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 (21 page)

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.