feels terrible!” the dragon boy moaned. Then his face grew downright alarmed. “Oh no! I think I need an outhouse! And fast!”
“I’ll tell you where the park is with the public bathrooms if you untie these roots!” I said helpfully. I could hear his stomach churning even from where I was, loud and obnoxious like a washing machine.
“Fine, fine!” Nidhoggr moaned. He was doubled over, clutching his stomach, but he waved his hands, instructing Yggdrasil to let me go. “Now tell me where the park is!”
“How about you let my friends go too?” I said, studying my cuticles with an air of calm.
“Ohhhhh!” groaned Nidhoggr, clutching his stomach and bending over in two. “You drive a hard bargain, snake princess! Your father would be proud!”
With another wave of his hand, there was a groaning and popping noise, and the tree trunk popped open, depositing a dirty but otherwise okay-looking Jovi and Zuzu.
“What about Lal?” I was starting to feel a little bad about how miserable Nidhoggr looked, but comforted myself with the fact that the “poison” obviously wasn’t “poison” at all, and while he might need to live on the potty for a couple days, the dragon would eventually be fine.
“Oh, all right! All right!” yelped the green and moaning creature boy. With a flick of Ned’s hand, Yggdrasil deposited a very dirty and very confused-looking prince on the frozen ground. Lalkamal looked around, yawning and rubbing his eyes, as if he’d been asleep for a very long time.
“Lal!” I yelled, running over to my friend and helping him to his feet.
“Just Kiran?” Lal looked around wonderingly at the icy landscape. “Where are we?”
“New Jersey—I’ll explain everything!” I promised.
“I did what you asked! I brought him up!” Ned growled, now doubled over in pain. “And now you have to show me the little dragons’ room!”
Obligingly, I pointed in the direction of the public park. As Nidhoggr ran down the street, desperately holding on to the back of his pants, Jovi burst out, “How did you manage that without getting sick yourself?” Her face was streaked with mud, but her eyes were all sparkly with interest.
“We could hear everything from inside the tree,” added Zuzu as she pulled clumps of frozen earth out of her hair.
“I put the Bhuvanprash in both cups,” I explained. “I’ve spent a lifetime building up my immunity. It’s not poison, but boy, it’ll mess your stomach up good if you’re not used to it!”
Zuzu and Jovi laughed, high-fiving me. Lal looked at all three of us in confusion and wonder.
Being trapped in a tree so long had left Lal confused, shaken, and cold. Plus, he had a wicked twisted ankle from when the ghost had originally tripped him, before stealing his identity. So the first thing we did was help him limp up Jovi’s driveway and into her warm mudroom. Jovi threw a blanket over Lal’s shoulders, and Zuzu gave him a big glass of water. Jovi’s black lab Loki tried to get in on the act too by jumping up on Lal and giving him big-tongued licks all over his face.
Even though Lal was out of it, I expected Jovi and Zuzu to be peppering me with questions—about the Kingdom Beyond, about Nidhoggr, about how Lal had been captured in another dimension by a ghost but held in a Norse tree in this dimension. I wasn’t sure about that last one myself, to be honest, but after their recent life-threatening experience, I was certainly expecting Zuzu and Jovi to be demanding some answers. What I couldn’t understand was why they weren’t.
That’s when I noticed that my friends were each giggling and staring at Lal, making up stupid excuses to touch his sleeve or brush the tree dirt from his hair. Their voices were like three octaves higher than usual and I kept trying to signal to them to cut it out, but they both avoided meeting my fury eyeballs. It’s not like I couldn’t understand. Even I was seriously dumbstruck at Lal’s movie-star handsomeness when I first met him, so I guess I got what they were feeling. But they were acting like such total dorks. It was like they were seeing half-naked fat cupids floating around above the prince’s head or something.
“I really like that jacket!” gushed Zuzu, running her finger down Lal’s arm. “Did you, like, get it at the Kingdom Beyond mall? You guys do have malls in your dimension, right?”
“What kind of conditioner do you use? Your hair smells, like, really good,” babbled Jovi, taking a big embarrassing sniff of Lal’s head. “I mean, a little like the inside of a tree trunk, but also really good.”
“Here, rest your leg,” said Zuzu, shoving Lal in the direction of a bench. “Sit here!”
“No, sit on this chair!” Jovi insisted, pulling in a kitchen chair. “It’s much more comfortable.”
“Thank you for all your kind attentions, ladies,” said Lal, who looked exhausted, but still somehow turned on his hundred-watt smile for my friends as they pushed and prodded at him.
“So there’s a lot I have to tell you all,” I said, hoping it would stop Jovi and Zuzu from making fools of themselves. Quickly I explained how the Raja had disappeared and Neel had been crowned (Lal gasped), how I suspected Sesha was at the bottom of smushing various story lines together (Zuzu and Jovi gasped), and how Stheno and Nidhoggr had therefore escaped from their Greek and Norse stories and appeared in New Jersey (everyone gasped, which made Loki howl). The one thing I didn’t go into, though, was how I was worried that the wormhole might have landed me in the wrong membrane dimension. I didn’t think I could bring myself to explain how my parents were acting, or how, in my real version of reality, Jovi and I were enemies, and Zuzu and I friends.
Lal looked thoughtful as he petted Loki’s head and nose. “Then the first thing we must do, Just Kiran, is to get back home to the Kingdom Beyond. But how? Are there any automated wormhole makers here in New Jersey?”
“Automated wormhole makers?” echoed Zuzu in a goofy voice, still acting like her eyeballs had been replaced by hearts.