"Where's Deuce?" Lagoona asked.
"RUN!" Deuce yelled, ripping off his glasses. A wave of stone-gray energy turned half the skeleton army into statues. The monsters bolted across the beach, splashing into the rowboat just as the curse tried to grab them.
Lagoona propelled them through the waves with a powerful tail sweep. Behind them, Skeleton Island shrank into the fog, the Skeleton King's howl fading like a bad dream.
"Technically, the brochure said 'haunted tropical getaway,'" Frankie Stein buzzed, her neck bolts sparking nervously. "I may have overlooked that detail."
But Frankie had been calculating. "The hourglass," she whispered. "If we flip it, the curse resets. It gives us five minutes to reach the boat."
The ghouls and mansters had crash-landed on Skeleton Island after Cleo's new scarab-navigation system malfunctioned. Now, they were running out of time. The island's curse turned anyone caught after midnight into living skeletons—not the fun, dancing kind. The screaming-for-all-eternity kind.
They crept toward the moonlit cove. The Skeleton King sat on a throne of coral, his skull polished white, eye sockets burning with green flame. He clutched a staff topped with a glowing hourglass. The sand was almost gone.
"Insane is staying here!" Frankie zapped the staff with a bolt of electricity. The hourglass shattered—then reformed upside down. Sand flowed upward.
"That's insane," Draculaura squeaked.
And somewhere in the deep, the hourglass began to drip—slowly, patiently—waiting for someone to read the fine print on their next vacation brochure.
Back on the Ghostly Galleon , their rented boat, Cleo inspected a grain of sand stuck to her bandages. "Next time," she announced, "we're going to the Mall ."
"Of course it is," Clawdeen muttered.
Behind them, the skeletal crew of Captain Deadman's Revenge rattled closer, their bones clicking like castanets. Clawdeen Wolf dragged Draculaura behind a pile of cursed crates. "This was supposed to be a beach vacation," Clawdeen growled.
The fog over Skeleton Island was thick as cobwebs, and twice as creepy. Lagoona Blue squinted through the mist, her fins twitching. "I can't believe Heath burned the only map," she whispered.
"Fresh blood," the King rasped. "You'll make fine additions to my court."
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