The Serpent's Secret: Chapters 25–33

The old rakkhoshi crone bent far down, and standing high on his toes, Neel gave her a gingerly kiss on her hairy cheek.

“Oh, boys, what has become of your Ai-Ma? Why do I still smell delectable meats?”

Returning the ruby to me, Ai-Ma grabbed us each in one of her gangly arms and drew us up to her chest, crooning, “Oh, my darling pom-poms, my shriveled beanpoles, my scrawny-crow grandbabies!”

Returning the ruby to me, Ai-Ma grabbed us each in one of her gangly arms and drew us up to her chest, crooning, “Oh, my darling pom-poms, my shriveled beanpoles, my scrawny-crow grandbabies!”

“Oh, we couldn’t ask for anything, Ai-Ma,” Neel protested, still rubbing the noxious stuff into her feet.

Where was he? Our diminutive yellow companion was nowhere to be seen.
Neel and I walked down a steep hill, all the while calling Tuntuni’s name.

The mist swirled around him, obscuring his features, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something really familiar about him.

Neel and I giggled from the back row like we were the classroom delinquents.

In fact, as the red giant ran, he wreaked havoc all around him.

On the garishly painted signboard, near the top, was the word:
DENGAR

Finally, after a slightly harrowing few minutes, I was at the top of the stones.

“Yeah, yeah,” I sputtered impatiently. Ma and Baba’s time was running out while Neel was pontificating. “Let’s move it along, haven’t got all night here. On a bit of a pre-apocalyptic deadline.”

I hardly had time to catch my breath, because then we were both being bombarded by boulders from the exploding well. Neel took the brunt of it, shielding me from the stones with his own body.

Wordlessly, Neel pointed at the dark sky, his face ashen.

It had putrid, moldy skin, open boils, and about six horns coming every which way out of his head—maybe some kind of homage to Einstein-ji, I wasn’t sure.

Of course, it also had the requisite fangs through which a more-than-requisite amount of drool was flowing.

Just as I had sliced through Lal’s scarf to free him from the demon on our front lawn, Ma sliced through the loose end of her sari, leaving the demon rug rat bereft and meal-less.

“Ai-Ma isn’t so old she can’t recognize a girl from a boy, or a prince from a pup,” the crone cackled. As she guffawed, her hairy cheeks puffed out in pleasure.

“It was your uncle Rahul, the stable master, who suggested that the Princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal might be dispatched to help you.”

Neel had just finished explaining the Queen’s unfortunate decision to eat Lal and Mati, and their subsequent transformation into inanimate objects.

The all-too-familiar voice echoed weirdly from within the unnatural torrent of water.

“Let them go!” Neel brandished his sword. Even in the dark cavern, it glinted with an inner light.

The Serpent King slithered into the room—his top half human, but his bottom half in his terrible serpentine form.

“Impudent demon-ling!” The Serpent King held up his hand, sending Neel’s sword clattering to the floor with a bolt of green lightning. “Did you actually think you could destroy my glorious kingdom and get away with it?”

The Serpent King waved a callous hand, mocking Naga’s snakey lisp. “Oh, shoot him, what do I care? You’d think those ssssseven ssssstupid heads would make him sssssmarter. But he let you get away last time, didn’t he?”

He writhed around within the glowing orb, his body twisting in unnatural contortions, as if he was being tortured.

He glowed an incandescent green, but then began to writhe and decay, his energy going from green to brown to gray to black.

As his power dissipated, so did the swirling orb holding Neel. Neel was free—panting, eyes closed, on the ground. But free.

She slipped something strong and yet pliable in my hands—my bow, magically intact.

“I think I’m retiring as a demonic pacifist.” Neel’s teeth flashed. “I’m going to kick some rakkhosh baby butt!”

The magic bow vibrated in my hands as I volleyed arrow after arrow in the demon’s direction.

Unfortunately, we already had. Because, in a puff of acrid -smelling smoke, who should be standing there but...“Ma?” Neel yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

“Bogli’s a girl?” The odd revelation seemed to take the anger right out of Neel’s sails.

“Do you have a problem with that?” The Queen crossed her taloned hands over her chest, her nostrils spewing flames. “Have I raised some kind of demonic sexist? A purveyor of rakkhosh patriarchy?”

“Yes, yes, best friends since childhood, friendship knows no class, race or creed, blah blah blah. We don’t like it, but we suppose that would be fine.” He waved his hands vaguely in the direction of the golden and silver spheres. “Just bring our boy back to us!”