Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (14 page)

“What is it, Inu?” I look where he's looking, at the cave.

A woman in a long white dress stands on the black beach. She's wearing a fur cape over her shoulders and holding something in her hand, like a staff.

Inu dives off the boat and comes up paddling and barking.
Woofwoofwoof!
He's going crazy, growling and snarling.

“Hey!” Peyton shouts at the woman from the air. “Hello. We come in peace! We have a question. How do you get through—”

Suddenly he drops out of the sky like a stone, his left wing streaking blood behind him. He clutches the wing with his right hand and spins out of control. He hits the shallow water shoulder-first.

My heart jumps into my mouth. “Peyton!” I look toward the woman. Now I can see that it's not a staff she's holding, it's a bow and arrow. “Run! Get out of there!”

Peyton drags himself onto the beach. The woman runs toward him, an arrow pointed again. At his chest.

I
look down at the water, which seems really, really far away. I've jumped into swimming pools before, but truthfully I hate going deep. My ears can't take the pressure change, and they bleed. But I have to get to Peyton. I'll hold my breath; I'll swim up. I picture it in my head for a second, then jump in. Quick, before I can imagine sharks and whirlpools and poisonous jellyfish.

The water closes around me. My feet hit the sandy bottom and my eardrums bulge with pain, and I push myself back up to the air. It's so cold I can barely move. I'm going to turn into a Xander-pop, like those people on the
Titanic
.
Move
, I tell my legs and arms, and reluctantly, they start churning through the water.

I swim as quickly as I can, and finally I make it to the beach. Inu's already there, circling Peyton and barking wildly at the woman but not attacking.

I stumble over to Peyton. The woman kneels beside him, dabbing the wound with a white cloth that's turning pink. Fat tears stream down her face. “I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! I thought he was a pheasant. I didn't know.”

The woman is beautiful. Or girl—she looks maybe sixteen. Not that I'm in love with her. No matter who you are, if you saw her, you'd have to admit she was beautiful, just like you'd have to admit the sun rises in the east. Because it's a fact.

Her marble skin glows as if there's a light inside her head. She has long hair the color of the mahogany dining table after my grandma polishes it with lemon Pledge. Her hair swirls in the wind like she's on a magazine cover. Her eyes are large and gray, rimmed with thick black lashes. She smells like apples. Really, it's almost ridiculous how pretty she is—she looks unreal, like she just escaped a portrait painted by some Renaissance guy.

She's sobbing as she swabs the wound. Doing no good. I think about the time Dad accidentally ran over a neighbor's cat—it darted out in front of him—and he cried more than the neighbor did, he felt so bad. Inu licks the woman's hand sympathetically.

Peyton's injury is a clean hole in his wing the size of a dime. Blood's whooshing out. “Give me your thing.” I point at the fur around her shoulders.

She touches it. “My mantle?”

“Mantle. Cape. Thing. Whatever.” I put the fur over Peyton to keep him warm. I take the cloth out of her hand. “Don't worry.” I don't know if I'm talking to her or to my friend. So I look at Peyton. “You'll be okay. It's just a flesh wound.” I think that's what it is. That's what they say in movies. I try to remember the first-aid training Obāchan put me through in case The End of the World happened. Press down. Keep pressure on it until the bleeding stops.

Maybe my grandma did know what she was doing after all.

The woman wrings her hands. I've never seen anyone do that in real life before. “Oh my. Please, don't die. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself. Ever.”

Even Peyton, though he's obviously in pain, thrashing in a pool of water that looks like cherry Kool-Aid, tries to make the woman feel better. He also says, “It's okay. I'm okay. Don't worry.”

She smiles then, wiping away pearly tears with the back of her hand. Once the bleeding has slowed to a trickle, she says, “Come inside. I have bandages. Let me help you.”

When she stands I see that she is only a little bit taller than me, which means she's pretty darn short. The woman takes me by one hand and Peyton by the other and leads us into the cave. Her skin is cool and a lot more leathery and rough than I would have imagined. I thought girls had soft hands. I also never thought the first girl I held hands with would be someone who, you know,
shot
my best friend.

I duck as we go inside. “Be careful,” she says. “Don't hit your heads. I wouldn't want to be responsible for that, too.”

“Wow,” Peyton breathes.

At first I think he's sighing in pain, but then I see what he's seeing. The cave ceiling stretches up and up and up, for hundreds of feet. But that's not even what's impressive.

Everything is jeweled.

Instead of stalagmites and stalactites made of regular, boring-looking minerals, these are covered with emeralds and rubies and diamonds, like in a dragon's treasure cave. It's at least thirty degrees colder inside, and Peyton and I begin to shiver. The ceiling above the jewels is white ice, and the floor is black ice. We walk slowly, my bare feet slipping and going numb.

I let go of the woman's hand and check Peyton's wound. It has stopped bleeding.

“I'm good. Much better,” he says through chattering teeth. He flaps his wings experimentally. “It didn't go through a muscle, so I think I can still fly.”

The woman smiles. “Just a little farther inside. It's warmer there, I promise.”

We make our way through a maze of jeweled stalagmites taller than we are until we get to an open spot. I hear water spattering and look to the right.

A wall of rain is coming down in a circle. Like a waterfall, only the water's moving quite slowly.

In the center of the circle, I can barely make out a figure behind the wavering curtain of liquid.

“Get out!” a girl's voice screams. “Get out now!”

“Oh, don't mind her,” the woman says with another lovely smile. “That's my little sister. She was naughty, so she has to stay in time-out.”

“You're too ugly to be my sister!” the girl shouts back.

Suddenly the woman snarls, and her entire face transforms into something monstrous. Her lips curl back, revealing teeth as sharp and white as Inu's. “Shut up, before I come in there and eat you!”

Too late, I realize we've made a really big mistake. I try to move my frozen feet.

“Run!” the girl in the water cries out. She's been trying to warn us. “Don't be stupid.”

But before I can move, the woman grabs my arm and twists it backward, her nails digging into my forearm like ten small daggers. I try to pull away, but she digs in deeper. Blood runs down my arm. I kick her and pain shoots up my leg. It's like kicking a block of ice.

All the woman's teeth are out now, in a gummy, wolflike snout. She yanks me close, wraps her icy arm around my neck. Her cold breath prickles my scalp. I can't breathe.

Inu attacks with a growl, going for her neck. It sounds like his teeth clamp down on stone, and he bounces off. He tries again, and she knocks him away. He falls down with a yelp. Peyton tackles her, too, and Inu joins in. This time she slips and slides on the icy floor. I manage to stagger out of her reach. The woman hisses and grabs my other arm.

With my free hand, I fumble to open the octopus's box and dip my fingertips in.
Salt is a weapon.
Could that really be true? Desperate, I throw it at her.
Disappear,
I think.
Melt
.

For a long second, nothing happens. She stares at me with her soulless eyes. Then her bones dissolve, and she falls into a heap of white, bubbling and sizzling. Like a ginormous slug.

It worked! I did it! I'm not totally useless after all.

No time to celebrate. Peyton grabs my shoulder. “Let's go.”

But the human girl—she's still in her watery cage. Inu paces around the perimeter, whining, trying to figure out how to get to her.

“It's no good,” the girl says, her voice fainter now. “Go out through the back.”

“We can't leave her there,” I say. “She helped us.”

Peyton sighs and slaps his hand to his forehead as he shifts back and forth on his feet. His wings flutter nervously. “Well, why doesn't she just step out already?”

Good question. We stand in front of the girl's water cage. The waterfall drops are bigger now, and falling faster than before. The girl is just on the other side, close enough to touch. She's like a blurred photograph. Brown hair, big terrified eyes. Taller than me. I reach my bloodied hand toward the water. Maybe the water's falling too hard….

Honestly, though, it looks like a shower. Harmless.

“It'll burn you to the bone.” The girl's voice is hoarse. “Acid.”

I look down at the black ice where the liquid is hitting. A deep ring has been carved into the stone underneath. I believe her.

I see a stick lying on the ground. It has a piece of meat stuck to it; I try not to think about what kind of meat it was and how the stick is probably actually a bone.

I pick it up and push it through the acid, to see what will happen.

The tip of the stick melts away. I drop it quickly.

I find another, smaller stick. I have an idea. I take the salt out. I need to make it stay on the stick. I spit on the stick over and over, and sprinkle the salt over my saliva.

For some reason, I remember a science lesson about outer space. If you pour water in space, it turns into a gel. I imagine this acid turning into a gel, like water in space. As if it's a fact that I'm recalling and not something I'm making up.

“What are you doing?” Peyton says. “I'm going to try to find an off switch.” He looks around the perimeter.

The white mound that was the woman bubbles and steams, getting bigger.

“Hurry!” Peyton says.

I take a quick breath. Without thinking any more about it, I push the salt-covered stick into the acid rain.

The liquid courses along the stick, solidifying into a quivering, solid clear gel. It runs along the hilt, then stops right before it hits my hand, the excess dripping off and bouncing on the ground like a Super Ball.

I grin. I was right! I don't know how, but I was right. “We need something bigger than this stick,” I say to Peyton. “Anything.”

Peyton hunts around. He grips an amethyst-colored stalagmite—a newer one about the size of my arm. Grimacing like a mini-Hulk, he breaks it free with a twist of his torso. He hands the frozen jewel to me. “Here.”

This stalagmite is wet and sweating cold. I sprinkle salt on it and push it through the flowing curtain. The amethyst repels the acid like an umbrella, turning water drops into quivering jelly. “Come on out,” I say to the girl. “Step under this.”

But she just stands there, looking at us. I can see now that she's wearing old, torn blue jeans, red Converse, and a white T-shirt with
THE MISFITS
printed on it in red letters. My dad listened to their music—punk rock from the eighties. Her hair is long and brown, so dirty it's almost dreadlocked, hanging mostly over her face.

“Come on!” I shout. “Hurry!”

She stares at me for a second, like she doesn't understand English. Finally, she seems to shake herself awake, and she steps through. Maybe she's all weirded-out from being held prisoner.

Carefully, I remove the amethyst from the waterfall. Liquid crashes down again, hissing against the ice. A drop splashes on my shorts and eats a hole in the fabric. Wow. Close.

The girl pushes her dirty hair out of her face. Her eyes are hazel and shaped like mine. I recognize what she is, like I'd know a member of my family. Half-Asian.

“Let's go,” she says. But instead of heading to the front of the cave, toward the beach, she bounds deeper inside the mountain.

The whole cavern shakes as though we're on a really turbulent jet. The ceiling trembles and big, boulder-size pieces of snow thump down behind us. Great. An avalanche.

“Our boat's the other direction,” Peyton tells her.

“Can't go that way.” The girl doesn't stop, and we have no choice but to follow her as the clumps of snow fall more quickly and tumble toward us. The air is now swirling with snowflakes, making it difficult to see.

“Run faster!” I yell to Peyton as I slip and slide. “We're going to get buried!”

The snow reaches us and it's not snow at all. The white flurries are little white bats.