Carlos De Vil didn't look like a villain; he looked like a survivor of a long-term siege.
He sat in the back of the "Selfishness" classroom, his fingers stained with grease and copper as he soldered a mess of frayed wires. He was the youngest in the room, but his mind moved with a frantic, twitching speed a byproduct of living with a mother whose moods were as sharp as a skinning knife.
"Don't mind her," Carlos whispered to Evie, not looking up. "Mal creates a vacuum. You either fill it with fear, or she fills it with teeth."
"And you?" Evie asked, her blue hair shadowed by the flickering, weak fluorescent lights of the mausoleum.
"I'm the friction," Carlos muttered. "I get used until I'm smooth, and then I get replaced."
He was an AP student (Advanced Psychosis.) It was a requirement for anyone living in Hell Hall. His mother, Cruella, hadn't been a fashion icon in twenty years. Now, she was a skeletal wreck fueled by "Metabolic Fury." She didn't eat; she screamed. She didn't sleep; she paced. Her "Rage Diet" consisted of thin broth and the psychological flaying of her only son.
"I'm Carlos," he said, finally looking up. His eyes were wide, darting toward the door as if expecting a blow. "We met at your birthday. Before the world ended."
"I remember the screaming," Evie said softly.
"I live down the street from you," Carlos said. "In the ruins."
"I thought only the crazy woman lived there," Evie said, her voice dropping. "With her… dogs?"
Carlos went rigid. The soldering iron hissed against a wire. "Don't say that word."
"Dogs? But she's always calling you her-"
"Don't." Carlos's voice cracked. His forehead was slick with cold sweat. Cruella had raised him on a steady diet of horror stories: pack animals that tore out throats, creatures of pure malice that hunted boys who didn't fluff their mother's furs. To Carlos, a "dog" wasn't a pet; it was a demonic executioner. "That word is a death sentence in my house."
Their teacher, Mother Gothel, finally swept in forty minutes late. She was a woman obsessed with the slow rot of her own beauty, surrounding herself with decaying Polaroids of her own face.
The lesson was Portraits of Evil. On the screen flickered a grainy image of Cruella De Vil from twenty years ago eyes wild, draped in the pelts of a hundred dead things. Carlos stared at the floor. He knew that face. He saw it every night when she made him iron her moth-eaten undergarments or polish the chrome on a car that hadn't moved since the Reagan administration.
As class ended, the shadows in the hallway seemed to lengthen. Mal and Jay were waiting.
"Carlos," Mal purred. It was the sound of a landslide starting. "Your mother is at the 'Spa' this weekend, isn't she?"
The "Spa" was a hole in the basement where volcanic steam seeped through the rock. It was the only place Cruella felt at home surrounded by heat and sulfur.
"Y-yes," Carlos stammered.
"Good. I need a venue," Mal said, stepping into his personal space. "My mother hates noise. Jay's father is busy trying to hypnotize the rats. So, we're using Hell Hall."
"I can't," Carlos gasped, his heart hammering against his ribs. "If she finds out if a single fur is out of place she'll skin me. Literally, Mal. She has the knives."
Mal ignored him, turning to the hallway. "Spread the word. The Twilight Bark is active. Party at the De Vil morgue tonight. Everyone's invited." She paused, looking at Evie with a look of pure, calculated ice. "Well... everyone who matters. You didn't get an invitation twenty years ago, Princess. Why would tonight be any different?"
After Mal and Jay vanished, leaving a wake of terror in the hall, Carlos collapsed back into his seat.
"She's going to kill me," he whispered.
"I'm sorry," Evie said. She looked at the black box Carlos had been building. "What is that?"
Carlos pulled the device closer. It was a jagged collection of copper coils, a scavenged power core, and a tip made from a snapped, powerless wand.
"It's a needle," Carlos whispered. "I'm trying to puncture the dome. Not for magic for a signal."
"To call for help?"
"To see," Carlos corrected. "I want to see the world where mothers don't scream. I want to catch the radio waves from Auradon. I've heard they have a 'digital' world. No one can hit you in a videogame, Evie. No one can make you iron furs in a virtual forest."
Evie looked at the flickering barrier through the high, barred window. "I just want to see the princes."
"I just want to disappear," Carlos said.
He looked at his machine. He had six hours to figure out how to host a "hell-raiser" for the island's most dangerous teenagers without ending up as a rug on his mother's floor.