Dorothy Must Die (15 page)

“I’m not Nox.”

“What?”

“Nox is just the name Mombi gave me. I don’t remember my real name. I remember my parents. Their faces. The way they smelled and sounded. I remember the day that they were taken from me. But my name washed away with them. And there’s no one alive who remembers it.”

“Nox . . .”

“It was in the beginning. When Glinda and Dorothy were just starting to mine everything and everywhere. Glinda hadn’t figured it out yet. She wasn’t using the Munchkins. She was just using her own magic to mine magic. She blasted a hole in the center of the town and boom. She hit the water table. Everything flooded. We climbed up to the roof. There was this old weather vane up there that was so rusty it didn’t even move when the wind blew. I remember my mother told me to hold on to it no matter what. And I did. But my mom didn’t. Or couldn’t. I wanted to let go, too, but I held on like she told me to. When the water went down, no one in the village was left except me.”

I inhaled sharply.

“Did Mombi find you then?”

“Later, much later I think. I went from town to town. I stole when I had to eat. I slept where I could. Sometimes people were good to me. And sometimes they were horrible. Mombi saved me during one of those horrible times. I stumbled upon the wrong town. The Lion was there. But so was Mombi.”

He glanced up at me, then looked away sharply. He didn’t want my pity.

“What I said back there when we were dancing—I’m sorry I had to do that. I needed to get a reaction from you. You’ve been fighting all along. You raised yourself. I had an army and three witches.”

Something hit me all at once. “What Gert said about magic—how can you use it if you don’t know who you are?”

“I know exactly who I am.”

“But you said . . .”

“I am a fighter. I am a member of the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.”

It occurred to me—maybe Mombi hadn’t rescued him out of the kindess of her heart. Maybe she had done it to make a perfect soldier. If all Nox had was a faded memory of some woman who may have been his mom, all Nox had ever really had was the Order. And all his magic came from there—from the person they made him. He was as pure as the magic that ran through the spring. He was all magic. Hardly a boy at all. He was the knife that he told me he could train me to be.

I wasn’t sure if I pitied him or envied him. Would I trade away the few good memories of my mom to get rid of all the bad ones? I thought the answer was yes, but who would I be without those memories? Who was Amy Gumm without her past?

I was running away from home. Nox was marching toward home. Home was battle for him.

And maybe it was for me, too.

Nox grabbed my hands suddenly. “Magic is just energy that wants to be something different,” he reminded me. “So take what you’re feeling right now and turn it into something different. Turn it into magic.”

I looked at Nox. I wished this moment had been the starting place for today’s lesson. Not what he did on the dance floor. But I pushed that aside and I tried to do what I’d seen him do. Tried to do what I saw Glamora and Mombi and Gert do. Be both in my skin and a part of the magic around it. I felt the energy coursing through my body like warm water. I thought of my mother. I thought of the question Gert had posed:
Who are you?

I focused on my sadness, the sadness I’d felt for my whole life, and I willed it to be something different. To change.

I thought of my mom again in the kitchen of our trailer, telling me what a disappointment I was. The image blotted itself out, becoming a fiery red light.

And then it happened. It was snowing. White, glistening flakes were falling all around me, around me and Nox. He looked at me with an expression that was somewhere between pride and awe.

“See?” he said quietly.

I stretched my arms out and spun around, laughing. The snow was accumulating.

“No one does this right away, not even me,” Nox said quietly. “You have power.”

I reached out my hand and let some flakes fall into it. It didn’t melt. It wasn’t snow, I realized. It was ash.

I looked up at Nox in surprise.

“Your fire burned up the sky,” he explained.

For a second, I was disappointed. Snow would have been so pure and beautiful. But ash made so much more sense with who I was.

“We should get back. Gert’s going to want to talk to you,” he said suddenly.

We walked back inside. I didn’t take his hand this time. I’d rather fall down in the dark.

When I got to Gert’s cave, she was standing in front of the scrying pool again.

“Don’t be too mad at Nox. He did what I asked of him.”

I could feel my anger bubbling up again, but I stayed in one place and my fingers didn’t feel like they were on fire. Yet.

“I’m not even sure if Nox actually knows how messed up this is. But you do. Why did you do this? Why did you tell Nox all that stuff about me? He has no right to know!” I was somehow certain that Gert’s moral compass pointed north, but she was ignoring it for the cause.

“Because we’re running out of time,” she said simply, gazing calmly into my eyes. Every line in her round face was fixed in its sincerity and certainty.

“So that justifies everything? You get to just root around in my head and mess with me because it’s convenient for you?”

Gert shook her head. “I’m sorry, Amy. It’s funny—we actually need your sense of good around here. Things have gotten murky after so many years fighting her. We need someone to remind us that not everything is complicated.”

She was apologetic for the hurt she’d caused me, but not the action. Did that mean that she would do it all over again if she had the chance? If it meant I would agree to take down Dorothy?

“I couldn’t think of any other way. Magic can be triggered by our strongest emotions,” Gert said, turning away from me. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Gert focused on her scrying pond. It was smaller than the one in the war room. Although I was still bristling with frustration over her witchy doublespeak, I moved closer to see what she was doing. Ripples began moving inward toward Gert’s finger as she mumbled words under her breath.

A face began to appear in the water. I narrowed my eyes. A familiar face.

“Mom,” I spat.

There she was. Looking completely the opposite of the angry, pill-popping mess who had stormed away from our trailer. Before the tornado. Before Oz. It all felt like so long ago.

She had a small Band-Aid on her forehead, her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing jeans and a pullover sweater I’d never seen before. She looked nice. She looked clean. But she looked sad, too.

“Is it a trick?” I demanded without looking up. Maybe there was a part of me that couldn’t believe she had changed so much. Maybe there was a part of me that didn’t want to believe she had changed so much without me there to help her.

“It’s not a trick, Amy.”

“I thought there was no way to see the Other Place.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “There are more things that can be done than people think. I can’t let the witches in on
all
of my secrets, now can I?”

I reached out to my mother, feeling hopeful and scared at the same time. The water rippled through my fingers but I couldn’t touch her.

The unfamiliar room she was standing in was small and gray and the furniture was that foam and wood kind that I’d seen in doctors’ offices. Where was she? Was she in a shelter? One of those places they put people who have been displaced by disaster? She was looking under the cushions of the couch, then she moved on to a tiny kitchen area and began rifling through the cabinets.

My gut twisted. I knew what she was doing. She was looking for her stash.

“I don’t need to see anymore,” I said. I’d seen this horror show before. But I couldn’t pull my eyes away. Her face lit up like she’d found what she was looking for. She pulled it out and held it at arm’s length.

It was a sweater. My red one. It was a little too tight and had a tiny hole in the sleeve, but it was my favorite because it was the only thing I owned that was actually designer. It was dirty, covered in what looked like the red clay roads for which Dusty Acres was named. It had probably been tossed from the trailer during the cyclone. She hugged it to her chest.

She wasn’t using. She was just missing me.

I balled my fists in anger. I had spent years trying to clean her up. And the thing that finally made it happen was getting rid of me.

“You can access magic from the good places as well as the bad, you know,” Gert said softly.

I laughed. “Maybe you haven’t looked around in my head enough. There
are
no good places.”

“You
can
decide what kind of magic you practice. Just like you can decide who you are. In the end, it’s really the same thing. But you don’t have to be angry.”

“What if I want to be angry?” I snapped. “Don’t I have a right to be angry?”

Gert just shrugged evenly, but I kept going.

“Look at what I did back there when I was angry. I set the sky on fire and made it snow ash. Being angry
works
. It works a lot better than anything else I’ve tried.”

“But imagine if you didn’t have to start there. Imagine if you got to start somewhere good.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I can imagine a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they’re possible.”

“Anything is possible, dear. Look around you.”

I laughed bitterly. “Oz—where all your worst nightmares can come true.”

“Look at us,” Gert said, ignoring me. “We witches spent our lives fighting each other. Now we live under the same roof. Working together for something greater. It just goes to show . . .”

I tried to imagine becoming besties with Madison Pendleton after years of her torturing me. I shook my head.

But Gert wasn’t talking about Madison Pendleton, not really. She was talking about my mother. I felt like if I forgave her, I was just asking her to hurt me again.

“Why are you pushing this?” I asked. “My mom’s a million miles away. It doesn’t matter.”

“She’s the voice in your head.”

“And you want yours to be in there instead?”

“I want
yours
to be, Amy.”

I refused to look at her, refused to be taken in by those warm, grandmotherly eyes. I knew what was behind them.

I kept staring at the water but when Gert didn’t respond, I looked up to see her fading into white smoke.

Well, clearly she was done with this conversation. I looked back down. The image of my mom was fading away. As it did, the water began to bubble.

Steam began to rise from the roiling, angry water. The pool was boiling, and I knew it wasn’t part of Gert’s spell. I was the one doing it.

Forgiveness can get you places, I guess. But sometimes you need to light a fire.

I sank into my bed that night without bothering to change out of my gown. I’d seen Mom. I’d done magic. It bugged me that even now, my mom was tied to everything I did. Was she seriously still screwing with me from a gazillion miles away? I couldn’t blink away the image of her in the scrying pond, all cleaned up and holding on to my sweater. It made me sad. It made me miss her. But it didn’t magically erase the years of other, grimmer images.

Sleep felt as far away as home.

The next morning, I was almost glad to remember that I had a session with Nox. I needed to punch something. That I would get to punch
Nox
was an added bonus.

On my way to the training room, Gert’s and Glamora’s voices wafted out at me as I passed Glamora’s chambers. Something about their tone—hushed, yet sharp and full of warning, like they were talking about something secret—made me stop just outside to listen in.

“Don’t encourage it, Glamora.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You know
exactly
what I mean. That girl has more cracks in her than the road of yellow brick. Nox will break her in two.”

“Or she’ll break him. Don’t pretend you were never young. She has no real connection to any of us. But she and Nox—there’s something there.”

“We are bound. She is warming to me—”

“That’s not enough. You know that I have my own suspicions about exactly who it was that brought Amy to Oz. There are few people with enough power to summon someone from the Other Place, and if my hunch is correct, we both know that a simple binding won’t be enough to hold the girl to us. But I can think of a stronger glue. . . .”

“She’s starved for it, certainly. But I don’t know if our boy is capable of love. He wasn’t built for it.
We
didn’t build him for it.”

“It’s funny, Gert,” Glamora said. “All that mind reading, and you still can’t see inside the heart. Our boy is starved for it, too. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

I backed away, shaking my head, and rushed down the hall. I did
not
feel that way about Nox. Maybe he wasn’t the total jerk I’d thought he was at first, but that didn’t mean anything. It definitely didn’t mean he felt anything for me.

My pulse was still speeding when I got to the training cave. Seeing him was already going to be different after last night—dancing together, hearing his story for the first time, and feeling the magic that had finally surged through me.

When I walked into the cave, he wasn’t alone. A glint of tin caught the light and blinded me for a second. It was the girls who had interrupted our dinner the other night, covered in blood. They looked fine now—better than fine. Annabel, the tall one with the unicorn scar, was stretching, while Melindra, the half-tin girl, leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, staring at me.

Something about the way Melindra flicked open her metal lashes reminded me of Madison back home. Like she already hated me and we hadn’t even met yet.

“Melindra and Annabel will be joining us today,” Nox explained to me without looking up. “Melindra, Annabel,” Nox said. “This is Amy.”

“We
know
who she is,” Melindra said. “The girl who fell out of the sky in a tin can to save us all.” There was something sarcastic in her voice, but there was something else, too—like she couldn’t decide whether she was supposed to be suspicious of me or if she was hoping everything they said about me was true.

“Nox told me that you escaped the Scarecrow’s labs,” I blurted. I’d been spending too much time with Glamora. One of her helpful hints about meeting new people was to tell them something you know about them. But for some reason I don’t think she meant bringing up that horrific time the person was tortured by a mad scientist Scarecrow.

But Melindra suppressed a smile, and I could see that it wasn’t such a mistake at all. She was proud—proud of who she was and of what she had been through.

“They wanted to make me join the Tin Man’s secret police,” Melindra said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I got out of there and came here. No one’s ever done that before.”

I was impressed. I’d needed Mombi’s help to escape, but this girl had done it on her own. I wanted to ask her how but now didn’t seem like the best time.

“We need to see if Melindra and Annabel are ready to go back out there,” Nox said.

“We’re ready,” Annabel volunteered, without looking to Melindra to back her up. I couldn’t believe it—they’d been torn apart by the Lion, but there was still no question of not going back.

“Okay, then show us what you’ve got. Amy can spar with the winner,” Nox said. He still hadn’t looked at me, and now he turned around to busy himself with the equipment.

“Don’t even,” Annabel warned, watching my gaze follow Nox.

“Don’t what?” I asked.

The girls both giggled. It was weird to see the flesh-and-blood side of Melindra’s face contort in laughter while the metal side stayed stiff and emotionless.

“What?” I asked again.

“We’ve seen that look before,” Annabel said. “Trust me, it’s not worth it. Nox only cares about the cause. There’s no room inside him for anything else. Not that plenty of people haven’t tried.” She shot Melindra a knowing glance.

“I’m not . . . ,” I started, but I could feel myself blushing. “I don’t . . .”

I stopped myself.

Nox returned, handing a knife to Annabel, who thanked him with a flirty smirk. Nox ignored it. Or maybe he just didn’t notice it in the first place. Melindra shook her head at the knife and instead offered up a clenched fist. As she lifted it to her chest, a thin, glittering blade folded out from the top of her wrist as easily as a bird would stretch its wings. She looked out at me from behind it with a smirk.

Great
, I thought. Melindra was a human Swiss Army knife, like Sword-Arm back in the palace. At least this one was on my side. She
was
on my side, right?

I leaned against the wall and watched the girls spar. I felt myself shrinking, in danger of disappearing again. I didn’t want to have to fight either of them. They’d both been at this way longer than I had. Plus, they seemed to hate me.

Why though? And what was Annabel trying to say about Nox? Was he playing me? Had every moment between us been planned to make me a better fighter?

I heard Annabel scream and I looked up just in time to see Melindra’s blade slashing across her chest, a bright-red streak of blood blossoming on her shirt. And then, just like that, she disappeared in defeat. Off to the spring, I guess.

Melindra didn’t drop her fighting stance. Nox looked over at me.

“Your turn, Amy. Keep your elbows up. You’ve been dropping them. And Mel, you’re a half step behind where you usually are. Focus.”

A few seconds later, it was me standing opposite Melindra, a knife from Nox in my hand. Although I had trained plenty of times with him before now, I was nervous to be facing someone new.

I didn’t have time to be nervous: the fight had begun.

Melindra was so light and fast on her tin feet that sometimes her metal and flesh seemed to blur together as she danced around me, landing jabs in my sides and chest.

It was clear that she was using magic, too. I tried to summon the power I’d found the night before with Nox. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t allowed to set my opponent on fire, but other than misdirection, that was basically the only magic I knew how to do. Not that it was working now—I felt my hands go hot a few times, but no flame appeared.

I dodged a blow from Melindra and something made contact with my shin—her metal meeting my bone. I made a desperate, errant swing and a miss at her flesh side before her other leg sideswiped mine, taking me down to the ground in an ungraceful heap.

“What do you think, Nox?” Melindra put a hand on her hip triumphantly. “Still too slow? Am I ready now?”

She reached out her hand to help me up. I ignored it and leapt to my feet.

We went at it again. This time, Melindra moved even faster than before, slashing and diving and feinting around me as I stumbled forward like my feet were made of cement, struggling just to keep my balance and avoid her blade as it whipped through the air in every direction.

“Look at you,” she said, not pausing in her attack. She swung her leg toward me in a powerful kick and I barely managed to get out of the way in time. “All this training and you’re fighting like it’s your first day. Am I making you nervous? Or is it someone else?”

I lunged for her, urging the fire to my hands, but it didn’t come. Melindra disappeared just as I was about to grab her, and I whirled and ducked just in time to avoid getting a haircut—or worse—as her sword grazed the top of my head.

“Oh, did I make you mad?” she asked.

She jumped up and seemed to hang in midair for a split second as she pulled her knees to her chest before whipping them out like a jackknife and shifting her momentum, flying straight for me.

Her feet collided hard against my breastbone, and before I knew what was happening I was on my back on the stone floor again, the wind knocked out of me. I watched with dazed double vision as she turned a graceful backflip and landed like it was nothing. Melindra whipped out her arm and pushed the tip of her blade into my throat, looking down on me with contempt.

“Poor little Amy,” she said. “All of Oz is depending on you and you can’t even take out a sorry half girl like me.”

She was pressing hard enough to hurt without actually breaking the skin. But the message was clear.
I could kill you if I wanted to, but for now I’ll be nice.

“Shut up,” I wheezed through clenched teeth, still struggling to breathe.

“Not the best way to impress boys,” she said, shifting her eyes sneakily toward Nox. “Especially a boy who cares more about the cause than anything else.”

“Shut up!” I spat again, feeling my face go red with anger.

“They all think you’re so special. I don’t know why. You can’t even do a simple spell. Go ahead. Try.” She pressed her blade harder. My face burned; my fingers tingled with heat.

Nox finally stepped in.

“Melindra,” he said, grabbing her by the arm. “That’s enough. Let her go. She’s doing her best.” From the disappointed way he was looking back and forth from her to me, I felt like I had let him down twice. First by letting her beat me, and then by not fighting back once she had me pinned.

Melindra rolled her eyes and snorted contemptuously, but she pulled her weapon away. “Don’t give her false hope, Nox,” she said. “You know as well as I do that you’re too good for her.”

She looked back at me. “Not so talented after all, are you? Just another outlander who thinks she’s special. We get used to that around here, you know.”

I’d had enough. Enough of being picked on. Enough of other people telling me what to do. Enough of feeling powerless.

“Shut up!” I screamed, my words reverberating through the stone chamber.

The burning feeling that had been building in my body rushed through me at once, and I lit up: I was on fire. The flames came shooting out of my chest in huge, curling tongues that all rolled together into one giant ball of fire that exploded out of me, rocketing straight for Melindra.

She stepped aside casually and the fireball shot right past her, hitting the wall of the cave with a pathetic fizzle. Nox’s mouth dropped open in surprise, but Melindra was unfazed. “That’s really the best you can do?” she asked with a sneer. I pushed past both of them without a word.

When I showed up in Gert’s cave she looked at me. “You burned your pretty hair,” she said, sounding completely unsurprised.

“Teach me,” I said. “I’m ready. I want to learn.”

“Get some rest,” she said. “Meet me in the training room tomorrow. You’ll learn.”

When I walked into the training room the next morning, it was empty except for a single stalk of corn growing in the center of the room.

“You ready for this?” Nox asked, appearing at my side without warning.

I glared at him. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Gert asked me to help,” he said without looking at me, and, as if she’d been summoned by her own name, Gert materialized out of nowhere. She drew her hand up in front of her and whispered something, and tiny green shoots began to spring up through the stone floor, quickly unfurling themselves into stalks taller than I was. Taller than Nox. Soon there were hundreds of them, and the cave seemed to magically expand to make room for an entire cornfield that had grown all around me.

I looked up to find that the ceiling had been replaced by a cold and artificial blue sky. When I glanced back at Nox, he was already disappearing into the green.

“Find him,” Gert commanded.

I lurched ahead, ready to chase after him.

Gert’s invisible hand stopped me. “Not like that. Pay attention. I like to say a few words when I cast a spell. It helps me focus. And it will also help you as you’re learning.” She wove her hands together and whispered an incantation: “What I seek, I shall find, what I see, will be mine.”

A white orb formed between her hands and rose like a flare, pausing in midair. Waiting for someone to follow after it.

I took a step forward.

Gert gave me a look of consternation. “No,” she said. “Make your own.”

“What if I set the whole place on fire by accident?”

She shook her head. She was frustrated with me, I could tell, but in her frustration—in her squinted, lined eyes and pursed lips—I could see something else, too. Something I didn’t see very often. She wasn’t just doing this because she wanted me to be able to help the Order. She wanted to teach me because she was worried about me.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’ll be helping you. But you
can
do it on your own. You’re almost there already. Just imagine what you want to happen. And then concentrate on that, and only on that. The magic is everywhere. It’s waiting for you to take it and make it your own.”

I closed my eyes, and my brain went right back to yesterday, when Melindra had me pinned to the ground.

“No, no, no,” Gert said, clucking her tongue. “Not that. Pick a moment not so filled with emotion this time. Try not to let the anger fuel you anymore. It’s too unreliable. Too uncontrollable. Pick an innocent moment where you aren’t setting the world on fire.”

I remembered my first training session with Nox, him leaning into me, his hand on my shoulder.

“Yes, there you go.”

I imagined reaching out for him with my mind, searching for him.

Something was happening. I could feel the tingle of energy rippling through me, seeping out through my pores. I pushed at it, shaping it, trying to make it into what I wanted.

In my mind’s eye, Nox turned from me and began to walk away. He grew smaller and smaller, and then he looked over his shoulder and beckoned for me.

I opened my eyes.

An orange ball of fiery energy, no bigger than a fist, was spinning in the air in front of me. I had done it.

Nox,
I thought.
Where are you?

At that, the flare jittered and shot ahead, into the corn. I followed it as it twisted and turned through rows and rows of stalks, not dropping my singular focus on finding him. It only took a few minutes before I found him sitting on the ground, looking bored.

His eyes lit up in pleased surprise when he saw me.