Glamora tapped her foot on the glass floor to the beat of the music. “You’re losing the beat, Amy.”
Nox leaned in and dropped his voice to whisper words that I hadn’t heard since I stepped into Oz.
“Am I right, Salvation Amy?”
The room spun. I wasn’t sure if I was dizzy from him or from my anger. I dropped his hand.
He reached for me—but his hand missed me completely and grabbed the air next to me.
I was standing in a new spot. Across the room from where I started.
“What the hell? How did I . . . ?”
Had I—? Was it possible—? Had I moved myself across the room?
Don’t you see? You did it. I heard Gert’s voice. She appeared in the center of the room. She’d been here all along. I felt hot. More specifically, my hands felt hot from casting the spell.
She had done this on purpose, made Glamora and Nox bring me to this room and beat at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. Like dipping me under the spring, she did what she thought she needed to do. But this time she’d gone too far.
The room spun again. My hands got hotter—light seemed to shoot from them. Not the gentle glow I’d seen from Gert. A searing red glow. Like darts of fire.
The fire darts seemed to be seeking Nox. But Nox lit up with a weird blue light of his own and the darts seemed to deflect off him. More darts came off my hands even though I wasn’t actually directing them. They shot straight up into the air and showered down like firecrackers.
I was angry. Too angry. No-turning-back angry.
I wanted to run away from him, from Gert, from all of them, but I couldn’t move. Nox made a beeline toward me and grabbed my glowing hands with his own. In a blink we were standing outside the caves on the same spot he’d taken me the first day of training—the peak of the mountain, this time looking out into a deep black sky dotted with strange constellations where the familiar ones should have been.
These stars were different from any stars back home. For one thing, they were brighter. For another thing, where the constellations I was used to never seemed to match the images they were supposed to resemble, these formed themselves into clear pictures the longer you gazed at them. There was a horseshoe and a bear and a tiger and a dragon, all as clear as pictures in a book.
“Gert thought home was stopping you from doing magic. We had to push. We had to know.” He pointed into the distance. “Look. That one’s always been my favorite.” As he pointed, a group of bright-white pinpricks rearranged themselves into the image of a bicycle. As I looked at it, a memory came back to me: my mother teaching me to ride a bike when I was five, before we’d moved to Dusty Acres.
It was the first time I’d ever tried it without the training wheels, and Mom had promised to hold on so I didn’t fall. But at some point, as I’d raced down the hill, the wind in my hair, I’d let out a whoop of triumph. I was doing it. It was only at that moment that I’d realized Mom had let go. I was on my own.
That was when I went crashing to the curb. When I crawled back to my feet, my knee scraped and bloody, my bike in a tangled heap on the ground, I’d looked up the hill to see my mom standing at the top, clapping for me.
I had been pushing back thoughts of Mom on a regular basis now. All Gert’s talk of forgiveness had planted a seed that I did not want to let grow. I’d told myself that all I’d been thinking about was where my fist was going next. About trying to light a candle just by thinking about it and remembering all the stuff in all the books Glamora had given me.
But it wasn’t true. She was still there no matter how much I didn’t want her to be. And now, standing on the top of the mountain with Nox, all I could think about was my mother.
I was an idiot. For a few minutes I had been thinking about prom and dancing with Nox and how he maybe didn’t hate it—and he was just following witchy orders.
And somehow that almost made me more angry.
“It matters how you do this,” I said through clenched teeth, staring him down. “What you do to get there. You can’t just kill someone. The ends do not make it okay.”
His eyes shifted away from mine and then back again. I saw something pass over his face. Guilt. Regret. No, it was maybe something else—like curiosity or realization—like he was happening upon completely new information.
Like it had never occurred to him that I would be hurt or mad or anything like that. Like being able to do magic trumped everything.
“We’re the only ones willing to take her down. The only ones capable. It’s us or nothing. We’re doing one bad thing for the good of Oz.”
“Do you ever not speak the witch party line—do you ever make a decision that is all your own?”
His eyes flicked away from mine.
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Do you ever ask any? You know absolutely everything there is to know about me and I don’t know anything about any of you. Not really.”
The cockiness from the dance floor was gone. He slipped out of it so easily it was a surprise.
“Do you really want to know who I am?” he asked.
I should have said no and backed away from him. But even though I was mad at him, I still wanted to crack him open and see what was inside. I nodded.
“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 wat
er 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. . . .”
Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise Page 15