“What is it?” I ask.
“You were outside without a coat?”
“It’s not that cold,” I say defensively.
“You’re going to catch cold if you don’t wear a coat.”
“I’ll wear it next time.”
She shakes her head. “Your mother was the same way. Never listening to me.”
“I’m not like her,” I say sharply. “I’ll wear one next time.”
Grandma picks up on my attitude. “You think you’re so different, but you’re not.”
“I would never leave my family,” I protest. I automatically reach for the turquoise pendant around my neck, but I can’t touch it, because now I’m wearing a puffy orange jacket, zipped all the way to my chin. When did I put that on?
Another shout from the living room, this one in triumph. The Lobos must have scored.
I fan my face, feeling hot, because now I’ve got another coat on top of the orange jacket. This one is black-and-red plaid. Two coats, and I can barely move my arms. Plus, I’m starting to sweat.
“Uh, Grandma…I’m having some trouble here.”
“Of course you are. Because you’re just like her. Your mother was so headstrong. Never listened. I told her not to get married so young and have babies.”
Whoa, Grandma’s never said that before, and for a minute, I’m distracted from my coat dilemma. “Really?”
“But she loved your dad. Loved you and little Mac, too, so she had to go.” Grandma drops a freshly peeled potato in the bowl. “Life has a way of messing up all your plans,” she tells me. “Your mom had plans, too, and see how that worked out. It’ll be the same for you. So you better wear a coat.”
“I think I have enough!” Because now I’m wearing three coats, the last a thick tan canvas Carhartt like my dad wears to chop wood. Sweat is dripping into my eyes, and I’m trying to unbutton or unzip all my coats to get to my pendant, but I have mittens on, too, and I can’t get a grip on anything. “Help!” I gasp.
My grandma just keeps peeling her potatoes, looking serene. “Listen to me, Nizhoni,” she says. “You can never have too many coats.”
“Nizhoni,” Mac says, punching me in the shoulder, “wake up! I think there’s something wrong with the train.”
I slowly come to, yawning and stretching and shivering from the cold. I rub my eyes and try to shake the fuzzy feeling from my head. That’s right—we’re on a train, running from a monster. I can’t believe I even fell asleep at all.
Then again, I’ve always been pretty good at sleeping through big events. Once I missed a tornado warning when we were visiting some relatives in Texas, and I’ve never quite made it to the ball drop on that New Year’s Rockin’ Eve special. Maybe my ancestral power isn’t monster sensing at all, but snoozing. Which would be just perfect. Mac gets water magic and spicy-food eating, and I get the power to nap during a crisis.
“Nizhoni!” Mac repeated. “Did you hear me?”
“Stop yelling. What is it?”
“Something’s wrong with the train. It’s taking us up the side of a mountain!”
And I’m awake! I push myself up and look out the window. The otherwise-normal Amtrak train is running steadily forward on the track, but in a totally not normal direction: vertical. And it’s not just any mountain—it’s huge, with a snow-capped peak. In fact, it’s starting to snow outside our window, delicate white flakes falling softly around us to blanket the desert floor. No wonder I dreamed about coats. The rest of the dream I’m not so sure about, but it makes me miss my grandma and her dogs.
“We must have gotten on the wrong train,” I say. “We’ll have to find the conductor and ask to switch at the next station.”
“Uh, that might prove difficult,” Davery says. He’s sitting up, yawning and stretching, as if he, too, took a nap. And I notice Mac has sleep boogers in the corners of his eyes. We all must have fallen asleep. “There’s no one on this train but us.”
“What?!” I twist around. Where’s the confused middle-aged woman? And I distinctly remember Davery thumping someone in the head with his backpack as he pushed his way down the crowded aisle. But now all the seats are vacant.
I turn to look the other way, toward the front of the train. Completely empty, too.
We’re all alone.
“Do you think Mr. Charles and his monster crew did this?” Mac whispers fearfully.
“I should think not!” comes a grumbly and muffled voice. “I did it. But no need to worry. We are headed in the right direction.”
I recognize it. “Mr. Yazzie?” Relief bubbles up in my belly as the horned toad from my dream crawls out of my backpack and settles on the seat next to me. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you!”
“Yes, dear child. I am pleased to see you again, too.”
“Again?” Mac says, mouth dropped open like a sea bass. “Since when do you know a talking lizard, Nizhoni?”
“Amazing,” murmurs Davery.
“So you both can see him?” I ask.
“And hear him,” Davery says, nodding.
If Mac and Davery can see Mr. Yazzie, then he couldn’t have only existed in my dream, if it was a dream at all.
“Mac, can you pinch me?”
He leans over the seat and punches my arm.
“Ow! I said ‘pinch,’ not ‘punch’!” But at least I’m sure that I’m not dreaming. “I know this is going to sound weird, but Mr. Yazzie used to be a stuffed animal, my stuffed animal, but he came alive because horned toads are natural helpers and he knew I needed help.”
“At your service,” he croaks.
“Amazing,” Davery says again.
“As for the talking,” Mr. Yazzie continues, “all animals can talk. It’s just that they speak a language most humans don’t bother to learn.”
“But we didn’t learn it, either…” I say.
“Ah, but your ancestral powers have awakened. This gives you the ability to know all kinds of things that were perhaps once forgotten, including the language of animals. Now allow me to introduce myself,” he says, turning to Mac. “My name is Theodous Alvin Yazzie.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mac says, extending his pinkie politely. Mr. Yazzie rests a claw briefly against his fingernail in a human-to-horned-toad handshake.
Davery also holds his pinkie out for a shake. “Ancestral powers, you say? I don’t know about that in my case, but this isn’t much stranger than anything else that’s happened today.”
“Now that introductions are out of the way, we must get down to business.”
“What business is that?” Mac asks.
Sometimes my brother has the attention span of a gnat. “Monster fighting!”
“Congratulations, Nizhoni and Marcus. You are the descendants of Changing Woman and have been gifted the powers of her sons, the Hero Twins!” Mr. Yazzie lifts a small claw and throws a handful of what looks like gold confetti into the air. I watch the teeny bits of colored paper rain down on our train seats. Mr. Yazzie pulls a tiny party horn from somewhere and blows it. It makes an unhappy sound.