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A de Vil by birth as well as marriage–she and her now-deceased husband had been third cousins–Malevola de Vil, the mother of Cecil, Cassius, and Estella "Cruella" or "Ella" de Vil, was the current owner and manager of the House of de Vil, the de Vil family's famous and notorious fashion empire, which Carlos, Diego, and Ivy were all heirs to. She was known to be strong-willed and intimidating, but over the past several years had become even more of a recluse from society than she already was, most likely due to all three of her children being banished to the Isle-although Cecil had actually chosen to go, rather than be left alone without his siblings.
Malevola seemed to have a difficult relationship with her children, to the point where her son Cecil wouldn't even call her "Mother" anymore but instead called her by her first name, but she still loved them in her own way, or at least that was what Cecil had told Diego. Malevola had banned the House of de Vil from selling to anyone affiliated with the monarchy in any way, most likely due to anger at her children't fate. She didn't care about the money the fur empire lost; the de Vil fortune was already extravagantly large. Every member of the de Vil family had worked at the House of de Vil, designing and making their own clothes; Malevola would not have her children in a supervisor's position while knowing nothing about the actual work that went into it.
Malevola now lived in a little house about as far away from anywhere as she could get, understandably wanting nothing to do with Auradon, after what they had done to her children.
"We know all this, Carlos," Diego said. "Why are you telling us this again?"
"He talks a lot when he's nervous," Ivy said from the backseat, where she had been relegated because Carlos was driving and Diego had the map.
"I'm right here," Carlos pointed out.
"Okay," Ivy said. "You talk a lot when you're nervous."
"That's true," Carlos admitted, carefully steering the car around a curve.
"Why is he driving?" Diego twisted around in the passenger seat to face Ivy. "I'm older than him. It's actually legal if I drive. More legal than if he drives, anyway."
"Like I said, he's the one who knows the Auradon rules." Ivy brushed a white strand of hair out of her eye. "Besides, we're de Vils! We have a legacy! We don't care about the rules! We're wild and chaotic; we're doomed so we doom everyone else! The world burns at our wish!"
Ivy got like this sometimes.
"Not our wish." Carlos rarely contradicted Ivy, but being in the driver's seat had made him bold. "We don't set things on fire. You set things on fire. I just hack into computer systems. And Diego melts his bedroom floor."
Diego looked up from trying to puzzle out the map. "You're still going on about that? That happened one time!"
"Well," Carlos noted, "it couldn't happen any other times because there was hardly anything left of your floor! I said you should wait for me before doing the experiment! Aren't I supposed to be the mad scientist?"
"I was in a bad mood!" Diego protested. "I wanted to be alone!" Diego's bad moods happened far too often.
"Where did you get the acid from, anyway?" Ivy wanted to know.
Diego grinned. "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no-wait! Left! LEFT!"
Carlos yanked the steering wheel to the left. The tires squealed. Ivy got thrown against the side of the car. "Ow!"
And then it was quiet. Carlos slowly drove the car down a barely-paved road surrounded by trees.
Diego broke the silence. "See, this is why I should be driving."
"This is why you shouldn't be distracting me," Carlos corrected. "And why you should pay more attention to the map."
Ivy threw a match at her cousins. "Carlos, drive carefully. Diego, keep an eye on the map."
"I still say it doesn't make sense that he's driving," Diego complained. "He's fifteen. If we're in Auradon now, shouldn't we be listening to Auradon rules?"
"Oh, so now you want to listen to Auradon rules?" Carlos asked.
Ivy sighed. She was a year older than Diego, a year and a half older than Carlos, and sometimes it felt like she was the most mature out of the three of them. By, like, ten years. Honestly, if they insisted on arguing all the time about ridiculous trifles, than they had no right to complain about her habit of burning their homework.
She liked fire. The flames seemed to soothe her, calm her, somehow. And her homework lasted barely a minute before it shriveled into ashes, so she had to use something.
"Diego," Ivy said. "We've been through this. Carlos knows how to handle Auradon if we get pulled over. Just because you want to drive is no need to act juvenile. You know what they say about de Vils!"
"That we're doomed," Diego muttered grumpily.
"That we're the bane of...of, well, everything," Carlos added.
"That we're hopeless. Like, with no hope for the future."
"And that we're cursed. Do you think we're really-"
"BESIDES all that!" Ivy yelled, interrupting the litany of excoriations and denigrations that had been said about her family over the generations. The de Vils were a rather notorious family, and Cruella hadn't exactly helped their reputation. "They say we stick together! That if you start up with one of us you start up with all of us, and you live to regret it! To beware of us! And I don't care if that was incorrect grammar! We're a family, and even Auradon knows it! So act like it!" She took a deep breath.
"Sorry," both Carlos and Diego muttered.
All three de Vil cousins were only children. Growing up, each other was all they'd had.
They were as close as siblings. They looked like it too-all three of them had the trademark de Vil black-and-white hair, as well as the same dark eyes, the same shaped nose and cheeks and ears. They understood each other better than anyone else, sometimes seeming as though they were reading each other's minds.
"It's kind of creepy," Jay had mentioned to Carlos once, after he and Diego had had an almost completely nonverbal conversation.
"And they way you and Jade finish each other's sentences isn't creepy?" Carlos had asked.
"You have a point," Jay admitted.
The de Vil cousins had vastly different personalities, but it was true that if you started up with one of them, you started up with all of them.
However, these personality differences sometimes led to "inane arguments over ridiculous trifles," as Ivy called them.
Ivy, as the oldest, like to show it by using a more advanced vocabulary than her cousins.
The car stopped, interrupting everyone's trained of thought. "I think we're here," Carlos said unnecessarily: they were in front of the only house for, quite literally, miles.
It was set nearly a hundred meters back from the road, a small one-story house, covered in peeling black paint with white trim.
Wordlessly, Ivy unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. Her cousins quickly followed.
Their banter had, perhaps intentionally, distracted them, but now, staring at their grandmother's home, all their worries returned full force.
"Wait," Carlos whispered. "What if..."
What if Malevola was like Cruella? Or even worse?
She hadn't sought them out when they had come to Auradon, after all. Maybe she didn't want to meet them. Maybe they should have stayed home.
"My father writes letters to her," Diego said. "Not very often, but regularly. Once every six months, at least."
"Does she know my father is dead?" Ivy interrupted. She would hate to spring this news on her grandmother. Who knows how she would react? If she was anything like her daughter...then it would be best to be several miles away when she got bad news. "Did your father tell him?"
"I think so," Diego said slowly. "He would have, right?" The de Vils had a...complicated relationship. "But, his letters–well, he wouldn't write if she was that bad, would she?"
"Just to tell her bad news," Carlos mumbled under his breath.
"Her name is Malevola," Ivy muttered, crossing her arms.
"It wasn't always," Carlos said softly. "It used to be Madeline. People started calling her Malevola, like they call my mother Cruella. But her name is Madeline."
"Does she like it?" Diego asked. Did she embrace her new, dark, de Vil name? Or did she resist, insist on being called Madeline long after the world had forgotten Madeline de Vil? Or both, like her daughter, who delighted in being known as Cruella to the outside world but secretly enjoyed it when her family called her Ella?
"I don't know," Carlos admitted. "Did you know that Malevola means, well, Malevolent, but Madeline means a high tower?"
"I don't see the connection," Diego said.
"Me neither. But I guess it sounds similar."
Ivy decided to let her cousins procrastinate another few moments. She hated to give in to uncertainty, but if they were all nervous, well, she could just blame the delay on them. She had no idea what awaited them inside Malevola's house any more than they did. "What does my name mean?"
"Well," Carlos started. "Ivy is an evergreen vine, the Latin name of which is hedera, and it–"
Ivy took another match out of her pocket and threw that one at him too, then bent and retrieved it, not about to let it go to waste. "I know what Ivy means. I meant my full name."
"I thought you hated being called Ivana," Diego said.
Carlos agreed, and added, "You said if I call you Ivana you'll call me Oscar, but you like to call me Oscar anyway, so–"
Ivy glared.
"Anyway!" Carlos said. "Ivana means a gift from the heavens."
"It's a nice name," Diego (the only one of them with a full name he didn't mind) put in. "Why don't you like being called that?"
Ivy rolled her eyes. "We're from the Isle, Diego!"
"But really," Carlos said, bringing the conversation back to their current situation. "Should we...I don't know...have some sort of plan?"
About time they got on with it. They could talk about name meanings any other time. They might as well get this over with. "We'll go in and see what happens," Ivy decided, forcing herself to take a few steps forward. "We'll...talk for a bit, or something. But if it goes wrong–" if she's worse than Cruella, she didn't say–"then we'll set a fire in the kitchen and run while she's distracted."
Her cousins hurried after her. "Why do we always have fires in our plans?" Carlos asked, but at least he was coming with them. He was last in line, but still. "We can't just point over her shoulder and run?"
"Fires work much better," Ivy declared.
Diego barked a sharp laugh.
All too soon, they were standing before the front door. It was black with red trim, not white, perhaps a nod to Malevola/Madeline's daughter.
They stood there. Carlos was timid but smart, and Ivy was fierce and fiery, and Diego was creative and moody, and right now all three of them were scared.
What lay behind this door? A loving, welcoming grandmother?
Or precisely the opposite?
Like Cruella, in her worst moments?
Even worse, perhaps?
"Devil, devil, devil child," Ivy whispered. She looked at her cousins. "On three. Together."
They nodded.
"One," Ivy whispered.
"Two," Diego put in.
"Three," Carlos finished, his voice barely audible.
Ivy, Carlos and Diego de Vil knocked together on Malevola de Vil's door.
And they waited.
Nothing happened.
"That was anticlimactic," Diego muttered.
Was she not home? Could they go now? Go, and say they'd tried, but she wasn't there–
–taking the cowards way out?
"We're de Vils," Carlos whispered. "In it to the finish."
Ivy grinned at him. "Exactly."
Diego stiffened. "Did you hear that?"
Now that they were listening, Carlos and Ivy heard it too: the creak of wood.
"It could just be the house settling," Carlos offered almost hopefully, but then they heard another sound, from just beyond the door: the sound of unlatching locks.
The three cousins were tense. Carlos tried to banish the mental image he had of his mother shrieking at him for disturbing her. Diego felt cold. Ivy took a half step forward, so she was standing in front of her cousins, and fingered the matches she had in her pocket.
With a long, rusty squeeeak, the door opened.
Malevola de Vil was shorter than they had expected, exactly the same height as Ivy was. She stood in the center of the doorway, facing them. Her hair was almost completely white, with only a single black streak snaking through it. She wore a black dress, as though she were in mourning. She leaned on a thick wooden cane–ah, so that's why it took so long.
She looked, essentially, like an older version of Cruella de Vil.
She stared at the three of them as though seeing ghosts. Her dark eyes went very wide, her face draining of what little color it had.
Of course, Carlos realized. We should have warned her–sent a letter at least–
She was looking at them as though seeing her children, come back from the Isle–and, in Ivy's father's case, the dead.
Strong family resemblances ran in the de Vil family. Ivy could have been a young Cruella, while Carlos looked just like his mother except that he was a boy, and shorter, and nervous in a way she never had been, which basically meant that he looked as much like Cecil and Cassius as Diego did.
For Malevola, it must have been like looking into a mirror from the past, like seeing spirits, a memory from a happier time.
Malevola's jaw twitched. She regained her footing, standing firm despite her cane. Her eyes darted quickly back and forth between her grandchildren.
She looks like me, Ivy realized.
Malevola opened the door to her home wider and spoke for the first time. "Come in."