Isle of the Lost (23 page)

The gargoyles were nearly upon them. They were taller than Carlos had realized, maybe eight or nine feet. They were enormous, and their weight made the bridge groan beneath their every step.

Carlos didn’t think even the periodic tables could help him now.

“WHAT IS HER ONE TRUE LOVE?” the gargoyles asked again, extending their massive wings. When they flapped, the mists swirled about them.

“The Dragon’s Eye?” Mal guessed. “That’s all my mom cares about.”

“Being the Fairest One of All!” Evie shouted. “Her, or me. In that order!”

Jay just shrugged. “I can’t help. I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t Jafar, Prince of Pajamas.”

At first it looked as if the gargoyles were shaking their heads, but Carlos realized it was because the bridge was rumbling so much. Everything was quaking, and the gargoyles were nearly upon them. His teeth began to clatter. Evie lost her balance and slipped, almost falling over the side, but Carlos caught her in time. Jay held on to a crumbling post and held out his hand so that Carlos could hold on to him, forming a link to Evie.

“Hurry! Somebody’d better come up with something,” Jay grunted. “I can’t hold on much longer.”

Evie screamed as she dangled off the bridge, Carlos clinging to one of her blue gloves, which she was slipping out of, one finger at a time.

“THINK, MAL! What does Maleficent love?” Carlos yelled. “She has to love SOMETHING!”

“WHAT IS HER ONE TRUE LOVE? ANSWER THE RIDDLE OR FALL INTO DARKNESS,” the gargoyles intoned.

“Diablo?” Mal screamed. “Is it Diablo?”

In answer, the bridge buckled under her feet, and Mal slid down, only by luck managing to hold on to Jay, who was anchoring everyone. The entire castle was shaking. Stones flew down from its ramparts, and the towers threatened to crumble on top of them.

The bridge began to sway dangerously.

“Wait!” screamed Jay. “You guys! They’re not talking about Maleficent! They’re still talking about Cruella! Quick—Carlos—what is her one true love?”

Carlos couldn’t think. He was too scared. He couldn’t even put a sentence together. And he was even more frightened by what the answer
would
be.

Maybe that was why he hadn’t guessed right, this time.

I can’t bear to say it out loud.

Jay’s voice echoed. “CARLOS! WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S ONE TRUE LOVE?”

He had to say it.

He’d almost always known.

Sometimes, like this afternoon, he would think she meant him, but he really knew better.

Because she
never
meant him.

Not once. Not ever.

Carlos opened his eyes. He had to say it, and he had to say it now.

“HER FURS! FUR IS HER ONE TRUE LOVE!” he yelled. She said it all the time. She had said it that afternoon in front of everyone.

“All my mother cares about is her stupid fur coat closet and everything in it. But you guys already know that.”

It was the truth, and like any truth, it was powerful.

In the blink of an eye, the four of them were standing on the other side of the gargoyle bridge, and everything was set to rights once more. There was no more swaying or rumbling, no one was falling over the side, and the gargoyles had all turned back to stone.

Although Carlos would swear that one of the stone gargoyles had winked at him.

They were safe, for now.

“Nice work,” said Mal, breathing heavily. “Okay, now—where to?”

Carlos shakily looked at the beeping box in his hands. “This way.”

T
he Forbidden Fortress lived up to its name. Once the four adventurers had found their way in through its massive oaken doors, it was almost impossible to tell the darkness of the shadow world outside the castle from the shadow world within. Either way, it was intimidatingly dark, and the farther Jay and Carlos and Evie and Mal crept inside, the more their nervous whispers echoed through the ghostly, abandoned chambers.

Jay wished he’d worn something warmer than his leather vest. Mal’s lips were turning blue, Carlos’s breath appeared in white clouds as he spoke, and Evie’s fingers felt like icicles when Jay grabbed them. (Once. Or twice. And strictly for warmth.) It was colder than Dragon Hall inside, and there was no chance of anything getting any warmer; there were no logs on the fireplace grates, no thermostats to switch on.

“That’s modern castle living.” Evie sighed. “Trade in one big, cold prison for another.” Mal nodded in agreement. Privately, Jay thought that Jafar’s junk shop seemed downright cozy in comparison, but he kept that to himself.

Inside every corridor, a dense fog floated just above the black marble floor. “That has to be magic. The fog doesn’t just
do
that,” Mal said.

Carlos nodded. “The refracted energy seems stronger here. I think we’re closer to the source than we’ve ever been.”

As he spoke, an icy wind blew past them, whistling in through the shattered stained-glass windows high above them. Each step they took reverberated against the walls.

Even Jay the master thief was too intimidated to try and take anything, and kept his hands to himself for once.

Of course once they did find the scepter, he’d have to man up. Jay knew that, and he’d made his peace with it—no matter how well they’d all gotten along on the way there.

Villains don’t have friends, and neither do their children. Not when you get right down to it.

None of them had come there out of loyalty to Mal, or friendship. Jay knew what he had to do, and he’d do it.

Until then, his hands stayed in his pockets. If this haunted place was selling it, he didn’t want it.

“What’s that?” Jay asked, pointing. Green lights flashed through half-shattered panes of glass, but he couldn’t figure out the source.

“It’s what we’ve been tracking all along,” Carlos answered. “That same electromagnetic energy: it’s going crazy.” He shook his head at the flashing lights on his box. “This fortress was definitely exposed to something that’s left a kind of residue charge—”

“You mean, an enchantment?”

He shrugged. “That, too.”

“And so, even after all these years, this place is somehow still glowing with its own light?” Evie looked amazed.

“Cool,” Jay said.

Mal shrugged it off. “In other words, we’re getting closer to the Dragon’s Eye.”

“Yep,” said Jay. Like the rest of the group, he knew what everyone else in the Isle and the kingdom knew—that the evil green light meant only one terrifying person.

Even if it probably reminded Mal of home.

Corridors led to more corridors, until they passed through dark hallways full of framed paintings shrouded in cobwebs and dust. “It’s a portrait gallery,” Evie said, straining to see the walls through the shadows. “Every castle has one.”

“Mal, stop it—” Jay shouted, looking behind him and jumping away.

Mal reached out and tapped his shoulder. She was standing right in front of him. “Hello? I’m not back there. I’m over here.”

“Crap. I thought that picture was you.” He pointed.

“That’s not me. That’s my mother,” Mal said with a sigh.

“Whoa, you really do look like her, you know,” Jay said.

“You two could be twins,” Evie agreed.

“That, my friends, is called genetics,” Carlos said with a smile.

“Gee, thanks—I look like my mother? Just what every girl wants to hear,” Mal replied. Still, Jay knew different. What Mal wanted, more than anything,
was
to be just like her mother.

Exactly
like her.

Every bit as bad, and every bit as powerful.

That was what it would take for someone like Maleficent to even notice her—and Jay could tell that this portrait gallery was only making Mal want it that much more desperately.

“Now, what?” Mal asked, as if she were trying to change the subject.

Jay looked around. Before them were four corridors leading to four different parts of the fortress.

A foul draft issued from each of the paths, and Jay could have sworn he heard a distant moan; but he knew it was only the wind, winding its way through the curving passages. He yanked a matchbook from his pocket and lit a match, muttering a quick “eenie-meanie-miney-mo.”

“How scientific,” Carlos said, rolling his eyes.

“You got your way, I got mine. That one,” Jay said, pointing to the corridor directly in front of them. Just as he did, the wind blew out from that same passage, and the foul stench of something rotted or dead came along with it.

The wind snuffed the burning match out.

Evie held her nose, and Mal did the same.

“Are you sure about this?” Mal asked.

“Duh, of course not. That’s why I played eenie-meanie-miney-mo! One corridor is as good as the next,” Jay said, entering the corridor and not waiting for the rest to follow. It was the first rule of breaking into an unknown castle: you never let it get to you. You always act like you know what you are doing.

Jay had a feeling this fortress was playing with them, offering them choices when really all roads probably led to the same place. It was time to take matters back into his own hands.

“No, wait—you don’t know where you’re going. Carlos, check your box-compass-thing,” said Mal.

Carlos brought the box up to the intersection. It beeped. “Okay, I guess maybe Jay’s right.”

“Of course I am.”

They followed Jay into the dark corridor.

Carlos held the beeping box in his hands, the sound echoing off the stony walls. It led them to a dank, cold stairway that led further downward, deeper into darkness. The air felt colder and damper and in the eerie silence came a distant rattle, like bones striking rock, or chains rattling in the wind.

“Because that’s comforting.” Evie sighed.

“The dungeon,” said Mal. “Or you might know it as the place where my mother encountered the lovestruck Prince Phillip.”

Evie’s eyes were wide with awe. It was probably the most famous story in all of Auradon. “Maleficent was going to lock him down here for a hundred years, right? That would have been fun.”

Carlos looked around. “She nearly pulled it off, didn’t she?”

Mal nodded. “If not for that trio of self-righteous, busybody, blasted good fairies.” She sighed. “End of scene. Enter Isle of the Lost.”

“I don’t know about you, but I feel like we’ve been down here a hundred years already. Let’s get on with it,” Jay said.

He was more alert than he’d been all day, because he knew he was on the job now.

It was time to get to work.

Jay found a dungeon door. Carlos held the box inside, listening for its beep. “This is the one.”

He went ahead with the box, while Jay and Mal and Evie helped each other slowly down the steps, bracing themselves against the wall as they went. There was no rail, and the treads were coated in a black moss. Every step squished in the darkness, and it felt as if they were stepping on something living and wet.

“Suddenly the whole mud river thing doesn’t seem so bad,” said Evie.

“Seriously,” Jay said.

Mal didn’t say a word. She couldn’t. She was too distracted. Even the moss smelled like her mother.

It only grew thicker as they delved deeper into the dungeon. There were layer upon layer of gauzy cobwebs, a spider’s tapestry woven long ago and forgotten. Every step they took pulled apart the threads, clearing a way forward. All of them were quiet, hushed by the lingering menace in the air as their footsteps squished in the gloom.

“Here?” Mal asked, stopping in front of a rotten wooden door hanging partly off its hinges. When she touched it, the frame collapsed, sending the wood clattering against the floor. Even the heavy iron straps that had once bound the door fell against the stones and the wood, making an awful racket.

“Maybe we shouldn’t touch anything,” said Carlos, scrutinizing the device in his hands.

Mal rolled her eyes. “Too late.”

“I think this is it,” Carlos said.

Jay hoped he was right, that the box had led them to the Dragon’s Eye.

He couldn’t imagine what Mal would do to poor Carlos if it hadn’t. And Jay himself needed to get on with the job at hand.

Mal nodded, and Jay pushed aside what was left of the door. As they entered, he couldn’t help but notice that the shattered remains of the door and its frame looked like a kind of mouth—a panther’s mouth—and they were stepping through its open jaws, into the mouth of the beast.

“Did any of you notice—”

“Shut up,” Evie said tensely. They had all seen the same thing, which couldn’t be good. That was probably why nobody wanted to talk about it.

The four of them walked inside. The room was impossibly dark. There was not even a hint of light, not a glow from a distant window or a torch. Jay reached out, looking for a wall, something to touch.

“Maybe we should find a flashlight or something in Jay’s pockets, before we touch any—” Carlos warned, but it was too late.

Jay struck something with his hand, and the room was suddenly filled with the deafening sounds of metal and stone colliding and grinding and tinkling all around them.

And just as suddenly, they were bathed in the brightest light, a glow that burst from every corner of the room. The golden brilliance filled their eyes—and before they knew what was happening, the room was suddenly filling with sand.