Isle of the Lost

by Melissa de la Cruz

  Talk about delusional.

  Even if it did exist, could such a treasure take any of them back in time to a better day, or free them from a lifetime of imprisonment? As if an object or a jewel or any amount of gold coins could fix the mess that people like Jafar had gotten them all into, in the first place?

  The big score. His father was as crazy as Mal had been tonight. Jay shook his head.

  And then he just shook. Because he’d thought of something.

  Hang on.

  What had Mal told him tonight? That the raven believed Maleficent’s scepter, the Dragon’s Eye, was hidden somewhere on this island? If Diablo was telling the truth, and Jay was able to find it, it would be the biggest score of the year. Of the century! He thought it through. Was it possible? Could it be that easy? Could his father have been right to hold on to the faintest hope for something better, even after all these years?

  Nah.

  Jay rubbed his eyes. It had been a long night. There was no way that thing was on the Isle of the Lost. There was nothing of power here—not when it came to people, and not when it came to their stuff.

  And even if it was here—however unlikely that might be—the dome over the island kept out all magic out. The Dragon’s Eye was just a fancy name for a walking stick now. Like he’d told Mal, it was a useless enterprise. They were better off trying to hijack a boat out of the Goblin Wharf back to Auradon. Not that any of them would want to live there.

  Maybe we belong on the Isle of the Lost, Leftover, and Forgotten. Maybe that’s how this story is supposed to go.

  Only, who’s going to break the news to my dad?

  Jay watched as his father returned to stacking the coins in neat piles. Counting coins gave him peace in some way his son would never understand. Jafar was whistling, and looked up when he saw Jay staring at him.

  “Remember the Golden Rule?” his father purred as he caressed the money with his hands.

  “Totally. ’Night, Dad,” Jay said, heading to the worn carpet underneath the shelves in the back, where he slept. Whoever has the most gold makes the rules. It’s what his father believed, and while Jay had never seen any gold in his life, he’d been taught to believe it too.

  He just wasn’t sure that he believed there was any gold to find. Not on the Isle of the Lost. Still, as he curled up on the hard bit of carpeted floor that was his bed, he tried to imagine what it would feel like to find it.

  The Big Score.

  He fell asleep dreaming of his father bursting with pride in a pair of pajamas made of gold.

  Cruella was going to kill him if she ever found out he’d thrown a party while she was away. People on the island kept telling him Cruella had mellowed with age, that she was rounder and less shouty, but they didn’t have to live with her.

  Cruella De Vil’s son knew his mother better than anyone.

  If his mother had any idea that he’d let a bunch of people come over…and even worse, let anyone even come near her fur closet—let alone inside it—let alone be tackled in a pile of full-length grade-A–pelt coats—well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be a puppy she would be trying to skin.

  But thankfully his mother was still at the Spa and hadn’t returned unexpectedly as she was wont to do sometimes, if only to keep her son and Jasper and Horace on their minion-y toes.

  Carlos stumbled out of bed and found a few bleary-eyed guests wandering around Hell Hall, smelling like last night’s spicy cider. “You’re probably looking for the bathroom. This way. No problem!” He shoved them out the front door before they could realize what was happening. As he did, Harry and Jace, the two young, second-generation De Vil minions who had helped him decorate for the party, stumbled out of the ballroom with crepe paper in their hair.

  “’Morning,” said Carlos, his voice still froggy with sleep. “Why are you wearing the party?”

  “I told him not to get me tangled up in his stupid streamers,” Harry said, still surly.

  “You told me? You were the one playing tag all night, dragging half the decorations around after you.”

  “I was entertaining guests.”

  “Then why was no one playing with you?”

  As usual, there was no hope of real conversation with either of them. Carlos gave up.

  His cousin Diego De Vil gave him a thumbs-up from the couch. “Great party. Total howler!” The rest of the band was packing up their gear.

  “Thanks, I think.” Carlos wrinkled his nose. The gloomy morning light made everything look sadder and more sordid. Even the chandelier’s candles had burnt down to stubs, and someone had broken the rope swing so that it swayed gently, brushing the floor.

  “We’d better get out of here so you can clean up.” Diego grinned. “Or did your mom say to leave it for her to do when she got home?” He burst out laughing.

  “Very funny.” Carlos ignored his cousin, pushing his way through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. He was hungry, his head hurt, and he hadn’t slept well—dreaming anxiously of keeping the party a secret from his mother, but also of the dazzling light that had emanated from his machine and hit the dome.

  Did that really happen?

  For a moment there, Carlos thought he had felt something in the air. Something wild and electric and thrumming with energy. Magic? Could it be?

  He wondered if he could make the machine do it again.

  After breakfast.

  He poked his head into the kitchen, which looked like a party bomb had exploded. Every counter and surface was sticky and littered with cups, bowls, bits of popcorn and chips, rotten deviled eggs, uneaten devil dogs, and empty bottles of cider. His feet stuck and unstuck with every step on the floor, ripping up and down with a noise that was part Velcro, part pseudopod. He took a broom and began to sweep and clean, just enough so that he could get to the fridge and the shelves.

  “Hey, uh, can I just…” Carlos said, pushing a snoring Clay Clayton away from the kitchen counter to grab his breakfast. Clay was the son of the Great Hunter who’d almost captured Tarzan’s gorilla troop (almost being the operative word: like every villain on the Isle, each one’s evil schemes had ultimately ended in failure).

  Carlos filled a bowl with some congealed, lumpy oatmeal and grabbed a spoon just as the Gastons stuck their heads inside.

  “Hey, man! What’ve you got there? Breakfast? Don’t mind if we do.” The burly brothers high-fived him as they stole his cold porridge from under his nose on their way out the door. Being the Gastons, they were the last to leave and the first to steal all the food, as usual.

  “I guess I wasn’t hungry anyway,” Carlos said out loud, although only he was listening. “We should get busy and clean this place up before my mom gets home.”

  He sighed and picked up the broom.

  There was way too much to clean. But he was Carlos De Vil, boy genius, wasn’t he? Surely he could figure out a way to make this task easier? Yes, he would. He just had to put his mind to it. He would take care of the cleanup later. First, he had to go to school.

  Back at her own castle, Evie hadn’t been able to sleep any better than Carlos had. Perhaps her dreams weren’t plagued by Cruella De Vil or the cracking dome, but they were tormented by endless mazes of dark rooms and snapping traps—and she had woken up in a full sweat just as one was about to clamp down on her leg with its steel jaws again.

  I can’t go back to school, she thought. Not after last night.

  The thought of having to face Mal again made her stomach queasy.

  Besides, what was wrong with staying home? Home was, well, home. Wasn’t it? So maybe it wasn’t nice here, but it was safe. Relatively. Cozy. In a not-exactly-traditionally-cozy way.

  Or not.

  Okay, so it was cold and musty and basically a cave. Or a prison, as she had come to think of it during her years of castle-schooling. And today, like most days of her life, Evie could hear her mother talking to herself in her imaginary Magic Mirror voice again.

  But at least at home there were no
traps and no purple-haired wicked fairies angling for revenge. There were no confusing frenemies, if she and Mal were even that.

  I don’t know what we are, but I know I don’t like it.

  And here I thought once I got to a real school my life was going to be so much better.

  Evie got up and went to her desk, which had a few of her old textbooks from her years of castle-schooling. She picked up her favorite, a worn leather grimoire, the Evil Queen’s personal spell book.

  Of course, it was useless on the Isle, but Evie still liked reading all the spells. It was like a catalog of her mother’s finer days, of a time before she spent hour after useless hour rattling around the empty rooms of the castle doing the Voice. It made Evie feel better, sometimes. To remember that things hadn’t always been like this.

  She paged through the spell book’s worn yellow pages like she had when she was a little girl. She had pored over them the way she imagined the princesses in Auradon pored over their stupid fairy tales. She studied them the way other princesses studied, well, other princesses.

  There were truth spells involving candles and water, love spells that called for flower petals and blood, health spells and wealth spells, spells for luck and spells for doom. Trickster spells were her favorite, especially the Peddler’s Disguise, which her mother had used to fool that silly Snow White. That was a good one.

  A classic, even.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Evil Queen said, entering her bedroom. “You’re looking pale again! Let me blush!” She removed a big round brush and began to work on Evie’s cheeks. “Pink as an appleblossom. There. Much better.” She looked down at the book in her daughter’s hand. “Oh, that old thing? I never understand. Why would you want to get that out again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I just can’t picture it. I mean, did you really do this spell? You?” Evie somehow couldn’t imagine her mother as a frightening old hag. Sure, she was plump and middle-aged and no longer resembled the formidable portrait of her that hung in the main gallery, but she was far from ugly.

  “Oh, yes! It was a scream! Snow Why-So-Stupid? was completely fooled! What a dope.” Evil Queen giggled. “I mean, hello? Door-to-door apple sales hag? In the middle of the forest?” She sighed. “Ah. Good times.”

  Evie shook her head. “Still.”

  Her mother fussed with her hair. “Wait. Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I don’t feel like going,” Evie confessed. “I’m not sure it’s right, after all. Going to a big school. Maybe I should just stay in the castle.”

  Evil Queen shrugged. “Who needs an education anyway? Pretty is as pretty is—remember that, darling.”

  “Don’t worry. You don’t let me forget.”

  “It’s attention to the little things. You have to work for it, and you have to want it. Your eyelashes aren’t going to curl themselves, you know.”

  “Nope. You’re going to curl them for me, even if I don’t want you to.”

  “That’s right. And why? So that one day you can have what’s rightfully yours, even if you are stuck on this miserable island. It is your birthright, to be the Fairest. Of. Them. All. Those aren’t simply words.”

  “I’m pretty sure they are, actually.”

  “It’s a responsibility. Ours. Yours, and mine. With great beauty comes great power.”

  Evie just stared. When her mother got like this, it was hard to talk her down.

  “I can’t want this more than you do, Evie.” Her mother sighed, shaking her head.

  “I know,” Evie said, because it was true. “But what am I supposed to do? What if I don’t know what I want? Or how to get it?”

  “So you try harder. You reapply. You add that extra layer of gloss over your matte lip stain. You use your blush and your bronzer, and make sure you don’t confuse the two.”

  “Bronzer on the bone, blush on the cheek,” Evie said, automatically.

  “You know which mascara makes your eyes pop.”

  “Blue for brown. Green for gold. Purple for blue,” Evie recited, as if these were her family’s version of math facts.

  “Exactly.” Evil Queen clasped her fingers around her daughter’s in a touching, if rare, maternal gesture. “And please, my darling girl. Never forget who you really are.”

  “Who am I?” Evie said, squeezing her mother’s hand. She felt so lost—more than anything, it was all she wanted to know.

  “Someone who needs to use elixir on her hair, or it looks too frizzy.” With those parting words, Evil Queen left the room, gathering up her dark skirts behind her. “Mirror! Magic Mirror!”

  Yeah, Evie thought, she could stay here, reading her old books and watching Auradon News Network, just like before. Later, if she was really lucky, her mother would come into her room to give her yet another interesting hairstyle, even though Evie had told her millions of times she preferred the V-braid.

  This is my life, when I’m in the castle.

  Braiding and blushing and bronzing.

  That was the thing about leaving home, she guessed. Once you’d made your way out into the world, once you’d left the darkness of the cave, it was hard to go back.

  Even to make your hair smooth and your eyes pop.

  The more Evie thought about it, the more she knew she couldn’t stay in the castle one more second. She’d read all the books and watched all the shows and there was no one to talk to other than her mother, who was only obsessed with the latest cosmetics that arrived on the Dumpster barges, the used tubes of lipstick and opened jars of cream that the Auradon princesses tossed when they didn’t want them anymore.

  Even school has to be better than this.

  Besides, she could deal with Mal, couldn’t she? She wasn’t scared of her.

  Not that scared of her.

  Okay, so maybe she was. But Evie was more terrified of rotting in a cave forever. And she was far too young to start working on her own Magic Mirror voice. She shook her head at the thought.

  Pretty is as pretty is?

  Was that what my mother said?

  But what was the point of being pretty if there was no one there to see how pretty you were?

  Even the crack on her ceiling was starting to look like the Dragon’s Eye.

  Mal stared up at it from her bed, transfixed. She had woken up extra early—even earlier than Carlos and Evie—as she couldn’t sleep, thinking of the quest her mother had all but immediately dispatched her on. Maleficent was like that: once she had an idea in her head, there was no stopping her. It didn’t matter if it was her daughter or one of her minions—she expected everyone to stop and drop and risk everything to do her bidding.

  That was the Maleficent way.

  Mal knew there was no exception made for daughters, not when you were one of the all-time most villainous villains of the Isle of the Lost. You didn’t get to be number one by being merciful, or even reasonable.

  Not when you were one of the evil elite.

  Maleficent wanted the Dragon’s Eye back, which was great, and all, and Mal totally got it; but actually trying to find out where it was on the island—now that was something else entirely.

  So, yeah.

  It wasn’t as if Diablo were any help. All the raven did was caw when Mal poked it. “Where is it, huh, D? If you’re back to life, then it can’t be far, right? But where?” He’d poke her eyes out if she got close enough to let him. That stupid bird had always wanted her mother all to himself; and to him, Mal wasn’t even a threat as much as a nuisance.

  Still, it was more than just a bird that was haunting her now.

  Maleficent’s threats were hard to shake. As always, her mother knew exactly where to strike. She could find her daughter’s soft spots as easily now as when she had been a baby wearing one on the top of her own head.

  Don’t you want to prove yourself to me?

  Prove that you are worthy of the name I bestowed on you, Maleficent!

  Mal turned over in her hard, squeaky bed, restless. />
  Yes, Mal was named for her mother, but her mother liked to say that since Mal had shown so far that she was only a tiny bit evil, Mal could only have a tiny bit of her real name until she proved herself truly worthy of her dark fairy heritage. Which was ridiculous, really, if you thought about it. Mal didn’t exactly have an army of evil resources at her command. She made do with what she had to work with—stolen paint cans, hapless high school kids, a closet full of old mink coats and fur traps. Sure, maybe she wasn’t encasing whole castles in hedges of thorns, but then every villain had to start somewhere, didn’t she?

  And if she had let Evie off the hook at the end of the night, that wasn’t her fault either, was it? It wasn’t like you could put a time line on this kind of thing. Good scheming took a little planning, didn’t it?

  Mal turned over again.

  It was still quiet in the Bargain Castle, which meant Maleficent hadn’t gone out on the balcony yet to harangue and humiliate her subjects. When Mal finally slid out of bed, slithered into today’s purple everything, and tiptoed out of her bedroom, she noticed that the door to her mother’s room was locked, which meant Maleficent was not to be disturbed under any circumstance. She was adamant about getting eight hours of “evil sleep” and recommended a healthy diet of nightmares to keep the claws sharp.

  It had worked for her so far, hadn’t it?

  Mal brooded on her mother’s warning as she hurried down the crumbling staircase.

  The Dragon’s Eye was cursed, as Maleficent had told her, which meant that anyone who touched it would immediately fall sleep for a thousand years. That had always been her mother’s specialty—putting people to sleep against their will. Of course, that hadn’t exactly worked out during the Sleeping Beauty debacle, but that didn’t mean that the Dragon’s Eye staff would be any less powerful now. When Mal found the scepter she would have to take care not to touch it, and then to figure out a way to somehow bring it back without awakening the curse.