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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.
