I woke to the most brilliant pair of blue eyes I'd ever seen.
And a hand clapped over my mouth.
The sheets of my bed twisted as I writhed, trying to get out of my captor's grip.
"Shh," he said into my ear. "You belong with the others. Now sleep."
As he lifted his fingertip to brush my temple, I was forced to do just that.
***
When I woke for the second time, I was hacking up bucketfuls of water.
I leaned to the side and coughed until the last bits of moisture were dispelled from my lungs. My throat burned.
"Y/n!"
Then Sophie was there, throwing her arms around me and sobbing into my shirt.
"Wha—Sophie?"
"Oh, Y/n, you're okay!"
I gripped her upper arms and pulled her away from me enough so I could see her face. "What are you talking about?"
Her crying eyes were nearly frantic. "I don't know! All I saw was you dropped into the moat and then one of the wolves threw you onto shore but you weren't waking up for the longest time!" She pressed her hands to her tear-stained face and sobbed. "And Agatha's here but she was dropped into the School for Good! Oh, there's been a terrible mistake, they've mixed us up! I'm supposed to be where she is!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down." I shifted to sit up more, wincing as my soggy clothes grated against my sand-crusted skin. "What do you mean? They've mixed what up?"
Sophie cried some more. "Don't you see? We've been taken to the School for Evil."
Something gripped the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet. I came face to face with the snout of a large gray wolf. Its breath stank of rotting carcass.
He pushed me into a line. I stumbled, nearly slipping on wet sand, but the soles of my boots found traction at the last second.
A pack of wolves stood—on two feet—in bloodred soldier jackets and black leather breeches, snapped riding whips to herd students into line. If any dawdled, a wolf delivered a swift crack, so I kept an anxious pace. I spotted Sophie a few heads in front of me, her golden locks making her stick out like a sore thumb.
The tower gates were made of iron spikes, crisscrossed with barbed wire. Nearing them, I saw it wasn't wire at all but a sea of black vipers that darted and hissed in our direction. I swallowed and breezed through. The rusted words held between two carved black swans over the gates read:
THE SCHOOL FOR EVIL EDIFICATION AND PROPAGATION OF SIN
Ahead the school tower rose like a winged demon. The main tower, built of pockmarked black stone, unfurled through smoky clouds like a hulking torso. From the sides of the main tower jutted two thick, crooked spires, dripping with veiny red creepers like bleeding wings.
The wolves drove the children towards the mouth of the main tower, a long serrated tunnel shaped like a crocodile snout. The tunnel grew narrower and narrower until I could barely see the child in front of me. I squeezed between two jagged stones and found myself in a leaky foyer that smelled of rotten fish. Demonic gargoyles pitched down from stone rafters, lit torches in their jaws. An iron statue of a bald, toothless hag brandishing an apple smoldered in the menacing firelight. Along the wall, a crumbly column had an enormous black letter N painted on it, decorated with wicked-faced imps, trolls, and Harpies climbing up and down it like a tree. There was a bloodred E on the next column, embellished with swinging giants and goblins. Creeping along in the interminable line, I worked out what the columns spelled out—N-E-VE-R—then suddenly found myself far enough into the room to see the line snake in front of me. For the first time, I had a clear view of the other students.
One girl had an overbite, wispy patches of hair, and one eye instead of two, right in the middle of her forehead. Another boy was like a mound of dough, with his bulging belly, bald head, and swollen limbs. A tall, sneering girl trudged ahead with sickly green skin. The boy in front of me had so much hair all over him he could have been an ape. They all looked about my age, but the similarities ended there. Here was a mass of the miserable, with misshapen bodies, repulsive faces, and the cruelest expressions I'd ever seen, as if looking for something to hate. One by one their eyes fell on Sophie and they found what they were looking for. The petrified princess in glass slippers and golden curls. The red rose among thorns.
I clenched my jaw.
We needed to get out of here as soon as possible.
I followed the line into a sunken anteroom, where three black crooked staircases twisted up in a perfect row. One carved with monsters said MALICE along the banister, the second, etched with spiders, said MISCHIEF, and the third with snakes read VICE. Around the three staircases, I noticed the walls covered with different-colored frames. In each frame there was a portrait of a child, next to a storybook painting of what the student became upon graduation. A gold frame had a portrait of an elfish little girl, and beside it, a magnificent drawing of her as a revolting witch, standing over a comatose maiden. A gold plaque stretched under the two illustrations:
CATHERINE OF FOXWOOD
Little Snow White (Villain)
In the next gold frame there was a portrait of a smirking boy with a thick unibrow, alongside a painting of him all grown up, brandishing a knife to a woman's throat:
DROGAN OF MURMURING MOUNTAINS
Bluebeard (Villain)
Beneath Drogan there was a silver frame of a skinny boy with shock blond hair, turned into one of a dozen ogres savaging a village:
KEIR OF NETHERWOOD
Tom Thumb (Henchman)
Then I noticed a decayed bronze frame near the bottom with a tiny, bald boy, eyes scared wide. A boy I knew. Bane was his name. He used to bite all the pretty girls in Gavaldon until he was kidnapped four years before. But there was no drawing next to Bane. Just a rusted plaque that read:
FAILED
I looked at Bane's terrified face and felt my stomach churn. What happened to him?
I gazed up at thousands of gold, silver, and bronze frames cramming every inch of the hall: witches slaying princes, giants devouring men, demons igniting children, heinous ogres, grotesque gorgons, headless horsemen, merciless sea monsters. Once awkward adolescents. Now portraits of absolute evil. Even the villains that had died gruesome deaths—Rumpelstiltskin, the Beanstalk Giant, the Wolf from Red Riding Hood—were drawn in their greatest moments, as if they had emerged triumphant from their tales. The other children gazed up at the portraits in awed worship.
Then, another portrait caught my eye. One of a boy grinning maliciously, clad in a tunic made of autumn leaves, hovering fifty feet in the air.
PETER OF MOAT BRAE
Pan (Villain)
I furrowed my eyebrows. What? No, that couldn't be right. Peter Pan was a hero. A boy who had slain Captain Hook and saved the Lost Boys from a lifetime of misery at the hands of Hook's crew.
One of the wolves shoved me forward. "Move along," he growled.
Turning the corner into a wider corridor, I saw a red-skinned, horned dwarf ahead on a towering stepladder, hammering more portraits into a bare wall. The frames on this wall held familiar faces. There was the dough boy I had seen earlier, labeled BRONE OF ROCH BRIAR. Next to him was a painting of the one-eyed, wispy-haired girl: ARACHNE OF FOXWOOD. I scanned the portraits of my classmates, awaiting their villainous transformations.
Then I saw the frame under his hammer. My own face smiled back at me.
I narrowed my eyes. I'm really considered to be Evil? Their standards must have dropped tremendously.
A dark-skinned hag with a massive boil on her cheek thrust a sheet of parchment into my hands, which outlined my schedule.
An ogre then dumped a ribbon-tied stack of books in my hands.
Best Villainous Monologues, 2nd ed.
Spells for Suffering, Year 1
The Novice's Guide to Kidnapping & Murder
Embracing Ugliness Inside & Out
How to Cook Children (with New Recipes!)
A spotted satyr threw a musty black fabric around my neck—the school uniform, a dumpy, tattered tunic that sagged like shredded curtains.
A scream drew my attention immediately. Across the way was Sophie, struggling against a wolf's hold.
"You don't understand!" she screamed. "It's all a mistake!"
The wolf bent down to her level and snarled.
"There are no mistakes."