Yellow Brick War, Page 2

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  “We’ve been trying to defeat Dorothy by fighting one battle at a time, but that’s like trying to put out a forest fire by hauling water in a bucket,” Mombi said. “The Order has been scattered across Oz. Half the soldiers you trained with back in the caverns are dead. Others . . .” She shrugged. “We know where some of them are, but we’re too spread out to do any good anymore. What we did out there”—she waved vaguely at the ruins of the place where I’d lived since my mom slid into her downward spiral of addiction—“was make Nox into one of us. The Wicked Witch of the East, essentially.”

  “By restoring the Quadrant, we’re finally strong enough to kill Dorothy,” Glamora said. “We had all our hopes pinned on you—”

  “But I can’t kill Dorothy,” I said slowly. “Because we’re linked somehow. So you have to do it yourselves.”

  Mombi nodded.

  “Not to mention the fact that Dorothy just teleported herself back to Oz and we’re stuck here.”

  Mombi nodded again.

  I sighed and put my head in my hands. I was getting really sick of witches. “If you knew all along that you could make Nox into one of you, why didn’t you do it sooner? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because once Nox is bound to the Quadrant, he’s in for life,” Gert said. “There’s no hope for him to ever be anything else. We didn’t tell you—he didn’t tell you—because we hoped it would never come to this. We’re older than you can imagine, Amy, and for us the sacrifice is—well, it’s done. There’s no going back for any of us. But this is a terrible fate to wish on someone as young as Nox.”

  “He can never live a normal life,” Glamora said quietly. “Like us, he’s responsible now for the future of Oz. He can never have a family. Grow old like an ordinary person.”

  “Fall in love,” Mombi added, with a significant look at me.

  “He can fall in love,” Gert corrected. “He just can’t do anything about it.” She paused. “Of course you still have a place with us, if you want it. But we’re in Kansas, Amy. We’ll find a way to get back to Oz. And once we’re there, we can defeat Dorothy without you. You can go home.”

  Home. I could go home. It struck me suddenly that I was in Kansas—and I could stay here.

  Home was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I didn’t know what Oz was to me anymore. When I first got there, I had thought it was a place where I could finally belong. A place where I had found friends. Then it had become something else entirely.

  But had Kansas ever been home either? What was I going to go back to? My mom was gone—who knew if she was even alive. I hadn’t exactly been Miss Popularity at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High. The trailer where I’d lived with my mom wasn’t a place I ever wanted to see again—and even if I did, it was long gone. Home might not be Oz, but it sure wasn’t the empty, ruined landscape outside the tent the witches had conjured up. And I’d been through so much in Oz, seen so much, that I couldn’t even imagine going back to a normal life. I’d learned how to do things I hadn’t even known were possible in a completely new world I hadn’t known was real. I’d battled some of the most terrifying enemies imaginable. I’d flown with monkeys, hung out with royalty, killed Dorothy’s baddest minions. What was I going to do next, get a job at the mall?

  “It’s up to you, Amy,” Gert said, reading my mind again and pulling me back into the moment. “You don’t have to decide right now. But you do need to decide if you want to help us get back to Oz.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “So we’re not stuck here forever? What’s your plan?”

  Gert sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “Even with Nox as part of the circle now, we’re not powerful enough to open a portal back to Oz. The Wizard was only able to do it because he had the magical gifts he’d given to the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Woodman.” I tried not to think about that last, awful glimpse of the Wizard exploding into blood confetti as Dorothy twisted his spell. “But we do have an idea.”

  Of course they did—yet another top-secret plan they only decided to clue me in on when they felt like it? I sighed, and Gert gave me a sympathetic smile. “Okay, let’s hear it,” I said, settling back into a pile of Glamora’s cushions. They even smelled heavenly—like the way the makeup counter at a mall smells, kind of glamorous and relaxing all at once.

  “You remember Dorothy’s shoes,” Glamora began.

  “Yeah, not likely to forget those,” I said.

  “Not the shoes she has now,” Gert said. “Dorothy’s original shoes.”

  I stared at them. “Wait, what do you mean her original shoes? Like, the ‘no place like home’ ones? Those are real, too?” I almost started laughing. What was I thinking? Of course they were real. If Oz was real, why not Dorothy’s magic silver shoes?

  “The first time Dorothy came to Oz,” Glamora explained, “she didn’t want to stay for good.”

  “If only she’d never returned,” Gert sighed.

  “My sister, Glinda, sent her home with a pair of enchanted silver shoes—the predecessors to the pair that brought her back here a second time. Dorothy always assumed they’d been lost when she crossed the Deadly Desert, and though she tried to find them again, she was never able to.” I wasn’t sure how to explain to Glamora that all this Ozian history was a series of classic books—not to mention a hit movie—in Kansas, so I didn’t bother trying. “But what if the shoes are still here?”

  “Here, like Kansas?”

  “She means here here,” Mombi said. “Where Dorothy’s farm used to be.”

  “Dorothy’s farm used to be in Dusty Acres?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Glamora said. “Dorothy’s farm used to be in the exact spot where your school is sitting right now.”

  “High school,” Gert prompted. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “Barbaric system, really. Oz’s method of apprenticeship is vastly superior.”

  Were they serious? Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High had somehow been sheltering the long-lost magic silver shoes of Oz this whole time? It was almost too much. If only Madison Pendleton had known that when she’d done her book report on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Not that she’d have needed anything extra to get her A+. Everybody loved Madison already. Everyone, that is, except for me. “How do you even know the shoes are still magic?” I asked. “What if they don’t work anymore? What if they only go one way, from Oz back to the Other—um, back to Kansas?”

  Mombi sighed. “You’re right. It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot we have. We have to take the chance.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so you guys find the shoes. Then what?”

  “Amy,” Glamora said, “we’re not going to find the shoes. If you agree to help us, you are.”

  “But I don’t understand how,” I argued. “I mean, my magic doesn’t work here any better than yours does. Why can’t you find them without me?”

  “Because they’re in your high school,” Gert said. “It would look a little funny if three old ladies and a teenage boy showed up for class in the middle of the school year, don’t you think? Consider it an undercover mission.” She beamed. “To tell you the truth, you’re our only hope at this point. If you want to help us get back to Oz, you have to go back to high school.”

  THREE

  “No,” I said. “No way. Absolutely, positively, no way in hell am I going back to high school. I didn’t even want to come back to Kansas.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Mombi said.

  “Well, I do. I am not a member of the Quadrant.”

  “Amy,” Gert said gently. “We still need you.”

  “Why don’t you just glamour yourselves?” I said, exasperated. I wanted to help them—at the very least, it would distract me from the decision I had to make. But I sure didn’t want to help them like this.

  “Amy, you’ve already realized how difficult it is for us to use magic here,” Glamora said. “We’re close to where the W
izard opened the portal, so we still have some connection to Oz. But the farther we get away from Dusty Acres, the weaker we’ll probably be. We simply don’t know what effect Kansas will have on our power, and we can’t risk a long-term glamour spell.”

  “You don’t need me. You can send Nox,” I said. “He can be—he can be a foreign exchange student. From, uh, France.”

  Glamora cocked her head at me quizzically. “From what?”

  “It’s like a—uh, it’s like Quadling Country,” I said. “But with baguettes.” The witches stared at me blankly, and the stupidity of my own idea hit me. Right. A foreign exchange student with no papers, no parents, and no passport. A foreign exchange student who had never even heard of the country he was supposedly from. Nox would last about five minutes at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High, dreamboat hair or no dreamboat hair.

  I didn’t want to admit it any more than Mombi did, but the witches were right. Whether or not I wanted to go back to Oz myself, they didn’t have a chance of finding the shoes without me. And unless I could come up with a better plan—not that theirs was much of one—the shoes were the only chance they had.

  “I can’t even get extra credit for learning magic,” I muttered. “How long have I been in Oz anyway? Everyone in Kansas probably thinks I’m dead.”

  “You know time works differently here than it does in Oz,” Gert said. “As far as we can figure out, about a month of your time has passed while you were in Oz.”

  Only a month? The idea was crazy. So much had happened to me, so much time had passed. I didn’t even feel like the same person anymore. The Amy Gumm who’d lived here was a total stranger. I didn’t belong here anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.

  “You’ll have to find them fast,” Mombi added. “There’s no telling what damage Dorothy will be able to do in Oz. We have to get back as soon as we can.”

  “I haven’t even said I’ll help!” I said angrily, but I knew Mombi was right. Yet again it was up to me. “Fine. I’ll find the stupid shoes. So where am I supposed to live while I’m repeating senior year?”

  “Oh,” Glamora said cheerfully, “that part at least is easy. We found your mom.”

  My mom. Just the word brought back a flood of memories, most of them bad. I’d just been dumped back in Kansas, watched Nox take a place among the witches that they hadn’t even considered me for despite how hard I’d worked, and I had no idea if it was possible to return to Oz—or if I even wanted to. And now I was going to have to stay with the woman who’d abandoned me to party with her friends while a tornado descended on our house? It was too much.

  “I need a minute,” I mumbled, and ducked out of the tent. The air was still and cool; overhead, clouds moved quickly across the stars as if a storm was on its way. Like we needed any more of those. One tornado per lifetime had been way more than enough.

  I couldn’t help but wonder: What if, that afternoon in the trailer, my mom had decided just that once to take care of me? To drive me to safety—somewhere both of us could ride out the storm together? What if she had finally done the right thing? Was what I’d gained in Oz—strength, power, respect, self-reliance—worth what I’d lost? Without Nox, what did I even have to go back for? Being with him was the closest I’d come to happiness in Oz, but if his duties to the witches meant we could never even try to have a relationship, I didn’t relish the idea of returning to Oz just to be the Quadrant’s servant.

  I wondered what would have happened if my mom had kept me safe and I’d never been airlifted into Oz at all. I knew that somewhere inside the mom who’d abandoned me that day was the mom who’d once loved me as though I was the greatest treasure in her life. But Kansas had a way of stripping the good out of anything, like the harsh prairie winds that peeled pretty paint from siding until all the houses were the same peeling, hopeless gray. And who was I kidding—my life here, in Kansas, had basically been hell.

  After my dad bailed, I’d watched my mom’s downward spiral: slow at first, circling the drain faster and faster as pills and booze took away anything that resembled the happy, cheerful, loving mom I’d once known. By the time the tornado picked me up out of Dusty Acres, my mom was a couch-hugging wreck who only got up long enough to stagger down to the nearest bar with her best friend, Tawny. And the day the tornado had hit she’d cussed me out for getting suspended—as if über-pregnant tyrant Madison Pendleton’s picking a fight with me had been my fault—before abandoning me to the mercy of the storm in order to hit up a tornado party. I remembered what she’d looked like the last time I’d seen her: caked in drugstore makeup, her cheap skirt not much longer than a belt, her boobs racked up to her chin with a push-up bra. Trashy, bitchy, angry, and mean: like a trailer-park version of the Seven Dwarfs. I could’ve died, easily, because she’d left me that day. And now I was supposed to go back to her? To pretend everything was fine? The witches had asked a lot from me during my time in Oz, but this was something else.

  “Amy?” It was Nox. I could barely make out his silhouette where he perched on a crumbling cement foundation. Somehow, he was the person I most and least wanted to see at the same time. What comfort was he going to be to me now? He’d made his choice. We could never be together. “Amy, I’m really sorry,” he said. I hesitated, and then sat down next to him. He put an arm around me, and I flinched. Hastily, he pulled away.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “Why did you even let me hope we could—” I broke off, grateful he couldn’t see my cheeks flush in the dark. I was sixteen and I’d only known him for—well, for a month, apparently. It’s not like we were engaged, I thought bitterly. Except it had felt like so much more than that. I guess Oz did that. Made everything feel larger than life.

  The edges of the sky were turning purple, suggesting that sunrise wasn’t far off. I couldn’t help myself—in spite of all my hurt and anger, I looked up. Kansas didn’t have much to offer, but the night sky was something else. The clouds had cleared, and the entire length of the Milky Way spilled across the heavens, blazing with stars. When my dad was around, he’d take me out at night sometimes with a pair of binoculars and point out all the constellations. I could still remember some of them—a lot better than I remembered my dad.

  Nox and I were sitting literally on top of where my old trailer had been before the fateful tornado that picked me up and dragged me out of the only world I’d ever known. Being back here was unthinkable. But the Milky Way made me feel for the first time that maybe I had a home here, too. I hadn’t missed anything about my world, but seeing the constellations overhead made me reconsider. And if I couldn’t be with Nox in Oz, the list of reasons to return had just gotten a lot shorter.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nox said again. “It’s not how I wanted this—” He took a deep breath and started again. “Look, it’s normal to have feelings for someone in the heat of battle. Emotions are intense. It’s happened before.”

  Right—how could I forget. Melindra, the half-tin girl I’d trained with when I first came to Oz. She had wasted no time in telling me that she and Nox had been an item. When he took me to the top of Mount Gillikin to see the sprawling, beautiful landscape of Oz and told me I was special, it was the same routine he’d used on her. Now his words stung like crazy. How many girls had he shown that view? How many girls had fallen for his sad orphan shtick? Nox was straight out of Central Casting: Tortured Revolutionary Dreamboat—Are You the Girl Who’ll Finally Capture His Wounded Heart?

  “Oh, great,” I snapped. “So I don’t mean anything to you.”

  “Will you let me finish, Amy?” Now he sounded exasperated. “I knew you were different—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. From the very beginning. I haven’t had a lot of family in my life,” he added quietly. “Gert, Mombi, Glamora—as bad as they can be, they were all I had. Until you came along. I didn’t tell you because I knew they could call me in at any minute and I’d have to leave yet another thing I cared about. I guess I was dumb enough to think that ignoring the possibility
would make it go away. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “Can’t I help you? Can’t I become part of the circle somehow, too?”

  “Amy, I don’t think you can handle Oz’s magic much longer,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked angrily. “You think I can’t handle myself? Why do you just do everything they tell you?” A sudden thought hit me. “You’re jealous,” I said. “You’re jealous of my power, and the fact that I could be strong enough to take down Dorothy. You know you need me and you don’t want to admit it—because that would be telling the Order that brave, perfect Nox can’t do it all on his own.”

  “Listen to yourself, Amy,” he said quietly. “You accused me of doing the same thing when we first met. Remember?”

  I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. The night when I was still training with the Wicked. When Gert had first provoked me into using magic, and I’d gotten so angry I couldn’t even think. Nox had whisked me away to show me the stars and calm me down. I’d yelled at him for always doing what the Order told him without thinking, and he’d told me how Dorothy and Glinda had killed his family and destroyed his village. He’d opened up to me for the first time, and I’d seen the depths of what haunted him. Of what Dorothy had taken from him. Compared to Nox, I’d lost hardly anything at all. And now here we were again, under a different set of stars, having the same fight.

  “I remember,” I said. “But everything was different then.” Everything was simpler, I wanted to add.

  “Do you really think I’m jealous of you?” Nox said. “How could I be? I’ve seen what Oz’s magic is doing to you. It’s tearing you apart. I can’t let that happen to you. I won’t. You know you can’t kill Dorothy. You’re bound to her somehow. And we know Dorothy has been hopelessly corrupted by Oz’s magic—and probably the Wizard, too. When he first came to Oz, he wasn’t evil—just bumbling. Every time you try to use your power you turn into a monster. If Oz’s magic doesn’t twist you into something unrecognizable, it’ll—” He stopped short.