Return to the Isle of the Lost - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,36

with its peeling paint, bolted doors, and shuttered windows. Mal wasn’t sure what she thought she would find in there, but after using a stick to pry off the panels that had nailed the door shut, discovering that the whole place was completely ransacked was a surprise. When Maleficent ruled the island, her boar-like henchmen at her command, and goblins to do her bidding, no one would even dream of knocking on their door before a decent hour. But now…

Mal picked her way through the destruction. The slimy contents of their fridge were spilled on the floor, and her mother’s former throne looked as if it had been raided for its upholstery, with bits and pieces of foam and feathers sticking out of the huge holes that had been ripped and torn or clawed from its seat.

The queen was dead (well, she was a lizard). But there wasn’t a new queen either. The Isle had fallen further into chaos and disrepair. While its citizens feared Maleficent, she had brought a semblance of order to their hardscrabble lives, and now that she was gone, it was total anarchy.

Mal made her way to her room, wondering what she would find, and a bit anxious about the small but real treasures she had kept there. When her mother had shipped her off to Auradon, there was no expectation that she would actually stay there, and so Mal had left most of her things back home. She opened the door, expecting to see it similarly looted and plundered.

But her room was just like she had left it. Purple velvet curtains, bureau with all her little sparkly doodads, her many sketchbooks and canvases stacked neatly on the bookshelves. “Huh,” she said. Why was her stuff left untouched?

Mal grabbed a backpack from her closet and began stuffing it with the things she wanted to bring back to Auradon: her journals and sketchbooks, a necklace with a dragon-claw charm that her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday (in fact, it was the first—and only—gift she’d ever received from Maleficent that she’d felt like keeping). When Mal was eight her mother had gifted her with an apple core; at ten, with fingernail shavings. Maleficent explained they were part of spells, but since there was no magic on the island, it just seemed like an excuse to give her daughter trash.

“Hello?” a voice called from the main room, and Mal heard the sound of footsteps coming closer. “Is anyone in here?”

“Who is it?” Mal asked, stepping out of her room warily.

“Mal! You’re really back!” The girl who stood in the middle of the living room was tall and rangy, wearing black from head to toe, with a tight jacket and leather pants.

“Mad Maddy?” Mal said, excited to see an old friend. When they were little Mad Maddy and Mal were practically twins since they had the same color hair. But when they got older Maddy liked to change it to a different shade every week. Right now it was bright aqua green to match her eyes.

“It’s just Maddy now,” she said, with a witchy giggle. “But just as mad as ever. I saw that the door was open and I thought it might be you. Everyone’s saying you guys are back; news travels fast on the Isle.”

“I bet,” said Mal. “Do you know who did this?” she asked, motioning to the gutted living room.

Maddy took a look around. “Goblins mostly, but almost everyone came here after the Coronation. I saw Ginny Gothel wearing one of your mother’s capes the other day.”

“Ugh!” said Mal. Ginny really was more rotten than she had remembered. “Well, at least no one touched my room; isn’t that odd?”

Maddy took a seat on the broken sofa, which looked as if it had been used as a trampoline for a school of goblins, and put her booted feet up on the smashed coffee table. “Of course not, why would they?”

“What do you mean?”

Her old friend pulled at her green hair, twirling it around her finger. “We all saw what you did, after all.”

“What I did?”

“To your mother. You turned her into a lizard. You beat Maleficent,” said Maddy, as if the words were more than obvious.

“Is that what everyone thinks around here? That I wanted that to happen?” asked Mal. She’d only wanted Maleficent to stop attacking her friends, to leave the good people of Auradon alone, and she’d had no idea that by doing so her mother would be greatly reduced in size