The Wicked Will Rise

  Then she stood up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dorothy looked as surprised at her condition as I felt when I saw her get back up to her feet.

  She wasn’t dead. I had given her everything I had, and it hadn’t been enough. She seemed as shocked I was.

  She stared at me, then looked down at herself, where my knife was still lodged in her body. She began to laugh at the absurdity of it.

  Then, with more strength than she should have had left in her, she kicked me in the stomach with a spiky heel and sent me flying onto my back. As I struggled to my feet, she flicked her wrist and shot a bolt of energy at me, hitting me square in the rib cage. My whole body seized in convulsions, pain shooting through my every nerve as I fell back down again.

  Dorothy yanked my knife from her chest. Blood was squirting everywhere, but she didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. She held the blade aloft, looking at it curiously.

  She shouldn’t have been able to do that. The knife was a part of me. No one else was supposed to be able to touch it unless I was using it to slice them open.

  Then again, Dorothy shouldn’t have been alive either, after what I’d just done to her.

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t know what just happened, but I guess it didn’t work. Cool knife, though.” She rested the hilt against her palm. “Looks like magic. The black kind.”

  Now she was advancing toward me, brandishing my weapon. All I could do was lay there waiting for her, twitching. Her red shoes were sparkling with magic, and with every step she took she seemed to grow more powerful. Without even looking like she was trying to do it, she was drawing down a storm of lightning bolts from the sky, all of it flowing through her body and into her shoes like she was a living conduit for all the magic Oz had to offer.

  Was it possible that I had somehow just made her more powerful?

  “So. It seems that you have a bit of a problem. It looks like you can’t kill me, now doesn’t it? I think this is the part where you cry uncle.”

  “Not on your life. Assuming you even have one anymore,” I said.

  But I knew she was right. Maybe I still needed the Scarecrow’s brains, just like the Wizard had said, or maybe something else was the problem, but I wasn’t going to be able to beat her. Not like this.

  All I could do was retreat to the one place I knew I would be safe. So, old hat or not, I pulled the darkness over me, feeling it envelope me like a familiar blanket. I burrowed into it as far as I could, closing out the flames, the smell, the screams—closing out the whole world until everything, everything, everything was pitch-black.

  Everything except the one thing I was really trying to hide from. Against the utter nothingness of the shadow world, Dorothy looked Technicolor. Her eyes were so blue they vibrated, and her face—which had formerly been tinged with a sickly olive pallor—was now a vibrant, clownish green slashed with lips red as cartoon blood. Her shoes were the reddest of all. They were so bright I had to look away.

  Even here, I couldn’t escape from her.

  “You think you’re the only one who knows about the Darklands?” she asked, seething. “Oh, honey, this dimension might as well be my living room. Have to admit, I’ve never met anyone else who could get in here—even Glinda doesn’t get it. I guess it’s a Kansas thing!”

  It’s hard to describe the powerlessness I felt just then. This was a different kind of powerlessness than I’d felt when Dorothy had me wrapped in her chains. Instead of feeling hypnotized—held in her thrall—I just felt hopeless, like nothing I could do would make a difference, so why bother trying?

  She looked down at my knife curiously. Watching her touch it gave me a strange, awful feeling, like when you’re a little kid and you wiggle your tongue around in the hole where you just lost a tooth.

  I could see that Dorothy understood my discomfort. “I doubt I can hurt you with it,” she said, “But I’m guessing as long as I’m holding it, you won’t be able to put up much of a fight. Shall we test the theory?”

  She extended an arm and touched the tip of my knife to my collarbone. I didn’t resist. She drew the blade across my neck, pressing hard enough for me to feel pressure. But there was no blood, and no pain.

  “I figured,” she said. “You get a feel for these things after a while, you know? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll just have to get creative.” She paused.

  “Oh, never mind,” she said. “You can’t kill me, I can’t kill you; how predictable can it get? There’s probably some dull prophecy about it—there always is, isn’t there? Chosen ones and blah blah blah. Who can keep track? Good thing I don’t need to kill you anyway. Oh, I’d like to, but as Glinda’s constantly reminding me, a girl can’t have everything she wants. Not even me. But you’ve got your wants, and you’ve got your needs. And all I need”—she grabbed the strap of my bag and yanked it hard, snapping it—“is this.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, digging around inside. “Let’s see. One mechanical heart. Check. One artificial tail. Check. And . . . a French textbook? I mean . . . I guess that could come in handy, too. You never know when a girl might want to aim for higher education.” She brushed a lock of hair from her face and the blackness began to fade.

  As the world returned, I saw that the battle was over. Really over. The floating island on which it had been waged was now just a scorched, charred husk of dirt and rock, with only a few small flames lingering in the wreckage.

  Polychrome lay still in the middle of it, her delicate hand wrapped around Heathcliff’s lifeless tail. Nox was kneeling beside them in defeat, his face bloody and covered in dirt and ash, his formerly wild hair singed to almost nothing.

  The battle was over, and we had lost. I had lost. Glinda stood above us, arms crossed at her chest in a pose of both victory and impatience.

  “There you are,” she said as Dorothy stumbled out of the shadows to join her at her side. “I was just about to wonder if I was going to have to leave without you.”

  “I got what we came for,” Dorothy said, holding up my bag triumphantly.

  “And yet the girl lives. Curious.”

  Dorothy shrugged. “You know how magic can be. Annoying,” she said, finishing her own thought.

  “So it can,” Glinda agreed.

  “Must be some dumb rule no one remembers. She couldn’t kill me either, by the way.”

  “It makes no difference. The girl is no more than a nuisance now. So what do you think? Should we take them with us?” Glinda asked. “Put them to work? The Order’s little warlock can wash windows, the witch from Kansas can serve, and the beautiful boy behind the boulder”—she waved a hand and a large rock disappeared from the periphery, revealing a sheepish Bright’s hiding spot—“could make a very interesting plaything.”

  Even as she said it, I could see that it was, at least in part, bravado. She and Dorothy might have won, but they hadn’t come out of this unscathed. Dorothy looked aged and decrepit, her skin still a sickly green, and even Glinda looked exhausted. Her bun had come undone, her armor had been pierced in several places, and she had a giant gash running from her shoulder to her elbow. If she’d had the juice left in her, she could have done whatever she wanted to us. But she didn’t. Which meant that this was a stalemate of sorts, whether or not either of them wanted to admit it.

  Dorothy shook her head with an exasperated groan, trying to act like she seriously didn’t give a shit. “They’re too much trouble,” she said. “Ozma is back in our control. We have the things we came for. The rainbow fairy and her familiar are dead, and this horrible so-called paradise has been burned to a crisp. Soon, we’ll have done the same to the place I used to call home. I say, let’s get out of here.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Glinda said. She turned gloatingly to me: “Toodle-oo! Polly’s been the mostess of hostesses, but even the most delightful teatimes must come to an end. And Dorothy and I are late for a very important appointment, aren’t we, dear heart?”

&nb
sp; “We sure are.” Dorothy lowered her eyes toward the bodies on the ground, then shot a glance at me. “I hate to leave it such a mess, but I guess a girl from the trailer park has slung some slop in her day.” She gave me a barely perceptible wink. “Not that I know what that’s like.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Ozma let out a screech from where Dorothy still had her chained, where Pete had been earlier. It had taken her this long to come to her senses, but now, she finally seemed to understand that she was being held prisoner.

  “I command you!” she shouted. “With the Old Magic that . . .”

  “That’s the royal spirit we like!” Glinda said, looking like she wanted to explode with laughter.

  Dorothy waved a hand, the chains pulled tighter, and Ozma was silent.

  Then Glinda snapped her fingers and, in a puff of pink smoke and a shower of glitter, all three of them were gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Glinda, Dorothy, and Ozma were gone. The falls, and the islands revolving around it, had been destroyed. The sun was rising, and the purple sky was filled with floating ash and ember and the sad, wilted remnants of barbecued rainbows.

  Off in the distance, the place in the skyline that had been occupied by the Rainbow Citadel now held only a billowing plume of blue-black smoke.

  It all looked like the morning after a surprise party gone really, really wrong.

  Nox and I couldn’t even bring ourselves to look each other in the eye.

  Meanwhile, Bright stood stoically, gazing out at the wreckage as the sun rose slowly above it. He shook a single cigarette from his case. “My last one,” he said. “Ever, I guess. No more rainbows left. I guess I should savor it, huh?” But instead of lighting it, he put it carefully back into the case and patted it like a precious object.

  He walked over to Polychrome’s sad, limp body and knelt to touch her face. “She was something,” he said. “Y’know, I never figured out what she saw in me, not really.” He bent over and kissed her tenderly.

  As his lips touched hers, her body began to glow one last time, and when he pulled away, a small, weak tendril of yellow light curled from out of her mouth and began to eat away at the rest of her until she had melted into a shapeless puddle that danced with color like an oil slick. When there was nothing left of her, the puddle began to unwind, rising—first slowly, then quickly—into the sky in a luminous, vibrant thread.

  A rainbow.

  We watched her go. And when the last of the last rainbow had faded, Bright turned his attention to Heathcliff. He carefully untied the ribbon at the giant cat’s chin, and removed the horn that Polychrome had given him. “Here,” he said, handing it to Nox. “This will come in handy. It’s real, you know. It came from a real unicorn. Polly got it off one when it crashed through the window by the breakfast nook and died. Stupid things are dumber than birds. God, that was ages ago. Anyway, it’s rare you find one of these. And it’s magic. Does some crazy shit. You’ll see.”

  “You don’t want to keep it?” Nox asked. “It should be yours.”

  “Nah. It’ll just make me sad. And what am I going to do with it anyway? It’ll probably just get lost, like everything else. It’s time for me to get moving again.”

  He reached behind his ear and pulled out a golden button. “My only trick,” he said, holding it up to the morning light. “But it’s a good one. My parents always said I was bright as a button, and Polly knew I’d get bored if she tried to keep me cooped up, so she magicked these for me so I could get out whenever I wanted. Don’t want my bird in a cage, she said. Didn’t even care if I sometimes left without telling her when I’d be back. Anyway. I only have a couple of these left, but I guess I don’t really need ’em anymore. Won’t be coming back here, will I?”

  He pulled out another button and handed it to me. “Do good, babe,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Where are you going to go?” I asked him.

  “Where else?” he asked. “I’m going to get lost.” He flipped the button up, and it spun a few times, then exploded in a shower of glitter, leaving in its place an ordinary wooden door, standing free amidst the rock, connected to nothing.

  Bright turned the dull, glass knob, pulled the door open, and stepped through the frame. It disappeared as he closed it behind him, but I kept staring at the empty place where it had just been.

  Instead of saying anything, I stepped to the precipice of our flying hunk of burned-out rock and sat down, letting my feet dangle off into the vast, empty sky. Nox slid down next to me and we just sat there in silence, watching the last of the sunrise.

  “Well,” I said to Nox when it was over. “I guess it’s just us. What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  “You know what I wish?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I kinda do.”

  I knew he knew. I said it anyway. “I wish we could just stay here. Just the two of us. See if we could rebuild this place. Maybe not the same as it was, but, maybe like we would want it to be.”

  “Like it was ours.”

  “Exactly. Make it a home.” I didn’t need to say what we were both obviously thinking. The first real home either of us had.

  “I wish that, too,” Nox said. His voice cracked. “Maybe next time.”

  “Yeah. Next time.” I turned away, and Nox stood and walked to where Heathcliff’s body still lay.

  “You were right,” I said. “About Pete, I mean. I should have listened.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Nox said. “It was already done.”

  “I shouldn’t have trusted him in the first place.”

  “Yes,” Nox said. “Yes, you should have. Because that’s who you are.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but maybe he was right.

  “Maybe we should find Mombi,” Nox offered. “Maybe she’s better now. Maybe she’ll know what to do.”

  No. I was sick of maybe. I was sick of witches, sick of searching, sick of chasing mysterious objects. Sick of being ordered around and used like a pawn. Now, if I had to trust anyone, it was myself.

  “Forget Mombi,” I said. “We’re going to find Dorothy and kill her. And then we’ll finally get a happy ending.”

  Nox seemed too tired to argue with me. I was tired, too, but I was also jittery and restless and suddenly not in the mood to waste time. I took the button that Bright had given me and tossed it up just like I’d seen him do. Like before, a door appeared.

  Screw it. I didn’t know where it would take us, but I stepped through it anyway. Maybe, I thought, the magic will be on my side for once.

  Instead, it sent me walking right into a brick wall. Literally.

  A yellow brick wall, to be precise.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bright’s portable doorway had deposited me back on solid, non-floating land, where the clouds were now once again hundreds of feet above my head rather than miles below my feet. Nox was just a second behind me, and as soon as he stepped through the portal, it slammed shut and disappeared. We both stared up in amazement at what was standing in our way.

  Rising up out of the field in which we stood, the Road of Yellow Brick had turned itself into a gleaming wall. A wall so high that there was no hoping to see over it, and so wide in either direction that it appeared to go on forever, with no sign of any way through it.

  I pressed my hands against it. “Does this count as lost?” I asked, wondering if maybe we should have found another way back down to earth than the one we had chosen.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Nox said, echoing my thoughts. “What do you think’s on the other side of this thing?”

  “I guess I’ll find out.”

  Before I even tried teleporting to the other side of the wall, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be so simple. My gut was right. When I tried to melt into the shadows—what Dorothy had called the Darklands—and slither through the wall, some kind of force stopped me. Instead of finding
myself on the other side of the barrier, I rematerialized ten feet back from where I’d started, with a woozy sensation and a sudden headache, like I’d just tried to butt my head against the bricks. I tasted something metallic in my mouth.

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Not really,” Nox replied. “The road is serious business. Mombi once told me it’s as pure an expression of Oz’s magic as there is—and now that the magic’s coming back, I bet it’s getting more powerful than it was before. You’ve seen how it can be. It has a mind of its own. I guess it decided that it doesn’t want anyone going past this spot. And it looks to me like it’s not going to give up without a fight.”

  I felt the wall, running my fingers along the smooth bricks, which were glittering golden in the sun. It was so beautiful that, under other circumstances, I would have been awestruck.

  I don’t know what I was looking for. A secret button that would open a door, like in a Nancy Drew book?

  I laughed at the irony of that. Come to think of it, though, how nice would it have been to find myself in any other storybook world than this one, with nothing to worry about except missing heiresses and stolen jewels?

  Next time, I promised myself.

  For now, I was out of luck. Even if there was a hidden switch somewhere in these bricks, I had no way of finding it—it would take me weeks, if I was lucky, to cover every inch of the wall looking for it.

  “So what do we do?” I wondered aloud, giving the wall a kick. “Know any flying spells?” Flying had never been my thing. Hovering, maybe, a little levitation here and there, fine, but actual flying was something I’d only seen Mombi do, and it took a lot out of even her.

  “Nope,” Nox said. “But there’s no law saying we have to go through it. Who knows what’s on the other side, you know? Maybe we should head the other way and try to regroup. Go find the Order and get a real plan together.”

  “News flash,” I said. “There is no Order anymore. Mombi’s sick, Glamora’s probably dead. Who knows where the rest of them are? That leaves you and me. Look, I say Bright’s doorway took us here for a reason. If something’s trying to keep us from getting through here, there must be something important on the other side.”