Dorothy emerged from her trance.
“Traitor,” she said. She flung a hand out, and, like she was pulling a marionnette string, Pete flew away from the Wizard. She wanted the Wizard to herself, and now, as she approached him, his face went white. “I should have done this long ago,” she said. “Now, let’s hear you scream.”
She clapped her hands together, and the Wizard did scream. His body began to ripple and twitch as Dorothy’s spell moved through it, and then it was like something was eating him from the inside. “No!” he yelled. “Help me! Amy, help!”
But there was nothing I could do. The spell was quick. In an explosion of blood, guts, and glitter, the Wizard was no more.
The sky opened up. And Kansas rained down on us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Have you ever looked at the American state of Kansas on a map?
The answer, at least for me, was, of course, yes. Obviously. In fourth grade, we’d spent at least a month of social studies on what Mrs. Hooper called our “Kansas Unit.” During which, we’d had to memorize the Kansas state flower (the wild sunflower), the state bird (the western meadowlark), the state song (“Home on the Range”—that one was easy), and stupid trivia like where the name Kansas was derived from. (Either Native Americans or French people, or both; I forget).
In addition to memorizing all that trivia, each one of us had to give an oral report on a famous Kansan in history.
Until now, I had completely forgotten it, but in this moment the memory came back to me fully formed.
I had wanted to do my famous Kansan report on Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’d had my heart set on it, in fact. But Madison Pendleton had gotten to school early and had called dibs on it before anyone else could even get a chance.
Then, when I’d asked Mrs. Hooper if I could do Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island instead, Mrs. Hooper had told me it wasn’t allowed, because Mary Ann Summers isn’t a real person.
Dorothy Gale from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz isn’t a real person either, I’d said.
But Mrs. Hooper loved Madison Pendleton. She loved her so much that she would sometimes let her sit next to her at lunch so that they could brush each other’s hair.
Mrs. Hooper hated me. “Dorothy isn’t real, but she’s important. She’s one of our most famous Kansans,” she said. “Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island is not important. In fact, Amy, I always thought Mary Ann was from Oklahoma. Are you sure you’re not thinking of the Howells?”
I knew it wasn’t worth arguing, so I asked if I could do Amelia Earhart. If you thought about it, she seemed, at the time at least, to be a little bit like Dorothy, except real. But Mrs. Hooper gave that one to Candy Sinclair, her second favorite fourth grader after Madison Pendleton, and finally assigned me Bob Dole just to be mean.
Kansas had never been particularly kind to me.
And now I was back there. I was back home— if you could still call it that—and I had been brought there the way I’d left it: through a tornado.
The only thing is, it didn’t feel much like Kansas anymore.
And I wasn’t alone.
The two of us stood there, together: me and Dorothy, right where we had both started. In Kansas. In the Dusty Acres trailer park, to be exact. Not that there was much left of it: I guess when the tornado had taken me to Oz, it had made quick work of this place. Now it was just an empty expanse of gray dust, with a sign: Dusty Acres, it read. If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.
The only other thing that remained of the place I’d once lived was the concrete barbecue that no one ever used except for on the Fourth of July. Only now, it was blazing with fire, and a single dark figure was hunched over it. The figure was both clear and indistinct at the same time—solid, but blurry at the edges. Then the figure broke apart, and I saw that it wasn’t one but three: from out of the darkness, a trio of women emerged, each of them wearing a heavy cloak in a different color: red, gold, and blue. Another cloak, a purple one, was lying in the dirt next to them, without an owner.
Witches. I recognized the one in red. It was Glamora.
In the distance, I thought I heard another voice calling my name—a voice that seemed familiar, but that I couldn’t quite place. It was a boy. A man. It was someone important, someone who mattered to me, but I couldn’t remember why.
“Rise, little witch,” Glamora said. “Take your place among us.”
I stepped forward.
CREDITS
COVER ART AND DESIGN © 2015 BY RAY SHAPPELL
HAND LETTERING BY ERIN FITZSIMMONS
COPYRIGHT
THE WICKED WILL RISE. Copyright © 2015 by Full Fathom Five, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
ISBN 978-0-06-228070-1 (trade bdg.)
ISBN 978-0-06-240613-2 (special ed.)
ISBN 978-0-06-238221-4 (int. ed.)
EPub Edition © February 2015 ISBN 9780062280725
Hand lettering by Erin Fitzsimmons
15 16 17 18 19 PC/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
Dedication
Thanks to Angela and Darren Croucher for all their help
Contents
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Copyright
One
They say you can’t go home again. I’m not entirely sure who said that, but it’s something they say. I know it because my aunt Em has it embroidered on a throw pillow in the sitting room.
You can’t go home again. Well, even if they put it on a pillow, whoever said it was wrong. I’m proof alone that it’s not true.
Because, you see, I left home. And I came back. Lickety-split, knock your heels together, and there you are. Oh, it wasn’t quite so simple, of course, but look at me now: I’m still here, same as before, and it’s just as if I was never gone in the first place.
So every time I see that little pillow on Aunt Em’s good sofa, with its pretty pink piping around the edges and colorful bouquets of daisies and wildflowers stitched alongside those cheerful words (but are they even cheerful? I sometimes wonder), I’m halfway tempted to laugh. When I consider everything that’s happened! A certain sort of person might say that it’s ironic.
Not that I’m that sort of person. This is Kansas, and we Kansans don’t put much truck in anything as foolish as irony.
Things we do put truck in:
Hard work.
Practicality.
Gumption.
Crop yields and healthy livestock and mild winters. Things you can touch and feel and see with your own two eyes. Things that do you at least two licks of good.
Because this is the prairie, and the prairie is no place for daydreaming. All that matters out here is what gets you through the winter. A Kansas winter will grind a dreamer right up and feed it to the pigs.
As my uncle Henry always says: You can’t trade a boatload of wishes for a bucket of slop. (Maybe I should embroider that on a pillow for Aunt Em, too. I wonder if it would make her laugh.)
I don’t know about wishes, but a bucket of slop was exactly what I had in my hand on the afterno
on of my sixteenth birthday, a day in September with a chill already in the air, as I made my way across the field, away from the shed and the farmhouse toward the pigpen.
It was feeding time, and the pigs knew it. Even from fifty feet away, I could already hear them—Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha—squealing and snorting in anticipation of their next meal.
“Well, really!” I said to myself. “Who in the world could get so excited about a bit of slop!?”
As I said it, my old friend Miss Millicent poked her little red face out from a gap of wire in the chicken coop and squawked in greeting. “And hello to you, too, Miss Millicent,” I said cheerily. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be getting your own food soon enough.”
But Miss Millicent was looking for companionship, not food, and she squeezed herself out of her coop and began to follow on my heels as I kept on my way. I had been ignoring her lately, and the old red hen was starting to be cross about it, a feeling she expressed today by squawking loudly and shadowing my every step, fluttering her wings and fussing underfoot.
She meant well enough, surely, but when I felt her hard beak nipping at my ankle, I finally snapped at her. “Miss Millie! You get out of here. I have chores to do! We’ll have a nice, long heart-to-heart later, I promise.”
The chicken clucked reproachfully and darted ahead, stopping in her tracks just in the spot where I was about to set my foot down. It was like she wanted me to know that I couldn’t get away from her that easily—that I was going to pay her some mind whether I liked it or not.
Sometimes that chicken could be impossible. And without even really meaning to, I kicked at her. “Shoo!”
Miss Millie jumped aside just before my foot connected, and I felt myself lose my balance as I missed her, stumbling backward with a yelp and landing on my rear end in the grass.
I looked down at myself in horror and saw my dress covered in pig slop. My knee was scraped, I had dirt all over my hands, and my slop bucket was upturned at my side.
“Millie!” I screeched. “See what you’ve done? You’ve ruined everything!” I swatted at her again, this time even more angrily than when I’d kicked her, but she just stepped nimbly aside and stood there, looking at me like she just didn’t know what to do with me anymore.
“Oh dear,” I said, sighing. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. Come here, you silly hen.”
Millie bobbled her head up and down like she was considering the proposition before she hopped right into my lap, where she burrowed in and clucked softly as I ruffled her feathers. This was all she had wanted in the first place. To be my friend.
It used to be that it was all I wanted, too. It used to be that Miss Millicent and even Jeannie the pig were some of my favorite people in the world. Back then, I didn’t care a bit that a pig and a chicken hardly qualified as people at all.
They were there for me when I was sad, or when something was funny, or when I just needed company, and that was what mattered. Even though Millie couldn’t talk, it always felt like she understood everything I said. Sometimes it even almost seemed like she was talking to me, giving me her sensible, no-nonsense advice in a raspy cackle. “Don’t you worry, dearie,” she’d say. “There’s no problem in this whole world that can’t be fixed with a little spit and elbow grease.”
But lately, things hadn’t been quite the same between me and my chicken. Lately, I had found myself becoming more impatient with her infuriating cackling, with the way she was always pecking and worrying after me.
“I’m sorry, Miss Millicent,” I said. “I know I haven’t been myself lately. I promise I’ll be back to normal soon.”
She fluffed her wings and puffed her chest out, and I looked around: at the dusty, gray-green fields merging on the horizon with the almost-matching gray-blue sky, and all of it stretching out so far into nothing that it seemed like it would be possible to travel and travel and travel—just set off in a straight line heading east or west, north or south, it didn’t matter—and never get anywhere at all.
“Sometimes I wonder if this is what the rest of life’s going to be like,” I said. “Gray fields and gray skies and buckets of slop. The world’s a big place, Miss Millicent—just look at that sky. So why does it feel so small from where we’re sitting? I’ll tell you one thing. If I ever get the chance to go somewhere else again, I’m going to stay there.”
I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I knew how I sounded.
“Get yourself together and stop moping, Little Miss Fancy,” I responded to myself, now in my raspy, stern, Miss Millicent voice, imagining that the words were coming out of her mouth instead of my own. “A prairie girl doesn’t worry her pretty little head about places she’ll never go and things she’ll never see. A prairie girl worries about the here and now.”
This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.
I sighed and shrugged anyway. Miss Millie didn’t know there was anything else out there. She just knew her coop, her feed, and me.
These days, I envied her for that. Because I was a girl, not a chicken, and I knew what was out there.
Past the prairie, where I sat with my old chicken in my lap, there were oceans and more oceans. Beyond those were deserts and pyramids and jungles and mountains and glittering palaces. I had heard about all those places and all those things from newsreels and newspapers.
And even if I was the only one who knew it, I’d seen with my own eyes that there were more directions to move in than just north and south and east and west, places more incredible than Paris and Los Angeles, more exotic than Kathmandu and Shanghai, even. There were whole worlds out there that weren’t on any map, and things that you would never believe.
I didn’t need to believe. I knew. I just sometimes wished I didn’t.
I thought of Jeannie and Ezekiel and Bertha, all of them in their pen beside themselves in excitement for the same slop they’d had yesterday and would have again tomorrow. The slop I’d have to refill into the bucket and haul back out to them.
“It must be nice not to know any better,” I said to Miss Millicent.
In the end, a chicken is a good thing to hold in your lap for a few minutes. It’s a good thing to pretend to talk to when there’s no one else around. But in the end, if you want the honest-to-goodness truth, it’s possible that a chicken doesn’t make the greatest friend.
Setting Miss Millicent aside, I dusted myself off and headed back toward the farmhouse to clean myself up, change my dress, and get myself ready for my big party. Bertha and Jeannie and Ezekiel would have to wait until tomorrow for their slop.
It wasn’t like me to let them go hungry. At least, it wasn’t like the old me.
But the old me was getting older by the second. It had been two years since the tornado. Two years since I’d gone away. Since I had met Glinda the Good Witch, and the Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. Since I had traveled the Road of Yellow Brick and defeated the Wicked Witch of the West. In Oz, I had been a hero. I could have stayed. But I hadn’t. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry were in Kansas. Home was in Kansas. It had been my decision and mine alone.
Well, I had made my choice, and like any good Kansas girl, I would live with it. I would pick up my chin, put on a smile, and be on my way.
The animals could just go hungry for now. It was my birthday, after all.
Two
“Happy Swoot Sixtoon,” the cake said, the letters spelled out in smudged icing. I beamed up at my aunt Em with my brightest smile.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I’d already changed into my party dress—which wasn’t that much different from the dress I’d just gotten all dirty in the field—and had cleaned myself up as best as I could, scrubbing the dirt from my hands and the blood from my knee until you could hardly tell I’d fallen.
Uncle Henry hovered off to the side, looking as proud and hopeful as if he’d baked it himself. He’d certainly helped, gathering the ingredients from around the farm: coaxing the eggs from Miss Millice
nt (who never seemed in the mood to lay any), milking the cow, and making sure Aunt Em had everything she needed.
“Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t marry a master chef!” Henry said, putting his arm around her waist.
Even Toto was excited. He was hopping around on the floor yipping at us eagerly.
“You really like it?” Aunt Em asked, a note of doubt in her voice. “I know the writing isn’t perfect, but penmanship has never been my strong suit.”
“It’s wonderful!” I exclaimed, pushing down the tiny feeling of disappointment that was bubbling in my chest. A little white lie never hurt anyone, and I didn’t doubt the cake would be delicious. Aunt Em’s food might not usually come out looking fancy, but it always tastes better than anything else.
Oh, I know that it’s how a cake tastes that matters. I know there’s no point in concerning yourself with what it looks like on the outside when you’ll be eating it in just a few minutes.
But as it sat lopsided on the table with its brown icing and the words “Happy Sweet Sixteen” written out so the e’s looked more like blobby o’s, I found myself wishing for something more.
I just couldn’t let Aunt Em know that. I couldn’t let her have even the smallest hint that anything was wrong. So I wrapped her up in a hug to let her know that it didn’t matter: that even if the cake wasn’t perfect, it was good enough for me. But then something else occurred to me.
“Are you sure it’s big enough?” I asked. “A lot of people are coming.” I had invited everyone from school, not that that was so many people, and everyone from all the neighboring farms, plus the store owners at every shop I’d been to on my last trip into town. I’d invited my best friend, Mitzi Blair, and even awful Suzanna Hellman and her best friend, Marian Stiles, not to mention a reporter from the Carrier who had taken a special interest in my life since the tornado. Plus, Suzanna would be dragging her horrible little sister, Jill, along.
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 57