Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (24 page)

That's probably the biggest compliment she's ever paid anyone in her whole life. “Thanks, Jinx.” I throw more sand on the bird. “I appreciate it.”

“And, Jinx,” she imitates my voice, “you're not as bad of a monkey as I thought. That's what you're
supposed
to say. Sheesh.”

I nod at her. “Good monkey.”

At dawn, we get up for real and Jinx pokes around in the galley again. “Oatmeal packets and Coke.” She waves them in the air. “Breakfast of champions.”

Coke seems safe enough. Would that expire, ever? I pop open the can and take a cautious sip. If I don't look at any expiration dates, I won't freak myself out. It tastes mostly like Coke—kind of syrupy, but not too bad.

I glance outside. The sky's a clear purple. Somehow I'm getting used to that color. “Is it cold again?”

“It's always a bit cold around here. I'll be right back.” Jinx goes outside, carrying a bag of something. I figure she wants to do her business and needs privacy. I tried to use the bathroom on the plane, but opening that door turned out to be not such a good idea. Talk about stinky.

But then Jinx raps on the window and motions for me to follow her. When I get out there, she's got a rock in each hand. She strikes them together over a metal cup with a small amount of syrup-colored liquid in it. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Making us a hot breakfast.” She taps and taps some more until, finally, a little spark comes off the rock and the liquid whooshes into a full-blown fire. “Jet fuel. It burns fast and hot.”

She sets another cup on top of the fire and fills it with water from a bottle. When the water's boiling, she wraps the cup with a towel, takes it off the flame, then pours the instant oatmeal into it. She presents it to me with a little bow. “For you.” She hands me a plastic spoon, too.

“Thank you.” I bow back, feeling a little guilty, like I'm not pulling my weight. Jinx isn't so bad. Look how helpful she's being.

“My mother always said there's nothing like a hot breakfast to shore up the soul on a tough day.” Jinx sits cross-legged in the sand, waiting for another cup of water to heat.

I take a spoonful of the oatmeal. Peaches-and-cream flavor, my favorite. Even the dehydrated peaches taste like heaven. The warmth goes into my core and down to my numb toes. I gobble it all down. “Your mother was right.” This is the first time Jinx has mentioned her mother. I squint at her in the bright morning light. “Do you live with your mom?”

“Not anymore.” Jinx concentrates on stirring her oatmeal and won't meet my eyes. That's all she wanted to say, I guess.

“I miss my dad and grandmother,” I offer into the silence.

She frowns, blows on her cereal. “Haven't you ever been away from home before?”

“Yeah. For camp.”

“Then what's the big deal?” She tips the cup into her mouth.

“You mean besides the fact that my dad is being held hostage by a contingent of monsters?” I let out a muffled belch and consider saying
Excuse me
, but when I see Jinx scooping the last bits of oatmeal into her mouth with her fingers, I decide she doesn't care. “I just want to get home, is all. Have things get back to normal.”

“What's normal?” Jinx peers at me with curiosity, as if she really wants to know.

“Hanging out with Peyton. Playing video games. Sleeping in my own bed. All that good stuff.” I remember the feel of Inu next to me as I slept on my bed, wrapped in an old quilt my mother's mother made a long time ago, and tears spring into my eyes. I turn before Jinx can spot them.

“Sounds about as exciting as a bag of rocks.” Jinx wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I have news for you, my friend. You're Momotoro. You're never going to be normal again.” She stands up and kicks sand onto the fire. It takes at least a bucketful before the flame finally goes out.

W
e set off away from the plane right after we finish breakfast. Jinx takes the airline bag she found and packs it with water bottles, oatmeal, and more of those handy metal containers. The sun's up, but it hasn't heated the desert yet. Icy fingers of wind tickle my ribs.

You're never going to be normal again.
The phrase repeats itself in my head as I put one foot in front of the other. It used to be that my biggest worry was keeping chip crumbs off my keyboard. No more of that. I am the Momotaro. Saver of worlds.

A sour taste rises in my throat. Am I really ready for this? It doesn't matter anymore—I'm already here, and unless a Momotaro can time-travel, I have to keep moving forward.

The temperature rises as we hike all day through the sand, stopping only occasionally to rest and eat rice balls under the purple sky. Jinx folds us paper hats from magazines she found in the plane, and these keep our heads nice and shaded.

It's late afternoon when the ground shakes, making the dunes roll like the ocean. I drop into a crouch, my sword clattering behind me. “What is that?”

Jinx freezes, her eyes going wide. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh? What's uh-oh?” The dune we're walking on shudders. Then it rises, and the sand swirls around me. I can't see.

“Jinx?” I reach out for her and grab hold of something, but I'm not sure what.

The sand falls away as I'm lifted by a rising piece of land. The air clears, and I can now see treetops below me. Where am I? I try to walk. The ground is squishy and crisscrossed with shallow ridges. It smells like a dirty rest-stop bathroom.

“Xander!” Jinx calls. She sounds far away.

Suddenly I'm looking into an enormous blue eye the size of a semitruck's tire. “Hello, boy,” a deep voice rumbles in Japanese. “How did you enter the land of oni?”

I glance down again and realize I'm standing in the palm of a hand. I jump up, but that's a bad idea, because he's still lifting me.

Jinx waves and shouts up to me, “It's a
daidarabotchi
. A giant.”

“Really? I thought it was a midget.” Great. Another monster. “What do I do?”

What I thought were plain old sand dunes are now gone. The giant was taking a nap under the sand, and the dunes were his knees and belly and whatnot. He must be fifty feet tall. Not something I want to fall off of.

“I don't know!” Jinx yells back. “Try talking to him.”

Dude. Talk? That won't work. The hand moves and I crouch for balance, trying to hang on. “Please don't eat me.”

The giant chuckles. “I don't eat. I collect.”

“Collect?” I squeak.

He holds me at arm's length and now I can see his whole face. Humanlike. A wide nose with flared nostrils, and nose hair so long I can see it waving with his breath. But his skin's orange and, of course, he's not human at all.

“A half-Asian boy,” he says in a voice that sounds like a jet engine. “Very rare in these parts. I don't have one.” He holds up his other hand. In it he's got a shaft of steel, deadly sharp on one end, between his tree-trunk fingers. It's a huge pin. He makes a
tsk
ing noise. “Now, try not to wiggle. It will only hurt for a moment, but it hurts worse if you move.” He pinches me between his forefinger and thumb. The piles of dirt under his nails are bigger than me. The piece of metal comes at me like an arrow.

He's going to stick me with that pin, like a butterfly collector, and put me on a wall someplace. I scream. Without thinking, I unsheath my grandfather's sword and jab it, hard, under his fingernail.

His shout's like a bomb going off.
“ITAI! ITAI!” It hurts!
“I told you not to squirm.” He drops the pin and shakes the hand that held it. His grip around me loosens.

Jinx appears at the giant's shoulder. How did she get up there? She looks like a gnat compared to him. She motions me to come toward her. To crawl across his huge arm.

I gulp. Don't look down.

I put my sword away and start crawling. The hairs on his arm are like a black forest. A stinky black forest. A huge louse scuttles by, the size of a small terrier, and I shriek.

“Where did you go?” The giant examines his arm.

“Here.” Jinx kicks him in the Adam's apple.

“Ouch!” He claps his hand to his throat and drops me in the process. It's like falling off the side of a mountain.

Somebody catches me. Somebody with golden wings. “Peyton!” I shout.

“Don't you know you're not supposed to wake a sleeping giant?” Peyton grips me under my arms. Jinx clings to his back, like Yoda did to Luke. Her face is about two inches away from mine.

Peyton flies for a minute, to grassy hills farther away from the oni volcano. Hopefully these are giant-free. He sets me down next to my dog.

Inu's whole body wriggles with glee. He jumps up and hugs me, licking my face. I laugh and scratch his head, his chest, his sides. “Inu! Hey! Did you miss me, boy? Huh? I missed you.”

Woof, woof!
Inu barks, then whines. I pet him some more.

“Okay, boy, down,” I tell him at last. Inu goes over to Jinx and repeats his greeting with her. She giggles with delight. I turn to Peyton and give him a half hug. I swear, he's bigger than I remember. His hand dwarfs mine. “How did you find us?”

Peyton shrugs, smooths down his shock of hair. “It wasn't hard. A giant man suddenly stood up in a desert. I could see him from a mile away.”

I squint at him. “Did your voice get deeper?”

“Maybe,” he says, and, yeah, it's definitely deeper. He sounds like a television announcer. He strokes his chin. “Look. I even have real stubble.”

“No way.” I'm getting on my tiptoes to admire his growing beard when every hair on my body stands straight up, like I'm about to be hit by lightning. Peyton and I both tense. What's going on?

Inu leaves Jinx and starts growling, his ruff poofing out around his neck.

“Xander,” a deep voice says from behind me.

I turn slowly. But I know who it is before I see him.

“Welcome to the land of oni. We've been waiting for you.”

The beast monster man stands there. He looks about two million times worse in real life than he did in my dreams or in any drawing. He has bulging muscles, and the muscles seem to have muscles of their own. A long monkeylike tail, reddish brown, swishes impatiently, and his knifelike scales gleam. He smells like a sandwich somebody forgot to throw away a week ago. His coal black eyes focus on me.

That giant was a beacon for more than one person.

Or thing.

Salt. I need my salt.

The beast-man grabs my wrist. I'm like a toddler fighting Superman. “No salt,” he hisses.

I try to reach for my sword, but he crushes the fingers in my other hand, too.
Inu, Jinx, help
.

Jinx leaps on the thing's back, her nails clawing his eyes. He lets go of me, reaches behind him, and throws Jinx off like she's nothing. My shaking hands grab my octopus netsuke and open the box for the salt.

Inu goes after the beast, snarling like I've never heard him snarl before, his jaws opening wide and going for the thing's neck. He makes contact and the beast tries to get Inu off, but my dog won't let go. I didn't know Inu had this in him.

The beast screams. The tail whips around and slashes at Inu. My dog falls down with a wail.

I throw the salt at the oni—only a few grains hit. He shrugs them off with a growl. I jump forward, my sword in my hands, and swing it through the air. The beast-man blocks it with his tail, but the blade penetrates the scales and slices through his flesh. The end of his tail wiggles on the ground like a cut worm. The monster hisses, then gets on all fours, and runs away over the hills.

I fall to my knees, panting, my blood on fire. “Yes!” I pump my fist. “Oh my gosh. It worked. It actually worked.” I let out a big sigh of relief.

Jinx glances at the darkening sky. “Now let's get to shelter before it's totally dark.”

“Oh no,” Peyton breathes behind me. “Inu.”

Inu, my best friend since I was a baby, lies limp on the ground. He weakly thumps his tail. Gashes wider than my hand gape open on his neck and along his ribs.

For a second, I can't believe my eyes. Then I see his blood pumping out and know it's all too real. “Nooo!” I throw myself on my dog, over his soft furry body. I feel his heart racing. “No, no, no.” He doesn't deserve this. He only wanted to protect me.

Jinx gets up from where she landed. Breathing hard, she staggers over to us. “Inu! Not Inu.” She begins crying hysterically. “Inu. It wasn't supposed to be Inu.”

“It could be any of us,” Peyton says.

“I don't care that Momotaro is supposed to have a dog. I should have left him with Obāchan.” I stroke his neck. My dog's brown eyes look up at me sadly. They say,
I forgive you, Xander
.

But I'll never, ever forgive myself. I bite my tongue to keep from screaming. A sob escapes. “I'm sorry, Inu.”