CJ's Treasure Chase

by Jessica Brody

  Copyright © 2016 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney Press, 1101 Flower Street, Glendale, California 91201.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-8620-8

  For more Disney Press fun, visit www.disneybooks.com

  Visit DisneyDescendants.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Marooned

  Ahoy…and Stuff

  Stowaway

  Arrrr!

  Keep a Sharp Lookout!

  Hardy-Har-Har

  Sink Me!

  Fire in the Hole

  Pirate in Shining Armor

  It’s Time to Haul Wind!

  Yo Ho Ho!

  Unfurling the Map

  All Hands on Deck!

  Cannonball!

  The Pirate and the Frog

  Close to the Chest

  Overboard

  Overhaul

  Gangway!

  Shiver Me Timbers!

  X Marks the Spot

  Blimey!

  Anchors Aweigh!

  Skeleton Crew

  Second-in-Command

  Skull and Crossbones

  Heave Ho!

  Hooked!

  Clear the Deck!

  Rope’s End

  Thar She Blows!

  Farewell, Matey!

  More New Books Coming Soon in The School of Secrets Series…

  The girl was a child of the Isle of the Lost. You know the one. Just off the coast of the United States of Auradon. The isle was home to every evil villain and sidekick who had ever plotted, cursed, cheated, plundered, or wreaked havoc.

  The girl was seven, and although she had been marooned there when she was a baby, she always knew she was destined for greater things. Far-off places and grand adventures. Storming seas and buried treasures. Especially buried treasures…

  One night, after the hanging oil lanterns had burned out, the little girl crept through the dark ship she called home to sneak into her father’s study. Most of his belongings had been confiscated after he was exiled to the Isle of the Lost, but just under the old ship wheel sat a large wooden treasure chest with a rusty gold clasp, concealed by a dusty white sheet.

  The girl was sure there had been a time when the treasure chest was overflowing with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls as white as the foam of crashing waves.

  Now the wood was old, peeling, splintered. The hinges creaked when she lifted the lid. In the moonlight that shone through the porthole, she peered at the item hidden deep inside.

  It was a map.

  The girl lifted it and touched the yellowed paper, with its crisp brown edges and faded ink. The map was incomplete. The finely drawn details started at the bottom left corner of the aged paper, depicting a compass, waves of an ocean, a forgotten island, and the beginnings of a dotted trail. Then the map just stopped. Maybe it was the girl’s keen intuition, a trait passed down to her by her shrewd and cunning father. Or maybe it was hope. But the girl had a feeling that the map was magical. That was what lured her back to look at it night after night.

  The girl believed that given the opportunity, the map would cease to be just a piece of a paper and turn into something else. Something greater. She considered the possibilities. Maybe it led to an all-powerful treasure. Maybe someone had enchanted the rest of the map to disappear…only to reappear in the right place at the right time to the right person.

  She traced the dotted trail with her fingertip until it vanished into nothing. She ran her hand over the empty space that she dreamed held the promise of adventure, wondering if the rest of the map would ever be revealed to her.

  Magic was banned on the Isle of the Lost. King Beast had made sure of it. The girl knew that. But she also knew that magic did exist someplace else: Auradon. The girl spent that night, like every night, dreaming about finally stealing the map and taking it there, activating its magic, and using it to find the greatest pirate’s treasure ever known….

  As she placed the map back in the chest and closed the lid, she whispered into the darkness, “Someday.”

  Oh, how time flies.

  Hi. I’m CJ, the teenage daughter of Captain Hook.

  You may think that as the descendant of a villainous pirate, I’m all “plunder” this and “pillage” that. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But what I am, more than anything, is an adventurer. That’s definitely something I get from my once–upon–a–time–swashbuckling dad. But enough about him. This story is about me.

  The problem is it’s pretty hard to have an adventure when you’re trapped on the Isle of the Lost with no way out. And for a while there, I was convinced that I was as stuck as a barnacle on a boat. But then something unexpected happened.

  I was magically transported to Auradon Prep through Jordan’s genie lamp.

  I won’t get into all the details…blah, blah, blah, magic lamp, three wishes, whatever. One minute I was hanging out on the Isle of the Lost with my best friend, Freddie, minding my own business, and the next minute, Freddie and I both disappeared in a puff of pink smoke and were magically transported to Auradon Prep!

  As soon as we got there, I hid. Freddie, on the other hand, was more than happy to make her presence known. Freddie, I should mention, is very persuasive—something she got from her dad, the evil and awesome Dr. Facilier. One of Freddie’s secret weapons is her “velvet voice,” which is so smooth and mesmerizing, it gets her exactly what she wants. It’s like vocal black magic. She managed to convince King Ben (the son of that beast who locked us all away on the Isle of the Lost) to let her stay at Auradon Prep as a student. She even got her own dorm room.

  And you know what that means, don’t you?

  I, CJ Hook, am now her roommate.

  Well, her secret stowaway roommate.

  But it doesn’t matter. I don’t plan on hanging around here for very long. I have big plans now that I’m finally in Auradon—very big plans.

  Let the pirate games begin….

  So I finally got off the Isle of the Lost and into Auradon!

  But it turns out hiding in Freddie’s room is worse than being stuffed into Davy Jones’s locker.

  (I hear that place is cramped.)

  “So why exactly are you stowing away in my room?” Freddie asked CJ.

  They were settling into Freddie’s new Auradon Prep dorm room, which fortunately had two beds. CJ would need a place to sleep while she enacted her big plan. She’d also need some food to eat and maybe a sink to wash her face in—although pirates were known for going months without bathing. (The past year, CJ had gotten her father, Captain Hook, a bottle of Rotting Kelp cologne for his birthday, to remind him of his glory days on the high seas.)

  CJ glared at one of the beds, as if she were staring down an incoming enemy ship. It was pink and covered in ruffles. CJ didn’t mind ruffles, as long as they were white and on her shirt. Not on her bed. “Blimey. This just won’t fly.”

  “CJ,” Freddie prompted, “do you have a plan or something?”

  CJ pulled off the blanket, ripped the ruffles from the hem, and flung the blanket across the four posters of the bed, fashioning it into a makeshift sail. Then she grabbed a black marker from the nearby desk and drew a skull and crossbones on the pillowcase. She took a step back to examine her work. “Better,” she said.

  Freddie placed her hands on her hips and frowned. She was wearing a pin-striped red-and-purple dress, white-and-black ankle boots, and a
tiny purple top hat, which sat slightly crooked atop her long, shiny black hair. “Please tell me you aren’t just going to crash here and play a bunch of pranks on people.”

  CJ collapsed onto her newly transformed bed and flashed Freddie one of her signature mischievous grins, complete with a wink. She was really good at those. Freddie might have had the “velvet voice” market cornered, but CJ could smirk her way out of any plank walk.

  CJ was just counting the minutes until Freddie would leave and she could finally be alone. But she couldn’t tell Freddie that. If Freddie knew what CJ was really up to, she might want to help. And CJ didn’t need help. Not even from her best friend.

  “CJ,” Freddie said warningly.

  CJ glanced around the room, her smirk quickly morphing into a disapproving scowl. “Eew. The decoration in this place is truly disgusting. I mean, it looks like a fairy threw up in here.”

  Freddie walked to CJ’s bed and sat down next to her. “Stop changing the subject.”

  CJ yawned, kicked off her crocodile-skin boots, and fell onto her back, her red pirate coat flaring out around her like wings. “What was the subject again?”

  Freddie threw up her hands. “What are we doing here?”

  “You,” CJ said, sitting up to face her friend, “are going to school to learn about kindness and decency and the chemical compound of fairy dust.” The sarcasm was thick in her voice. Freddie shuddered.

  It was clear from the look on Freddie’s face that she hadn’t quite thought this whole student thing through yet. “And you?” she asked CJ.

  CJ reached out and touched her friend’s nose. “Don’t you worry your pretty little shrunken head about me.”

  Freddie didn’t look convinced. “Whenever you say that is when I worry the most about you.”

  CJ just flashed her the smirk again. Then, for the tenth time since they’d magically arrived in Auradon, CJ reached into the pocket of her coat and ran her fingertips over the very special object she’d been keeping with her since she was a little girl. Fortunately, it had survived the trip. Her whole secret plan depended on it.

  Freddie sighed in surrender and stood up. “Well, maybe they’ll have a music class I can take or something. Singing will be a good distraction from whatever horrors Headmistress Fairy Godmother has in store for me.” She turned back to CJ and pouted. “Whatever it is you’re planning, can you at least try not to get caught? The last time you plotted secretly, you got us both in huge trouble.”

  CJ shook her head. “Two minutes in Auradon and you’ve already gone soft on me? Since when do you care about getting in trouble?”

  Freddie seemed to think about that for a second. “I just…” She hesitated. “I don’t want to get kicked out of this place before we’ve had a chance to do some real damage, you know?”

  But CJ wasn’t at all convinced by her explanation. Freddie’s usual mischievous spirit wasn’t in it. She sounded almost worried. And Freddie never sounded worried. When you’re the daughter of the great and powerful Dr. Facilier, a man who can turn another grown man into a frog, you have very little to worry about.

  CJ wondered if Freddie was already starting to like it there, which was not acceptable.

  What if Freddie ended up wanting to stay? Like forever?

  Maybe CJ was just paranoid after what had happened with Mal and Evie, but she didn’t want to lose another friend to this pixie palace.

  Not that she had time to worry about that. The clock was ticking and she had work to do. Plus, she hated ticking clocks.

  Some things are just hereditary.

  Alone at last. And not a second too soon!

  Something’s been burning a hole in my pocket.

  Freddie left for lunch at the banquet hall and CJ was finally alone.

  She knew that was her big chance.

  This is what I’ve been waiting for ever since I was a little girl, she thought as she reached into the pocket of her red pirate coat and pulled out the cracked and yellowed scroll of paper she’d been itching to look at ever since they’d arrived in Auradon.

  She carried it to the white dresser next to the door. With a quiver in her heart and a thumping in the pit of her stomach, she ever so carefully began to unfurl the page, revealing her beloved treasure map.

  As a child she had spent many nights gazing at the scuffed paper, with its crispy edges and worn black ink. She had wasted many hours tracing her fingertip along the dotted line that had simply stopped at the barrier surrounding the island she’d called home. She had dreamed of the moment when she would finally arrive in Auradon, a place where magic wasn’t forbidden, and the map would be complete.

  Now that moment had arrived.

  With trembling fingers, she finished unrolling the paper, and a tiny gasp escaped her lips.

  It had happened. It was real.

  The map had changed.

  Even though she had predicted it, even though she had been waiting for that moment for as long as she could remember, she jumped away from the dresser in shock, as though afraid the map might attack her.

  Then, of course, she immediately rushed back to study the wondrous transformation.

  There were so many new, unfamiliar things on the page she didn’t even know where to look first. Fields and trees and oceans. Buildings and towns and castles. The kingdom of Auradon—with its curvy borders and harbors—had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

  With excitement pumping through her pirate veins, CJ noticed that the dotted trail—the one she had traced over and over with her tiny fingers years earlier—had expanded, too. It had grown and now traveled, from the desolate, magic-forsaken island, across the sea, over the land, to the city of Auradon.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, CJ felt giddy. She felt hopeful.

  She felt happy.

  She followed the newly extended trail with her fingertip, knowing it was leading her straight to the treasure she’d spent her entire life dreaming about.

  She knew it would be big. Riches beyond her wildest dreams. After all, it was her father, the once-great Captain Hook, who had kept the map hidden all those years. He wouldn’t have wasted his time unless there was something worthwhile waiting at the end.

  Of course, he probably hadn’t expected the map to be stolen by his own daughter. But could he really blame her? He had taught her well.

  The treasure would surely be enough to buy CJ a ship of her very own—one with great big sails and a gold skull decorating the hull. And, of course, a plank for her many prisoners to walk.

  Once she had her ship, she would be free. Forever.

  But something was wrong. She stared at the map, turning it this way and that. All those years, she had been sure the map would be complete once she’d found her way off the Isle of the Lost. She had sworn it would lead her right to the treasure. But it was not complete. Far from it. Although a multitude of new things had been revealed, the page was still over half empty.

  CJ could see the great ocean that separated the Isle of the Lost from the kingdom of Auradon. She could see Auradon City on the coast, Belle’s Harbor to the west, and Belle and Beast’s castle to the north. But that was it. Only a small part of the map had been revealed since she’d arrived in Auradon. The rest of it was still missing.

  She tried everything she could think of—tapping it, shaking it, rerolling and unrolling it—but nothing worked. The map stayed as it was: incomplete, unfinished.

  CJ wondered if something had gone wrong, if maybe some of the enchantment had worn off after years of being banished to a place where magic was not only forbidden but impossible.

  She started to feel panicky. She started to pace and fidget and growl. She was close to crumpling up the useless map and tossing it out the window.

  But then, during her relentless scowling and pacing, she noticed something.

  Words.

  Written in swirling cursive penmanship.

  She hadn’t noticed them before because she had been too distracte
d by the brand-new section of the map. The words were scrawled alongside the dotted trail.

  She bent forward, twirling a beaded strand of her wild golden-brown hair between her thumb and forefinger. As she read the words, her heart started to pound again.

  In this historic site of the learned

  Lies a special stone unturned.

  Find it among the tulips so bold

  And your future will shine bright with gold.

  CJ slapped herself on the forehead.

  Of course! she thought. Treasure maps were never easy to follow. Otherwise everyone would find the gold. Treasure maps were like pirates—shrewd and sly and mischievous.

  It was a clue!

  A clue that would lead her to the loot!

  She just had to be clever enough to follow it.

  And CJ was as clever as they came.

  One day she would be as great a pirate as her father once had been. Maybe even better! CJ had listened to Captain Hook’s stories for years, and she had learned from them. She knew better than to surrender to flying boys in green tights or be tricked by repulsive fairies.

  She would prove herself worthy of the great name Hook. She would follow the clue wherever it led. She would find the treasure and get her pirate ship so her life’s adventure could finally begin.

  CJ reread the clue, feeling extremely confident.

  A historic site of the learned?

  That was kind of obvious. The clue was clearly referring to Auradon Prep. And she was already there! Now all she had to do was find the stone unturned in the tulips so bold and she would be well on her way to riches.

  Smiling, CJ rolled up the map and returned it to her pocket. She was already plotting, formulating a foolproof plan.

  If she was going to find this special stone, she would have to do some serious reconnaissance work—familiarize herself with the territory, listen in on people’s conversations, gather information.

  Explore.

  “Blast! I wish I had a compass,” CJ muttered to herself. She knew it would make her quest much easier. But the sad fact was she’d never owned a compass. It was a great travesty for a pirate to be without one. Like a fairy godmother without a wand.