Only now, as Agatha inched closer, she saw that the frames of Evil’s most famous villains had all been defaced.

Captain James Hook’s old student portrait as a young, broodingly handsome boy was splotched in graffiti from multiple people:

DON’T BLOW IT THIS TIME!

Payback for Pan!

NO ONE BEATS HOOK TWICE!

Over a gluttonous boy who became Jack’s giant, there were more scribbled exhortations:

SECOND CHANCE AT GLORY!

KILL HIM AND HIS LITTLE COW TOO!

JUST STEP ON THE LAD!

Agatha scanned more frames along the wall: a willowy girl who’d become a famous Evil fairy (“NO SPINNING WHEELS THIS TIME!”), a blond boy with a scanty blue moustache who’d become Bluebeard (“YOU GONNA LET A GIRL WIN AGAIN?”), and dozens more notorious villains, their portraits splashed with more motivational creeds . . . until her eyes stopped on a Nevergirl whose face looked eerily familiar. Then Agatha noticed the graduation scene next to it: a raven-haired witch standing in front of a gingerbread house with her daughter. It was the same picture as the one on Hester’s night table, only here scrawled with a single taunt:

Hear your kid’s a better witch than you!

Agatha inched closer. Who did all this?

Voices suddenly floated from the foyer—

She dove behind a staircase.

An undead ogre and an undead hobgoblin stalked into the stair room, both stitched up and shedding off skin like the zombie villains she’d seen in the Woods. The ogre, bald and potbellied, had a thick gray hide, a serrated spine, and wielded a wooden cudgel, while the slimy, green hobgoblin with stumpy white horns carried a twisted brass dagger.

“Turnin’ fog to chocolate? Bloody good prank if you ask me,” chortled the ogre in a gravelly voice. “Few’a those New whippersnappers might amount to somethin’ after all.”

“Don’t know why you think this is funny,” piped the shrill-voiced goblin. “Came back to do our stories over again, not patrol empty halls and chase candy. Why can’t I be in class upstairs with the others?”

“Henchmen guard the castle, not go to class,” groused the ogre. “Best git back to yer’ post. Anyone breaks in and the School Master will shove us back inna graves we came from.”

The goblin sighed and the two parted ways into opposing halls.

Behind the stairwell, Agatha didn’t move. “Class?” What classes were taught in the School for Old? And more importantly, who was taking them?

On instinct, she tiptoed from her hiding place and up a staircase, quite sure that whoever the students were at this school were the same hooligans who’d defaced the portraits.

The classrooms were lined up in an airless corridor off the first floor of Malice tower, Agatha recalled, but as soon as she turned off the landing, she saw two spear-toting guards down the hall and ducked behind the banister.

Of course the classrooms are guarded, you idiot. But how else was she supposed to get a view inside?

She racked her brain for a plan, listening to the trolls pace up and down the hall, feeling a cold breeze raise goosebumps on her skin . . .