Isle of the Lost (11 page)

Mal tossed her empty cider cup on the floor and left without a backward glance. She spent the night rearranging her neighbors’ overgrown lawns, swapping lawn gnomes, mailboxes, and outdoor furniture. She amused herself doing some light redecorating by toilet-papering a couple of houses and egging a few rickshaws. Nothing like a little property damage to make her feel better. She left her mark on each house with the message
Evil lives!
spray-painted on the lawn, to remind the island people exactly what they stood for and what they had to be proud of.

Feeling as if she had salvaged the evening, it was with some surprise and not a little shock that when she rolled home to the Bargain Castle, she found her mother awake and awaiting her.

“Mother!” Mal yelped, startled to see Maleficent sitting on her huge high-backed green chair in front of the stained-glass window. It was her throne, as it were—her seat of darkness.

“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 scoffed. “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

J
ay 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.