The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,37

outstretched. I held the garbage lid up like a shield to keep her claws and hair and teeth from me. At the same time, I kept waving the flaming hockey stick at her around the side of my makeshift shield.

“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