“Mrs. Lopez, I really want Jorge to come,” Ernie said. “I even convinced my parents to pay for his spot.”

  My abuela’s hand flew up like a traffic cop working a busy intersection. She didn’t want to hear it.

  “We Lopezes never accept charity!” she snapped, and you could practically see the last of Liza’s and Ernie’s hopes shredded to confetti. But Paz wasn’t finished talking. “Except…if it gets Jorge out of my hair for a while. Truth is, the kid’s cramping my style.”

  “Cramping your style? What style?!” I yelled.

  “How much is it?” Ignoring me, Paz snatched the price sheet from Liza’s hand. “Only three hundred dollars? That’s a bargain! I would’ve paid double that to get rid of Jorge for two whole weeks!”

  Chapter 7

  The plan was simple. We’d use part of the money Liza’s and Ernie’s parents had paid to “Camp Treetop” to buy bus tickets to L.A. Then we’d use the rest for food, hotel, and taxi fare over to Pepe’s once we got there.

  The only tricky part: finding a suitcase big enough to hide Carter in, since we figured he’d draw less attention that way.

  When that idea crashed and burned like an earthbound meteor, we switched gears and decided to give Carter the old “celebrity in disguise” look.

  It was a fifteen-hour bus ride from Boca Falls, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, California, and Liza, Ernie, and I sweated during every last second of it.

  I kept having this horrible vision of someone realizing what Carter was, yelling “MONSTER!” then bringing out the pitchforks and torches.

  It was probably the biggest downside of having a legendary bloodsucking monstruo as a best friend. You worried about the guy. A lot.

  The bus finally reached Union Station in Los Angeles and let us out not too far from Gloria Molina Grand Park. I hopped down onto the familiar gray sidewalk, breathed in the familiar L.A. air, and heard all the familiar L.A. sounds—the hum of cars and motorbikes, the wild roar of 747s out by the airport. I felt the power and energy of the Pacific Ocean not fifteen miles to the west.

  I knew I was home.

  It was almost like stepping into an old photograph, a memory—only there wasn’t anything old about it. Los Angeles was just as alive and vibrant as the day I’d left.

  Man, it’s good to be home again! I thought, looking up and down the rows of Mexican fan palms. Nothing had changed!

  Only that wasn’t exactly true…

  Things had changed. I’d changed a little. But most of all, my family had changed. It had grown to include three new faces—one of which happened to be particularly furry.

  I couldn’t explain how cool it was to have Liza, Ernie, and Carter with me in the city where I’d grown up. It was as if all the puzzle pieces of my heart had finally clicked into place. And it was better than I could have dreamed.

  Standing there on Alameda Street, with Dodger Stadium ahead of us and the Hollywood Walk of Fame only a few miles away, I realized that I was in the same city as my mom again. Probably not even thirty miles apart now. And suddenly, I was missing her so bad it hurt. But I had to keep my head in the game. For now, anyway.

  Chapter 8

  We knew Pepe and his clan lived somewhere on Señor Gomez’s ninety acres of private woodland nestled pretty close to the Sierra Pelona mountains.

  The mountains were a pretty well-known spot to Angelenos, about seven hundred thousand pristine acres of protected pines.

  And firs.

  And yucca plants.

  And wild blooming flowers.

  And over two hundred species of wildlife.

  Including bobcats.

  Bears.

  Mule deer.

  Quail.

  California mountain lions.

  Kangaroo rats.

  Hawks.

  Ground squirrels.

  Eagles.

  Toads.

  Owls.

  And even some bighorn sheep.

  Our Uber arrived a few minutes after lunch, and on the drive over, I felt like one of the tour guides on the double-decker buses that tour you around L.A. visiting famous spots. Ernie kept asking me if I knew where Captain Kirk lived, so I pointed at some random house along the way just to give the kid a thrill, and you should’ve seen how excited he got. I thought he was going to bust through the window with his face, he had it pressed up against the glass so hard. Anyway, the driver found Señor Gomez’s property pretty easily, but there was only a mailbox, no house, and a whooole lot of land.

  Carter began making these weird high-pitched howls as we started up one of the overgrown trails into the woods, but I didn’t think that was going to help much.

  “It’s going to take us forever to find Pepe in there!” Ernie shouted, basically reading my mind.

  There probably hadn’t been a gathering of bloodsuckers this big since Dracula celebrated his one thousandth birthday back in ole Transylvania.

  Fortunately, they were all just as friendly as we’d hoped. Well, at least after Pepe introduced us to all his friends and fam. We shook so many hands—er, hairy paws—I felt like I was running for president or something.

  A little while later, Pepe quietly pulled me aside to ask if we’d come to help him solve the kidnapped two-footers mystery. When I told him that we had, the chupacabra came within a fang tip of bursting into tears, he was that grateful. Pepe reminded me not to tell his abuelo the reason for our visit, then got all of us together and took us down to see the guy. And when I say “down,” I mean down down—maybe twenty yards into a humongous underground burrow that looked like a warren for gigantic rabbits!

  Pepe’s grandpa, whose name was Carlos, turned out to be a cool guy. He was super stoked to meet us, and he had us all sit around inside his nest and asked us all sorts of questions about ourselves and our trip over. He also asked the big guy about his family, and when Carter told him what had happened and how they’d gotten separated that night, Carlos promised he would find Carter’s mother and siblings for him. I’d never seen Carter so excited.

  Of course, when Carlos got to the big question, “¿Y qué hacen aquí?” we had to lie to the guy. But he seemed to buy our “visiting some friends and family” excuse, so it was all good. Anyway, after we said our goodbyes to Pepe’s grandpa, it was party time.

  And let me tell you a little secret I learned: nobody—and I mean nobody—parties harder than chupacabras! How was it, you ask? It was like the world’s largest petting zoo, the world’s biggest luau, carnival, and Cirque du Soleil, all rolled into one!

  The food was out of this world, too! I’d never seen a spread like it in my entire life! There was goat stew, goat sausage, goat eyeball ravioli, goat guts ceviche, goat liver pâté, fried goat, grilled goat, goat à la mode, goat tongue sandwiches—and that was just their goat selection.

  After the party, the chupacabras held this big ceremony for us, which was supposedly a huge deal among the fanged and furry. It was called the Fanging, and it started with Pepe giving me, Liza, and Ernie chupacabra costumes to wear—fur-covered animal skins and sets of fake fangs. Then the entire clan led us deep underground into their most sacred burrow, which looked like the biggest hobbit hole you’ve ever seen. There, the elder of the clan, Pepe’s grandfather, sat on a huge throne-like chair of twigs, and we all knelt before him in our costumes while the rest of the chupacabras cheered and clapped. Then Carlos touched us all on the shoulders, back, and kneecaps with what I had to guess was the leg bone of a T. rex.

  “You are officially chupacabras now!” Pepe told us when it was all over. “You are part of our familia!” Carter was so touched by the whole thing I was pretty sure I saw him wiping a tear from the corner of his owl eyes. You’d think we’d just been knighted by the queen or something.

  “Awesome!” shouted Ernie through a mouthful of fangs. “I’ve always wanted brothers and sisters!”

  “Now you have about ten thousand of them,” laughed Liza. “And they’re furry, too.”

  “One question,” I said to Pepe. “These are fake fangs we have in our mouths, right?”

  “Oh, no, definitely not fake! They are all real chupacabra teeth!” he said proudly. “The ones you have in your mouth are my abuelo’s. They fell out many moons ago. But he was happy to let you use them for the ceremony!”

  His grandfather’s old teeth. ¡Híjole! “B-b-but you at least washed these things before I put them in my mouth, right?”

  Pepe frowned, looking as confused as a dog at a rainbow-watching party. “Washed them with what?”

  Beside him, an ancient-looking chupacabra gave me a smile that was all withered gums from ear to ear. And that was right about when I nearly refunded all the goat stew I’d recently gobbled down. “Never mind,” I told him. “It’s been a total horror—I mean, honor…”

  Surprisingly, Pepe said they still had one more treat in store for us that night. I just hoped this one didn’t involve putting anyone else’s rotten old teeth in my mouth. We followed him up a set of steps that wound around the massive mossy trunk of a ginormous fir tree. Up, up, up…into the COOLEST tree house on the planet!

  Pepe had even set up an old-school antenna TV for us. Sure, it probably only caught two channels, but it was still a super-thoughtful thing to do.

  There was only one problem I could see with the place…

  “Uh, where’s the bathroom?” I asked, looking curiously around.

  Liza pointed over to the clump of leafy bushes where Ernie was currently sprawled out and grinning from ear to ear. “What do you think those are for?” she said with a giggle.

  “Wait. I thought this was the chupacabra version of a beanbag chair!” shouted Ernie, leaping to his feet.

  “Think again.” Liza pointed up at the dark wood ceiling beams. “Chupacabras sleep like bats, remember?”

  The corners of Ernie’s mouth pulled into a deep frown as he glanced disappointedly back at the bushes. “I thought they smelled kind of funny…”

  “This is just like a real summer camp!” I shouted, sticking my head out the window into the cool evening air. Truth was, I’d always wanted to go to camp. At the beginning of every new school year, I’d hear kids talking about how much fun they had at camp and how they couldn’t wait to go back next year. But my mom could never afford to send me to one. In fact, the closest I’d ever gotten to camping at all was when my mom would let me set up a sheet tent in the living room. Not that those weren’t cool, too. They were. But this…this was something else!

  Chapter 9

  Later that night, the giant furry nocturnal bat we all referred to as Carter gripped my shoulder and shook me until I sat up with a start, my heart rattling like a maraca in my chest. For un segundo there, I didn’t have the slightest clue where we were.

  Oh right, a chupacabra tree house. “Dude, what’s wrong?” I hissed.

  “Nothin’. Jess wonderin’ what you dreaming about.”

  “Say what?” I whisper-snapped. Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t anywhere near as shocked as I might’ve sounded. Chupacabras don’t sleep at night. They are nocturnal, and this certainly wasn’t the first time Carter had ever woken me up in the middle of my z’s for some totally ridiculous reason. What shocked me was that Carter had just violated my recently instituted “most important rule ever, ever, ever”: NEVER WAKE ME UP TO ASK WHAT I WAS DREAMING ABOUT! It was no golden rule, but still pretty important when you had a buddy with less-than-usual sleep habits.

  “Carter, did you seriously already forget our new rule?”

  “No…” he admitted sheepishly.

  “Then what’s the problem?!” I asked. And it better be good. In the bunk above, I could hear Ernie snoring his lawn mower snore. Si no es uno, es el otro.

  “Is no problem, Jorge. I’m jess so excited I wanted to talk to you!” And Señor Fangs looked it, too. I’d seen little kids opening Christmas presents who looked less amped.

  I tried to rub some of the sleep out of my eyes. “Talk to me about what?”

  “Mi familia, Jorge! Carlos said he gonna find dem! I’m gonna see my mamá again!”

  I sighed. I guess I couldn’t blame the guy. I mean, who wouldn’t be excited about finding their lost mother and siblings? “Carter, about that. I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high, okay? I’m sure Carlos is really good at finding people, and I’m sure he’s going to try his best, but let’s just see what happens before you get too stoked.”

  Carter’s face was a picture-perfect confused emoji (plus the fur and foot-long fangs, of course). “But why, Jorge? Carlos already said so.”

  “Yeah, dude, I know Carlos said so. But what if—what if he can’t?”

  “Oh, but he can! Carlos said so!”

  “Okay, but let’s just say he can’t. Then what? Then you’re going to be crushed. Trust me. I know all about getting your hopes dashed. When I was five, my grandma promised to take me to Disneyland one of these years for my birthday. And every year I was positive that this was going to be the year. Seven years later and I still haven’t even so much as sniffed the parking lots at Disneyland. You get me?”

  Carter didn’t seem to get me.

  “All I’m saying is that I don’t want you to be hurt,” I tried to explain.

  “Is okay, Jorge. I won’t be hurt. I know Carlos gonna find dem!”

  Oh man. This just wasn’t the conversation I wanted to be having with my best bud. And it was especially terrible since I was 99 percent sure I knew what had happened to his family. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

  The night they’d been separated, Carter and his familia had been on the run from a pack of dips—rabid, bloodsucking vampire dogs.

  Seconds from being caught, Carter’s mom told him to flee in one direction while she ran the opposite way with his baby siblings so that those evil monstruos wouldn’t be able to catch them all.

  Carter had gotten away.

  You do the math.

  Looking up at those huge, brown, honest eyes so full of hope and excitement was almost breaking my heart. It was too much for me to handle right then, so I just said, “Yeah, dude. I’ve got a feeling he just might find them, too…”

  Chapter 10

  “Rise and shine, sleepyheads,” Liza said, waking us up early the next morning.

  “Liza, what time is it?” I yawned, sitting up.

  “Time to get to work.” Liza was tapping her watch impatiently. “We’ve got a case to crack.”

  “Mom, I need a few more minutes of sleep,” grumbled Ernie, turning over under his sheets. “I don’t mind being late to school today.”

  Liza gave him a funny look as I said to her, “And how exactly do you plan on cracking that case? Because if you haven’t worked that part out yet, I’m going to hit the snooze button and you can wake me when you do.”

  I actually thought that might buy me some more z’s, but then Liza said, “There’s no snooze button, Jorge,” and grabbed me by the leg, dragging me out of the bunk.

  Then she rolled Ernie out of bed, and even though he landed on the floor of the tree house with a loud plunk! it didn’t seem to help much. The kid was still off in Neverland, counting sheep. “It’s time to get up and get ready.”

  “You still haven’t told us the plan,” I said, going over to poke the big guy awake.

  “The plan is simple.” Liza unzipped her travel bag and brought out a stack of files. “I did a little extra research on Mr. Gomez’s production company and the strength of his balance sheet. It was already pretty weak, because of a few weird distribution snafus and some odd accounting oversights. Then he went all in on this movie, and with the delays plus the skyrocketing production costs, he’s in a terrible spot. For me, it’s clear as day: sabotage.”

  “Sabotage?” mumbled Ernie. Looked like Snorlax was finally coming around.

  “It’s the only logical explanation. Remember, Pepe followed someone leaving the studio. That was the person with the list of the people they wanted kidnapped. So putting two and two together, it’s pretty obvious that person is trying to tank this movie. It’s an inside job. Their motive is impossible to say at the moment, so we’re going to have to sniff around the set, ask questions, and draw up a list of possible suspects. I don’t see any other way to catch this saboteur.”

  I mean, it was a pretty good plan. Most of Liza’s plans usually were. That’s why she was the brains of the outfit. But there was just one teeny, tiny problem with this particular plan…

  “And how exactly are we supposed to ‘sniff around’?” I asked. “I think it’s going to take more than a smile to get into any studio lot.” The big guy grinned at me. “Especially Carter’s smile.” That one would probably get us run out of town with garlic and wooden stakes.

  “Fair point,” Liza said with a sly smirk. “But I don’t think crew members would have much problem getting in.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not crew members!” Ernie pointed out.

  “Liza, if your plan is to get us hired by Mr. Gomez’s company so we can get on set, then you could’ve let us sleep in for the next month! You know how long it probably takes to get hired by a production company, especially when you’re twelve?”

  Liza shrugged. “Nope. All I know is we’re already hired.”

  I blinked, shocked. “Seriously?”

  “It wasn’t that hard, actually. Mr. Gomez’s movie is losing crew every day. People are quitting because they’re vanishing or scared, so he’s pretty desperate for help. Especially for summer interns who they don’t have to pay. I took care of all this before we left.”

 

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