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“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Mal says.
“Yes, you do,” Carlos replies, hefting the duffel bag over his shoulder. It clinks dangerously as he moves, and she eyes it with suspicion.
And, okay, he has a point. Mal may be the leader of this gang, but if Carlos said ‘jump’, Mal would say, ‘how high?’. It’s a side effect of all the gang activity; you learn to trust each other with things that normal people have never even thought to trust another person with.
“Okay, revise: I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
Carlos meets her eye, gaze as sharp as she’s ever seen it. He smirks like an Isle boy, wide and wicked, and says, “Science.”
“Science?”
“Just trust me.”
Without any more preamble whatsoever, Carlos begins traipsing through the woods. With single-minded purpose, he stomps over the weeds and roots, directly into the belly of the beast. Mal swears, rushing to follow.
“I just don’t understand what kind of science,” she smacks at a branch before she can run right into it, “we’re going to be doing in the Enchanted Forest.”
“The magical kind,” Carlos says, not pausing in his trek. “That’s why I brought you.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction?”
He abruptly stops. She nearly runs into him from behind. He whirls around on his heel and says, “No, it’s not. There’s actually an entire field of scientific study here in Auradon dedicated to the way magic interacts with things like biology and chemistry. And cosmology, but that’s more philosophical… Anyway, you,” he sticks an accusatory finger into her face. “didn’t tell me that there’s a special magic lake that washes away curses!”
She blinks at him. His phrasing is very interesting, given that all she’d said was that it washed away the love spell they casted on Ben, all that time ago. “It doesn’t just wash away curses.”
He rolls his eyes. “Spells, then.” He huffs theatrically. “The point is, you’ve been holding out on me!”
“Okay, wait,” she holds a hand up. “You dragged me all the way out here so you can do some freaky science experiment—“
“It’s not freaky.”
“—on the Enchanted Lake?”
“Yeah,” he says, easily. “Are you coming?”
“Obviously.” She scoffs. “I’m just wondering what all the secrecy was about.”
“Revenge, obviously. For holding out on me. Now, can you just show me where the damn thing is?”
“You don’t know? Then why were you leading?” She groans. “Is this part of your ‘revenge’?”
He rolls his eyes. “I thought I heard water.”
“Well, you’re shit out of luck, because Ben made me close my eyes when he showed it to me.”
Carlos stares at her, genuinely scandalized. “And you did?”
“Ben is like if a kitten were a person. I wasn’t worried about it.”
He frowns. “Whatever you say, killer.” And, it’s like, yeah, on the Isle closing her eyes just because someone had asked would’ve been a fast way to get a switchblade buried in her gut, but she’d been playing the part of sweet-girl-with-a-crush, just the way Evie had taught her, so closing her eyes had just made the most sense.
“You gonna tell FG about those ‘Isle instincts’ you got going on right now?”
He smiles at her, all kinds of smug. “FG loves me. I don’t got any ‘Isle instincts’, didn’t you know?” He bats his eyes at her, expression suddenly the picture of shattered, wide-eyed innocence. “My mommy hurt me and kept me inside all the time. Gang violence? Oh, evil, I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing anything like that!”
“You know, puppy,” she laughs, reaching forward to ruffle his curls. “sometimes you scare me.” He ducks from the affection, shooting her a tilted grin.
It takes them the better part of an hour to find it. By the time they do, Mal is sweaty, dehydrated, and adorned with at least two scratches from thorny plants. They had run into a total of three (three) weird, fucky-looking creatures that Mal didn’t know forests in Auradon could have. Weird, lithe, rodent-like things with sharp teeth and too many eyes… She’d had to do some creative magic to avoid them. Overall, she’s not pleased with the experience.
Finally, though, they find it.
Just how she remembers it: granite arch on a silver dais. Ivy crawling up the sides, flowers dotting the bank. It’s… deeply picturesque. The sun hanging high in the sky above it, framed by mountains. Even the breeze smells like flowers, like this is some sort of fucking romance novel.
The fact that Auradon has places like these, just, sitting around, and nobody even bothers to visit them half the time drives her slightly insane. It makes her want to grip Ben by the back of his skinny neck and shove his face in the wild, freezing, rocky surf of the Isle. But that isn’t very ‘good’ of her, so she pretends the feeling isn’t there.
Carlos drops the duffel bag onto the dais, just by the edge of the water. He seems completely unaffected by the beauty around him, and truly, that’s half the fun of doing anything with Carlos; he’s dressed in Isle clothes like he doesn’t give a shit, an old ratty pair of studded combat boots, a shirt covered in patches and pins, hair haphazardly dyed. He breaks up the serenity of the fairytale image of this place, a smudge amidst all the pastels.
The inside of the duffel appears to be, almost entirely, small glass vials. He pulls out a thermos and dunks it into the water, twisting the cap shut.
“Is that legal?” She asks, plopping down beside him. He’s crouched over the lip, hands braced on his knees as he stares impassively down at the crystalline water. It’s reflecting the sunlight, and somehow the glittery light is shining off of it in hues of pink.
“Definitely not,” he replies, gently setting his thermos of contraband back into his duffel. “Technically, we aren’t even supposed to be here.”
“Wait, seriously?” She watches as he pulls vials of various liquids from the bag. “But Ben brought me here?”
“Special privileges. Those of royal blood are permitted to enter public property that would otherwise be restricted, providing it has substantial religious significance. And by ‘religious’, they just mean—“
“—fairytale-relevant.” She finishes. “I can’t believe you memorized that whole damn book.”
“‘S not a book.”
“I can’t believe you memorized the entire Constitution of the United Kingdoms of Auradon,” she drawls. “Still, it’s weird. Somehow I can’t imagine Ben doing something like that. He just, hates breaking the rules.”
Carlos finishes laying out his perfectly even line of glass vials, before selecting one carefully. “It’s easy to hate breaking the rules when the rules for you are so lax.”
“Preach,”
He hands her the vial. “Put a spell on this.”
She takes it, raising her eyebrow at it critically. It’s clear, sloshing around in the sealed vial as she eyes it. “I don’t have any love spell cookies on hand.”
He rolls his eyes. “I already know it works on the love spell. Put another spell on it.”
“This seems like a very lax way to conduct an experiment,” she says. “Any requests?”
“I’m just satisfying my curiosity, not writing for a scientific journal. And, I don’t know. Make it sweet or something. It’s just water.” He pulls out a notebook and a pencil, opening it to a fresh page with confident, practiced motions. With ease, he makes a table with five columns. On one side, he writes, substance. Then, spell. Then, time submerged. Then, observations. Then, effects.
“Does anyone know we’re out here?”
“You think I would tell people we’re going to go flagrantly ignore Auradon’s laws regarding private religious property?”
“Fair enough,” she mutters. “Evie and Jay?”
“Yeah, I mentioned it.” He gestures with the eraser of his pencil. “Now hurry up.”
She rolls her eyes, but acquiesces. She doesn’t need her spellbook to do magic anymore, which is nice, because FG’s been way sweeter on them since they put the spellbook and the mirror in the museum. No, magic isn’t about some arbitrary collections of poems in a book; it’s about intention, power, the sleek possibilities of the meaning they’ve given to the things they say.
Power gathering in her clavicle and leaking hotly from her eyes, she says, “Sweet like candy, sweet like cake, make this water so sugary it aches.”
Words and rhyme schemes was how she learned magic, and so it is what her magic associates with power. The legends of fae and contracts and names speak for themselves, after all. Magic itself does not require words, but for her, half-faery she is, there is nothing more powerful.
“Did it work?”
“You doubting me, De Vil?”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s science. I have to be sure.” And then he yanks the vial from her fingers. He sets it down, twisting open the cork. He pulls an eyedropper from the bag and gently sets it inside, sucking up some of the water. Then, he sticks his tongue out, and drops a glob of it onto his tongue.
“Well?”
He smacks his lips. Holds up the eyedropper. Rolling her eyes, she sticks her tongue out for him. He lets another drop fall, and saccharine sweetness explodes on her tongue. It tastes like funfetti cake, which is exactly what she’d been picturing when she spelled it.
He takes it back and hands her a stopwatch. He holds his hand over the lake and says, “On three.”
He inhales, eyeing the lake with eyes that sparkle. With a wild, manic sort of excitement. In another life, she’s absolutely sure he would’ve been some kind of mad scientist. Maybe he’s already on his way there. “One,”
The water laps gently at the lip of the dais, perfect and undisturbed. It looks like an oil painting; the kind she’d see in Ben’s castle, ten feet tall and set into a gold frame. Pure opulence. “Two,”
It’s funny, she thinks, how all he had to do to get her to come with him was ask. He’d even made her drive. Yanked her phone from her back pocket and set the address into the GPS. And she’d done it, because she knows he hates driving. “Three,”
He dunks his hand underneath the surface. She clicks the stopwatch on.
“We’re going to do ten seconds to start. Then twenty. Then thirty.”
She groans. “When you said ‘science’, I thought we were gonna do something fun.”
“This is what you get for holding out on me—“
“Time.”
He pulls it from the surf. He goes through the motions of testing it again, before announcing, “I fucking knew it.”
“What?”
“It’s still sweet,” he shakes the vial gently. “The glass protected it.”
He makes her spell another vial, and this time, he pulls a dropper full of water from the lake. Then, he drops it into the vial. When he tests it that time, it’s not sweet anymore.
“Is it safe for us to be testing it like this?”
“Oh, it’s a flagrant violation of every lab safety rule ever made.” He’s not even looking at her, scribbling notes down.
Her eyes fall onto the water. Perfect. Clear. Gentle and glittering pink in the sunlight. Auradon. “What d’you think would happen if I drank it?”
He looks up from his notebook to deadpan, “What?”
“Like, if you drank it, it would probably just taste like water. But I’m a magical creature.”
He opens his mouth. Doesn’t say anything. Narrows his eyes in thought. Sets his pencil down with finality. Closes his mouth. Opens it again.
“Maybe it would make you, like, not able to do magic?”
“Like the barrier.”
He presses his lips into a thin line. “Yeah, like the barrier.”
“Or maybe it’d be like poison.”
“Didn’t you say you swam in it, when you were with Ben?”
‘Swam’ is a charitable word for it. She’s not going to argue, though. “Yeah, but I didn’t swallow any of it.”
He pauses for a moment, seemingly contemplating this. Then, he goes digging through his duffel, arms shoulder deep. He emerges with two empty vials. “You wanna find out?”
“Hell yeah,” she swipes one. Together, they fill their vials with the liquid. And together, they shoot them back like it’s booze.
It tastes like the way sunlight feels on her face, like the way the vines look where they climb up the granite. She hates it.
Gently, Carlos takes the vial back when she offers it, their fingertips brushing. He pulls his notebook into his lap, eye glittering as he pierces her with his gaze. “How do you feel?”
“Normal.” She says. “Well, I can sort of feel the water.”
“Feel it?”
“Like the way you can feel booze. Except it’s cool, not warm. It’s in my stomach.”
He hands her a vial. “Spell it.”
She does. It’s not sweet. She could tell as soon as she said the words, though; the power didn’t gather in her, didn’t leak from her eyes like hot steam. He could tell, too. But that’s because the magic didn’t turn her eyes green, because there wasn’t any magic.
He scribbles furiously. She says, “You know, you should dunk the Anti-Magic Machine in here.”
The ‘Anti-Magic Machine’ being their awful, pre-teen colloquialism for the machine Carlos had once been developing to try and tear an exit in the barrier. He’d only just gotten it to work— put a teeny tiny hole in the sky, letting in a strange dot of unfiltered sunlight— when they were brought to Auradon. The excitement had been electric, she remembers. She’d really thought he was going to break them out.
He mumbles, “Possible effects: mind wandering,” and she snaps, hey! But then he digs around in his duffle again and emerges with a black box about a foot long and half a foot wide. It’s got ANTI-MAGIC MACHINE V3 written haphazardly one the side in metallic, silver sharpie. “I brought it to use as a control, but,” and then his eyes land on the water.
He drops it in.
It, predictably, explodes.
A fountain of water and sparks shoots upward into the air. Mal grabs Carlos by the shoulder, shoving him as hard as she can away from the explosion, jumping after him, shielding him with her body. The shockwave bursts past her, rippling through every inch and plane of her body. She gasps, heart hammering, body screaming in pain.
Then, all is quiet. Her ears pop painfully. They are laying on the riverbank, Carlos pressed into the dirt by Mal’s weight. Her arms are braced on the soil beside his temples, framing him. She attempts to catch her breath.
Carlos blinks up at her, expression only mildly put-out. The ends of his hair are smoking, and she pats them out with a shaking hand. It smears ash over his forehead. He says, very calmly, “Interesting.”
It explodes again. They’re far enough away that the shockwave is only kind of painful, and they turn to watch it. Fire sprays into the sky, surrounded on all sides by a cacophonous shower of water.
It explodes a third time, this time less intensely. The shockwave still makes her ears pop and her eyes water, but it’s nothing she isn’t used to. She pulls herself from on top of Carlos, standing. She gives him a hand up, brushing dirt and grass from his clothes.
Together, they creep over to the dais. They peer over the edge at the water. Carlos drops to his knees and sticks his arm in the water, searching blindly; eventually, he pulls the Anti-Magic Machine from the surface.
As soon as it touches the air, it catches fire.
He yelps, throwing it to the dais like it’s a roach he caught crawling on him. He hops back, hissing in pain, waving his hand back and forth. She grips his wrist, pulling the wound to her face.
It’s a third-degree, but it’s on his fingers, which sucks. She says as much.
His eyes are on the AMM, though. “It’s soaking wet. Why the fuck did it catch fire?”
“Beats me.” She nearly casts a healing spell on the wound; she belatedly realizes that she’s still under the Lake’s effects.
His eyes are glittering with that manic excitement again. He’s staring at the fire with violent passion in his face, licking his lips like a predator sizing up its prey.
On the Isle, Carlos had always been hungry for knowledge. Starving, even. He had gripped whatever he could learn in greedy hands and put it all to use as soon as he could. But on the Isle, it’d been about survival. It was about keeping their enemies off their backs, finding creative ways to save food, making a machine to escape the island.
But as soon as he came to Auradon? It stopped being for survival and started being for sport. For fun. A game he plays. Hours spent in the library, late nights in the school’s lab, doing experiments he’s not supposed to be doing with materials he’s not supposed to have. She was wrong, earlier; he already is a bit of a mad scientist.
She kicks the AMM away with her boot. It’s still smoldering, filling the air with the stink of melting plastic.
He opens his mouth to argue.
She says, “Next weekend. You make a new AMM, I bring the spellbook.”
A smile breaks across his lips. Stretches wide over his face, crinkles his eyes at the corners, bells his cheeks, warps his freckles; his hair is singed and there’s that smudge of ash on his forehead in the shape of her thumb. They’re gonna have to dress that burn, but goddamn. He’s never looked so beautiful.
He may smirk like an Isle boy, but his smile is all his own. He says, “You’re on.”
“Am I forgiven for holding out on you?”
She cradles his burned hand. He says, “Killer, I was never mad.”
She knew that already. Still, though. For that smile? She’d do anything. Not that she’d ever tell him. His head would get too big.