She wasn’t going to leave them, either.
A burning hand reached out through the wall of flames.
“I AM HANGRY!” Agni thundered.
When his head emerged, Aru couldn’t make out the parts of his face anymore—except he had swirling red pits for eyes. It was as if being hungry for so longhad made him pure element.
“I’ve got something for you!” she shouted, holding up the vial.
The head loomed forward.
“I’m going to need some height,” Aru told the others.
“You got it,” said Brynne, rolling onto her hands and knees. “Pile on!”
Althoughshe was apparently too stuffed with food to change shape, Brynne was still superstrong. Aiden climbed onto her back, then Mini climbed ontohis. Aru clambered up her friends. In theory, it should have been like going up stairs. But it did not go as smoothly as planned.
At one point, Aiden grumbled, “Shah! Your foot is on my face!”
And he did not take kindly to Aru’s suggestion: “Then get your face off my foot!”
They teetered back and forth as Agni rolled their way. Waves of fire skirted around them, nearly blistering their skinand blackening the wooden planks beneath their feet. Agni opened his jaws, getting ready to swallow them whole. All Aru could see were searing flames, the air in front of her heat-warped and furious.
“Now, Shah!” screamed Brynne.
Aru pitched the “bright idea” forward. The blue light of the bottle looked like an iceberg in a sea of flame. Agni lurched forward to grab it between his molten teeth.The moment he bit down on it, a wave of energy coursed through the national park, blowing them off the boardwalk and sending them into the shallow, reed-filled swamp.
The cold water stunned Aru. Quickly, they stood up and waded over to the pathway, shivering. In front of them, Agni was struggling, contorting himself and chewing furiously.
“WHY …” he grumbled.
“CAN’T …” He choked.
“I …” Hegasped.
“EAT …” He chewed.
“YOU?” he roared.
Agnispun around, trying to find Aru and the others. The flames on his body flickered and hissed. Slowly, he shrank from the size of a raging forest fire to that of a big, glowing man. His clothes smoldered and burned, smoke unraveling in the air above him. The fires he had ignited rolled backward, instantly restoring everything that had once beenconsumed. No—not restoring.Changing.The trees, once reduced to cinders, grew tall again, but their trunks and branches were now made out of gold. The dirt, previously dull and covered in brambles, was now the rich brown of hot cocoa, and studded with small jewels instead of rocks. Bright red flowers carpeted the areas that had been full of reeds.
“What-t-t d-d-did you d-d-do to that v-v-vial?”Aiden asked Aru, his teeth chattering in the cold.
She shrugged. “N-n-nothing. I just had an idea and p-p-passed it on to him.”
“What idea?” Brynne didn’t even seem cold, maybe because she’d just eaten more than her own weight in spicy Indian dishes.
“I wondered what would happen if n-n-nothing around here was edible,” said Aru.
“Look at the t-t-treasure!” Mini said, pointing.
The picnictable was back, but now, instead of being piled with food, it was piled with jewels of all kinds.
“Man,” grumbled Brynne. “He couldn’t even leave us some naan?”
But the biggest change was in Agni himself. Now that his fire had receded, he’d turned into Sparky 2.0. He was tall, but no longer monstrously so. His ugly shirt had been upgraded to a scarletsherwanijacket edged in flame designs,and his cheap plastic sunglasses were now a pair of Ray-Bans. A scarf of moltenlavahung around his neck, and his hair looked like banked embers—which was definitely an improvement over the weird dye job. At his side trotted a bright red ram, which Aru recognized as hisvahana, or celestial mount.
Agni stretched his arms above his head, yawned, and patted his stomach. “Oof … That was a lot ofcalories I just ate. I feel a food coma coming on.”
