Authors: Danielle Paige
The Lion narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down. He was used to people cowering before him, like Maude and Ollie, who were both quivering with fright, crouched on either side of me, their teeth chattering in terror.
This was the effect the Lion usually had. His courage had somehow been twisted into something dark and sick. Now it was a weapon. Wherever he went, he brought a cloud of terror with him. Just being around him was enough to make most people shrink in fear until it consumed them.
Then the Lion consumed it. He ate fear, literally. It made him stronger. I’d seen him do it—pick up a terrified Munchkin and suck the fright right out of him until the Munchkin was just a lifeless shell and the Lion was supercharged, bursting with power.
And yet, today, standing ten feet from him, I found that for the first time I wasn’t afraid. I had already faced down everything
that had ever frightened me and I’d come out the other side.
Instead of fear, I felt my body fill with a deep rage. There was something about the anger that seemed to put everything into focus—it was like a pair of glasses I had put on, and I was finally seeing everything clearly.
The Tin Woodman’s heart. The Lion’s courage. The Scarecrow’s brains
. According to the Wizard, once I had all of them, Dorothy could finally die the death she deserved. I already had the first item in the bag strapped across my chest: the Tin Woodman’s metal, clockwork heart. Now the second thing on my list was within reach—if only I could figure out where the Lion actually
kept
his courage.
No big deal, I thought. I could always figure that out after he was dead.
I wanted to wait for him to make the first move, though. I was counting on him underestimating me, but even on my best day the Lion still had ten times my physical strength.
“Now, let’s see,” the Lion was saying. “Who should I eat first?” He looked from me, to Ozma, to Ollie, to Maude, raising a gigantic claw and passing it around from one of us to the next.
“Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish,” he rumbled in a low, ominous croon. Maude. Ollie. Me. He paused as he reached Ozma. “You know,” he mused, “I’ve never had much of a taste for bubble gum.” The muscles in his hind legs twitched. “Fairies, on the other hand, are delicious.”
“You’re very bad,” Ozma said scornfully. “You can’t eat the queen.”
I could have cheered, hearing her talking to him, totally unafraid, with such casual, careless haughtiness. You had to give it to her for nerve, even if it was just the kind of nerve that came from not really knowing any better. But the Lion didn’t seem to think it was very funny.
I was ready for him when he growled and sprang for her. I moved before he did, slashing my knife through the air in a bright arc of red, searing flame, aiming right for him. Ozma clapped at the display. I was getting better at this magic thing.
But I was also overconfident: my blade barely grazed the Lion’s flank. I drew blood, but not enough to slow him down. He simply twisted in annoyance and swiped for me with a powerful forearm. He hit me right in the gut and I went stumbling backward like a mosquito that had just been batted out of the way, landing on the ground on my butt in a burst of petals. I bounced up quickly only to see that Ozma, as it turned out, was perfectly capable of protecting herself.
She hadn’t moved an inch, but a shimmering green bubble had somehow appeared up around her. The Lion clawed and poked at it, but wherever the force field had come from, it was impervious to his attacks. Ozma blinked innocently at him.
“Bad kitty!” she said. She scowled and wagged her finger at him. “Naughty cat!”
The Lion growled a low growl, apparently not amused at being called “kitty,” and took another swipe at her. Again, though, his attack bounced right off her protective bubble.
While the Lion was distracting himself with the princess, I
was stealthily circling toward him, positioning myself to strike again while charging up my knife with another magical flame.
“You’ve always been a stupid little thing,” the Lion was saying to Ozma. “Nevertheless, I suppose you have your own
irritating
kind of power. It’s a good thing there are other ways to teach a fairy a lesson.”
He turned from Ozma and reached for Maude, who had curled herself into a ball on the ground, her teeth chattering with terror. She didn’t even try to run. “No!” Ollie screamed, hurling himself in front of his sister.
This was my cue: I rushed him.
The Lion sensed me coming. He spun around and gave a furious roar, his jaw practically unhinging.
He lunged for me.
Fake out
.
Just as he was about to grab me, I flipped myself backward into the air and blinked myself behind him, my teleportation spell reversing my momentum as I landed on his back. I grabbed a hank of his mane in my fist and pulled hard, yanking his head backward.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” I said through gritted teeth, using every ounce of strength I had to slash my burning blade across his exposed throat. I cringed at the sound of his flesh hissing under my weapon’s white-hot heat, but somewhere, deep down, I found myself surprised at how used to this kind of violence I had already gotten. At how easily it came to me.
As the Lion howled, I felt some small kind of pleasure in his pain. I pushed it aside, but it was there. I felt the tiniest glimmer of a smile at the corner of my lips.
The Lion bucked and shook wildly and I hung on to his mane for dear life, thinking of my mom’s friend Bambi Plunkett, who had once won five hundred dollars riding the mechanical bull at the Raging Stallion on Halifax Avenue. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that I wasn’t going to be crowned queen of the rodeo anytime soon.
As the Lion desperately tried to shake me, I felt my hold on his mane begin to slip. He jumped into the air and we landed with a force that shook the ground, flowers flying everywhere. As he gave one last powerful shudder, I lost my grip and tumbled off him, my head cracking against the ground.
My vision blurred. In a flurry of fur and fangs, the Lion pounced, the weight of his body crushing my legs as he pinned my arms with his paws.
“I see you’re a courageous little one,” he purred, pushing his face just inches from mine. “I must admit, I didn’t expect it from you.” He licked his chops. “We’ll just have to change that, won’t we?”
A trickle of blood made its way from his throat, down his fur, and onto my shirt, and I saw that the cut across his throat was really just a surface wound. I’d barely hurt him.
This wasn’t going as well as I’d thought it would. I tried to blink myself out from under him, but my head was still throbbing from the fall I’d just taken, and as hard as I tried, I found
that I couldn’t quite summon the magic for it.
Then, before I could decide what to do next, I heard a squeal. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something white streak through the grass as Star scurried away, and felt the Lion’s weight on my body lighten, as he leaned over and shot a paw out.
“No!” I screamed, suddenly realizing what was coming. But there was nothing I could do. He had grabbed my rat by the tail, and she wriggled and screeched as he held her over my face.
“Dorothy wants
you
alive, brave little Amy,” he said. “And while I haven’t decided yet whether to let her have her way this time, in the meantime,
this
one will make a nice appetizer.”
The Lion snapped his jaw open. Star’s final scream sounded almost human as he dangled her over his toothy, gaping maw.
First the fear left her. It went streaming from her trembling body into the Lion’s open mouth in a wispy burst like a puff of smoke from a cigarette. Then she was still, looking down at me with wide, placid eyes.
There wasn’t much left of her, but at least I knew that she wasn’t afraid when she died. The Lion dropped her into his mouth and chomped hard. A trickle of blood made its way down his chin.
“Not very filling,” he said with a laugh. “But I hear rats are actually a delicacy in some parts of Oz.” He paused and licked a stray bit of my poor dead rat’s white fur from his lips. “Now, I’ve made a decision. On to the main course.”
“No,” I said as something strange came over me. I felt more lucid than ever, like the volume had been turned up on all of
my senses. I felt like I was looking down on myself, watching the scene unfold from somewhere far away. “Wrong. Fucking. Move.” With that, I blinked myself out of his clutches.
The Lion lurched in surprise and twisted around to face me where I was now standing, a few yards away, my back to the trees. He pawed at the ground.
Somewhere in my peripheral vision—somewhere on the edge of my consciousness—I saw that Ollie and Maude were both clinging to Ozma under the protection of her bubble. They were safe, but I hardly cared anymore.
I didn’t care about them, I didn’t care about Oz. I didn’t even care about myself. All I cared about was my dead rat.
That stupid little rat was the last connection I had to home. In some ways she was the only friend I had left. She had made it through Dorothy’s dungeons with me. She had helped me survive. Now she was gone. The Lion had eaten her as easily as a marshmallow Easter Peep.
Now I was alone for real. But suddenly I knew that it was really no different from before. It was no different from Kansas, even.
I had always been alone and I would always be alone. It had just taken me this long to figure it out.
All I cared about now was revenge.
The Lion bounded for me with a thundering growl so loud it shook the trees. I didn’t move to step aside. If the Lion thought eating my rat and creating a racket was going to make me afraid, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I was less afraid than ever.
I was ready to kill, and I suddenly had no doubt what the outcome would be.
My heart opened up into an endless pit. I looked over the edge into the void, and then I jumped right in.
Brandishing my knife, I silently called out for more fire—for the white-hot flames of the sun. The Lion was going to burn.
The fire didn’t come. Instead, like a glass filling with ink, my blade turned from polished, flashing silver to an obsidian so deep and dark that it seemed to be sucking the light right out of the sky.
It wasn’t what I had been expecting, but that was how magic sometimes worked. Magic is tricky. It’s not as simple as saying
abracadabra
and waving a wand. When you cast the spell, the magic becomes a part of you. Who you are can change it. And I was different now.
Once, I had been an angry, righteous little ball of fire. Now I was something else.
But what?
I felt the magic in every pore of my skin, in every hair on the backs of my arms. I felt it in the tips of my eyelashes. I was vibrating with it as the Lion came at me with a roar loud enough to split the world right open.
It was too late for that.
He hurled himself at me in a lithe, powerful cannonball; he clawed and scratched and bit. He wasn’t playing around now; there was no taunting and no banter as he hit me with a graceful, animal fury that wouldn’t let up. But he couldn’t touch me.
When he had killed Star he had unleashed something in me that I hadn’t known was even in there. Now the magic was flowing through me like a song and my body was moving to its pulsing, thrumming beat.
I was everywhere at once. I was barely anywhere at all. With every move that he made, I was ahead of him. It was like we were dancing.
I was spinning and dodging and somersaulting, thrusting and parrying, and every time the Lion thought he had me, I found myself melting into the ground, only to rise back up a moment later in the place he least expected to find me.
It was a different kind of teleportation than the kind I did when I blinked myself from one place to the next. It was like I was entering a world of shadows. I wasn’t sure how I was doing it, and I wasn’t sure where I was going when I disappeared like that—only that wherever it was, it was cold and foreign and deadly silent. From down there, everything was hazy and slow-motion, and I was outside reality, looking up into it from the darkness like gazing up through a layer of black, muddy water.
I may not have known
how
I was doing it, but every time I rose back up, reshaping myself into my own form, I knew
what
I was doing when I was under there. I was touching the darkness.
If I’d had time to think about it, it probably would have frightened me. Somehow, I knew instinctively that I was tapping into some of the blackest kind of magic. Everywhere I slashed and stabbed, my knife left a thick, inky trail behind it. It looked like I was cutting a hole in the atmosphere, and what was on the other side was nothing.
We went on like that for a while. I could tell that the Lion was tiring out. We weren’t dancing together anymore.
I
was dancing, but him? He was just going to die.
It was pathetic, really, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. Actually, I was having fun. I’d found something in Oz I was
good
at.
Finally, he gave one last valiant effort and sprang up, grabbed a tree branch and swung, barreling down at me feetfirst. I didn’t bother dodging. I melted into nothing and rematerialized behind him, wondering how it was that this kind of magic was suddenly coming so easily to me.
The Lion was still scooping himself up from where he had fallen, and I let him flail for a moment in confusion before I swept my leg around in a roundhouse kick that met his face with the satisfying crunch of shattering teeth.
I plunged my knife into his side and a web of inky lines spidered across the surface of his golden, tawny muscles like I was injecting him with poison.
Well, maybe I was.
I twisted my blade. The Lion screamed, collapsing. He had all but surrendered now, but I wasn’t done yet. As he lay there howling in pain, I jumped up and found myself moving almost in slow motion, suspended in the air for a moment before I pushed myself forward and launched myself straight for him, sinking my knife into the roof of his gaping mouth, a geyser of blood erupting.