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Carlos was standing in the lunch line at the Auradon Prep cafeteria when Freddie Facilier walked up to him, handed him her phone, said, "Here. I want it back when you're done," and walked away.
Carlos stared at her retreating figure for a moment, confused, and then put the phone to his ear. "Hello?"
"Carlos," a very familiar voice said.
Carlos relaxed slightly, relieved. "Hi, Ivy," he greeted his cousin. "Um, whose phone are you on? And how?"
"Dr. Facilier's," Ivy answered.
"We borrowed it," Carlos heard the voice of another of his cousins, Diego, chime in.
"I see," Carlos said.
"No, really!" Diego protested. "Hunter went and said we needed to use the phone he got so he and Celia could talk to Freddie, and he said yes! We're going to return it and everything!"
"We need to be on our best behavior if we want you to be able to convince Auradon to take us off the Isle," the voice of Carlos's third cousin Hunter, Diego's older brother, added wryly.
"Right," Carlos managed. "Uh, what was wrong with-"
"De Vil!" Someone behind him yelled. "You're holding up the line!"
Like you have what to complain about, Carlos thought, thinking about the food availability on the Isle, or, to be more accurate, the lack thereof-but he got out of the line without getting anything and sat down at the nearest empty table. He felt an odd sense of foreboding; it had taken away his appetite anyway. Why were all three of his cousins calling him on the Faciliers' phone?
"De Vil?" He heard Diego ask.
"Me, not you," Carlos clarified.
"We know." He could almost see Ivy rolling her eyes. "You're the only de Vil there."
Carlos finished his earlier question. "What was wrong with letters?"
"They're too slow," Hunter said immediately. Of course; Hunter was as fascinated by computers as Carlos was; he'd taught him half of what he knew about technology. He would see communicating by pen and paper as an old-fashioned necessity, since none of the technology on Auradon connected to the Isle. (Except for the televisions. And the gadget Carlos and Hunter had made a few years ago out of one of the televisions, random wires and springs, some Auradon kid's thrown-out video game console, and a well-placed nail file. But that was a secret.)
"Besides," Ivy said. "We need to-talk to you. Not by letter."
The feeling of foreboding intensified into full-blown trepidation. "What is it?"
A moment of silence. Carlos could almost hear their four hearts beating as one.
"Carlos," Ivy said-of course it was Ivy, she was the oldest of them, their leader, first into everything, except going to Auradon through no fault of her own-"Carlos." She took a deep, slightly shaky breath.
That scared Carlos most of all. Ivy had the best self-control of anyone he knew.
"Are you alone?" Ivy asked.
Carlos looked around the full cafeteria. "Uh, not really...." Sure, his table was empty-no one wanted to sit with a VK, much less a de Vil-and besides, Mal and Evie and Jay were all in the grade above him, and weren't having their lunch break yet, and Jane was talking to her mother about something.
Even so, this table wouldn't remain empty for long once a few more kids needed somewhere to sit, and as a VK, he attracted attention. All VKs did. Freddie never ate in the lunchroom-she was probably eating a sandwich on the roof or something. Anything to stay away from prying eyes.
"You should go somewhere private," Ivy said.
"Are you all right?" Carlos asked immediately. What had happened? "You three-"
"The three of us are fine, Carlos," Diego, the cousin closest to him in age assured him.
The three of us. "What about Uncle Cecil? Or-my mother-"
"My father's fine," Hunter assured him. "So's your mother."
Carlos didn't ask about his father, or Hunter and Diego's mother, or either of Ivy's parents; they'd all been dead for years.
"So what-"
"Go somewhere where you can be by yourself," Ivy ordered him. "This is de Vil business."
They obviously weren't going to tell him anything until he went somewhere else. This sounded important, foreboding, grave-de Vil business-but if they were all fine...
Carlos got up and left the room, pretending not to notice the Auradon kids whispering about him, wondering who he was talking to and where he was going.
"All right," he said. "I'm somewhere private. What happened?"
"Where are you?" Ivy demanded.
"Janitor's closet."
Diego snorted.
"Diego," Hunter hissed chastisingly.
"All right," Ivy started. "You should sit down..."
Carlos's stomach dropped again. "What happened?" he repeated.
No one spoke.
His cousins hadn't merely wanted him to get out of sight of other people; perhaps they had also been trying to procrastinate whatever they had to tell him.
"Carlos," Ivy whispered finally. "We found..."
Carlos couldn't breathe. "Found what?" he rasped. He felt cold.
"The catacombs," Diego jumped in. "You remember the catacombs underneath the Isle, that me and the rest of the Anti-Heroes Club were exploring? They run in a whole network, all around the Isle, leading to different places-we were exploring them, mapping them-"
"They're everywhere," Hunter added. "The Queen of Hearts' salon, the basement of the Tremaine's place, near the docks-"
"And there's one," Ivy cut in, "in the backyard."
Silence again.
"The...backyard?" Carlos asked. "Of Hell Hall?"
More silence.
"I can't actually see you if you're nodding or shaking your heads," Carlos reminded his family.
"Yes," Ivy said abruptly. "And-" He could almost see her biting her lip, a nervous habit that she denied.
"Like, all the way in the corner," Diego said-Hell Hall had a big yard-"on the other side from where the treehouse is, there's a pile of rocks, and you move one of the rocks and there's a hole there, and that leads to the tunnel-"
"We found her, Carlos," Hunter said bluntly.
Silence again, which was almost worse than the previous babble.
Carlos' skin felt like ice, yet it was crawling. He clenched his free hand into a fist and held the phone closer to his ear. When he spoke, his voice was almost steady. "You found..." They couldn't be speaking of who they thought they were, could they? But in the de Vil family, there had only ever been three hers-that Carlos knew, anyway-and Ivy was right here and they'd already mentioned his mother, so it could only mean-
"We found your sister there, Carlos," Ivy whispered.
When Carlos was nine years old, and Diego nine and a half, the latter had shoved him off a short cliff into the water. It had been a ten-foot drop, and he'd missed the rocks by nearly a foot (Diego had good aim) and he'd hit the water with a splash that knocked the air out of him, and just floated there beneath the surface of the water, too shocked to even try to swim, until suddenly Hunter had hauled his head out of the water, and he'd seen Ivy yelling at Diego up on land.
It had been oddly peaceful, underneath the water. No noise, nothing to bother him. Nothing at all.
Carlos felt now the way he had then, detached, removed from the world, like there was an invisible layer separating him from everything else.
But only for a moment, and then he was in the real world again.
"You found her..." he whispered.
"Yes." Ivy's voice was as quiet as his.
"Dead?"
A stupid question, perhaps, but Ivy didn't treat it as such. "Yes," she repeated. "I-" Her voice broke. Carlos' sister had been as much a sister to her and Hunter and Diego as she had to Carlos. They were more than cousins, they were de Vils.
"You're sure it's her?" Carlos asked.
"She was in the tunnel," Hunter told him. "Nothing had disturbed-the tunnel hadn't been opened in years, she-it-not-I mean, the...the body...it was in-fairly good shape. The hair...it was her."
The hair, the black-and-white de Vil hair that marked its wearer as a de Vil, permanently and forever.
Which of his cousins had found her?
What state exactly had she been in? He found he couldn't bring himself to ask.
"And her dress," Ivy added. "I recognized her dress, it was her favorite one-"
"The purple one," Carlos whispered. He remembered that dress too.
He remembered the first time she'd worn it. He'd been six or so, so she couldn't have been more than nine. Yet she'd made the dress herself, out of scraps of different shades of purple fabric that she'd saved up for ages and ages, and then sewed together all by herself. She may have been only nine, but she had the innate gift for fashion that all de Vils had.
She'd spun in front of the mirror, the bottom of the dress swirling around her ankles, laughing, the white streaks in her hair almost glowing against the ebony in which they were set. "I made this all by myself! Do you like it, Carlos?"
"Yes," he said, of course.
"I showed it to Mother," she added in a half whisper, pausing in her pirouette and glancing toward the door. "She was having her weird moods again. First she laughed and said I was a true de Vil and I had the gift and one day I might almost be her equal. Then she shouted at me and said I was her rival and I was going to discredit her and upstage her and I was a spy for-the Baroness? Do you know who that is?"
"No," Carlos said.
"She said I couldn't be better than her," she added absentmindedly, than smoothed the side of the dress with her hand. "But it's not black-and-white, anyway. It's purple. Ivy said it was weird, but I said that just because our hair is black and white doesn't mean everything we wear has to be. I told her she could borrow it if she wants, when I grow out of it."
But she'd never grown out of it.
He'd been seven, and she'd been ten, and she'd stayed home from school to clean the house like Mother had them do once a week, and he'd come home and she hadn't been there, and he'd looked all over for her, even in the treehouse, although she didn't like heights, but there was not a trace of her to be found.
The next day half her things had been gone, and he'd finally gotten up the courage to ask his mother where his sister was, to which she'd responded with a languid wave of the hand and a single word: "Gone."
"Gone where?" Carlos asked.
"Gone," Cruella repeated. "She's not here anymore, Carlos. She left you. Now, is the hallway going to sweep itself?"
And that had been the end of that conversation. Cruella had never mentioned her daughter again, not even to her brother.
He was seven years old, she was his mother, he loved her, he trusted her, he believed her-
"How long..." he tried.
"Since she-disappeared," Ivy managed. "Always since then."
Carlos took a deep, shuddering breath. "How...how did she...she..." He couldn't finish the sentence. "She was...stuck in the catacombs?" That would be terrible, horrific, but better than the dreaded suspected truth-
"We-asked Dr. Facilier," Diego rasped. "I mean, he's not called Dr. for nothing, and we brought him-he said that she hadn't-it wasn't asphyxiation, or dehydration, or-anything that would mean she got trapped in there." His words were nearly clinical, as though echoing what someone had told him.
"He said it was blunt force trauma," Hunter supplied. Ivy didn't even reprimand him. "There wasn't any blood or anything, though. It must have dried or disintegrated years ago."
His seemingly callous, brusque, too direct words were broken by a choked sob-Hunter, the biggest and physically strongest of all of them, who had once dared to start a fistfight with both Gaston twins, who was as much a rock of strength as Ivy was. But she'd been the sister of all of them, not just Carlos.
To know all this information...they hadn't just found her yesterday. They must have found her a few days ago, but hadn't told him until now. They'd wanted to be absolutely sure about everything.
"Does Uncle Cecil know?" Carlos asked.
"No," Ivy said quietly, subdued for once. Carlos' sister had been the closest to her in age, one year older. After she'd-disappeared-Ivy had become the de facto leader of the de Vil children. But it was as if she was living in her shadow...only to find now that she no longer lived to cast one.
"We can't tell him," Carlos stated unequivocally. "It'll destroy him." Carlos wasn't usually so forthright-that was Ivy's job-but this....Cecil had given up his life for Cruella-his sister. He had gone with her to the Isle rather than let her be exiled alone. To find out the truth...it would, indeed, destroy him.
"We haven't," Diego assured him. "We're not." Cecil had been the only stable parent figure any of them had had-well, the only one who hadn't died nearly a decade earlier anyway. People tended to die young on the Isle, what with there being no proper medical system and all.
"Good," Carlos whispered.
His fingernails had dug four little crescent moon shapes into his palm, he noted abstractly.
"It's just-that's it," Ivy said, regaining control of the conversation. "We just had to tell you."
"I know," he said, for the first time hating the day he had been taken to Auradon, away from his cousins, away from his sister. "Thank you."
Ivy hung up. She wasn't big on small talk. None of the de Vils were. Say what you needed to say, and get out. Carlos knew they cared about him, and that was all he needed, not false platitudes.
Carlos took the phone and found Freddie on the roof and gave it back to her and didn't answer her questions and went back to his dorm room and ignored Jane and Evie who he passed on the way and stumbled inside and locked the door and sat on his bed, running his fingers through Dude's fur.
It was only then that he let himself cry.