Dorothy Must Die

Chapter Twenty-Three

A screeching sound woke me in the middle of the night. When I opened my eyes, still groggy, I saw it. A bat.

It was zigzagging around my room, wings flapping, howling with a voice that was ten times bigger than its body.

I knew what it meant. It was a signal. It wanted me to follow it.

When I got to the war room a few minutes later, everyone else was already there, dressed for battle and clustered around Glamora’s scrying pool. Melindra and Annabel had grim looks on their faces. In other words, some things were the same as ever.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The Lion’s moving faster than we thought,” Gert said. “It’s time to go.”

Glamora pointed to the pool, where the shadowy image of an enormous lion breaking through the door of a small thatched house appeared. It was too dark to really make him out, but he didn’t look so cowardly to me. He looked mean—and hungry.

Behind him, I could see other silhouettes. The bumpy outlines of some kind of reptile, and a furry blur that looked like it might be some kind of enormous rodent.

“The Lion spent so long afraid of every creature in the forest. Now he commands them,” Nox whispered.

“What are those things?”

“You name it. If it has claws and teeth and it drools, it probably answers to the Lion.” I felt myself shiver as my imagination filled in the blanks.

“What are they doing?” I asked quietly, fighting back the irrational fear that he could hear me.

“What they do best,” Glamora replied. “Going door-to-door. Some of the villagers he’ll capture to bring back to Dorothy; the rest of them he’ll kill. For fun. After he eats, of course.” She trailed her fingers through the water, and the image disappeared in a swirl of red. “It’s too late for this village—it’s already lost. But he’ll be on to the next one soon, and if we act fast we can stop him before he gets there.”

“Not to mention get to us,” Nox said.

“Exactly,” Mombi interjected. “He’s less than a hundred miles from us. If he gets any closer, we run the risk that his senses will be able to see past the magical barriers that keep us hidden here.” She looked at me. “I hope what I saw yesterday wasn’t a fluke, Amy. This isn’t a test anymore.”

“Mombi,” Nox said, cutting in. “Please. Think about it. Amy should stay behind. We can’t risk her on something like this. It’s too dangerous.”

Mombi dismissed him with a wave of her gnarled hand. “We’ve already been through this, Nox. I wouldn’t expect you, of all people, to let your feelings get in the way of what must be done. We need all the strength we can muster tonight.”

“If we can’t count on Amy now, when all the rest of us will be there, she won’t be much good alone against Dorothy anyway,” Melindra added, shooting a sidelong glance in my direction.

I was annoyed. They were talking about me like I wasn’t even there. And why was Nox trying to prevent me from going? Didn’t he think I’d improved? “I’m going,” I said coolly, all heads turning in my direction. “Melindra’s right. And I’m a member of the Order now. I’m not just going to hide out here while everyone else fights.”

Nox’s forehead creased in frustration, but he let it drop. It was settled.

Mombi, Gert, and Glamora left the war room to make the final preparations. I was about to leave when Nox pulled me aside. “Here,” he said, pushing something hard into my hand.

I turned the object over in my palm. It was a knife, but it wasn’t only a knife. I could tell it was special just by the way it felt. It was heavy, heavier than it looked, and it was almost vibrating with something that I now recognized immediately as magic.

I didn’t want to like it. I didn’t want to like anything that Nox gave me. But I couldn’t help it: the knife was too beautiful. It was nothing like the kitchen knife that Pete had given me. It had a glinting silver blade with mysterious symbols engraved into it. The hilt was smooth and white, and was intricately carved into the figure of a bird with wings outstretched, ready to take flight.

“I carved it by hand from a Kalidah’s bones,” he said, looking down to avoid meeting my eyes. “The blade’s made from the claw. Gert spelled it and Mombi sealed it. It’s designed to channel your magic for you—to store it and make it easier to access. Not so different from Dorothy’s magic shoes, really. Except, hopefully, you know, not totally evil.”

I rubbed my fingers over Nox’s handiwork. It must have taken hours. I knew that he’d done it for the cause, so that I could be a better fighter. But it was still a gift and it was still beautiful.

“It will protect you,” he said. “And there’s another spell attached to it, too—push the wings down.”

The wings didn’t look like they would move, but when I pressed gingerly on them, they ceded easily to my touch and folded up neatly against the side of the bird’s body. As they did, the knife sparkled in my hand and then evaporated into smoke that drifted off into the air.

“Where’d it go?” I asked.

“It’s still with you,” Nox said. “Just not anywhere someone else can find it. Now picture it in your hand again.”

I looked down at my empty, open palm and imagined I was clutching the weapon. Its image entered my mind, and as it did, I was holding it again.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. I wrapped my fingers gently around the hilt. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had given me anything, and this was something that Nox had made just for me. Something magic. I felt my spirit lift inside myself. The corners of my mouth threatened to turn upward, but I didn’t want him to see how happy the present had made me. “What kind of bird is this?” I asked. It didn’t look like any bird I’d seen before.

“It’s a Magril—a bird that’s native to Gillikin Country. It spends half its life as a beetle, and when it’s an adult, it goes to sleep for a year and wakes up as this majestic creature.”

“Kind of like a butterfly.”

“Kind of like you,” he said. I didn’t have an answer to that.

I didn’t need one. At that moment, Mombi appeared before us. She looked down at the knife and up at me, and then Nox.

“It’s time to go,” she said.

We all gathered a few minutes later in the training room—me, Nox, Gert, and Mombi—and held hands. Glamora would be staying behind, along with Melindra and Annabel.

Melindra complained about being left behind—she wasn’t the type to want to miss out on any action—but she seemed placated when Mombi reminded her that it was important that our most skilled fighter guard the headquarters in case it was a trap. Melindra didn’t look happy about it, but she knew better than to argue with Mombi.

I felt myself envying her. Now that it was time to go, I suddenly wondered if I should have been so eager to fight.

But it was too late to think about that. In the training area, we all stood in a circle, all of us chanting at once as we worked together to cast the spell that would take us to the village.

Glamora took a step back, still chanting, and stepped out of the circle, followed by Annabel and Melindra. We all joined hands.

Nox looked over at me. “Hold on,” he warned me with a sly, nervous grin.

He squeezed tight.

I felt an invisible force start to lift me, then it yanked me upward like a bullet, and we shot straight up.

I screamed and closed my eyes, knowing I was about to be smushed like a bug against the roof of the cave.

Instead, I felt wind on my face. I opened my eyes and found that my body was horizontal, my arms strained to their limits as I held on to Nox. Everyone else still had their eyes closed, their mouths forming the same chant over and over and over, and we were all fanned out like skydivers in formation, the mountain below us, hurtling out of sight.

We were flying.

It was the most incredible feeling I’d ever had. The sensation of free-falling made me giddy and light-headed, like I was a balloon and my insides were helium. I laughed, almost forgetting that I, Salvation Amy, was on my way to battle the Not-So-Cowardly Lion and his army of monsters. How could my stomach tie itself into knots about what was coming when I was busy tumbling into the sky?

“It never gets old,” Nox said, opening his eyes. “In case you were wondering.”

His normally spiky hair was flattened against his head by the wind, but for some reason his voice came out normal, like we were still standing right next to each other in the training room.

“You could have warned me,” I said. “I thought we were going to teleport.”

“It takes too much energy to teleport this many people,” he said. “By the time we got there, we’d all be ready to pass out from exhaustion. This is more efficient. Plus, it’s fun.”

“Won’t they see us coming?”

“Nope,” Nox said. “We’re traveling in the Space Between Space. They can’t see us if we’re not really here. It’s how we passed through the mountain.”

“Oh,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about.

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

“Should we still be chanting?” I asked nervously, seeing that both Mombi and Gert still had their eyes squeezed tight.

“Nah,” he said. “The takeoff is the hard part. Now that we’re on our way, it only takes Gert to keep us in the air.”

“What’s Mombi doing then?” I asked.

Nox wiggled his eyebrows and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Mombi’s afraid of heights,” he said. “She’s not casting a spell. She’s saying her prayers.”

“Who exactly do wicked witches pray to?”

Nox laughed. “Who knows? She’s just trying to stay distracted so she doesn’t piss herself before we land.”

Our ascent had slowed down by now and we floated easily through the air, a mist of lavender clouds hovering just inches above our heads. In the distance, the sun was rising over the Deadly Desert. Instead of looking down, I looked at Nox as he took in the landscape.

Seeing him like this, away from the caves, away from the cause, I could almost see the boy he could have been. The boy he would have been if Dorothy had never come back. He looked happy. He looked beautiful.

Then he turned dark again. “Almost here,” he said. I followed his gaze and saw thick, black smoke rising up from a forested area at the foot of a mountain range, curling into the sky.

“Get ready,” Gert said, not opening her eyes. “We’re coming in for a landing.”

The knot in my stomach tied itself right back up as our velocity reversed itself and we hurtled for the ground, picking up speed.

But her warning was unnecessary. We landed like feathers in a field on the outskirts of what must have been Pumperdink. It was on fire, its small, dome-shaped houses consumed with flames as panicked townspeople raced in every direction.

The smell filled my nostrils and stayed there, churning. It was disgusting—a horrible combination of smoke and blood and burning flesh and other things, I’m sure, that I didn’t even want to know about.

As I looked around, unsure what to do next, I saw something moving above me. Monkeys—they were weaving through the burning sky. The almost humanlike way in which they swooped and dove into the chaos made me shiver.

“Mombi and I will take down the beasts left in this village and save as many of the children as we can,” Gert said, turning back to me and Nox. “Amy, you go with Nox to find the Lion. Send a summoning spell when you’ve got him in your sights. Don’t try to defeat him yourselves—he’s too powerful for either of you to take on without us.”

Nox nodded and Mombi and Gert disappeared.

He balled his hand into a fist, and when he opened it he was holding a glowing ball of blue flame, which he blew on gently. It spun from his hand and hovered a few inches in the air. Nox blew on it again—it circled lazily around us, then darted back and forth for a few seconds before zinging off in the opposite direction of the village, leaving a trail of blue energy in its wake.

Nox jerked his head wordlessly toward the forest on the other side of the field. I pulled the knife he had given me out of the air, like he’d taught me to do, and his eyes met mine. The rest of his face was stony and emotionless, but his eyes were flashing with something else that I couldn’t place. Pride, maybe? They seemed to be saying, See? This is it. This is what I told you about.

I nodded, hoping he knew that I understood. And we went racing off, chasing the light.

It got darker as we went farther into the trees, until finally the only illumination was the dim light from the tracing charm that was leading us. But my training served me well now, and my feet nimbly avoided every obstacle as if I’d run down this path a thousand times.

After a few minutes, we heard a roar in the distance. Nox put a finger to his lips and slowed down until we reached the edge of a clearing.

“Stay back,” Nox whispered. “They won’t notice us yet if we’re careful.”

The clearing was crowded with animals, some I recognized and others I didn’t. There were foxes and crocodiles and wolves and tigers and bears. A few were walking around on their hind legs, while others were pacing on all fours. It was a nightmare zoo—a menagerie of wild mutated animals of every size and shape. These were the Lion’s beasts.

Did the Lion command every animal in Oz, or did they have a say in the matter? I wondered, thinking of Star. If anyone was stubborn enough to show a little backbone, it was my pet rat. With any luck, Pete was keeping her nice and safe, but if she ever had the bad luck to meet this guy I hoped she would give him a good, hard bite.

The beasts had surrounded a group of Gillikin people, who were lined up neatly in the middle of the clearing like they were waiting for something.

Or maybe like something was waiting for them: at the front of the line, I saw the Lion himself for the first time in the flesh. He had been a vague, hazy shadow in Glamora’s scrying pool, but now, in person, I realized exactly how terrifying he really was.

Really, he was barely recognizable as a lion at all. He looked like a monster, like some warped nightmare version of the king of the jungle. He was huge and golden, with bulging, grotesque muscles and a filthy, snarled mane. His lips were curled back, baring a mouth crowded with sharp, long, crooked fangs.

“Is that what he’s always looked like?” I asked under my breath. Nox just shook his head and signaled for me to keep watching.

There were about ten townspeople in line. At the front of it, a trembling man with a top hat and a purple beard stumbled forward to where the Lion stood. He clasped his hands in front of him, and I could tell that he was pleading with his captor, but they spoke too quietly for me to hear what he was saying. I snapped my fingers, casting a listening spell. As I did it, I felt energy flowing out of my knife and into my body. The knife made magic so much easier.

“We’ve given you everything that you asked for,” the man was saying. “We have nothing left. Please, just leave us alone. We’re Dorothy’s loyal subjects. We’ll help you in any way we can.”

“There’s still plenty you can give me, Mr. Mayor,” the Lion said. He widened his jaw lazily, almost like he was yawning. Thick ropes of drool rolled down his chin as he leaned forward on his haunches. The mayor levitated a few inches off the ground to meet him.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. At first it looked like the Lion and the man were kissing. But they weren’t—their mouths were inches apart, not quite touching. The man looked like he was struggling, but then his mouth fell open, too, as his face contorted in pain and something that looked like red smoke came spewing violently out of him. I couldn’t tell whether it was vomit, or blood, or something worse. Whatever it was, the Lion lapped it up hungrily.

“What’s he doing?” I asked in horror, gripping Nox’s arm.

“The Lion eats the fear of others,” Nox explained in a whisper. “It’s how he survives. How he gets stronger.”

As if proving Nox’s point, the Lion’s muscles rippled and bulged. He was changing. He was growing.

The man was changing, too—his beard went from purple to gray in a matter of seconds. His rounded cheeks turned gaunt as the Lion finished and dropped him to the ground. The mayor gasped for air, suddenly old and frail, but smiling, too. I realized I understood why. He wasn’t scared anymore.

“Hopefully you won’t ever have to face him,” Nox said. “But if you do, try not to be afraid.”

Not exactly possible, I thought, looking at the smiling old mayor.

“What will happen to the mayor now? Will they let them go?”

Nox just shook his head sadly.

As we watched, a hyena and a giant rabbit, who was probably as tall as I was, grabbed another victim from the line and led him forward to their leader. The rabbit seemed to be the Lion’s second in command. He was on his hind legs just like the Lion. He had sharp buckteeth and giant, watery, bloodshot eyes. The hyena, also walking on two legs, was every bit as creepy. He looked nervous, jumping at every sound in the woods around him while he assisted the rabbit. And there were a lot of sounds to react to with a zoo of animals behind them.

“We have to stop them,” I whispered to Nox.

He shook his head. “Not alone. I’ll call Mombi. There’s no way to do it without blowing our cover though, so be ready.” I took a deep breath and prepared myself as he conjured another ball of light from his hand and sent the flare spinning out into the darkness. This was it.

The orb went whizzing into the trees, and as it did, a wolf lurking on the edge of the crowd pricked up his ears, jerked his head up, and let out a howl, his quick eyes darting from the ball of light straight over to its source.

That source being me and Nox.

The Lion looked up from his second victim, trying to find the cause of the commotion. With a wave of his arm, he released his beasts like a violent tide that came right toward us. I had seen a few members of the Tin Woodman’s guard. They were eerily organized and obedient. But the Lion’s army was different—they were wild and disorganized, each one of them operating on its own.

The wolf sped ahead of the pack in a gallop. Nox stepped forward and, in one swift motion, pulled out the sword he’d had strapped to his back, meeting the wolf with a gut-opening slice.

And then we were surrounded. Nox ducked and feinted and swung, flames trailing behind him, but every enemy he sent flailing to the ground was replaced by another.

I couldn’t help Nox, and Nox couldn’t help me. A group of winged monkeys had descended from unseen perches in the trees and were now spinning around me like furry little gymnasts, clawing and snapping with pointy little fangs. They were quicker than I was; even when I used my magic to dodge out of their way they seemed to know my movements before I knew them myself.

Don’t be afraid, I reminded myself. I lunged, pulling my knife through the air, trying to be fearless.

One was bigger than the rest, and more vicious-looking, too. He flew right for me, claws outstretched.

I raised my knife, ready to fight, but then I hesitated, remembering what Indigo and Ollie had told me: that the winged monkeys were under Dorothy’s control. No matter how horrible they seemed now, they weren’t attacking me because they wanted to. They were doing it because they had to.

My split second of sympathy cost me. The monkey wrapped his hands around my neck and his legs around my waist. He was stronger than he looked, and I struggled to disentangle myself as he squeezed my throat tighter and tighter, chattering maniacally, his rancid sour-milk breath hot against my cheeks. I gasped for air, feeling myself grow dizzy.

Nox got to the monkey just in time, wrenching him from me just as I was about to pass out. He snapped the monkey’s neck before tossing him to the ground.

“Why did you do that?” I cried. “If you clip their wings they won’t be enchanted. They won’t serve Dorothy.”

Nox looked at me like I was insane. “Amy,” he said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a war. Now’s not the time to start worrying about the plight of the poor monkeys.”

I looked at the dead monkey on the ground, its wings now folded over him like a pathetic blanket. There wasn’t time to dwell on it, though. The rest of the monkeys had closed in on us. We were surrounded. But I pulled out my knife, hoping I could defend myself with as little collateral damage as possible.

I wielded my blade almost instinctively as the next monkey sprung at me, striking him in the chest. He screamed, collapsing. I couldn’t tell if he was dead. I hoped not, but there was no way to find out: another one was on me already.

This one got close enough to swipe at my stomach before I managed to take him down. He slid to the ground in a heap of fur and feathers. They kept on coming, but Nox and I were a good team: we made quick work of them. Some writhed in pain, others seemed to give up immediately, almost like death was a relief.

As the bodies piled up around us, I realized Nox was right. It was them or us.

I looked up to find another wave of beasts descending on us—this time a group of giant crocodiles lumbering toward us with swords and spears. I remembered the bumpy shadows in the scrying pond, lurking behind the Lion. They were even worse in the light: slimy green skin. Triple rows of teeth exposed and ready. They were slower than the monkeys, but more massive. I didn’t know how my knife could penetrate their thick reptilian skin.

“You ready?” Nox asked. He whirled around into a crouch, his back pressed against mine, and we prepared to fend the attackers off.

“I’m ready,” I said, ignoring all the blood and the pain in my left arm from where the monkey who’d tried to strangle me had bitten down with his sharp little teeth.

Then everything stopped.

The hyena dropped to the ground, and a split second later the rabbit did the same. What the hell? Were they dead? I looked around.

They were frozen. Every beast, every creature of the forest—all frozen, as if someone had pushed a giant pause button. But how?

I looked immediately to the Lion. Had he done this?

But he seemed as surprised as Nox and I were, dropping the girl whose fear he’d been feasting on into a heap on the ground and looking up. During the fight, he’d been happy to let his henchmen take care of business while he enjoyed his dinner, but now he was interested.

This isn’t good, I thought, nervously shifting my grip on my blade. Whatever spell had just frozen all our other enemies didn’t seem to have any effect on the Lion himself.

And I still had no idea who had cast it.

The Lion rose up on his legs in a fury, and roared into the sky.

Then I understood. I could feel her coming, could feel the warmth of her energy suffusing my body. It was Gert.