Read Online Isle of the Lost by Melissa de La Cruz - Free Book Online Page B

bother her. Evie was her mother’s daughter, after all, and used to the horrors of the night—to dark, hidden things with yellow eyes glittering in the shadows, to candles dripping over skull candleholders, to the flash of lightning and the fury of thunder as they rolled across the sky. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared in the least bit.
    Except…
    Except…her foot just struck something hard and cold…and the quiet of the closet was broken by the loud, echoing snap of steel meeting steel.
    She screamed.
What was that?!
When her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw fur traps littered all over the floor, lying in wait for the next animal to wander through. There were so many of them that one wrong step would mean a trap would snap her leg in two. She turned back to the door and tried to open it, but it was no use. She was locked in there.
    “Help! Help! Let me out!” she yelled.
    But there was no answer, and the band was playing so loudly, Evie knew no one would hear her, nor care.
    It was hard to see, so Evie felt her way tentatively in the darkness, sliding her left foot on the floor first. How many were there? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? And how big was this room, anyway?
    Her foot came in contact with something cold and heavy, so she retreated. How was she going to get out of this place without losing a limb? Was there another door on the other side, maybe? She squinted. Yes, that was another door. There was a way out.
    She headed slowly to the far end, the floorboards creaking ominously under her feet.
    Evie shifted to her right, hoping to avoid the trap, to move around it, but her foot struck another, and she jumped back as it too snapped shut with a bang, springing into the air and barely grazing her knee. Her heart thundered in her chest as she slid around the next trap, careful not to strike the metal for fear that it might close around her ankle. As long as she missed the trap’s center, she would be good.
    She could do this. All she had to do was move slowly, carefully. She edged around another one. She was getting better at this; she could find her way to the back of the room and possibly another door. She cleared one and then another, moving more quickly, sliding one foot in front of the other, searching for and avoiding the traps. Faster. A little faster. The door must be close, then—
    She struck a trap and it suddenly popped up with a snap. She jumped away, and as the trap fell on the floor, it hit another trap, which sprang up and hit the one next to it, all in succession—and this time, Evie saw that she couldn’t move slowly but that she had to
run
.
    The chorus of snapping metal jaws rang through the darkness, steel blades against steel blades, as she ran screaming toward the back door. The traps slammed shut,
BAM BAM BAM
, one after another, one a hairbreadth away from her stocking while another almost caught her heel as she turned the door handle, left the room, and shut the door behind her.
    But just as she thought she was safe, she realized she had plunged right into a dark, furry presence.
    Was it a bear? A horrible shaggy monster? Had she gotten out of the frying pan only to fall into the fire? Evie twisted and turned, but only succeeded in wrapping herself deeper in fur—dense, thick, woolly fur—
with two armholes?
    This was no bear…no monster. She was trapped in a fur coat! Evie tried to shake it off, tried to shrug it off her shoulders, but she was smack-dab in the middle of dozens of coats, all of them black or white or black
and
white, made of the thickest, lushest hides—there was spotted ocelot and dip-dyed mink, silky sable and shiny skunk, all of them packed in like sardines, so full, so fluffy, so thick. This was Cruella De Vil’s fur closet, her wondrous collection, her obsession, her greatest weakness.
    And those fur traps back there were her security system, just in case anyone got too close to the stuff.
    Evie finally managed to untangle herself and push aside the