“Gather up?”
“Of course. Belongings. What, you thought you were staying here? The pool party’s over, sweetie.” She jerked her head toward Ozma. “Wouldn’t be much fun anymore now that your plaything’s packed himself back up in the toy box anyway, am I right?”
I didn’t tell her I was pretty sure I could turn Ozma back into Pete whenever I wanted to. A girl’s got to have a few secrets here and there.
“You’re in no shape to travel,” I said.
“Me?” Mombi laughed. “Who said anything about me? We both know I’m no good to anyone right now. I’m going to stay right where I am until I’m feeling better.”
“I’m not going to just leave you like this,” I said.
Mombi gave a wry, weak chuckle. “Oh, yes you are,” she said. “And don’t think I’m not going to enjoy myself. I deserve a little R & R. If I do say so myself. You’ve got work to do, though. I want you to seek out Polychrome, the Daughter of the Rainbow. She’s never been much of a joiner, but she’s helped the Order before and she’ll help us again. She wants Dorothy gone as much as anyone, and she has power. Wouldn’t be surprised if other members of the Order were on their way to find her, too.”
I considered it. I had decided a while back that I was done taking orders from Mombi, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave the comfort and relative safety of the monkeys quite yet. On the other hand, if Nox was headed to find this rainbow lady, that was where I wanted to be, too. “How do I get there?” I finally asked. I hadn’t made up my mind, but I would hear her out.
“Ahh, now there’s the rub. The Rainbow Citadel is no easy place to find. The way it usually works, Polychrome only opens up a door when she wants you there. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to get in touch with her at the moment. So you’ll have to find the back way in.”
“Okay, fine. So how do I do it?”
“It moves around,” Mombi explained. “That’s what makes the Rainbow Citadel so safe—and it’s how Polychrome gets away with having as much power as she does. Only way to get in uninvited is to find the back door. And no one finds the back door. Dorothy spent a year looking for it a while back. Tore apart half the kingdom, offered up a reward to anyone who could give her a clue, but no cigar. Eventually she gave up—wasn’t worth the hassle, I guess.”
“If Dorothy can’t find it after all that, then how am I going to?” I asked.
“You won’t,” Mombi said. “But I have a feeling she can.”
The witch crooked a finger at Ozma. “Come to dear old Mombi,” she cooed sweetly. When Ozma kept her distance, Mombi rolled her eyes. “Bring the little darling over here,” she snapped.
I gingerly took the reluctant princess’s hand, eyeing Mombi warily. Ozma didn’t look pleased, but she didn’t resist.
“You’re not going to hurt her, are you?” I asked.
“No, no, no. We need her,” Mombi said, looking Ozma up and down wolfishly. “As stupid as she looks, there’s still power in there. Somewhere. She’s a fairy, you know. She’s connected to Oz’s lifeblood in a way that none of the rest of us ever could be. If anyone can find the Rainbow Citadel, it’s her. It’s magic, she’s magic, it’s the way these things work. She just has to want to find it.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said. “I don’t think Ozma wants anything. Except maybe to play patty-cake.”
Mombi ignored me and placed her hands on Ozma’s cheeks. Ozma looked like she was going to run away, but the witch held her firm. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m just an old woman. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, would I?”
Mombi stared deep into Ozma’s eyes and bit her lip in a look of mild concentration. A small, purple dot of light began to form in the center of the witch’s forehead. Mombi plucked it off like she was removing a piece of dirt and placed it in her palm, closing a tight fist around it.
“Just hold still and close your eyes, my darling.” As if in a trance, Ozma obeyed.
I watched the whole scene with a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. “Ozma’s shielded from most magic,” Mombi explained nonchalantly. “But when you’re dumb as a brick like she is, certain spells can get through well enough.”
She opened her hand, revealing that the pinprick of energy had taken the form of a glowing indigo spider the size of a nickel. She plucked its wriggling body up and placed it on Ozma’s temple, where it sat for a second and then crawled down, across her cheekbone and onto her earlobe, finally skittering into her ear canal and disappearing.
“Yuck.” I shuddered.
“Oh, don’t be a ninny,” Mombi scoffed. “It’s just a little spell of intention. She won’t even feel it. Barely does anything except give her a little push in the right direction. Think of it like this: if I whispered I want doughnuts in your ear while you were asleep, you’d wake up craving doughnuts, isn’t that so? This isn’t much different, except that I’m too old a woman to stay up all night muttering in Ozma’s ear, especially with those enormous flower earmuffs she loves to wear. Just wait—she’ll be able to guide you to the Rainbow Citadel now. Just follow where she leads, and keep an eye on her along the way. Make sure she doesn’t walk off any cliffs or into any glass doors. And for god’s sake don’t let her get captured. She’s more important than she looks, you know.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “So let’s say I agree to go looking for this Polly character?” I asked. “What do I do once I find her?” I asked.
“You ask her to help you find Nox and Glamora, not to mention any other stray Order members she can get a line on. You show her those little trinkets you’ve got in your goody bag, and see what she makes of them. You have her point you in the direction of Dorothy, who, may I remind you, still needs to be disposed of. You ask her to return the shawl she borrowed from me last time she paid me a visit. Oh, and have her take a look at Princess Dumbbell. Polychrome knows a fair bit of fairy magic. Now that we’ve finally got Ozma out from Dorothy’s watch, maybe we can fix whatever spell Dorothy used to turn our beloved monarch’s brains into royal scrambled eggs.”
“Oh, that’s all?”
“Should I give you a list, or will you remember?”
I didn’t say anything.
I looked from Mombi to Ozma and back. I weighed my options. I could stay here. I could go off looking for Nox on my own. I could look for the Scarecrow and Dorothy without any clue where either of them were. Or I could just take a nap.
Call me stubborn, but I didn’t really feel like obeying Mombi just for the sake of following orders. On the other hand, what if orders were, in this case, also the right thing to do?
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go. But I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for Ozma.” I looked over at her. If there was a chance of fixing her, I wanted to give her that chance. I was doing it for Nox, too, but Mombi didn’t need to know that.
“I don’t care why you’re doing it,” Mombi said. “Just go! I’ll find you when I’m myself again.”
“Now?” I asked. “Can’t we wait till the morning?”
“Certainly not. Leave in the middle of the night and no one will notice or ask questions. Secrecy, my dove! Even up here, you never know who’s watching. Anyway”—Mombi looked around pointedly—“I only see two hammocks, and three of us. What would you propose to sleep on?”
“Can I at least say good-bye to Ollie and Maude?”
“Can’t you see I’m too weak and weary for all this tiresome chitchat? Tell no one! And if you encounter anyone on your journey, keep your trap shut. Or, better yet, kill them.”
I wasn’t prepared for this. I’d been looking forward to one more comfortable night’s sleep, at the very least. But Nox was out there somewhere, needing my help. And the bug Mombi had dropped in Ozma’s ear must already have been working, because she was making for the door.
I knew it was no use. I took a look at my dirty clothes heaped in the corner and decided I was better off traveling without them. I turned to Mombi, but she had already fallen asle
ep, and was now loudly emitting an unpleasant combination of a snore and a moan.
It was time to get moving. I followed Ozma out of the Princess Suite. This time, I took a page from my mother’s book and didn’t look back.
TEN
It was the dead of night, and Ozma and I were making our way through the jungle. Yet again, I was reminded of the dream I’d had that wasn’t quite a dream. The feeling of déjà vu was so visceral, tingling in my pores, setting the hairs on my arms on end. I ignored it and pushed ahead, following Ozma, and tried not to let it get to me.
I was holding a tiny orb of flame in my palm, just bright enough to light our way. But still, the woods around us were black, and we were moving more quickly than I thought possible. Ozma walked ahead of me with a strange purpose, not seeming to even need my light to see by. She didn’t hesitate with a single step, but she didn’t seem to be following any particular path either; she was weaving and zigzagging through the thick clusters of trees, sometimes doubling back on herself, sometimes groping oddly at the air as if feeling for something. In her flowing white dress, with her luminous ivory skin flickering in the glow of my flame, she looked like a teenaged ghost.
I just hoped she knew what she was doing, because I thought there was a distinct possibility that she was leading me in a circle.
With every step we took, I second-guessed myself. Was I doing the right thing? It didn’t feel like it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so alone. I wished I had Star. I wished I had Indigo, or Ollie, or anyone. I wished I had Nox.
Ozma didn’t count. Tomorrow I would try to summon Pete back—at least he would be someone to talk to—but for now, I just wanted to get out of the woods, find a place to rest, and take stock of things in the daylight.
So I walked, letting Ozma lead the way. My hand was clenched hard around my knife, which had appeared in my hand without even being summoned, the way it always did when I sensed danger or felt out of my element. The knife was beginning to feel so much like a part of me—like an extension of my body—that it was easy to forget Nox was the one who had given it to me, had spent hours carving the bird-shaped hilt himself not just because he wanted me to be able to protect myself, but because he wanted me to have something that he had made; something that was just mine.
I felt a pang of loneliness at the thought, but instead of getting sad, I tried to take that feeling and use it, to shape the pointless emotion into something more like determination. It felt almost like working with magic—the way you could take it and mold it into something different from what it had started as. Into something you could actually use.
The thing about Nox was that I didn’t even know him that well. I really didn’t.
We had kissed, what—twice? Three times? And most of the time that we hadn’t been kissing, it wasn’t even obvious that we were friends. Much less anything more than that.
Look, it didn’t matter what we were to each other. It didn’t matter whether I really knew him or not. I just knew that I wanted to find him.
But Nox wasn’t why I was roaming through the dark forest in the middle of the night. I wasn’t doing it for Mombi either, or for the Order, or for Ozma, although I had to admit I was starting to feel a certain amount of protectiveness toward her. I wasn’t doing it for Oz, or for justice. Some of those things were part of it, but they weren’t the main reason.
For some reason, I had kept it from myself, because it had made me feel somehow selfish, but isn’t everyone allowed to be selfish sometimes?
The real person I was doing this for was me.
In my old life, I had been picked on by Madison Pendleton, taken advantage of by my mother, and ignored by pretty much everyone else. Because I had never been special. I had never been powerful.
When I’d dreamed of getting away from Kansas, what I’d really wanted was to find a place I could matter. Where I could be someone, and have a purpose.
Now I had found the place where I belonged. Yeah, it might have been nice if it had been a fairyland with fewer problems—someplace a little harder to mistake for a nightmare—but on the other hand, the more I settled into this nightmare, the more I began to realize that the insanity of the place was what gave me this feeling of purpose that I’d never had before.
Before Oz, I’d never been needed by anyone other than my mother, and apparently I wasn’t even much of a help to her. Oz, though, I could try to fix, and I was going to.
Some people spend their whole lives searching for the one thing that they can do to say, I changed the world. I had found that thing. I might not be able to accomplish it, but I was going to die trying. So call me selfish.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared. I tried not to think about what else was out there in the woods, in the dark, beyond the glow cast by my fire. The jungle might not have been the Lion’s domain anymore, but there were still monsters who lived here, and they didn’t need the King of Beasts to tell them I would make a delicious snack.
Lions, tigers, bears. None of those really bothered me. It was the thought of things I wouldn’t even be able to put a name to.
It wasn’t just an abstract fear of creepy-crawlies. Ever since we’d left the monkeys’ treetop village, I’d had the sensation that we weren’t alone. I couldn’t quite place the feeling, or give any evidence to prove my suspicion was right. But I could feel a lurking, heavy presence somewhere just over my shoulder, creeping behind me through the trees, almost close enough to reach out and grab me.
At first, I told myself it was just my imagination, but after an hour of walking, I heard a telltale crunch of branches and a faint, wheezing grunt.
I spun around and shone my flame up and down in the dark, but the only movement I saw was a giant spider half skittering up the trunk of a tree to take cover from the light.
There was a time when just that would have been enough to have me running for my life. Now it was nothing.
I knew in my gut that there was something else, though. Call it magical insight or just good old Kansas intuition. There was something bigger, badder, something dangerous. It had been stalking us this whole time.
I tried to shift my focus, the way I’d done earlier in the day, trying to see if whatever was out there was using magic to hide. But nothing revealed itself except for the vague shimmer of energy that coated everything in Oz. And considering how jumpy I was feeling right now, I couldn’t be sure that even that was anything other than my overactive imagination.
Ozma had noticed that I was hanging back, and had looped around to join me. She looked at me curiously and gazed out at the forest.
“Mommy,” she said. A slow smile spread across her face. And then, more urgently, she repeated it: “Mommy!”
Between her demented smile and the flickering light on her face, she looked like a horrible, beautiful jack-o’-lantern.
Mommy. Was she talking to me? Was she trying to say Mombi? Or was it something else? None of the options really reassured me. I put a finger to my lips, and Ozma narrowed her eyes and nodded as if she understood.
Without any further warning, I let the flame in my hand extinguish. Everything went black, and I was already a shadow, effortlessly sinking into the in-between place I’d somehow learned to unlock over the past few days, then I was back, myself again, ten paces behind the place where I’d started.
I couldn’t waste any time; I had to move before our pursuer figured out what I was doing. In one swift motion, I stabbed my knife into the air and brought it down in a crackling arc that lit the whole forest for a split second, as if I’d just set off a flashbulb.
But that split second was enough: I saw it. The thing that had been following us was crouched menacingly behind a tree, its shoulders heavy and muscular. It spun its head toward me, and I saw its yellow eyes staring back at me in two thin, yellow slits.
A chill went up my spine as I thought of the cloaked figures I’d seen in my dream last night.
But those had been witches, and when this thing
rose up onto its hind legs, I knew that it was not a witch. It was a monster.
An enormous ball of orange fire was already bursting forth from my outstretched palm, and before I could see my flame hit the target, I was teleporting straight for where I’d seen it hiding.
When I reappeared, I expected to hear whatever it was screaming as it burned. But I’d gotten cocky. When I materialized, there were no screams, my fire had already extinguished itself, and I couldn’t see anything in the blackness.
Hopefully that meant it couldn’t see me either. Instead of trying to light things up, I decided I would try to use the dark to my advantage, and I mumbled a few words to cast a simple amplification spell. This way, even if I couldn’t see my attacker, I’d be able to hear it.
I listened, turning in a careful, clockwise circle, until I had picked out the creature’s thumping heartbeat and labored breathing.
I came up with nothing and stumbled forward.
Suddenly, before I’d recovered my balance, a flying ball of muscle hit me out of nowhere like a bag of bricks. I grunted loudly and, instead of falling, let my body roll into a sideways somersault, and then flipped easily back to my feet.
I was fast, but the thing was faster. It had ricocheted away from me before I’d even managed to get a look at it, back into the trees where, even with my magically heightened senses, I could barely make out the sound it made as it crawled from branch to branch.
Just a few minutes ago, I had been feeling lonely and a little helpless. In other words, I could use a good fight.
“Come and get me!” I shouted, brandishing my knife, knowing I barely needed it. Once again, my loneliness had turned, like magic, into fury. I would kill this thing with my bare hands if I had to. “C’mon, asshole!” I screamed, my voice reverberating through the trees. “I don’t care who you are. Mess with me again. I dare you.”
I stopped, picking through all the sounds around me until I heard a soft heartbeat, a few feet away, behind a tree. But when I listened more closely, I realized that it didn’t belong to my stalker. From its steady, even pace, I knew it could only be Ozma—no one but her could remain so calm in the midst of all this.