all.”
I don’t know if it was the magic of the jewels or the magic of all our interconnections or even if it was some otherworldly magic only possessed by grandmothers, but Ai-Ma flung us all out of the light, throwing our dizzy and crumpled bodies to the floor. As she did so, the room exploded in a shower of golden and silver sparks. We were ourselves again, parts of stars no more.
But when I looked for the gentle old rakkhoshi, all I saw was the glowing white orb of light, raining gold and platinum upon us all. On the floor beneath where she had been were the Chintamoni and Poroshmoni Stones in their original size and form. I picked them up and tucked them into my pack for safekeeping.
The magical gold and platinum rain now pouring over us was an alchemist’s dream. It coated our skin, clothes, hair—making everyone glitter and glow. The precious metal soothed the burns where I’d been hurt by Sesha’s magical orb. They changed the color of my hair and skin back to normal. The metallic rain acted as a powerful healing medicine on the Rakkhoshi Rani too, bringing her back from her near death, giving her form, healing her mangled arm. And as she straightened up from the floor, an expression of blood-violent hatred on her face, I saw, for the first time in my life, my bio father the Serpent King actually look afraid.
“Now, Pinki,” he cooed, “you don’t want to do anything rash.”
Pinki? I thought. Neel’s mom’s name is Pinki? But there were more important things to worry about right now. Like the TV screens and cameras, which all seemed to have been blown to smithereens by the force of the neutron star explosion. Like the one person who was missing from our midst.
“Ai-Ma,” Neel said frantically. “What happened to Ai-Ma?”
The world was blurry through the precious metals on my eyelashes, and the tears in my eyes. I watched everything happening as if from very far away. Watching but not watching, caring but not caring. All I could think of was the sweet old rakkhoshi who had sacrificed herself to save us all.
“Don’t you ‘now, Pinki’ me!” In the meantime, the Demon Queen was rounding on Sesha with her arms raised above her head. “‘Rash’? You want to see rash? Rash like imprisoning my boy to lure me and little Luna Loo Loo here? Rash like relying on some ancient 2-D myth to try and cheat death? Rash like killing my mother?” Her eyes were so dark with rage, they were like the velvety black of outer space. Her dark hair spun out from her head, shooting electric-like sparks from each strand. Her teeth elongated, and her talons seemed to grow as we watched, becoming a twisting jungle of sharp nails.
I was surprised when Neel stepped in between her and Sesha. “Mother, I just got you back. I’m not going to lose you now too.”
“I don’t understand!” yelled Sesha, his own teeth clenched and bared. Like the rest of us, he too was coated in gold and platinum, looking like someone had dumped glitter all over him. “It should have worked! You!” He pointed a long green nail at me. “You are the reason for my failure. You are the poison infiltrating my plans and my power!”
“You better believe it!” I shouted. “And I’ll keep poisoning, I mean infiltrating … I mean …” I looked to Neel for help, but he just shrugged. “Oh, bite your own tail, you snaky loser!” I finally concluded.
“Forget the Ouroboros!” Sesha snapped his teeth. “Just come to Daddy and die!”
He shot green bolts at me, but the Rakkhoshi Queen deflected them. I rained a torrent of arrows down on the Serpent King even as I expected the hotel to fight me back. What I didn’t expect to see was that there was no more hotel between Sesha and me. What I didn’t realize was that the very building around us was dissolving.
The gold and platinum rain falling all over us was incredibly powerful. It had not only healed me, and brought Neel’s mom back from the brink of death, but it seemed to be attacking the Serpent King’s fortress. Where the glittering pieces of precious metal hit the wall, ceilings, and floors, the solid substance of the hotel around us was corroding away. And because this particular building was at the bottom of an ocean, that meant the for-tress was springing a zillion leaks of ocean water.