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

by Danielle Paige

  His body was aching, and he was ready for a rest. He unrolled the blanket, stretched out on the ground, and was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the earth. But his dreams were awful: the monkeys battled each other savagely with their miniature swords, hacking at one another until the ground ran red with their blood, screaming in rage and pain—and then he jerked awake and realized the screams were real, and they were coming from somewhere ahead of him in the forest. His heart pounded in his chest. The screams were alarmingly near, and somehow familiar. Someone was in desperate trouble.

  “Pete!” Hex shouted. “Help! Pete!” His voice barely carried past the clearing, and there was no response. The screams wavered for a second, and then continued even more awfully. He saw that there were now two paths leading out of the clearing—one toward the source of the noise, and the other away. He groaned aloud. Was this a test, or a trap? Either way, not very subtle.

  Abruptly, the screams cut off with an awful gurgling sound. He stood poised in the clearing, listening intently. Perhaps it was too late. Whatever was happening out there, it was over. There was nothing he could do. Far better to protect his own skin; after all, he could hardly recover his memories if he was dead. And then, through the trees, he heard a faint, pleading—and familiar—wail. “Somebody please help me!” The voice sobbed. There was no mistaking it for anyone but Iris.

  He stood a second longer, wavering with indecision. He was a bad person. Pete had told him as much. And bad people put themselves first—and came out ahead. No one could possibly fault him for wanting to protect himself. It wasn’t his problem. He thought of the pain and reproach in Iris’s face as he’d betrayed her in front of the queen, and sighed. So far, he’d done nothing but prove Pete right: that he was nothing more than a con man and a coward.

  But the feeling of persistent shame kept nagging at him, and he suddenly found himself wanting to do better. Even if it meant putting himself in danger. Even if he was risking his life for a cranky, spear-happy monkey with a persecution complex. He might not go down in the annals of history for trying to rescue Iris from whatever terrible thing was happening to her, but a more noble quest had yet to present itself. Maybe he had been a terrible person in the past, but being a terrible person in the present wasn’t turning out to be very much fun. He took a deep breath, wishing Pete had thought to pack him a weapon of some kind, and took off running on the path that led to Iris.

  He didn’t have to go far before he found her. She was in another clearing like the one he’d left, so covered in blood she was almost unrecognizable. She cowered in a heap at the far edge of the clearing; opposite her, a huge, awful lion, spattered with her blood, lounged against a tree picking his teeth with one giant claw. The lion’s mane was filthy and matted, and his huge muscles bulged grotesquely. Iris was sobbing, which at least meant she was still alive. The lion looked up as Hex entered the clearing. He grinned savagely, exposing his terrible, jagged fangs.

  “Two for the price of one,” he growled. “It’s my lucky day: dinner buffet special.”

  “Leave her alone!” Hex said faintly, and the lion laughed.

  “I don’t think so, little man,” he said, sneering. “I’m hungry. And when the Lion is hungry, the Lion gets his meal . . . or else.” The Lion? Something about the horrible animal sparked at Hex’s memory as fear flooded through him. The Lion’s voice had a terrible power; across the clearing, Iris whimpered, even though the Lion hadn’t been speaking to her. Hex’s chest flooded with a sick, nameless dread. It was as if the Lion was fear itself, formed into the body of a terrible, powerful creature. “That’s right,” the Lion sneered, gloating. “Now you understand why I rule the forests of Oz. No one can withstand their fear of me. And now, little man, I’ll feed on your terror—and then I’ll feed on you.”

  The Lion rose to his feet, lashing his long, sinuous tail like a whip as he advanced toward Hex. His tail. Something about his tail. And then a whole memory came back to Hex, sudden as a tidal wave: a different Lion, a real one, cowering before him, begging for the gift of courage. “Only you can help me,” it cried, its golden fur gleaming in the warm Oz sun. “Please, Wizard! If only I had the courage of a real lion, I could stop being ashamed of myself—I could be free.” So Hex had been a wizard, then—but what kind? Had he somehow created this awful monster out of an ordinary beast? Would he have done something like that? Once, long ago, the Lion had wanted to be braver—but this perversion wasn’t just a creature filled with ordinary courage. Pete had said Oz was changing, its very magic twisted. Was the Lion a part of that? Was this transformation somehow Hex’s fault—or was he a victim of it, too?

  He’d deliberated too long, and the Lion had crossed the clearing and was standing in front of him, leering at him. Up close, the Lion’s breath smelled like a slaughterhouse crossed with a sewer.

  “Don’t they teach you to brush your teeth in this crazy country?” Hex said, and suddenly he found that his fear had fallen away from him. He remembered: not everything, and not enough, but he knew this terrifying creature had once been something else. Something desperate and even more cowardly than he was. Something ordinary and cowering and meek. And without fear, the Lion had no power over him.

  The Lion halted in mid-pounce, rearing back so quickly that he almost fell over backward. “You fool,” he snarled, a menacing growl so deep it almost seemed to come from the very earth itself. “Do you really think you can challenge me and win?”

  Hex wasn’t swayed. “Be strong,” he called to Iris. “I’ll be there to help you as soon as I can.”

  “Oh-ho!” the Lion chortled, leaping away from Hex and toward Iris. “Have I found your weakness, human? It’s all well and good for you to think I can’t hurt you, but your monkey friend here is a different story.” The Lion stood over Iris, one enormous paw upraised, as though he meant to disembowel her.

  “Leave her alone,” Hex hissed, and the Lion laughed, bringing his paw down with all his might—and stopping just short of a killing blow, cuffing Iris roughly on the side of the head.

  “No,” the Lion said, “I don’t think I will. But the longer she suffers, the more I get to enjoy watching you squirm. I don’t know who you are, but I don’t like you.” He nipped lightly at Iris’s arm, tearing away a piece of flesh. Iris howled in pain and fear.

  Hex suddenly found that he was furious. Furious with Pete, for telling him nothing and leaving him here to battle this awful creature; furious with Iris, for getting herself into such an awful predicament and—worse—making him care about her; and above all else, furious with this disgusting, brutal lion, sneering and tormenting someone so small and helpless. Anger flooded through Hex’s body, and with it something else—a force that seemed to come from the very earth itself. Something strange and powerful rushed through his body, but instead of feeling swept away he realized he was in total control. “ENOUGH,” Hex said, and he could see his voice traveling across the clearing in a roiling wave of dark energy that surged toward the Lion and knocked him to his knees. The Lion roared in anger, springing to his feet again, but Hex held up one hand and pushed against the wall of power, and the Lion flew away from Iris and crashed into a tree.

  “I made you what you are, animal,” Hex said, and his voice was as strong and fierce as a thunderstorm. “To me, you are still nothing but a coward. Begone from this place.” He raised his hand again and the Lion rose into the air; with a flick of his fingers, he summoned more power and sent the Lion cartwheeling through space, head over tail, before slamming him into the ground again. The Lion moaned feebly, his own eyes wide with fear. “Now you know how it feels,” Hex said. “Think twice, before you inflict pain on the innocent. And get out of here, before I regret sparing you.” The Lion grabbed his greasy, lashing tail, staring at it in bewilderment, before he shot Hex a look of pure hatred and bounded away through the trees. All the power rushed out of Hex in a flood and he stumbled, almost falling to his knees. Iris was struggling to prop herself up on her elbows. “No!�
�� he said, scrambling over to her. “You must rest. You’re badly wounded.” Up close, he saw just how much blood she had lost, and his heart sank. Her uniform was so soaked he couldn’t even tell its original color. Her eyes were glazed, and her breathing was fast and shallow.

  “That was a dirty trick you pulled back there in the palace,” she wheezed, staring up at him. “But I think you just saved my life. Does that mean I have to thank you?”

  “No,” he told her. He stripped off his jacket and shirt, tore the shirt into strips, and did his best to bandage the worst of Iris’s wounds. If it had been magic that he had somehow summoned back there battling the Lion, it was gone now. But without it, he didn’t know if he could save the plucky little monkey he’d risked his life for.

  “That hurts,” she said crossly as he tied off a bandage too tightly.

  “Complain to the Lion,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. There was no mistaking it: Iris was close to death. And, he realized, he desperately wanted to save her. The feeling was so alien he didn’t know what to make of it. Another fit of coughing wracked her broken body, and he hushed her gently, cradling her in his arms. She closed her eyes. “Too bad you went to all that trouble,” she coughed. “I was following you, you know. To stab you in the back.”

  “Iris, hush,” he said. “Save your strength. You wouldn’t really have stabbed me anyway.”

  “Probably not,” she conceded, and then her head rolled back and she lost consciousness. Hex lowered her to the ground, frantically feeling for a pulse. There it was, at the side of her throat—faint, and growing fainter. “Iris,” he pleaded. “It’s my fault you’re even here. Please don’t die.” He felt an unfamiliar wetness coursing down his cheeks. Was he bleeding? But his hands came away wet with something clear.

  “Tears,” a voice said behind him, and he whirled around. Pete was looking over his shoulder, staring at Iris with an expression of intense concern.

  “Tears? You leave me like this—leave her like this—and that’s all you can say?”

  “You’re crying,” Pete said curtly. “Now get out of my way if you want her to live.”

  Hex moved aside, and Pete knelt over Iris’s body, holding his hands just above her chest. As they hovered over her, they began to glow. This time, Hex could see tendrils of magic rising out of the earth, forming a web that wrapped Iris’s body over and over again until she was an Iris-shaped purple light. Pete’s face was tense with concentration, his eyes closed, his lips moving silently as the magic intensified. His arms began to tremble and his forehead grew slick with a sheen of sweat, and Hex worried that he might faint. Finally, with a gasp, Pete slumped backward and opened his eyes. Iris was still out, but her breathing had evened, and the worst of her wounds had stopped bleeding.

  “She’ll be all right,” Pete whispered. “But the Lion did more than just harm her body. His power is to feed on others’ fear—on their very essence. She has to rest for a while, and so do I.”

  Hex covered Iris with the blanket from his pack; mysteriously, two more had appeared beneath it, along with a loaf of bread that looked decidedly fresher than what he’d eaten earlier. He spread out the blankets while Pete did his best to start a fire. It took him several tries, but finally he coaxed a feeble magical blaze out of the air.

  “Will the Lion come back?” Hex asked, tearing the loaf of bread in half. He handed the bigger half to Pete, who took it without commenting on Hex’s sudden generosity.

  “Not tonight,” Pete said. “We’re safe for a little while at least.” He settled back onto his blanket, chewing on his hunk of bread, and after a moment Hex did the same. While Iris snored softly, Pete and Hex stared into the fire, neither of them ready for sleep.

  “You knew,” Hex said, and Pete started.

  “Knew what?”

  “You knew the Lion had Iris. You knew he would kill her, if I didn’t stop him somehow.” Pete was silent. “She’d be dead,” Hex repeated. “If I hadn’t found a way to save her—if I hadn’t been brave enough to face down the Lion–you would have left her there to die.”

  “She didn’t die,” Pete said.

  “But she would have.”

  “None of us know what would have been,” Pete said quietly. “We only know what is.”

  “How is leaving her there to die any different than what I did in the palace?” Hex asked angrily. “We’re not so different, you and me. You tell me I only think of myself, and maybe that’s true—maybe it’s always been true. But you were willing to sacrifice Iris for some stupid test, to see if I’m eligible for some quest you want me for—”

  “Saving Oz is not ‘some quest,’” Pete said. “And the circumstances of the test choose themselves. I didn’t know Iris would be in danger.”

  “If you had known the test would put her in danger, would you have consented to it?”

  Pete raised one hand in a helpless gesture. With a loud snort, Iris turned over and settled herself again. “I don’t choose the magic,” Pete said. “The magic chooses us. Oz chooses us. We can only do what it asks of us, and do our best to keep it safe. Sometimes that involves sacrifice, yes.”

  “But not your sacrifice,” Hex said.

  “I’ve sacrificed more than you will ever know,” Pete said sharply. “You don’t know the first thing about sacrifice, Wizard.”

  Hex was silent, watching the flames flicker silently from blue to pink to green and back to blue again. Though they burned for hours, they didn’t seem to require fuel. Just one more thing in this crazy country that didn’t make any sense.

  “I felt something strange,” Hex said quietly. “Back there, when I was trying to save Iris. I think it might have been something I’ve never felt before at all. Not even before, when I knew who I was.”

  Pete was silent for a long time. “Selflessness,” he said finally. “That feeling’s called selflessness.”

  Selflessness. Hex turned the word over in his mind. He’d cared about Iris’s well-being more than he’d cared about his own—maybe it was only for a few minutes, but it had opened something up inside him that felt different and new. He couldn’t undo the person he had been before, whoever that was, and whatever he’d done to make Pete feel such contempt for him. But he didn’t have to be tethered to that idea of himself either. The Wizard. The words still meant nothing, though they’d obviously meant something to Iris.

  “When I was the Wizard,” he said. “You said I didn’t have real magic, just a bunch of flashy tricks. But when I fought the Lion . . .” He trailed off, not sure how to ask.

  “That was magic,” Pete said. “The Old Magic of Oz. When you saved Iris, you tapped into it for the first time.”

  “Can I do it again?” he asked. Pete sighed. “I know, I know,” Hex said hastily. “There’s so much you can’t tell me. Of course. But what I did back there—that was new?”

  “Oz is changing fast,” Pete said. “And we’re all changing with it. Everything is going to be different now for all of us.” He looked at the dancing flames. “Get some rest,” he said. There was something new in his voice, something different. If Hex didn’t know better, he would have said it was respect. “You still have one more test to pass. And this one’s going to be the worst of them all.”

  TEN

  Hex expected Pete to leave him again in the morning, but to his surprise, Pete made the three of them a tasty breakfast of porridge and scrambled eggs—where he’d gotten the eggs, Hex didn’t ask—and showed no signs of departing after he had magicked away the breakfast dishes. The rest seemed to have done wonders for both he and Iris; Pete’s terrible pallor of the night before was gone, and though he moved stiffly, he had clearly regained most of his strength. Iris had a noticeable limp and difficulty moving one arm, but she babbled at them a mile a minute. The Lion had damaged her body, but he’d certainly done no permanent harm to her spirits.

  Pete was mostly silent, and Hex couldn’t help but wonder what his sullen mood meant. Iris chattered on at them bot
h about a new formula she had developed to track banana consumption by age, happily oblivious, and Hex was grateful for her cheer. She hadn’t forgiven him exactly for what he had done in Lulu’s palace, but since he had saved her life, she seemed somewhat appeased, and she’d apparently forgotten all about her plan to murder Hex in his sleep. (He seriously doubted she had ever been capable of such an act, anyway, as much as she wanted them to believe she was a ferocious warrior.) She’d given them a detailed rundown of the current political situation among the Wingless Ones: with Quentin’s treachery exposed, Lulu had been able to restore order among the rebel factions. The chancellor had been storing away most of the supplies he’d stolen, and Lulu was busy redistributing them among the poorest of the monkeys. Anyone else would have managed to report this news in a few sentences, but Iris was only too happy to go off on long digressions about statistical analysis, equations for determining equitable distribution of goods, and cost-benefit analyses. While Queen Lulu still credited the mysterious sorcerer with exposing the chancellor’s wrongdoing, Iris said, shooting Hex a menacing look, Iris herself had been promoted out of the guards to a management position as soon as he’d left, and couldn’t be happier about it.

  “Now that everything’s settled with the Lion,” she said finally, “I should be getting back to the Wingless Ones. Lulu’s a great ruler, of course, but she doesn’t have a head for numbers. I’m badly needed back at the palace.” She puffed her chest importantly, and then winced.

  “You shouldn’t travel alone,” Pete said. “You’re still hurt, and vulnerable.”

  “I can take care of myself!” Iris said, immediately furious.

  “The Lion may return at any time,” Pete said, and she deflated.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said, and her bravado fell away. “I thought I was going to die back there,” she said softly.