Monster High/Ever After High--The Legend of Shadow High Read online

  “I didn’t think it was funny, either,” Frankie whispers to Apple.

  Apple glances at her and quirks a little smile.

  “Anyway,” Frankie says, loud enough to interrupt the giggle party just starting between Draculaura and Raven, “I think the answer is that Moanica is difficult in a pretty bad way. She loves to cause chaos. But she couldn’t be responsible for this weird fog wall that’s cut your school off from the rest of the world. That’s serious business.”

  Raven glances at the mirror in Maddie’s room. “Not on her own, anyway,” Raven says.

  “I still don’t get how Moanica, much less the Zomboyz, could have gotten here at all,” Draculaura says.

  “We got here,” Frankie points out.

  “And now we’re trapped here,” Draculaura says, looking out a window at the fog.

  Frankie’s blood goes as cold as yeti feet. Trapped. At least when she was locked up in the laboratory she had her dad with her and the hope of one day leaving. Now she’s trapped in some school full of people who are frightened of monsters, and she can’t even run away. Outside the window, the world is brightening with morning, but the fog stays put.

  “Wait,” Frankie says.

  “Not a problem,” Draculaura says. “I was kind of doing that anyway, since there’s nowhere to go.”

  “What if there is, though?” Frankie asks.

  “You saw the road to Book End,” Raven says. “Where the fog starts, the bridge just ends.”

  “But Maddie was taken away,” Frankie says. “Therefore, she was taken away! She left Ever After High. Despite the fog, she left. Therefore—”

  “There’s got to be a way out!” Draculaura says.

  “I see only two possibilities,” Apple says. “One: She left through a secret wishing well. Or two: She left via a hidden bridge through the fog.”

  “Wait, what?” asks Frankie. “Those are your only two possibilities? And one of them is ‘a secret wishing well’?”

  “It’s an Ever After thing,” Raven says.

  Apple taps her finger on her chin. “Briar said that the wishing wells were fog-bottomed.”

  “So there’s got to be a bridge,” says Frankie, heading toward the door. “I’ll go look.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Apple says. “Headmaster Grimm asked us to take care of you, and besides, the students are already a little on edge. If they see a… a…”

  “Monster?” asks Frankie.

  Apple shrugs. “As nice as I’m sure you must be, if they see a monster creeping about alone, they could get frightened.”

  “I wasn’t planning on creeping about, but I see your point,” Frankie says.

  “Cool!” Draculaura says. “I’ll stay with Raven and we’ll work on magic!”

  Frankie follows Apple out into the halls of Ever After High. No coffin lockers, no dangling cobwebs or slime trails, no mysterious gurgling noises from the vents. Instead, it’s all filtered sunlight, live trees growing like pillars through the floors and up the walls, humming mushrooms sprouting between their roots, and butterflies—Wait, do those butterflies have human faces?—flitting past her nose. It is, in a word, magical. Frankie stares. She’s never believed magic was real, but she’s kinda loving the thought that she might be wrong.

  “Briar gathered the students in the Charmitorium for a ‘fog party,’” Apple says. “Ashlynn Ella is helping, so at least the students will be—”

  “Who is Ashlynn Ella?”

  “Oh, she’s…” Apple blushes, a pretty pink on her pale cheeks, and mutters, “Cinderella’s daughter.”

  Frankie shakes her head. Her neck makes its usual creaking sound. “Cinderella’s daughter… This can’t be real—none of this is real.…” Not for the first time, Frankie considers that maybe she is still lying in the Mad Science lab at Monster High after being struck by lightning, and this is all just a dream.

  “We’ll go out the opposite direction of the Charmitorium so no one has to see you,” says Apple.

  So no one has to see me, Frankie thinks. In Ever After, I’m some kind of disgusting Thing.

  Frankie groans at the thought, and Apple jumps.

  “Ooh, please don’t make that noise! It’s fairy creepy.”

  “Sorry,” Frankie says. Behind them, she hears the distinct popping noise Draculaura makes when turning into a bat, followed by Raven’s applause.

  At least they’re getting along, she thinks. Her ear tips are hot again; her hair rises slightly with static. She’s not usually a jealous friend. What’s gone wrong with her?

  Water break. Or… er… scene change. Time jump. Something like that.56

  56 Look, a girl has to keep hydrated when telling a story.

  Anyway, sometime later, Frankie is hiding behind a garden shed as Apple checks to make sure no one is around. Frankie is all too familiar with hiding and prefers for that part of her life to be over.

  “The coast is clear,” Apple whispers loudly.

  Frankie edges out from the shed and paces along the fog.

  “You could whistle,” suggests Frankie, “instead of trying to whisper at me.”

  “Well, whistling is close to singing, and it’s hard to be sneaky when I sing, because birds start to follow me—”

  “Wait, birds follow you?”

  Apple shrugs. “Birds like me. If I whistle, they might think I’m in distress and come to my rescue.”

  “Okaaay. Well, this might go faster if we split up.” Frankie sees nothing out there. The land just drops away. It’s so creepy it gives her a happy kind of jolt in her heart region.

  “What? Are you kidding?” Apple asks. “Never split up! That’s when they get you!”

  “When who gets you?”

  “The monsters!” Apple blurts. “Well… other monsters. Evil ones.”

  “You know, I think you might be underestimating your fellow students,” Frankie says. “This fog is way scarier than I am, and they’re currently having a party hosted by Sleeping Beauty’s daughter in bunny slippers. Maybe we don’t need to worry about hiding me so much?”

  A branch cracks somewhere behind them.

  Apple shoves Frankie to the ground. “Quick, pretend to be a rock.”

  Frankie moves to get back to her feet, but Apple sits on her.

  “Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum,” she sings. “Nothing to see here. Just Apple White sitting on a perfectly normal rock.”

  A rabbit scampers out of a nearby bush, stares at them, and hops away.

  “I think it was a rabbit,” Apple whispers to her Frankie-chair.

  “This isn’t working,” Frankie mumbles, her face pressed against the grass.

  When they return to Raven and Draculaura, they find the room bathed in purple light. A hairbrush is on the table, a thin purple mist surrounding it.

  “Okay,” Raven says. “Now spin it.”

  Draculaura hits the handle of the hairbrush and it spins on the top of the table like a deranged clock. After a few rotations, it suddenly hops off the table, clatters to the floor, and scoots itself under the desk. The glow fades, and Raven sighs.

  “Are walking brushes normal here?” Frankie asks.

  “You’re back!” Draculaura says. “Did you find a bridge?”

  “No,” Apple says. “No bridge, and also walking brushes are not normal.”

  “That all depends on your definition of normal,” Raven says. “But no progress here, either. I’m trying to enchant objects to go find my mom, but nothing works. I think they might be afraid of her.”

  Under the desk, the brush, a plush bear, and a copy of Princess Today magazine all shiver.

  Frankie runs her mint-green fingers over Maddie’s desk. Not much open space for doing homework; it’s taken up by two pairs of tiny running shoes that look small enough to fit a mouse, a basket of bright-purple muffins, several dozen teapots, a collection of shoelaces, a stack of books so high it tilts in the draft but never falls, and various other items Frankie has no name for, though her curious brain ac
hes to figure them out. Maddie seems like the kind of person anyone would want to seek out. Even a hairbrush.

  “Would the spell work better if the brush were trying to find Maddie?” Frankie asks.

  “Maybe,” says Raven. “Or… ooh! I know! In order to do a stronger, long-distance seeking spell, I need something that belongs to Maddie.”

  Of all the various teacups in the room, one appears to be more well used than the others, with tea stains in the bottom and an affectionate chip in the rim.

  “How about this?” Frankie asks.

  “Hexcellent!” Raven says. “Put the teacup on the table.”

  With her left hand, Raven makes a gesture, and the teacup begins to spin around and around. With her right hand, she points at the spinning cup and chants.

  Glow show the go flow.

  A green fog surrounds the cup, forming a perfect sphere.

  Raven clenches her teeth and spins her left hand harder. The green sphere forms the barest suggestion of a point.

  “Gah!” Raven exhales. The sphere disappears and the cup comes to a stop.

  “Was it working?” Draculaura asks.

  “I think so,” Raven says, massaging her hand. “But I can’t keep that up. It needs to spin at a constant rate so the magic can detect where its spin is different from the natural state of matter.”

  “Oh, so it’s like a gyrocompass,” Frankie says.

  “What?” the three other girls say at once.

  “Ships use compasses to navigate, right?” says Frankie. “But the big ones are full of metal and magnets, which throw off the magnetic field. With a gyrocompass, an electric motor spins the compass at a constant speed, and gravity naturally pulls a floating needle in the direction of true north. So Raven’s left hand is the magical motor, and her right is the magical gravity.”

  “That sounds about right,” Raven says. She holds up her hand. “But my magical motor is cramping.”

  “Give me a second,” Frankie says, glancing around the room.

  She takes apart an alarm clock and a makeup case she finds on Kitty’s side of the room. Raven fetches some tools, and before long Frankie puts the parts back together to form a spinning mechanism. When she wires the device to the bolts in her neck, the dial begins to spin as fast as a windmill in a storm.

  “And you’re certain that isn’t magic?” Raven asks.

  “It’s science,” Frankie says, handing the device to Raven. “Well, engineering, technically. And plain old electricity makes it go. Put Maddie’s teacup in here and the device can keep it spinning for you as long as I’m connected to it.”

  Frankie attaches the cup to the device with metal clamps, keeping it firmly in place. Raven casts the seeking spell on the cup as Frankie gets the compass spinning again. A misty green sphere surrounds the device, and a small arrow pokes out, pointing to the door.

  Draculaura pops into bat form. “Follow that arrow!” she says.

  The two princesses and two monsters make their way down the stairs and out toward the wall of fog.57

  57 Oh my bolded text, I have no idea what’s going to happen. What is that fog wall? How did the rest of Ever After just suddenly get cut off? Why does my first solo narration have to be such a dangerous story?

  RAVEN TAKES THE LEAD, CREEPING THROUGH Lizzie Hearts’s Wonderland garden toward a wall of fog as high as the sky. The compass shivers in Raven’s hand. Or is she the one who is shivering? Is the land tremoring again?

  It could also be Lizzie’s hedgehogs, who are rubbing up against Raven’s ankles, their shivery backs vibrating with alarm.

  “Poor little things,” says Raven. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure out what that nasty fog is and get rid of it, okay?”

  The hedgehogs squeak, curl up into balls, and roll away.

  The compass arrow points at a place in the wall of fog that looks exactly the same as the rest, certain to lead dead off the sudden cliff.

  “Oh curses,” says Raven.

  “Drac, can you…?” Frankie asks.

  Draculaura takes a deep breath and pops back into her bat form with a nervous little squeak. She flaps out into the fog and flies back a moment later.

  “A bridge!” she says. “There’s a narrow bridge of land, as white as the fog, so it’s hard to see, but it’s there!”

  “A small bridge leading off a mysterious cliff into a foreboding fog,” says Raven. “That doesn’t sound scary at all. Good thing there aren’t monsters involved!”

  Draculaura laughs. Frankie and Apple smile nervously at each other. The compass spins, pointing them forward.

  Raven sighs and takes the first step through. The wall of fog is so thick she can see nothing, feel nothing but a chill and a damp cold. But then she’s past it and in a space of thinner fog. She steps on something solid. A white stone bridge about ten feet wide extends into the distance.

  “Is it the right way?” Frankie asks. “It’s so small and so well hidden. There might be other bridges out there.”

  The teacup in the compass is still spinning, but the glow has disappeared.

  “Weird,” Raven says. “Let me just start this back up again.” She smiles as if she’s totally confident in her compass-magic abilities. Smiles as if she isn’t racked with worry that her mother has already ruined everything, no matter what they do. As if Maddie isn’t missing and possibly in terrible danger.

  Frankie holds the compass device. Raven casts the locating spell, and… nothing.

  She tries again. Nothing. No magic. She gets a few green sparks to spit from her fingertips, but that’s it.

  “What’s happening?” Frankie asks.

  “I don’t know,” Raven says. “My magic… just isn’t working.”

  Apple makes a face like someone gave her an apple with a worm in it. “Oh dear. Has this happened before?”

  “No,” Raven says, flapping her hands. “Not like this. Even when I was little, the magic was still there, just… smaller. And less manageable.”

  Flap, flap, flap.

  “Um, why are you flapping?” Apple asks.

  Raven hops on one foot, and then the other. She waves her arms in the air.

  “Something feels different,” she says. “Lighter. Do you guys feel that?”

  Apple, Frankie, and Draculaura look at one another. “No,” they say.

  “But we aren’t hopping around and flapping our arms,” Frankie says. “Maybe that has something to do with it.” Frankie leans over to Apple, whispering, “Does she do the flapping to cast spells or something?”

  Raven continues to hop. “I feel lighter. It’s so strange. Like walking on one of those huge, sproingy plants that bounce you higher when you jump? You know the ones, Apple.”

  “She’s talking about fairy fungus,” Apple says. “Kids love it. You can bounce for hours.”

  “Do you think magic has weight?” Frankie asks. “Because—and I’m not saying I completely believe fairytale magic isn’t just unexplained science—but if whatever you call magic is real, it might actually weigh something. If it were taken from Raven, she would feel lighter. And that would explain why she can’t do her tricks anymore.”

  “Not tricks, Frankie. Magic,” Apple says. “Raven, could this place have taken your magic away? Quick, go back to Ever After High!”

  Raven hurries back through the wall of fog. Midskip and mid-fog-wall, she comes down hard. A hedgehog squeaks at her landing and chitters angrily as it scurries away.

  “Oof,” Raven says. “Well, I’m off the fairy fungus. Everything’s heavier.” She gestures, and a little green butterfly springs into existence, flutters around her head, and vanishes. “And the magic is back.”

  “It’s that place that is magic-free, not you,” Apple says, Draculaura and Frankie trailing her back through the wall of fog. “That’s good news.”

  “So in the fog, where we most need it, our Maddie compass won’t work,” Frankie says. “Without your magic, it’s just an electric teacup spinner.”

  “L
et me try something,” Raven says. She lays a finger on the compass and chants.

  Be now a kinder finder,

  make your nature true

  and fate your school.

  Bind power to point

  to steel and joint.

  Go, become, be one.

  The seeds are sown,

  so fuel this lark

  with spin and arc

  alone!

  While Raven speaks, a glow surrounds the compass again, but when she ends the spell, the glow sucks into the compass rather than circling the air around it.

  “Whew, it worked!” says Raven. “I enchanted the object, so I don’t have to keep recasting the spell.”

  “Simply spelltacular, Raven!” cheers Apple.

  Until she did it, Raven hadn’t known just how much she needed a win. Just one thing today that maybe she could do right. Suddenly a scary bridge through a world of fog didn’t feel impossible.

  Maddie would say, Impossible? I do six impossible things before breakfast, and so can you, Raven Queen!

  Raven’s throat feels dry. She says, “We need to find Maddie.”

  Frankie flips on the compass spinner and crosses back into the fog. Raven takes a deep breath. The spell has left her feeling shaken and half-empty, like an autumn gourd.

  “It works!” Frankie calls back. “It isn’t quite as glowy as before, but it’s pointing us to this bridge.”

  “Over the river and through the fog, to Madeline Hatter we go!” And Raven starts down the narrow bridge through a mysterious foggy landscape, accompanied by monsters.

  The good, hopeful feeling stays with Raven for some time. She imagines it’s like Cerise’s warm red hood and cloak, protecting her as she walks through a forest of fog. Just as it occurs to her that most forests have big bad wolves in them, she spies movement in the fog ahead.

  Raven peers. A darting shape, gray, shaggy, long snout and tail. Is that… is that a wolf? Perhaps a big bad one? Way too coincidental that she thinks about a wolf and one suddenly appears. Her imagination must be playing tricks on her.

  The shape darts over the bridge. Raven shuffles close to the edge and squints into the mist. Nothing. Then she looks straight down. Not nothing.