Monster High/Ever After High--The Legend of Shadow High

by Shannon Hale

  The girls hold the Skullette and look at the spot on the map that says EVER AFTER HIGH.

  “Just like before?” Draculaura asks.

  “Just like before,” Frankie says. “But this time, with lightning.”

  “Exsto monstrum the principal of Ever After High.” They speak the commanding words just as lightning strikes. The electricity shoots through the cable, into the Mapalogue, up to the Skullette, and into the girls. They buzz with shock, the Skullette sparks, and the Mapalogue glows.

  “Aaaah!” says Drac, her pink-streaked black hair standing two feet up from her head.

  “Hold on!” says Frankie.

  A shudder, a whoosh, and they’re shooting through darkness. Frankie feels as if someone has grabbed her by her stomach and yanked her forward, the rest of her body following a second later. Her limbs vibrate, and her head leans back as if she’s moving at an incredible speed, but she can see nothing until a shadow, sparking with black-and-green energy, flits across her vision.44

  44 The Evil Queen! That was totally the Evil Queen!

  As suddenly as the Mad Science lab around them vanishes, it is replaced by a view of a beautiful fountain of crystal-clear water, a shining fairytale castle behind it. Frankie and Draculaura clatter to the cobblestoned ground. Frankie looks up into an unfamiliar face.

  It belongs to a tall, round-bellied man with gray hair, a fancy blue suit, and a mustache that doesn’t quite meet in the middle. Milton Grimm, the headmaster of Ever After High, is staring at Frankie and Draculaura as if they have popped out of thin air. Which, Frankie supposes, they probably have.

  HELLO!” FRANKIE SAYS, WAVING. SHE IS DOING her best to be exceptionally cheerful, because she knows how she would feel if a couple of people popped out of thin air in front of her. Well, actually, she herself would probably be excited to meet the popper-inners and would ask a lot of questions. But Headmaster Grimm looks how Frankie imagines Normies would react if a monster suddenly appeared in front of them.

  Frankie figures it’s best to be exceptionally friendly. So friendly, in fact, that she waves a little too vigorously and her hastily reattached hand pops off at the seams and tumbles to the ground. The headmaster’s eyes widen in horror.

  “Oops,” Frankie says. “Sorry.” She nods at her detached hand, and it scampers back to her like a frightened pet.

  Headmaster Grimm’s mouth drops open, and Frankie is pretty sure he is about to scream, but someone beats him to it.

  “eeeeee!” screeches a high-pitched voice. A tiny girl, no bigger than a thumb, is standing on a flower by Frankie’s feet.

  “monsters! monsters!” the tiny girl screams.

  “Monsters?” someone asks from the small crowd that’s gathering. Everyone looks Normie normal, except for wearing sort of fancy clothes. Have they interrupted some kind of Normie festival or outdoor play?

  “Monsters?” Headmaster Grimm repeats. He laughs uneasily. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”

  “Well, um…” Draculaura says, smiling big and doing her best to look friendly.

  “Look at her teeth!” someone shouts. “She has fangs!”

  “Ooh!” Draculaura pops into bat form. “Oops,” Bat-Drac squeaks, back into girl form. “Sorry. When I get spooked, sometimes I—”

  “Vampire!”

  “There… there’s… ahem… no such thing as vampires,” Headmaster Grimm says, all color draining from his face. “Go to class now, students.”

  “And that—that thing!”

  At the word thing, Frankie fumbles her hand, and it drops back to the ground.

  “And there’s no such thing as… as whatever that is,” Headmaster Grimm says, frowning at Frankie as she scrambles to pick up her severed hand.

  Several people are still screaming, but many have moved on to angry muttering.

  “I’ve read stories about this,” whispers Draculaura. “When Normies go from screaming to muttering, pitchforks and torches are next. We should run.”

  “Run where? Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” Draculaura says. “A Normie city?”

  “But something’s off,” says Frankie. “They aren’t dressed like any Normies I’ve seen. And that one girl is, like, two inches tall.”

  “Well, they aren’t monsters—that’s for sure,” Draculaura says. “Maybe we’re in France.”

  “Did I hear someone cry ‘monster’?” calls out a guy about their age who is framed in the doorway of the school. He is tall and athletic looking, with perfectly styled golden hair.

  “He seems nice,” Draculaura whispers.

  The boy hurriedly unzips his backpack and draws out a gleaming sword. “Present yourself for slaying, foul monster!”

  “I take it back,” Drac says. “Not nice. Not nice at all. Back to the running plan.”

  “There’s a forest that way,” Frankie says, nodding in the direction of a dark wood that seems the best possible option for a monster habitat.

  “Right,” says Drac. “Run.”

  They take off at a sprint. Behind them they hear Headmaster Grimm yell, “Mr. Charming! No slaying on school property! Put that sword away right now!”

  Frankie runs so hard she nearly bursts at the seams, her jumping gallop trying to keep pace with Draculaura’s speedy gait.

  The two girls skid to a stop at the edge of the forest.

  “They aren’t chasing,” Frankie says. “Should we—?”

  “Go back home?” Draculaura says. “Yes, please. It’s too bright with the sun and too sparkly with the clothes and too sharp with the swords. I don’t know what this Ever After even is.”

  A crash sounds from within the forest.

  “Is that a good noise or a bad noise?” Frankie asks.

  “I’ve got the Skullette,” Draculaura says. “We can go back.”

  “Okay,” Frankie says, looking toward the forest sound, “but we worked so hard to get here. We should try to investigate, at least. Maybe that’s a friendly… er… mob?”

  “Let’s not risk it.”

  “You’re right.”

  They both grab the Skullette and shout “Exsto monstrum Dracula!”

  Nothing happens. Certainly not the thrust back home to Draculaura’s dad that they were expecting.

  “The Skullette isn’t humming,” Frankie says. “Doesn’t it usually output a little energy when we hold it?”

  The crashing noise is getting louder. Whatever it is will be upon them soon.

  “Let’s try someone else’s name,” Draculaura says. “Ready? One, two…”

  “Exsto monstrum Clawdeen Wolf!” they shout.

  And nothing happens. Again.

  A hooded girl leaps from the woods at a dead run. The monster girls scream.45

  45 Only because they don’t know this is the friendly Cerise Hood, daughter of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.

  “Hey, it’s okay. Calm down,” the hooded girl says. “You’re scaring people.”

  “We’re scaring people?” Draculaura says. “You’re the one who just leaped at us from a dark forest!”

  “Sorry,” Cerise says. “I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just wanted to catch up to you before Headmaster Grimm did.”

  “Are you one of them?” Frankie asks. “One of those Normies who were just a hop and a skip from pitchforks and torches?”

  The girl removes her hood and smiles. Her teeth are sharp. Pointed ears tipped with tufts of fur poke out from underneath her hair, and her eyes flash yellow.

  “I don’t know what Normies are,” says Cerise, “but I don’t think I am one.”

  “At last!” Drac relaxes. “A monster! Hey, do you know Clawdeen Wolf?”

  “Yeah, is she your cousin, maybe?” says Frankie. “She’s a werewolf, too.”

  “I don’t know who Clawdeen is,” Cerise says, looking around nervously. “And I’m not a werewolf. Werewolves are monsters, and monsters aren’t real—” She gives the two monsters a once-over and shakes her head. “Tha
t is… I don’t know what’s real. Don’t tell anyone else about my ears, okay? I just wanted you to know that you’re not alone. Don’t worry. Ever After isn’t that weird.”

  Just then a giant chicken leaps out of the forest.

  At least, Frankie thinks it is a giant chicken at first. It has giant chicken legs. But instead of a giant chicken body, there is a cottage, like the kind an old-school witch might live in.

  “I’d better go,” says Cerise, pulling on her hood and slipping into the shadows. “But don’t worry. You’ll be okay!”

  A woman who looks remarkably witchy herself perches on the roof. The witch cackles, and Frankie relaxes. Witches feel closer to monster than Normie.

  Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut struts toward the girls and squats to ground level.

  “That is a fangtastic house, ma’am!” Draculaura calls up to Baba Yaga. “Where did you get it?”

  The door to the hut swings open, and Headmaster Grimm steps out.

  “We need to get you safely back to my office, um… girls,” Headmaster Grimm says. “Into Madam Baba Yaga’s hut now. Try not to be scared of it.”

  “Scared?” Draculaura says, leaping into the hut. “This thing is clawesome!”

  The floor of the hut sways as it stands on its chicken legs and begins to walk.

  Draculaura looks out the window. “I so want one of these chicken houses!”

  Baba Yaga sniffs. “This one is mine. You can’t have it.”

  “No, of course not. But wait, you said ‘this one.’ Are there more of these somewhere?”

  “No,” Baba Yaga says. “Maybe. Which is to say, I am done talking about chicken huts.”

  The hut makes its way across the campus, stopping just outside the window of Headmaster Grimm’s office on an upper floor of the building. The hut stands on its clawed toes, its front door opening and lining up with the office window. The foursome climbs through the window into the headmaster’s grand, book-filled office.

  “What are you hexactly?” Baba Yaga asks, poking at Frankie. “Flesh golem? Reanimated corpse? Zombie? Homunculus?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Headmaster Grimm. “None of those things exist!”

  “I… I’m Frankie,” she says. “Frankie Stein. My father, Frankenstein, made me in his laboratory.”

  The color drains from Headmaster Grimm’s face. “That’s preposterous!”

  “With what did your father make you? Sugar? Spice? Clay, maybe?” Baba Yaga pinches Frankie’s arm. “Doesn’t feel like clay.…”

  “I’m not sure,” Frankie says. “With different pieces. Sewn together.”

  “Different pieces of what?” Baba Yaga asks, one eyebrow arching.

  “This is all nonsense,” Headmaster Grimm says. “Frankenstein is a character in a campfire tale, a nonstory that is, I might add, forbidden!”

  Baba Yaga shrugs. “Flesh golem, then,” she mutters.

  Headmaster Grimm ignores the witch. “I don’t allow students to tell monster stories,” he continues. “It makes for sleepless nights, provokes dark ideas, and interferes with Happily Ever Afters. You two will need to stay hidden away here. You’ve already done too much damage.”

  Frankie looks around the office. “We have to stay… here? In this room? For how long?”

  “Until we can figure out who you really are and what to do with you!”

  The headmaster and the witch leave the office. The dead bolt slides into place, locking them in.

  “I’m sorry, Drac,” says Frankie. “I’m so sorry. This is one hundred percent my fault.”

  “No, it’s okay,” says Draculaura, but she sits in the corner, curled up, her arms around her knees, and nothing about her looks remotely okay.

  RAVEN: Hey Mad where are you?

  MADDIE: In Headmaster Grimm’s office guarding monsters

  RAVEN: Um what?

  MADDIE: Headmaster Grimm asked Apple to watch the monsters and Apple asked me to help cuz we’re the copresidents of the royal student council. He and the other teachers are off having the talkytalk biz. They’re all what do we do I don’t know there’s monsters in Ever After aah run away. Like that.

  RAVEN: When you say monsters what do you mean?

  MADDIE: Monsters. Rawr. AAH! You know like the stories. You should come I’ve never met monsters before so cool. Only don’t try to come through the door its locked, no matter how much I sing at it and feed it noodles

  To get in through the upper-story window, Raven hitches a ride on the back of her pet dragon.46

  46 If I had a pet dragon, I’d pretty much always be hitching rides on it.

  “Thanks, Nevermore,” says Raven. “Can you get any closer?”

  The huge purple dragon hovers outside the office window, inching close enough that her head nearly touches the glass. Raven runs down her pet’s back and onto her head and leaps to the window ledge. She clings to the stones with one hand and knocks frantically.

  Maddie opens the window and smiles. “Raven! Come in! This is like a holiday. There should be a We Just Met Monsters Day! We could eat creepy foods and have a dance party in a swamp. Or just a tea party, maybe. Really, a tea party works for any occasion.”

  “I’m royally glad you’re here, Raven,” Apple says as Raven hops down into the room. Apple has on her plastered smile, the smile that means, “I’m trying to be cool but really I’m flipping out.” Her grin gets even larger and she adds, “Meet our… guests, Frankie Stein and Draculaura.”

  In the corner, two figures stand with their backs against the wall, their faces in shadow.

  “Hey, hi, I’m Raven. Raven Queen. Nice to meet you?”

  The girls take a couple of tentative steps closer. The light catches their faces. A green-skinned face with one green eye and one blue, stitches around her neck holding on her head. The other pale as the moon, with canine teeth as long as… as long as a…

  “Whoa!” says Raven, taking a step back. “Sorry. Sorry, I just didn’t hexpect you. You’re like characters out of a story.”

  Apple’s smile stiffens, and she says without moving her lips, “They’re monsters, Raven. Real. Live. Monsters. Isn’t that just… just hexcellent?”

  Raven has seen griffins, cockatrices, basilisks, and even the Jabberwock. Some people call trolls and dragons monsters, and they are all over Ever After. But dragons and griffins and trolls and such are real. These girls are make-believe things who walked straight out of a scary story. Raven’s head feels as light as a charmflower seed puff.

  “Are… are you…?” Draculaura says, squinting at Raven.

  Raven feels a bead of sweat roll down her back, but to keep herself from running away, she takes a cue from Apple and slaps on what she hopes is a comforting smile. Her smile reveals her perfectly normal teeth.

  Draculaura sighs with disappointment. “Oh… never mind. I guess not… I just thought… I thought you were like me.”

  Raven swallows. Her first day at Ever After High, she couldn’t take a couple of steps out of her room without someone screaming in terror and running away from the Evil Queen’s daughter. “Um, maybe I am,” she says. “What are you like? Lost? I’ve felt lost before.”

  “No, no, I mean, you know, I’m a vampire.”

  “You’re a…”

  Draculaura folds her arms. “Fair warning: If you know what’s good for you, don’t try to stick me in a coffin.”

  “What? No way!” Raven exclaims. “Do you know how cool it is to be mistaken for a vampire? Only slightly less cool than actually meeting one.”

  “Really?” Draculaura smiles.

  “Vampires aren’t real,” Apple says through clenched teeth.

  “I know!” Raven laughs. “That’s what makes this so fableous. So, Draculaura, can you turn into a bat?”

  “Sure.”

  “So. Cool,” Raven says. “I met all kinds of creatures in my mom’s castle when I was a kid, but I thought straight-up bat-vampires were just stories.”

  Apple takes a step
backward. “Oh! Do you… er… eat… um, red meat?”

  “No,” says Draculaura. “But my dad does.”

  Apple gasps.

  “But he’s trying to quit!” says Draculaura. “Really! It would be much healthier for him if he were vegetarian like me.…”

  “A vegetarian vampire?” Raven rubs her hands together with delight. Tiny bits of purple magic spark into the air. “And you?”

  Frankie clears her throat and looks back at the dark corner as if wishing she could hunker down there longer, but she says, “I was made. Stitched together in a laboratory. My dad is Frankenstein.”

  “No,” says Apple, finally unfreezing her smile. “This. Isn’t. Possible. That is a character in a campfire story. Frankenstein isn’t real.”

  “Well, we’re kinda characters in stories,” says Raven.

  “But we are not make-believe!” says Apple. “We inherit stories. Just because my mother is Snow White—”

  “Waitwaitwait,” says Frankie. “Your mother is Snow White? Like in the Normie fairytale? Poisoned-apple, friendly-with-dwarfs Snow White?”

  Apple sniffs. “They prefer dwarves with a v, but yes.”

  “That’s impossible,” says Frankie. “That’s just a story.”

  “Just a story?” says Apple. “Like you’re just alive?”

  “What I mean is, that can’t be true,” says Frankie. “Snow White isn’t a real person.”

  Apple pulls out her MirrorPhone. “I assure you she is. I could call her for you if you want.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” Frankie says.

  “Well,” Draculaura says, “there is precedent. Normies don’t think my dad is real. Or your dad. Or Clawdeen’s mom. Or us, either, really. But we are. They are. Maybe this is the same kind of thing.”

  “We’re the Normies in this situation?” says Frankie.

  Draculaura shrugs. “Maybe.”