Isle of the Lost (8 page)

“I’m not really a dancer,” she said lamely.

“I can show you,” he said with a smooth smile.

Mal bristled. “I mean, I don’t dance with anyone. Ever.”

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Mal thought about it. Her mind flashed back to earlier that evening. She’d been getting ready for the party, trying to choose between violet-hued holey or mauve patchwork jeans, when her mother had made a rare appearance at her door.

“Where on this dreadful island could you possibly be going?” Maleficent asked.

“To a party,” Mal said.

Maleficent let out an exasperated sigh. “Mal, what have I told you about parties?”

“I’m not going to have
fun
, Mother. I’m going so I can make someone
miserable
.” She almost wanted to share
Operation Evie Scheme
right then, but thought better of it. She would tell her mother once she had completed it successfully, lest she disappoint her once more. Maleficent never failed to remind Mal that sometimes it just didn’t seem like Mal was evil enough to be her daughter.
At your age I cursing entire kingdoms
was a familiar phrase Mal had grown up hearing.

“So you’re off to make someone miserable?” her mother cooed.

“Wretched, really!” enthused Mal.

A slow smile formed on Maleficent’s thin red lips. She crossed the room and stood in front of Mal, reaching out to trace a long nail along Mal’s cheek. “That’s a nasty little girl,” she said. Mal swore she saw a glimmer of pride flicker in her mother’s cold, emerald-green eyes.

Mal snapped back to reality as the band finished a punk rock number with clashing cymbals and a drum roll. Anthony Tremaine was still staring at her.

“So why don’t you dance, again?”

Because I don’t have time to dance when I have evil schemes to hatch,
Mal wanted to say.
One that will make my mother proud of me, finally.

She turned up her nose. “I don’t have to have a reason.”

“You don’t. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have one.”

He caught her by surprise, because he was right.

Because she did have a reason, a very good reason to stay clear of any kind of activity that might hint at or lead to romance. Her missing father. Otherwise known as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-in-Maleficent’s-Presence.

So Anthony had her there. Mal had to give him that. But instead, she glared at him. Then she glared at him again, for good measure. “Maybe I just like to be alone.”
Because maybe I’m so tired of my mother looking at me like I’m weak, just because I came from her own moment of weakness.

Because maybe I need to show her that I’m strong enough and evil enough to prove to her that I’m not like my weak, human father.

That I can be just like her.

Maybe I don’t want to dance because I don’t want to have anything human about me.

“That can’t be it.” Anthony said, picking lint off his jacket. His voice was uncommonly low and pleasant, which once again brought back to Mal’s mind the handsome prince by the enchanted lake. Except that Anthony wasn’t quite as handsome as the boy in her dream had been, not that she thought that boy handsome,
mind you
. Not that she thought about him
at all
. “Nobody likes to be alone.”

“Well, I do,” she insisted. It was true.

“And besides, everybody wants to dance with a lord,” he said smugly.

“Nope, not me!”

“Fine, have it your way,” Anthony said, finally backing away, his head held high. In a hot second, he had already asked Harriet Hook to dance, and she’d accepted with a delighted shriek.

Mal exhaled.
Phew.
Boys. Dreams. Princes. It was all too much for one day.

“Mal. Mal. Earth to Mal?” Jay waved a hand in front of her face. “You okay?”

Mal nodded but didn’t answer. For a moment she had been lost in the memory of that awful dream again. Except that this time it didn’t seem so much a dream as a premonition? That one day she might just find herself in Auradon? But how could that be?

Jay frowned, holding out a cup of cider. “Here. It’s like you’ve powered down, or something.”

Mal realized that she hadn’t moved from the front hall. She’d been standing there, stupidly frozen, ever since Anthony had left her side. That was three songs ago, and the Bad Apples were playing their current hit, “Call Me Never.”

She perked up, not because of the cider or the catchy song but because, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Evie through the floor-to-ceiling window in the foyer. She was coming down the road in a brand-new rickshaw, her pretty V-braid gleaming in the moonlight.
She thinks she is
so
special. Well, I’ll show her,
Mal thought. Her eyes wandered over the room and rested upon a familiar-looking door.

It was the door that led to Cruella De Vil’s storage closet. Mal only knew it was there because she and Carlos had once accidentally come across it when they were working on a skit about evil family trees in sixth grade, and Mal had been bored and had decided to go poking around Hell Hall. Cruella’s closet was not for the faint of heart.

Mal would never forget that day. It was the kind of closet that would get the best of anyone. Especially a princess who was making her way up the steps to the front door and would appear at any moment now.

“Jay,” she said, motioning to the front door. “Let me know when Evie arrives.”

“Huh? What? Why?”

“You’ll see,” she told him.

“All part of the evil scheme, huh?” he said, happy to do her bidding. Jay was always up for a good prank.

But Carlos went white-faced when he saw where Mal was heading. “Don’t—” he shouted. He shook off his sheet, almost tripping over the fabric in an attempt to get to the door before Mal could open it all the way.

It slammed shut. Just in time.

But Mal crossed her arms. She wasn’t backing down from this one. It was just too perfect. She glanced out the window again. Princess-Oh-So-Fashionably-Late was at the front door now.

Mal raised her voice. “New game! Seven Minutes in Heaven! And you’ve never played Seven Minutes if you haven’t played it in a De Vil closet.”

The words were barely out of Mal’s mouth before most of the evil step-granddaughters practically trampled her to get to the door. They loved playing Seven Minutes and were enthusiastically wondering with whom they would end up inside. A few of them puckered their lips and powdered their noses while fluttering their eyelashes at Jay, who was stationed by the front door like a sentry.

“Who wants to go first?” Mal asked.

“Me! Me! Me!” yelped the step-granddaughters.

“She does,” Jay called, holding a very recognizable blue cape.

“I do? What do I want to do?” asked the cape’s owner.

Mal smiled.

Evie had arrived.

“Evie, sweetie! So glad you could make it!” Mal said, throwing her arms theatrically around the girl and giving her a giant and fake embrace. “We’re playing Seven Minutes in Heaven! Want to play?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” said Evie, looking around the party nervously.

“It’ll be a scream,” said Mal. “Come on, you want to be my friend, don’t you?”

Evie stared at Mal. “You want
me
to be your friend?”

“Sure—why not?” Mal led her to the closet door and opened it.

“But doesn’t a boy go in here with me?” Evie asked as Mal shoved her inside the storage room. For someone castle-schooled, Evie sure knew her kissing games.

“Did I say Seven Minutes in Heaven? No, you’re playing
Seven Minutes in Hell
!” Mal cackled; she couldn’t help it. This was going to be so much fun.

The crowd around the hallway had scattered in fear after it was clear Mal had no interest in having other people join the game—or Evie—inside the locked room.

But Carlos remained standing, his face as white as the tips of his hair. “Mal, what are you doing?”

“Playing a dirty trick—what does it
look
like I’m doing?”

“You can’t leave her in there! Remember what happened to us?” he asked, motioning angrily to his leg, which had two distinct white scars on the calf.

“I do!” Mal said gleefully. She wondered why Carlos was so concerned about Evie. It wasn’t as if they’d been taught to care about other people.

But Carlos soon made clear that he wasn’t being altruistic. “If she’s not able to get out on her own, I’m going to have to clean up the mess! And my mother will freak out! You can’t leave her in there!” he whispered fiercely, anxiety about Cruella’s punishment written all over his face.

“Fine, go get her,” said Mal with a sly smile on
her
face, knowing full well that he wouldn’t.

Carlos quaked in his scuffed loafers. Mal knew there was nothing he wanted to do less than go back in there again. He remembered all too well what had happened to him and Mal in sixth grade.

There was a scream from behind the door.

Mal wiped her hands. “You want her out? You get her out.” Her job was done.

Her evil scheme had worked. This was going to be a real howler.

T
he first thing Evie thought when the door unceremoniously closed with a bang behind her was that she had worn her prettiest dress for nothing. She had been looking forward to the party all day, had run home to go through every outfit in her closet, holding up dress after dress to see which shade of blue looked best. Azure? Periwinkle? Turquoise? She had settled on a dark midnight-blue lace mini-dress and matching high-heeled boots. She’d been extremely late to the party, as her mother had insisted on giving her a three-hour makeover.

Not that it mattered, because she was now locked in a closet alone. She wasn’t just imagining it—Mal really
was
out to get her, most likely for not having been invited to Evie’s birthday party when they were six years old. But it wasn’t as if it was her fault! Evie’d been just a kid. It had been her mother who hadn’t wanted Mal at the party for some reason. Mal couldn’t hold it against
her
, could she? Evie sighed. Of course she could. Evie still remembered the hurt and anger on six-year-old Mal’s face, looking down from the balcony. Evie supposed that she’d probably feel the same way—not that she could see it from Mal’s point of view, or anything.
There’s no
me
in empathy,
as Mother Gothel liked to say.

In the end, Evil Queen probably should have dropped her grudge against Maleficent and invited her daughter to the celebration. It certainly hadn’t been fun being cooped up in their castle for ten years. Evie wasn’t even sure why her mother had decided that now was a safe time to leave; but so far, other than Evie being locked in this closet at the moment, nothing too bad had happened. Yet.

Besides, the darkness of the closet didn’t bother her. Evie was her mother’s daughter, after all, and used to the horrors of the night—to dark, hidden things with yellow eyes glittering in the shadows, to candles dripping over skull candleholders, to the flash of lightning and the fury of thunder as they rolled across the sky. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared in the least bit.

Except…

Except…her foot just struck something hard and cold…and the quiet of the closet was broken by the loud, echoing snap of steel meeting steel.

She screamed.
What was that?!
When her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw fur traps littered all over the floor, lying in wait for the next animal to wander through. There were so many of them that one wrong step would mean a trap would snap her leg in two. She turned back to the door and tried to open it, but it was no use. She was locked in there.

“Help! Help! Let me out!” she yelled.

But there was no answer, and the band was playing so loudly, Evie knew no one would hear her, nor care.

It was hard to see, so Evie felt her way tentatively in the darkness, sliding her left foot on the floor first. How many were there? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? And how big was this room, anyway?

Her foot came in contact with something cold and heavy, so she retreated. How was she going to get out of this place without losing a limb? Was there another door on the other side, maybe? She squinted. Yes, that was another door. There was a way out.

She headed slowly to the far end, the floorboards creaking ominously under her feet.

Evie shifted to her right, hoping to avoid the trap, to move around it, but her foot struck another, and she jumped back as it too snapped shut with a bang, springing into the air and barely grazing her knee. Her heart thundered in her chest as she slid around the next trap, careful not to strike the metal for fear that it might close around her ankle. As long as she missed the trap’s center, she would be good.

She could do this. All she had to do was move slowly, carefully. She edged around another one. She was getting better at this; she could find her way to the back of the room and possibly another door. She cleared one and then another, moving more quickly, sliding one foot in front of the other, searching for and avoiding the traps. Faster. A little faster. The door must be close, then—

She struck a trap and it suddenly popped up with a snap. She jumped away, and as the trap fell on the floor, it hit another trap, which sprang up and hit the one next to it, all in succession—and this time, Evie saw that she couldn’t move slowly but that she had to
run
.