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 (40 page)

It seemed like the kind of place you could get lost in. The kind of place you could enter and never leave.

Unfortunately, Star didn’t seem to share my fear—she was already several yards ahead of me, and if I didn’t hurry, she would be out of sight before I knew it.

“Slow down!” I hissed after her, but she didn’t listen. I took a deep breath and followed her into the maze.

As soon as I stepped inside, the leafy walls on either side of me began to rustle, suddenly sprouting little pink buds. The climbing ivy grew and twisted.

My heart pounding, I looked back. The opening I’d just run through was no longer there. It had sealed up behind me with new growth.

“Damn,” I swore under my breath. I’d almost expected those frozen statues to come to life, but I hadn’t expected the
maze
to.

Keeping Star in my sights suddenly seemed more important than ever—it was no longer just a matter of not losing her. It was a matter of
me
not getting lost. Rats were supposed to be naturally good at mazes, right? Star seemed to have some sense of where she was going, but I knew that, on my own, I would be stuck in here for good.

There was no point in looking back, so I didn’t bother.

Relying on a rat to guide me through a magic maze pretty much summed up my last twenty-four hours. I felt out of control, isolated, and uncertain where I was headed. I plunged forward regardless. Sometimes the path was narrow and claustrophobic, the hedges so high I couldn’t even see their tops. Then I’d turn a corner into a sweeping cobblestone boulevard where the topiary walls were short enough that it seemed like I might be able to dive over them with a running start.

We turned a corner and found ourselves in a long, leafy corridor—grown over with ivy—where there didn’t appear to be any more turnoffs. The hedges stretched out in a rigid line, nowhere to go except straight ahead. Unfortunately, the path looked like it went on forever, extending so far into the distance that I couldn’t see an end. The maze felt massive, like an entire world unto itself.

The endlessness terrified me. Even Star slowed down and sniffed at the air, looking around like she was trying to get her bearings.

“Come on, Star,” I urged quietly. “Don’t fail me now.”

The hedge wall on my left was covered in a blooming honeysuckle-like vine that dripped with a sweet-smelling nectar. Without really realizing what I was doing, I reached toward one of the blossoms to sample the nectar—it smelled so sweet and alluring. A purple ladybug landed on the blossom just in front of my fingers and the flower snapped close with a crunch and a squish. I jumped back. The flowers had teeth.

I started forward, wanting to put some distance between me and the flowers. Star ambled along at my side, no longer leading the way.

“What did you get me into, Star?”

Just as I said it, her head popped up into the air and she doubled back on the path we’d been following. She began to examine one of the hedges we’d passed. It looked like any of the rest of them to me, but Star, having now made up her mind, circled around and ran straight toward it. As she did, the branches slid aside, forming an opening as wide as a doorway. I gasped—more from joy than surprise—a way out! Star ran through—and I ran right behind her.

We kept running, no longer obeying the paths laid out by the maze. The walls continued to slide aside for us as we charged on, closing at our backs as soon as we slipped through.

And then, finally, we reached the center of the maze. It was so unexpected that I almost tripped over my feet while skidding to a stop. It was a large, circular area, paved with jagged flagstones. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, the moonlight beaming down brightly on their open faces.

Dead center in the middle of the plaza was a stone fountain that looked older than time itself. Its water spiraled up into the sky in a corkscrew and didn’t seem to come back down again.

Sitting on the edge of the fountain was Pete.

As usual, he had found me when I least expected it. Like the Order, Pete was just another of my supposed allies that couldn’t be relied upon.

“You,” was all I could manage, still catching my breath.

“Hey,” he said casually. Clearly, he’d been expecting
me
. He sat there like there was nothing strange at all about meeting up in the early morning darkness for some fun times in the nefarious hedge maze.

Actually, with the way the bright-yellow half-moon shone on his dark hair, the colors around us supercharged, Pete looked almost beautiful. He looked better than normal—like an artist’s rendering of his ideal self. He looked perfectly at ease here, like he belonged.

“You brought me here,” I said suspiciously. “You had Star come get me.”

“Yes,” he said. He stood up from his perch on the fountain but didn’t come any closer.

“How?”

“Star may not be able to talk, but it’s not so hard to communicate with her if you know the trick,” he replied.

More half answers. This was way beyond its expiration date.

“What about the maze? Did you do all that? Do you control it?”

He laughed. “No one controls the maze. Especially not me. It’s a living thing—like you or me or Star. If you’re kind to it, it remembers. If it’s your friend, it will help you.” He smiled and gestured at everything around us. “These hedges and I go way back,” he said. “So I asked it for help.”

What was he saying? That he had trained this place?

I took a step closer.

Who are you?
I wanted to ask.
What do you want from me?

I wanted to ask those things. But I had asked them before. I knew he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. And if he somehow did now, I wasn’t sure I would like it.

“If you wanted to talk to me, why didn’t you just come to my room—like before? Why go through all this?” I asked instead.

“Things are about to get messy around here, Amy,” he said. “It’s not safe for me in the palace.”

I wanted to laugh. “And it’s safe in
here
? I hate to tell you this, but the flowers have teeth.”

Pete laughed. “Okay, true,” he said. “If you make it here to the center, though, you’re in the safest place in the whole Emerald City. Maybe in all of Oz. Dorothy’s afraid to come in here. Even
Glinda
’s afraid. They should be—it’s more powerful than they are. More powerful than Mombi, for that matter.”

He raised an eyebrow mischievously.

“You know Mombi,” I said. Of
course
he did. I should have known.

“I do,” he said. “Mombi and I go way back, too.”

“So
you’re
my handler. The one who’s been keeping an eye on me for the Order. Are you the one who told her to rescue me in the first place?”

Pete shook his head emphatically. “I don’t work with the Order. Just because I know Mombi doesn’t mean I like her.”

“How do you know her, then? Wait, never mind. I don’t know why I thought you’d answer that, since you haven’t answered any of my other questions.”

Pete’s expression darkened. “She may say she’s working for the good of Oz, but Mombi doesn’t do anything for the good of anyone except herself. Take it from me.”

I rolled my eyes and walked over to the edge of the fountain.

“Pete,” I said. “Why should I take
anything
from you?”

“I guess you shouldn’t,” he said. I couldn’t decide whether he sounded apologetic about it.

“So what do you want from me? Why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted you to know how to find the center,” he said. “I wanted you to understand this place. To introduce you, I guess. It might be useful to you someday.”

“Introduce me.”

“Yeah.”

“You wanted to introduce me to
a bunch of magical hedges
.” I was pissed at how evasive Pete was being, but the logical part of me knew this was a valuable place to know about. With things getting hot in the palace, the Tin Woodman sniffing around, the magic I’d used last night—I might need a place with carnivorous flowers to hide in.

Pete just shrugged. He tried to take my hand in his, but I pulled it away.

“And I wanted to say good-bye,” he said. “I have to leave the palace. I couldn’t before. But Dorothy’s weak right now. She’s being hit from too many angles. I don’t even think she realizes it. I have to leave while I can.”

I felt it like a punch in the gut. Mysterious and flighty as he was, at least Pete usually
tried
to be helpful. But now—just like the Order—he was leaving me behind. And I still didn’t have any answers. Was it a coincidence that he had just been walking by when my trailer fell out of the sky, that he kept showing up and disappearing?

I backed away from him. Pete was more than he seemed. That much was clear.

“Who
are
you?” I asked.

“I had started to think that there was no hope for Oz,” he said, again not answering the question. “Things were just so bad. The day I met you I was walking around looking at all the damage. Thinking there was no way things could ever get better. That we shouldn’t even bother trying. And then you dropped out of the sky. You reminded me that there was still Good here. Even if it was just the promise of Good.”

Good
. There was that word again. Back home, I had always thought of myself as a good person. Maybe a good person with a little bit of a temper, but still
good.
Here, in Oz, it had gotten more complicated—words like
Good
and
Wicked
had lost their meaning. What mattered was right and wrong.

At least, that’s what I’d thought. But Pete thought I was
Good,
and the way he said it made me wonder if it still mattered after all.

“It was selfish of me to get so close to you,” he went on. “But it wasn’t
just
selfishness. I wanted to make you feel like you weren’t alone, so that you could be the force for good Oz needs.”

His words made me feel unsteady. “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “I hardly know anything about you. You’re not a gardener at all, are you?”

“I wish I could tell you everything, Amy. I wish I could take you with me. But I can’t. We all have our secrets to keep.” He looked at me pointedly, and I remembered that I was still wearing Astrid’s face. “And you’re bound to Mombi now. I can’t break that. Even if I wanted to.”

He knew that, too. What else did he know about me?

I turned away from him and trailed my fingers through the water in the fountain. I half expected to feel something when I touched it—that it would be magical, charged somehow. But it was just water.

Then Pete stood up.

“Wait—” I said. I stood too. “Please.” I had so much more I wanted to ask him. Even if he wasn’t going to give me the answers.

But he was running his fingers through his hair, looking away. He had more he wanted to say, too, I could tell.

“Don’t trust anyone. Don’t even trust me. Trust yourself,” he said. “You’ll know what to do. Be safe, Amy.”

Before I could reply, he took a running leap and dove headfirst into the fountain. The water was only about a foot deep, but it swallowed him easily. I ran over and leaned into the pool, but all I saw was clear water shimmering over the mosaic-tiled bottom. It was empty. He was gone. I sighed in frustration.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” I said to Star.

I thought about following—about jumping right into the pool after him. But somehow I knew that whatever door Pete had just passed through was closed.

With all the magic in Oz, with all the magic the witches had taught me, there was one trick I still hadn’t mastered: how to make people stay.

The hedge maze basically showed me the way out, opening up its walls for me. As I passed, the bitey flowers made sweet little kissy noises at me. That didn’t really cheer me up.

I returned Star to my room, hiding her back in the drawer and using some of the padding from my ripped-up mattress to make her a bed. I figured the Tin Soldiers wouldn’t bother tossing my room twice. After that, I rejoined the other maids, scrubbing and dusting through the rest of the afternoon. No one seemed to have missed me, although I didn’t see Jellia anywhere.

Around dinnertime, the sun came back up. Dorothy must’ve been awake.

The maid staff was only half done with our meals when all of our bells started ringing at once. Something was wrong, and as they led us to the throne room, it wasn’t hard to guess what.

It wasn’t just the maids. The halls were crowded with people all heading in the same direction: guards, gardeners, deliverymen, cooks, everyone. I even saw the Wizard’s hat sailing through the procession.

“They know who it is,” someone behind me whispered. “They’ve discovered the traitor who helped the monkey escape.”

Even though I’d barely had time to touch my dinner, I felt sick to my stomach. If they knew who it was, then they knew it was
me.
I knew how Dorothy liked to work: that she was looking forward to calling me out from the crowd in front of everyone, making me beg and humiliate myself while she tortured me with my own fear.