The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,46

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