“Actually, sir, I thought we could clean the library,” Dustin said innocently. “That was my job last time. I’m a real expert.”
Mr. Stone stared at Dustin as if he was up to something—which, of course, he was. Sort of. But Dustin just looked back with a vacant, innocent expression. I had to look away or else I’d start cracking up.
“Fine,” Mr. Stone growled. “But I’ll be checking up on you. Any hanky-panky . . .” He stopped short and then flushed red. One of the potheads snickered and sneezed the name of a venereal disease.
“That’s enough!” Mr. Stone barked. “For that, you’re on bathroom duty, Carson.” Mr. Stone tossed Dustin a set of keys, and I hid another smile as I followed him to the library.
I’d never spent any time in the high school library. From what I could tell, nobody else had either. Dustin unlocked the door to what was more or less a glorified janitor’s closet: a tiny, windowless room full of rusting metal shelves crammed with books that hadn’t been new when my mom was going to school here. It looked like the shelves hadn’t been dusted since the last time Dustin served detention. The sad little book display arranged on a tiny table near the door was springtime-themed—despite the fact that it was October. There wasn’t even a librarian; if you wanted to check out books, you were supposed to borrow a teacher’s keys and use the honor system. Literature theft wasn’t exactly a high-concern crime in our neck of the prairie. The school probably would’ve been excited just to learn that someone could actually read.
The “archive” turned out to be a closet at the back of the library. Dustin flipped through the keys Mr. Stone had given him, but none of them fit the lock. “Shoot,” he said. I looked at the flimsy wooden door, and then at Dustin. He grinned. “Really?”
“Come on,” I said. “I did your homework for you for a year. You owe me.”
He nodded solemnly. “You do have a point there.” Bracing one foot against the doorframe, he grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Muscles bulged under the soft fabric of his cornflower-blue T-shirt, and I remembered with a pang that I’d once had a major crush on the guy. Dustin might be a little dumb, but he was hot. The door creaked alarmingly, and with one final tug it came away from the frame with a splintering crack.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t think that would actually work. You’re really strong.”
Dustin blushed modestly. “It’s just, like, laminate,” he mumbled.
“We’re going to be in so much trouble,” I said, looking at the ruined lock.
“Nah,” he said. “Nobody comes in here. They won’t notice for years.”
Eagerly, I looked over his shoulder at the contents of the closet: a teetering stack of dusty cardboard boxes, piles of faded fabric, and, weirdly enough, a rusty old hoe. That was it. The entire historical archive of Flat Hill, Kansas.
“I guess this place was always a dump,” I said. Dustin pulled the top box off the stack, grunting with surprise at how heavy it was. I lifted the lid, revealing a stack of ancient yearbooks. The top one was dated 1967.
“Far out,” Dustin said, leafing through it. “Check out this dude’s hair.” He pointed to a blissed-out-looking hippie guy with shampoo-commercial-worthy blond waves past his shoulders.
“Totally not fair,” I said. I shoved the box aside and went for the next one while Dustin looked at old yearbooks. More yearbooks, a box of old newspapers—none of them dating back to the time of Baum’s article—a leather-bound book whose title, Tales of the Prairie, was embossed on the front in frilly letters. Nothing. My heart sank. The piles of fabric were old-fashioned aprons and a frayed blue banner with CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 1934 sewn on in bright red letters.
“I guess that’s it,” Dustin said in disappointment.
“There’s one more box,” I said. “Way at the back.”
“I don’t see it.”
I reached for the box and then yanked my hands back with a yelp. It had stung me. I popped a finger into my mouth, tasting blood. “There’s something sharp back there,” I said.
“I don’t even see what you’re trying to grab.”
I reached in again, more cautiously this time, and then I felt it, like a halo around the battered old box: the unmistakable buzz of magic. A thrill ran through me. I’d been right. There was something here—and someone had tried to hide it. Someone powerful enough to use magic in Kansas. Someone who’d been able to keep the truth about Dorothy a secret for over a century. Someone who had to be from Oz.
“Give me those dust cloths,” I said. Just as Dustin handed them to me, the library door swung open, and we both froze.
“I don’t see much cleaning happening in here,” Mr. Stone growled. Dustin’s eyes were huge.
“Oh, shit,” he mouthed.
FOURTEEN
“What’s going on in here?” Mr. Stone asked peevishly, stepping into the library. We were hidden by the shelves, but if he came any farther into the room he’d see us, and there was no way we could explain what we were doing going through a stack of old boxes next to a busted closet door. Dustin jumped up and headed for the door. Instinctively, I threw the old graduation banner over myself and the pile of boxes. My arm brushed up against the last box I’d found. It didn’t sting me this time; it burned. Like the feeling of metal cold enough to freeze to your skin and peel away the outer layer. And then the awful burning faded and a strange sensation crawled across my skin, like the chill you feel when you’ve been out in the snow too long.
Everything around me dimmed until the edges of the room were lost in dense, thickening shadow. Tendrils of darkness crept across the floor toward me. A slender, silvery form stepped out of the shadows and looked down at me. It was mostly hidden by the darkness, but I could make out swirling black robes and a pale, bald skull topped with a twisted iron crown.
So, it hissed. I heard its voice inside my head rather than out loud and clapped my hands over my ears in a futile attempt to shut it out. You have found what I have hidden, little witch. My congratulations.
I struggled to say something, but the creature’s magic had glued my mouth shut. Who are you? I thought desperately.
I could feel its smile cutting into my thoughts.
You’ll find out soon enough, little witch. You are strong and clever to have uncovered so easily what I had concealed so carefully. Your witches could not see what I had put away here so many years ago. Even your Dorothy could not find what once had been hers. But you found it without magic, as if it was calling to you. You are very strong indeed—perhaps even stronger than my other little friend.
What other little friend? Did it mean Dorothy?
We will see each other again, my dear. I am beginning to think you shall be quite useful to me. But now is not the time for explanations. Give my regards to your . . . friends.
A knife-sharp flash of pain stabbed into my skull and I cried out in agony. I could see Mombi, Gert, and Glamora, darkness swirling around them, looking up in fear and alarm. Nox, out on the prairie somewhere, staring upward as if he knew I was looking down at him, opening his mouth to say something. The creature laughed and flicked its fingers, and a roiling cloud of darkness descended on the four of them, erasing their faces from my mind.
Until next time, little witch. Watch your back. Not all your friends are trustworthy. And then it stepped back into the shadows and disappeared. I felt its magic loosen its grip on me and I slumped to the floor, tears of pain leaking from my eyes.
“. . . Amy? She’s in the bathroom,” Dustin was saying. “Everything’s cool here, Mr. Stone.”
The shop teacher grumbled something I didn’t catch and the library door swung closed again. “Phew,” Dustin sighed, his footsteps coming toward me. “That was, like, really clo—Amy? Where are you?”
“I’m right here,” I said thickly. My mouth tasted like ashes and dirt. With effort, I pushed away the graduation banner and sat up. Dustin was staring at me with his mouth open.
“How did you do that?” he breathed.
/> “Do what?”
“You just . . . you weren’t there,” he said. “Amy, you weren’t there. And then you were. You just, like, appeared. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, faking a sneeze. “I didn’t go anywhere, I hid under this dumb banner.” I was still stunned from the effects of the creature’s magic, but I had to convince Dustin he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. “It’s so dark back here, you just missed me. I totally thought I could hide under this thing, can you believe that?” I babbled. “Like a little kid playing hide-and-seek, ha-ha. So silly. Um, anyway, there’s another box in there.”
Dustin was still looking at me like—well, like I’d vanished and then reappeared out of thin air. But the fact that it wasn’t physically possible to vanish and reappear out of thin air was working in my favor. Whatever explanation he was coming up with for what he’d just seen, it definitely wasn’t “some kind of really scary mind-stabbing supernatural entity just walked out of the walls, made Amy briefly invisible in order to drop a bunch of vague sinister hints, and then disappeared.”
“What’s in it?” he asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. Wrapping my hands in the dust cloths, I gingerly lifted the box from the back of the closet. But whatever magic had been protecting it had disappeared with the mysterious visitor, and it felt like an ordinary box this time when I touched it. It was light and small, but something thumped inside it. I lifted the flaps, and breathlessly, we looked in.
There was nothing in the box but an old notebook. I took it out and flipped through the pages. Every one of them was blank. My heart sank as I stared at the book, turning the pages over and over again as if looking at them again would make words appear. A secret, a spell—heck, even a map to Dorothy’s shoes. Nothing. I wanted to cry. All this, and for what? I’d never find the stupid shoes, even if they existed. The witches and I were stuck in Kansas forever. Dorothy was going to destroy Oz, and we had no way to stop her.
“Amy, what’s wrong?”
“I was just hoping for an answer,” I said.. Whoever the mysterious visitor had been, it had been wasting its time protecting a blank book.
“We can keep looking, Amy,” Dustin said, anxious to cheer me up. “We can—I don’t know, Topeka probably has a library. I can drive you over there if you want as long as Mad doesn’t mind watching the baby. It’s no big—”
The library door swung open again and we both nearly jumped out of our skins. “Time’s up!” Mr. Stone bellowed. “Go home, you little miscreants.” Thankfully, he stomped off without bothering to check our work. I shoved the boxes back in the closet and covered them with the banner. At the last minute I shoved the notebook into my bag. Maybe I was trying to remind myself that my mission was more hopeless than finding a needle in a haystack. We locked the library door behind us and returned the keys and our vacuum to a sullen Mr. Stone.
“I can give you a ride home,” Dustin offered.
“Thanks,” I said.
I was silent in the car, leaning my head against the glass and looking out, trying to see some beauty in the dull gray sky and flat, dusty earth. I might as well get used to it, I thought. This time, I’m here for good.
FIFTEEN
My mom and Jake were sitting side by side on the couch when I got back to her apartment, holding hands and watching the news. When I walked in they jumped apart, blushing, like I’d just caught them doing something actually scandalous. I stifled a giggle.
“Honey!” my mom exclaimed. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so late. Where have you been?”
I was definitely not in the mood for conversation, but I’d already been enough of a jerk to my mom. I explained about detention, and she beamed at me. “What a mature decision to make, Amy. I’m so proud of you.” Even Jake was nodding. At least I’d done something right, even if it was for the wrong reasons.
That night, Jake cooked. He was so nice to my mom it was hard not to like him, against my better judgment. My mom had had a few boyfriends here and there—if “boyfriend” was the right word for the losers who hung around the trailer for a month or two, eating all our food and burping in front of the TV with a six-pack before disappearing again—and she had an unerring instinct for jerks, deadbeats, and creeps.
There was the guy who liked to follow me around when she wasn’t home, eyeing me in a way that made me start carrying pepper spray everywhere I went. Thankfully, he didn’t last long. There was the guy who “borrowed” a bunch of money from her and then vanished without paying her back. Amazingly, she was surprised. There was the guy I never saw sober. But Jake actually seemed nice. Maybe he even was nice, not just putting on a show until he got whatever it was he wanted. My mom turned off the TV, and we sat around her little card table and ate the casserole he’d made like we were an actual family. I kept waiting for him to say something mean to my mom, or stare at my boobs, or spout off something really sexist or racist or just gross, but he was actually . . . normal. I’d only been gone a month of my mom’s time, but it was like I had come home to a different planet.
“How was school today, Amy? It must be hard to adjust to being back after your—” He paused, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Accident,” he finished. I wondered how much my mom had told him about her theories about my disappearance. “It was fine,” I said politely. “I’m not as far behind as I thought I would be, actually. Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High isn’t exactly Harvard.” He laughed at my dumb joke as if I’d said something incredibly funny. My mom smiled as he asked me more questions about myself. What books did I like to read? What were my favorite movies? How about favorite foods? If he was trying this hard to impress me, he must be really into my mom. I was surprised by how happy I was for her. I needed him to be this good for after. For when I was gone again.
Jake even did the dishes after dinner—I offered, but he insisted. I told Jake and my mom that I was tired, although mostly I just wanted to give them some privacy—and be alone to think. No sooner had I shut my door than the air in front of me began to shimmer, and Mombi materialized. “Again?” I hissed. “I can’t exactly explain away a random old lady standing in my room if my mom comes in!”
“‘Old lady’ isn’t very polite, missy,” Mombi growled. “That’s ‘old witch’ to you. Anyway, I’m not really here. Gert, Glamora, and I are still hiding out in the Darklands. I’m just projecting to check in. You and I need to talk.”
“I thought your magic was too weak to just zip around like you’re on vacation,” I said. “Or are all bets off when it comes to spying on me?”
“I only spy because I care,” Mombi hissed. “Unlike some people who seem to have forgotten what they’re here for.”
“I haven’t forgotten a thing,” I snapped. “Now what’s going on?”
“We seem to be adjusting to being outside of Oz. Still a long way from shipshape, but at least we’re getting strong enough for a little astral projection.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to help,” I said dully. I sank down onto my bed and told her everything. About the newspaper article, breaking into the library closet, finding the mysterious box. When I got to the creature who’d dropped in on my and Dustin’s party, Mombi stopped me.
“Tell me this part again,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “What did you see?”
“Something tall and skinny. Black clothes. Bald. I think it had a crown.”
“And what did it say to you?”
I struggled to remember, but it was like trying to look through fog. “I can’t remember exactly. Something about how I’d found what it had hidden. I think it has to be the person who covered up the truth about Dorothy—that she was real, I mean.” I shuddered. “Dustin couldn’t see it.”
“He wouldn’t be able to,” Mombi said grimly. She stared off into space for a moment, rubbing her chin with one thumb. “It can’t be him,” she muttered. “Ozma thwarted him. Has he really been here all this time?”
“Who?” I asked. Mombi kept talkin
g to herself. “Mombi, who?”
She sighed and shook her head. “The Nome King,” she said. “I think what you saw was the Nome King. But if it was . . . we are in a mess of trouble indeed.”
“What’s a Nome King? It sounds like a kind of mushroom.”
Mombi snorted. “Who, not what,” she said. “Who. The Nome King is a king of the Nomes,” she said. “That’s nome with an n not a g, mind you. Don’t screw it up. He gets very prissy about the spelling. He pulled one of his diggers limb from limb while he was still alive just because he pronounced it with a g.”
I swallowed. That fit pretty well with the creepy dude who’d magically dropped in on me in the library. My interest in meeting up with him again was at—well, let’s say an all-time low. “Diggers? He digs stuff? What is he, like some kind of a troll? Don’t they live in mountains?”
Mombi gave an exasperated sigh. “All that time Glamora spent teaching you the difference between a scone and a crumpet, and no one ever bothered to teach you about the Nome King. Typical.”
“Well, don’t blame me,” I said.
Mombi spoke through gritted teeth like it hurt her to have to explain something so elementary. “A troll is a big, stupid monster. You bop it hard enough over the head—no more troll. A troll is easy-peasy. A Nome is more like a cross between a fairy and a demon. Nasty things. They live in the underworld of Ev, across the Deadly Desert.”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“Frankly, it’s not much to write home about,” Mombi said. “The point is, the Nome King tried to invade Oz, ages ago, but Ozma stopped him. Made him swear an oath to leave Oz in peace as long as she ruled . . .” Mombi trailed off and looked at me as she let it sink in.
“Ozma isn’t in power anymore,” I said. “Congratulations, teacher’s pet.” I ignored her witchy sneer. “But if he’s trying to invade Oz, what’s he doing here?”