Return to the Isle of the Lost (5 page)

“And it’s possible they’ve hidden themselves until they can put their evil plan into action,” Evie finished.

“Evie, we’ve got move fast,” said Mal.

“On it.”

“Let’s go get Carlos and Jay.”

B
ack in Dragon Hall, it had been school policy that the library, otherwise known as the Athenaeum of Evil, was forbidden to the average student. Carlos de Vil had never been the average student, however. Most of the reading material he’d been able to find there had consisted of last year’s TV guides for shows he’d never heard of and past issues of
Carriage & Driver
magazine. Knowledge was hoarded like stolen gold and plundered treasure, and was equally hard to come by.

But at Auradon Prep, the library and its abundant resources were free and open to all. After school, Carlos could usually be found in the library, admiring the leather-bound books on every subject, from
How to Keep Yourself Busy for Sixteen Years Alone
by Rapunzel to
Genie’s Blue Planet Travel Guides: See the World in Three Wishes
. He would never get tired of the place.

But today he was holed up in the room he shared with Jay, seated on his comfortable bed with the blue plaid comforter around his shoulders as he stared at his laptop, ignoring the large-screen television and its many video games. The matching blue plaid curtains were drawn shut. As it turned out, like Mal, he preferred to work in a dark room. Carlos had been there all afternoon, so lost in his research that he’d missed tourney practice.

Carlos was a naturally curious boy, and when he wanted to understand how something worked, he didn’t stop until he’d figured it out. For instance, when Auradon City was hit with several earthquakes in a row over the past weeks, he’d looked up the statistics and noticed that there had been more quakes in the last month than there had been in the last year. He kept meaning to bring it up with his Wonders of the Earth teacher but hadn’t gotten the chance yet.

This time he wasn’t merely curious, though. He was furious. Earlier that day, he had received a rather upsetting e-mail. Unlike most kids at Auradon Prep, Carlos wasn’t very active on royal media—his GraceBook account only had one old post, he never sent ZapChats. He preferred the ease of his genie-mail account, which organized his e-mails like magic.

That morning, he logged in to see if the new video game he’d ordered (
Crown of Duty
) was on its way and discovered a new e-mail from an unknown sender. The message, like most anonymous messages, was mean-spirited, telling him to go back where he came from and return to the Isle of the Lost by moonset. While the e-mail itself had been annoying, it really irritated him no end that he hadn’t cracked the e-mail sender’s true identity yet.

Carlos figured he was smarter than the average troll, but the only progress he’d made was to unmask the server that had routed the e-mail, and so far he hadn’t been able to hack through its security defenses.

“Dalmatians,” Carlos muttered, frustrated enough to use his mother’s favorite curse. “Sorry, Dude,” he said, apologizing to the dog on his lap. Dude whimpered and Carlos scratched him behind his ears.

The rapid-fire sound of knocking on the door startled him. “Come in!” he yelled, and looked up to see Mal and Evie entering with dark looks on their faces.

He held up a hand as they crowded around his desk. He’d been expecting them for a while now. “Don’t tell me. You’ve both received rude messages saying to return to the Isle of the Lost, haven’t you? Which is why you’re here? I got an e-mail today.”

“How did you know…never mind,” said Evie. Carlos was often a step ahead of them.

“Yes, we did,” said Mal, pulling up a chair, giving Carlos the details. “What’ve you found? Do you know where they’re from?”

“Not yet,” he said, his fingers flying over the keys. But he was getting close, he could feel it. He’d finally breached the first security firewall; now all he had to do was figure out the password. He tried to ignore the girls so he could concentrate.

“Isn’t it weird that you got an e-mail, Evie got a comment on her InstaRoyal account, and I got a text?” Mal pointed out. “Whoever’s behind it seems to know us pretty well.”

Carlos nodded. “I’m barely on royal media, you only use your phone, and everyone knows Evie’s always updating her feed. Do you think they reached Jay? He’s never online and he’s always losing his phone.”

“I’m sure they found a way,” said Mal.

“We think the messages might be from our parents,” said Evie a little breathlessly.

That was not news he wanted to hear. “What! Why?” Carlos twisted around, suddenly seized with the fear that his mother, Cruella de Vil, with her wild hair and trademark screech, was right behind him.

Dude whimpered.

“Relax, they’re not here, at least not yet,” said Mal. Then she told him how Evie’s Magic Mirror had been unable to show them the villains on the island.

“Well, call me paranoid, but lately I feel like she
is
near. Like she’s watching me somehow. I can’t shake the feeling,” he said, panicking as he imagined Cruella appearing at his doorway. While Maleficent might be able to turn into a dragon, Cruella
was
a dragon.

“Nah, you’re just paranoid,” said Mal.

Carlos chewed on this new information. “Maybe so, but you’re saying there’s really a chance they’re behind these messages? Our parents? They want us to come back? But why?” he asked.

“Because they miss us and want to give us hugs?” said Evie. “I’m kidding, I’m sure my mom only wants to know if I’m keeping up with my weekly mud masks and facial massages.”

“They want us to return so we can help them get their revenge on Auradon, of course,” said Mal. “Defeat only makes villains try harder. I can just hear my mom now, saying
‘You poor simple fools, thinking you could defeat me! Me! The mistress of all evil!’
” Then she cackled like Maleficent.

“You’re scarily good at that,” said Evie, shivering.

“Thank you, I think?” said Mal.

Carlos shuddered and turned back to his computer to try out a succession of common passwords. None of them worked. He stared at the blinking cursor. “Dalmatians,” he cursed again. Then he realized if Mal was correct and the villains were behind the messages, there was only one way to find out for sure.

C-A-V-E-O-F-W-O-N-D-E-R-S,
he tried. Nothing.

M-A-K-E-U-P
was his next guess. He sighed with relief when it didn’t work, and
E-V-I-L-L-I-V-E-S
turned up nothing either.

Gathering his courage, he decided to try one more password that would link the messages to their parents.

D-A-L-M-A-T-I-A-N-S,
he typed.

The screen froze and for a moment Carlos was relieved that his hunch was incorrect, but after a second it came to life again, and green letters began scrolling across the screen. He’d hacked it. He was inside.

“Oh no,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” asked Evie, squinting at the screen. It was a Web site unlike any they’d seen before. It was more primitive and crudely designed, with no pretty icons or bright colors, only windows of black screens with green letters.

“The Dark Net,” Carlos whispered, still staring at the screen, unwilling to believe it was true. “There’s a rumor going around that after the dome broke when Maleficent escaped, the Isle of the Lost was able to start up a secret online network of their own. And I’m not talking about the kind of Internet where people share funny kitten videos.”

“But we don’t have access to the Internet on the Isle. We’re cut off, remember?” said Mal.

“Maybe something happened when the dome broke open,” said Evie.

“Anything’s possible,” said Carlos. “Especially during that time when the dome let magic back onto the island.” He looked up at them. “Supposedly since the Dark Net is effectively hidden from Auradon’s servers, it’s a way for the villains on the Isle of the Lost to communicate with each other. Think about it, on the Dark Net, they can hatch evil plots without anyone here knowing anything about it.”

“So they use the Dark Net to send each other evil e-mails?” joked Mal.

“And post evil insta-messages.” Evie giggled.

“I’m serious!” said Carlos. “It’s not funny.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” said Mal, sobering. “With an online network, they can organize their evil schemes more effectively.”

“Yeah, exactly, so I’m going to poke around, see what else I can find,” said Carlos.

“But, Carlos, you just said the villains are behind it!” Evie cried. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“I would say Danger is my middle name,” said Carlos cheerfully, warming up to the task as his dog slid from his lap to nestle at his feet contentedly. Now that he had a new thing to explore, he didn’t feel as frightened. He could do this. “But my middle name is actually Oscar.”

He saw their faces and muttered as he typed, “Hey, it could be worse, right? Mal, your middle name is Bertha.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Anyway, see what you can find,” Mal said with a crisp nod. “But I think we have to make plans to return no matter what.”

“Return? To where?” Carlos asked, although he had a feeling he already knew the answer.

“To the Isle of the Lost, of course,” Mal said as she rolled up her sleeves.

“But why? We might be falling right into a trap,” Evie argued. “Isn’t that just what they want us to do, whoever they are?”

“Well, we can’t stay here—we need to find out what the villains are up to back home,” Mal said. “Plus, I’m not going to be intimidated by whoever’s sending these messages. We have to take the risk, or something like what happened at the Coronation could happen again.”

“We sure do,” said Jay, who’d appeared at the doorway, his face bruised and one eye swollen shut, holding up a crumpled piece of paper covered in purple ink. “Did you guys get one of these today about returning to the Isle of the Lost?”

“Old-fashioned note! Of course!” said Carlos, who couldn’t help but be pleased at the cleverness of their mysterious nemesis.

“Sort of,” said Mal as the other two nodded. Jay looked relieved.

“What happened to your eye? Are you all right?” asked Evie. “Do you need Mal to conjure an ice pack for that?”

“Tourney practice. It’s nothing,” Jay said, waving off their concern.

“But as I was saying, we have to go back home, because we all know the villains won’t rest until Auradon is reduced to rubble and we’re all minions,” Mal said fiercely, as if she would take on an army of them right now.

“Goblins,” said Jay. “Maleficent had goblins for minions, why doesn’t anyone remember that?”

A
fter the group left Carlos to explore the Dark Net to see if he could find any more information on the villains’ plans and whereabouts, Mal decided to visit her mother. It bothered her too much to think that the mysterious M in her note might actually be Maleficent and she wanted to see for herself that her mother was still a lizard. It was late when she arrived in the library, almost time for lights-out. The royal guards, trained in imperial battle tactics by Mulan, stood in front of the double-locked doors and barred her way.

“Really? You know it’s me,” Mal said. “Open up. Family visitors are allowed under the royal decree,” she reminded them like she did every time she grudgingly visited.

The guard on the left grinned. “Oh yes, I see the resemblance now, I think it’s the forked tongue,” he joked, like he always did.

“Ha-ha,” said Mal, pushing her way inside.

The guard on the right grunted. “You have five minutes.”

“I know,” she said as they locked the door behind her and she made her way to the pedestal in the middle of the room with a glass dome sitting on top of it.

When she was a little girl, Mal had been very frightened of her mother. Maleficent was not the help-with-homework, bake-cookies type, after all. She was more the fearsome mistress who sent you on hopeless quests—like the one to retrieve her Dragon’s Eye scepter—and she didn’t take no for an answer.

Even so, these days Mal found it hard to believe she had once feared Maleficent. It was difficult to feel scared of something so small.

But the anonymous message from M had spooked her. Mal stared at her mother, who appeared to be sleeping. Under the glass dome, she looked like any ordinary lizard, harmless, cute even. But Mal knew better. No matter how harmless the reptile looked, it was still the Mistress of Darkness at heart.