The Isle of the Lost

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “Hello, dear,” Maleficent’s cold voice said. “Do you know what time it is, young lady?”

  Mal was confused. Since when had Maleficent imposed a curfew? It wasn’t as if her mother cared where she went or when she came home, now—did she? After all, the woman wasn’t called Maleficent for nothing. “Two in the morning?” Mal finally guessed.

  “I thought so,” Maleficent said, pushing up a purple sleeve and correcting the time on her wristwatch. She pulled the sleeve down and looked at her daughter.

  Mal waited, wondering where this was going. She hadn’t seen her mother in a while, and when they did come in contact, Mal was often taken aback by how small her mother looked, these days.

  The Mistress of Darkness had literally shrunk with the reduction in her circumstances. Whereas once she had been towering, she was now almost a miniature version of her former self—petite, even. If she stood up, one could see that Mal was taller than she was by a few inches.

  Yet the distinctive menace had not abated, it just came in a tinier package. “Where was I? Oh yes, Evil lives!” Maleficent hissed.

  “Evil lives—exactly, Mother.” Mal nodded. “Is that what you want to talk to me about? The tags around town? Pretty good, right?”

  “No, you misunderstand me, dear,” her mother said, and it was then that Mal noticed that her mother was not alone. She was petting a black raven that was perched on the arm of her chair.

  The raven croaked, flew to Mal’s shoulder, and nipped her ear.

  “Ouch!” she said. “Stop that!”

  “That’s just Diablo. Don’t be jealous my little friend; that’s just Mal,” Maleficent said dismissively. And even if Mal knew that her mother couldn’t care less about her (Mal tried not to take it personally, as her mother couldn’t care less about anyone), it still stung to hear it said aloud so bluntly.

  “Diablo? That’s Diablo?” said Mal. She knew all about Diablo, Maleficent’s first and only friend. Her mother had told her the story many times: how, twenty years ago, now, Maleficent had battled Prince Phillip as a great black fiery dragon but had been struck down, betrayed, by a weapon of justice and peace that some irritatingly good fairies had helped aim right into her heart. Maleficent had believed herself dead and passed from this world, but instead she had woken up the next day, alone and broken, on this terrible island.

  The only remnant of the battle was the scar on her chest where the sword had struck, and every so often she would feel the phantom pain of that wound. She had told Mal many times how, when she woke up, she had realized that those awful good fairies had taken everything away from her—her castle, her home, even her favorite pet raven.

  “The one and only Diablo,” purred Maleficent, actually looking happy for once.

  “But how? He was frozen! They turned him into stone!” said Mal.

  “Yes, they did, those horrid little beasts. But he’s back! He’s back! And Evil lives!” Maleficent declared, with a witch’s cackle for good measure.

  Okay. Her mother was getting just a wee bit repetitive.

  Mal gave her mother her best eye-roll. To the rest of the fools, minions, and morons on the island, Maleficent was the scariest thing with two horns around; but to Mal, who had seen her mother put goblin jelly on toast and drop crumbs all over the couch, polish her horns with shoe polish, and sew the raggedy hemline of her purple cape, she was just her mother, and Mal wasn’t that scared of her. Okay, so she was still scared of her mother, but she wasn’t like Carlos-scared.

  Maleficent stood from her chair, her green eyes blazing into Mal’s identical ones. “My Dragon’s Eye—my scepter of darkness—Diablo says it has been awakened! Evil lives!—and best of all, it is on this island!”

  “Your scepter? Are you sure?” Mal asked skeptically. “Hard to believe King Beast of Auradon would leave such an impressive weapon on the Isle.”

  “Diablo swears he saw it, didn’t you, my sweet?” Maleficent purred. The raven cawed.

  “So where is it?” asked Mal.

  “Well, I don’t speak Raven, do I? It’s on this blasted piece of rock somewhere!” Maleficent fumed, tossing her cape back.

  “Okay, then. But so what?”

  “So what?! The Dragon’s Eye is back! Evil lives! It means I can have my powers back!”

  “Not with the dome still up,” Mal pointed out.

  “It doesn’t matter. I thought those three despicably good fairies had destroyed it, but they had only frozen it, like they had Diablo. It is alive, it is out there somewhere, and best of all—you—my dear—will get it for me!” Maleficent announced with a flourish.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Don’t you want to prove yourself to me? Prove that you are worthy of being my daughter?” her mother asked quietly.

  Mal didn’t answer.

  “You know how much you are a disappointment to me, how when I was your age, I had armies of goblins under my control, but you…what do you do—put your little drawings all over town? You need to do MORE!” she seethed, standing up from her chair. Diablo flapped his wings and cawed in agreement.

  Mal tried not to show her feelings. She’d thought those tags were pretty cool. “Fine! Fine! I’ll go get your scepter!” she agreed, if only to stop her mother from raging.

  “Wonderful.” Maleficent touched her heart, or the hole in her chest where it should have been. “When that sword pierced my dragon hide, and I fell off that cliff twenty years ago, I was sure I had died. But they brought me back to suffer a fate worse than death, much worse. But one day, I will have my revenge!”

  Mal nodded. She’d heard the spiel so many times, she could chant it in her sleep. Maleficent took her hand, and they chorused, “Revenge on the fools who imprisoned us on this cursed island!”

  Maleficent urged Mal closer so that she could whisper a warning in her ear.

  “Yes, Mother,” said Mal, to show she understood.

  Maleficent grinned. “Now, get out of here and bring it back, so we can be free of this floating prison once and for all!”

  Mal trudged up to her room. She’d forgotten to tell her mother about the mean trick she’d pulled on Evie at the party, not that it would have been evil enough for the great Maleficent, either. Nothing was. Why did she even bother?

  She climbed out her window and onto the balcony where could see across the entire island and the shining spires of Auradon glimmered in the distance.

  A few minutes later, she heard the sound of jiggling trinkets, which meant Jay had dropped by to annoy her or to steal a late-night snack.

  “I’m out here,” she called.

  “You left before the fun really began,” he said, meaning the party. “We turned the ballroom into a mosh pit and crowd-surfed.” He joined her on the balcony, a bag of smelly cheese curls in his hand.

  She shrugged.

  “What’s with the rude raven?” he asked, chomping noisily on the snack, his fingers turning a fluorescent shade of orange.

  “That’s Diablo. You know, my mom’s old familiar. He’s back.”

  Jay stopped chewing. “He’s what?”

  “He’s back. He got unfrozen. So now Mom thinks the spell over the island might be unraveling, somehow.”

  Jay’s eyes grew wide.

  Mal looked away and continued, “That’s not all. Diablo swears the Dragon’s Eye is back too. That he saw it glow back to life. You know, her scepter, her greatest weapon, the one that controls all the forces of evil and darkness, blah blah blah. She wants me to find it, and use it to break the curse over the island.”

  Jay let out a loud laugh. “Well, she’s really gone off the cliff into the deep end to take a swim with the killer alligators, then, hasn’t she? That thing is hidden forever and ever, and ever and ever and—”

  “Ever?” Mal smirked.

  “Exactly.”

  Mal turned away, wanting to change the subject. “Do you ever think about what it’s like over there?” she asked, nodding toward Auradon.

  Jay scoff
ed. “Yeah, horrible. Sunny, and happy, and…horrible. I thank my unlucky stars every day that I’m not there.”

  “Yeah, I know. But, I mean—you never get sick of this place, like you want a change?” she asked, brooding.

  Jay looked at her quizzically.

  “Never mind.” Mal didn’t think he would understand. She continued staring into the night. Jay continued munching on his cheese curls and fiddling with some newly stolen costume jewelry.

  A memory came flooding back to Mal. She was five years old and was in the marketplace with her mother when a goblin tripped and fell, spilling his basket of fruit everywhere. Without thinking, she had started picking up the fruit, helping the goblin gather it all. One by one, she picked up the apples, dusted them off on her dress, and placed them back in the basket. Suddenly Mal looked up from where she was crouched. The market had gone silent, and everyone, including her mother, who was rotten-apple red and fuming, was staring at her.

  “Get up this instant,” her mother had hissed. Maleficent kicked the basket, and the apples all fell out again.

  Mal obeyed. When they got back home, her mother locked her in her room to think about what she had done. “If you’re not careful, my girl, you’ll end up just like him—just like your father—weak and powerless. AND PATHETIC!” Maleficent had bellowed through the locked door.

  Little Mal had stared into the dingy mirror leaning precariously on her vanity. Fighting back tears, she vowed never to disappoint her mother again.

  “We have to find it,” Mal said to Jay as an icy wind whipped up from the sea below and pulled her from her memory. “The Dragon’s Eye. It’s here.”

  “Mal, it’s not poss—”

  “We have to,” Mal said.

  “Eh,” Jay replied shrugging his shoulders and turning toward the window to go back inside. “We’ll see.”

  Mal took one last look out at the horizon to the bright, sparkling speck in the distance. She felt a pang in her gut, like longing. But what for, she couldn’t say.

  “Miserable,

  darling, as

  usual, perfectly

  wretched.”

  —Cruella De Vil,

  101 Dalmatians

  Jay left the Bargain Castle behind him. It was the very end of night, the time when it was just turning toward morning—when it was still dark, but you could already hear the mournful call of the vultures scavenging their way across the island. He shivered, retracing his steps through the grim backstreets and alleyways of the town, past the eerily bare trees and broken-shuttered buildings that looked as abandoned and hopeless as everyone who lived there.

  Jay quickened his pace. He wasn’t scared of the dark; he depended on it. Jay did some of his best work at night. He’d never get used to the way the island felt in the darkness, though. Jay picked up on it most when everyone else was asleep, and he could see the world around him clearly, for what it was. He could see that this town and this island and these bare trees and these broken shutters were his life, no matter what other life his father and his peers had known. There was no glory here. No magic and no power, either. This was it—all they would ever have or be or know.

  No matter what Mal thinks.

  Jay kicked a rock across the crumbling cobblestones, and an irritated cat howled back at him from the shadows.

  She’s so full of it.

  Mal wouldn’t admit it—their defeat—especially not when she was in a mood like tonight. Mal was so stubborn sometimes. Practically delusional. In moments like these, Jay had clearly seen the effects of a raised-by-a-maniacal-villain upbringing. He couldn’t blame Mal for not wanting to tell her mother no—nobody would—but really, there was no way that Maleficent’s scepter was somewhere on the Isle of the Lost, and even if it was, Jay and Mal would never find it.

  Jay shook his head.

  Eye of the Dragon? More like, Eye of Desperation.

  That raven is bonkers, probably from being frozen for twenty years.

  He shrugged and rounded the corner to his own street. He tried to forget about it, half-expecting (and half-hoping) Mal would probably do the same. She had her whims, but they never seemed to last. That was the good thing about Mal; she would get all worked up about something, but totally drop it the next day. They got along because Jay had learned to just ride out the storm.

  When he finally made his way through the last of the puzzle of stolen locks, chains, and deadbolts that guarded his own house (thieves being the most paranoid about burglary), he pushed the rotting wooden door open with a creak and crept inside.

  One foot at a time. Shift your body weight as you step. Stick close to the wall….

  “Jay? Is that you?”

  Crap.

  His father was still awake, cooking eggs, his faithful parrot, Iago, on his shoulder. Was Jafar worried about his only son being out so late? Was he worried about where he’d been, or who he’d been with, or why he hadn’t come home until now?

  Nah. His father had only one thing on his mind, and Jay knew exactly what it was.

  “What’s tonight’s haul?” Jafar asked greedily, as he set his plate of food down on the kitchen table, next to a pile of rusty coins that passed for currency on the island. The table was where Jafar practiced his favorite hobby: counting his money. There was a good-sized pyramid of coins on the table, but Jay knew it wouldn’t satisfy Jafar’s greed.

  Nothing did.

  “Nice pajamas.” Jay smirked. The trick with his father was to keep moving, to stay on your toes, and above all else, to avoid answering the question, because none of the answers were ever right. When you couldn’t win, you shouldn’t give in and play. That was just setting yourself up for disaster.

  I mean, my dad’s best friend is a parrot.

  Enough said.

  “Nice pajamas!” Iago squawked. “Nice pajamas!”

  Jafar was wearing a faded bathrobe over saggy pajamas with little lamps printed all over them. If twenty years of being frozen could turn a raven cuckoo, twenty years of life among the lost had done just as much to diminish the former Grand Vizier of Agrabah’s infamy, along with his grandeur and panache (at least, that was how his father thought of it). Gone were the sumptuous silks and plush velvet jackets, replaced by a uniform of ratty velour sweat suits and sweat-stained undershirts that smelled a little too strongly of their shop’s marketplace stand, which was located, rather unfortunately and quite directly across from the horse stalls.

  The sleek black beard was now raggedy and gray, and there was the aforementioned gut. Iago had taken to calling him “the sultan,” since Jafar now resembled his old adversary in size; although, in all fairness, Iago himself looked like he was on a daily cracker binge.

  In return, Jafar called his feathered pal things that were unrepeatable by any standard, even a parrot’s.

  Jay hated his father’s pajamas: they were a sign of how far their once royalty-adjacent family had fallen. The flannel was worn so thin in places you could see Jafar’s belly roll beneath it. Jay tried not to look too closely, even now, in the shadows of the early morning light.

  His father ignored the pajama insults. He’d heard them all before. He wolfed down his midnight snack with relish without offering Jay a bite. “Come on, come on, get on with it. What’d we get? Let’s have a look.”

  Jay eyed his carpet roll at the end of the room, beyond the table—but he also knew there was no way of getting past his father now. He reluctantly unpacked his pockets. “Broken glass slipper, got it from one of the step-granddaughters. With some glue, we could get a good price for it.” The cracked, heel-less slipper shattered into a pile of glass shards the moment it hit the table. Jafar raised an eyebrow.

  “Um, superglue?” Jay kept going. “One of Lucifer’s collars, Rick Ratcliffe’s pistol keychain—and look, a real glass eye!” It was covered in lint. “It’s only a little used. I got it from one of the pirates.” He held it up to his own eye and peered through the glass—then jerked it away, wrinkling his nose and fannin
g his face with his hand. “Why don’t pirates ever bathe? Hello, it’s called a shower. It’s not like they’re even out at sea anymore.” With that, he rolled the eyeball across the table to his father.

  Iago squawked curiously while Jay waited for the inevitable.

  Jafar waved a dismissive hand over the items and sighed. “Garbage.”

  “Garbage!” Iago shrieked. “Garbage!”

  “But that’s all there is on this island,” Jay argued, leaning against the kitchen sink. “This is the Isle of the Lost, the Isle of the Leftovers, remember?”

  His father frowned. “You went to the De Vil place, and you didn’t score a fur coat? What were you doing in there all night? Slobbering over Maleficent’s girl?”

  Jay rolled his eyes. “For the ten-thousandth time, no. And it’s not like I was the one locked in the coat closet.” As he said it, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of that.

  “You need to try harder! What about that princess? The one who’s just come out of the castle?”

  “Oh yeah, her. I forgot.” Jay dug into his jeans pocket and brought out a silver necklace with a red poisoned-apple charm on it. “That’s all she had on her. I’m telling you, even the castles around this place are dumps.”

  Jafar put on a pair of spectacles and examined the jewelry, squinting first with one eye, then with the other. His eyesight was going, and his back ached from the extra work of carrying around his own sweatsuited belly; even villains were not spared the perils of aging. “Paste and glass. In my day, a servant wouldn’t have worn that, let alone a princess. Not quite the big score we’re looking for.” He tossed the bauble aside, sighing as he stopped to feed Iago another cracker.

  “Score,” said Iago, gleefully spitting cracker crumbs. “Big Score!”

  Jay’s shoulders slumped.

  The big score.

  It was his father’s dream: that one day his only son would find a cachet of loot so big, so rich, so laden with gold, that Jafar would no longer have to preside over a junk shop, ever again. No matter that the Isle of the Lost was a floating rubbish heap; somehow Jafar believed the big score was always right around the corner—a bounty that could transport him back to his rightful place as a sorcerer, with all its power and trappings.