The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1)(3)

Ma looked stricken and I wondered if the words had come out harsher than I intended.

The regret nipped at me, but I didn’t have time to make nice like a good daughter now. “Look, I have to go, okay?”

That was when I heard the bus door open behind me with a whoosh. I sensed more than saw the kids on the bus taking in my family scene—Baba in his ratty, too tight kurta; Ma in a blinding, bright yellow-and-green sari, her bare, ringed toes peeping out from beneath the frayed hem. I felt the heat of mixed emotions flood my cheeks. Why couldn’t they just be like everybody else?

I rushed to get on the bus. But in my hurry, I tripped in the snake ditch—the long, shallow trench that Baba kept dug around our yard to protect us from Parsippany’s nonexistent cobra population.

I could hear kids on the bus snickering and kept my head down as I took my seat. I only looked up as the school bus pulled away to see both my parents standing in the driveway. I couldn’t hear them, and through the thick pane of glass, their faces looked strange and distorted.





All day long, the guilt churned in my stomach. I couldn’t shake the memory of my parents’ anxious expressions. What had they wanted to tell me? Well, maybe this would convince them to let me have a cell phone, like every other twelve-year-old kid in the universe. I planned my argument all day at school with Zuzu, who was obsessed with languages and loved using long, complicated words to get her way.

“Mobile telecommunications are a critical component of modern society,” I rattled off as I opened the front door that afternoon. But I stopped mid-argument. The house was strangely still.

Ma and Baba never both worked on my birthday. At least one of them was usually waiting inside the door to ambush me with food and presents. Where were they?

I took off my boots and crossed into the kitchen, noticing the back door was propped open at an odd angle. I knew that the hinges were old, but this was ridiculous. One more item to add to the list of things that needed fixing. I shut it the best I could behind me, and stepped back into the house.

That’s when I noticed that Ma’s normally spotless kitchen was a mess. The kitchen chairs were this way and that, with one upside down near the door, like someone had knocked it over as they ran.

My heart started beating so loud, my head felt like a drum. I’d seen way too many television crime dramas not to think that maybe someone had broken in.

“Hello?” I called, my voice cracking. I eased a knife out of the countertop butcher block.

But as I took a quick turn around our small house, there was nothing else out of place. Even Ma’s small jewelry box was where it should be on her bedside dresser. I returned to the front hall, confused.

Where were my parents? How had they forgotten about my special day?

What I saw by the front door made me feel a little better. On a rickety folding table rested a covered tray of homemade rasagollas and sandesh with a note that read:

For the dear trick-or-treaters

(gluten-free, nut-free, and made with lactose-free milk obtained humanely from free-range cows)

Classic! I laughed shakily, putting down the knife. I was letting my imagination get the best of me. Nothing could be wrong if my mother had remembered to make homemade Indian sweets for the neighborhood kids. It was one of her Halloween traditions. The problem was, cloth grocery bags and old pillowcases aren’t made to carry around the syrupy, round rasagollas or molasses-sweetened cakes of sandesh she handed out to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. But it would never have occurred to my parents to just give out store-bought candy. Another example of their overall cluelessness.

I was about to grab a sticky rasagolla myself when I spotted something else lying on the floor. A birthday card, half in and half out of an envelope. It was Baba’s typical sense of humor—a bright neon pink and sparkly card meant for a baby. On the front was, what else, a crown-wearing princess under the words Daughter, you’re 2! Only, Baba had taken a Sharpie and written a number 1 before the 2 so that it read 12. Har-dee-har. Again, typical Baba. But why was it on the floor like this? Wiping my syrupy fingers on my jeans, I picked it up.

Inside the card, under the words Have a Spark-a-licious birthday!, was a scrawled message, so unlike Ma’s normally precise handwriting.

Take heart, dear daughter.

We were hoping for the last dozen years that it would not come to pass. But it has happened—the magical spell protecting us all has been broken on this, your twelfth birthday. Forgive us for trying to shield you from the truth. Now there is too little time to explain.

Whatever you do, do not let any rakkhosh into the house. Trust the princes to keep you safe, but more importantly, trust yourself. We leave here some extra rupees and a moving map in case you find them of use.

But I beg you, do not try to find us. It is far too dangerous. We go now to that dark and terrible origin place where all spells meet their end.

(Oh, and make sure to take your gummy vitamins every morning.)

Darling piece of the moon, the first thing you must do is to find—

The note broke off there with a big, ugly inkblot, as if she’d been startled by something into stopping mid-sentence.

I shook the envelope, and out fell a small wad of colorful, unfamiliar bills—the rupees Ma had mentioned. But the other thing in the envelope wasn’t a map at all—just a yellowed piece of blank paper.



That was it. They had always been odd, but now my parents had totally gone off the deep end. I called their cell phones and the phone at the store. When I got only voicemail, I started to really panic. If this was some kind of a bizarre Halloween trick, it wasn’t funny. All that stuff about princes and rakkhosh—what planet did Ma and Baba think we were living on?