The Wicked Will Rise

NINETEEN


“We need to get out of here,” I told Nox. After leaving Ozma in the room Polychrome had given us—this whole huge castle, and that dumb fairy couldn’t even give me my own room!—I hadn’t been able to sleep, and so I had gone to find Nox. Now he was leaning against the wall in thought, staring out the window at the rainbows that swirled outside in the dark, and I was sitting on the edge of his bed as I related everything that had just happened.

“Get out of here and go where?” he asked.

“Back to the jungle to find Mombi,” I said. “Or to find Glamora. I don’t know. Anywhere.”

“Well that sounds like a plan.” Nox shifted his weight and crossed his arms at his chest. There was something else bugging him.

“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Nox took his time answering. “Why didn’t you want me in there with you?” he finally asked. “What were you telling her that you couldn’t tell me?”

“I . . .” I started. “I don’t know. Nothing. It’s just . . .”

“That you still don’t trust me? Even now?”

At first I was hurt, and then I was angry. “Of course I trust you,” I said. “I want to trust you. And I do. But there’s only so much trust in a place like this, and I didn’t come here to find a boyfriend. So get over it. I just wasn’t sure. And I’m telling you everything now, aren’t I?”

He looked surprised at my outburst, but then he just nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “I get it. And you’re right. I think I went soft when I was lost. I sort of—I don’t know. Maybe I started to lose perspective. It’s just . . .”

I waved him off. “Never mind,” I said. “Just help me figure out how to get out of here. Whatever she’s about to do to Ozma, I don’t like the sound of it.”

“Really?” he asked. “Or is it that you don’t like the sound of what she’s going to do to Pete?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference,” he said.

“I don’t want her to hurt either of them,” I said. “We have no idea what kind of voodoo she’s cooking up, or what could go wrong. For all we know, she wants to stick Ozma in a box and saw her in half.”

“I kind of doubt that,” Nox said. “But I’ll tell you what I know. I know that Ozma’s important. And I know that she’s already acting different. More powerful. If there’s something we can do to help her, we have to.”

“Pete’s my friend,” I said quietly.

Now it was Nox’s turn to look angry. “Do you know how many friends I’ve buried?” he asked. “Have you forgotten Gert? She wasn’t the first, and she won’t be the last, unless we do something. Look, I hope Pete’s okay after all this. But it’s worth the risk.”

It was pretty much exactly what Polychrome had told me back in her lab, but in nicer words.

“Not it,” I shot back. “He. And if he’s worth the risk, then who else is? Are you? Am I? Isn’t there a point where we stop deciding to sacrifice anything and start saving people?”

Nox sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said after a bit. “I really don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering back to the Fog of Doubt, and what Dorothy had said about becoming like her. Even if I hadn’t admitted it before, it really was the thing I was most afraid of. “You might not know, but I do.”

Nox looked me up and down with something I recognized as respect.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’ll help you. You’ve come this far without me. You’ve earned the right to make the decisions. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. Your call. But do me a favor, and think about it first. Just sleep on it.”

I stood up. “Fine,” I said. Even if we were going to leave, I still had to figure out how. “But tomorrow, we go.”

Back in my chambers, Ozma was already asleep in the darkness. I got under the covers and was still trying to put together all the events of a long, confusing day, when, from the other bed, a voice cried out. I sat up.

It was Ozma. She was screaming, writhing under the silk sheets, struggling with an invisible enemy. “No!” she was shouting angrily. “Go away!”

Half of me just wanted to ignore her and try to fall asleep anyway. Ozma talking to herself was nothing new, after all.

But I jumped up, and felt a now familiar darkness coming over me as I prepared to fight whatever was attacking her.

“Help me!” Ozma pleaded, but it wasn’t her own voice now. It was a man’s.

Then she was screaming again, still writhing in pain and fury. “I won’t!” she said. That was when I realized there was only one person in the room. Whatever was attacking Ozma was coming from within her.

“Pete?” I asked tentatively.

For a moment, the princess calmed herself, and turned her face to mine. “Please,” she said, and now I was sure it was him talking. “Amy. Please. You promised. Help me.”

“Pete . . . ,” I said. “I . . .”

“I helped you,” he said. “And you promised. I’m begging you.”

I had to make a split-second decision. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently if I had that moment to do over again. It was true. He had helped me. More than once. He was my friend.

Despite what I’d said to Dorothy’s Fantasm in the Fog of Doubt, and as wicked as I knew I could be when I had to, I had one weakness: kindness.

And kindness is a weakness. I can see that now. But it’s a weakness I’m still not sure I’d want to give up entirely.

I didn’t have a choice. He would have done the same for me.

I shifted myself, only for a moment, into the shimmering world of light and energy that I’d discovered, the world where all I had to do was pull a few strings to get what I wanted.

I pulled them, and Ozma’s body began to contort.

She was Pete, then she was herself. Like she was melting, her figure began to deform itself into a grotesque mishmash: Pete’s legs and chest, Ozma’s arms and face. She was fighting it. But Pete was fighting, too, desperate to get out.

So I helped him a little more. I had promised him. I pushed a little harder, then pulled, giving the invisible magical skeins a sharp yank, and Ozma screamed one last time, at the top of her lungs, and was gone, leaving Pete in her place, sweaty and panting in the bed where she had just been lying.

He sat up. He was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his brow. “Thank you.”

“No,” I said, my mind made up. “I won’t let them do anything to you. I promised, and I still promise.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I don’t want any of this. I never did. But I don’t believe you. And I need to live.”

He took the lamp from the table next to the bed, and before I knew what he was doing, he clocked me with it. Right in the face.