The Wicked Will Rise

THREE


I felt the magic in every pore of my skin, in every hair on the backs of my arms. I felt it in the tips of my eyelashes. I was vibrating with it as the Lion came at me with a roar loud enough to split the world right open.

It was too late for that.

He hurled himself at me in a lithe, powerful cannonball; he clawed and scratched and bit. He wasn’t playing around now; there was no taunting and no banter as he hit me with a graceful, animal fury that wouldn’t let up. But he couldn’t touch me.

When he had killed Star he had unleashed something in me that I hadn’t known was even in there. Now the magic was flowing through me like a song and my body was moving to its pulsing, thrumming beat.

I was everywhere at once. I was barely anywhere at all. With every move that he made, I was ahead of him. It was like we were dancing.

I was spinning and dodging and somersaulting, thrusting and parrying, and every time the Lion thought he had me, I found myself melting into the ground, only to rise back up a moment later in the place he least expected to find me.

It was a different kind of teleportation than the kind I did when I blinked myself from one place to the next. It was like I was entering a world of shadows. I wasn’t sure how I was doing it, and I wasn’t sure where I was going when I disappeared like that—only that wherever it was, it was cold and foreign and deadly silent. From down there, everything was hazy and slow-motion, and I was outside reality, looking up into it from the darkness like gazing up through a layer of black, muddy water.

I may not have known how I was doing it, but every time I rose back up, reshaping myself into my own form, I knew what I was doing when I was under there. I was touching the darkness.

If I’d had time to think about it, it probably would have frightened me. Somehow, I knew instinctively that I was tapping into some of the blackest kind of magic. Everywhere I slashed and stabbed, my knife left a thick, inky trail behind it. It looked like I was cutting a hole in the atmosphere, and what was on the other side was nothing.

We went on like that for a while. I could tell that the Lion was tiring out. We weren’t dancing together anymore. I was dancing, but him? He was just going to die.

It was pathetic, really, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. Actually, I was having fun. I’d found something in Oz I was good at.

Finally, he gave one last valiant effort and sprang up, grabbed a tree branch and swung, barreling down at me feetfirst. I didn’t bother dodging. I melted into nothing and rematerialized behind him, wondering how it was that this kind of magic was suddenly coming so easily to me.

The Lion was still scooping himself up from where he had fallen, and I let him flail for a moment in confusion before I swept my leg around in a roundhouse kick that met his face with the satisfying crunch of shattering teeth.

I plunged my knife into his side and a web of inky lines spidered across the surface of his golden, tawny muscles like I was injecting him with poison.

Well, maybe I was.

I twisted my blade. The Lion screamed, collapsing. He had all but surrendered now, but I wasn’t done yet. As he lay there howling in pain, I jumped up and found myself moving almost in slow motion, suspended in the air for a moment before I pushed myself forward and launched myself straight for him, sinking my knife into the roof of his gaping mouth, a geyser of blood erupting.

This time he didn’t bother screaming.

I tossed the knife aside, letting it disappear to wherever it went when I wasn’t holding it. But this time, when I drew my hand back, I pulled a long, dark tendril with it—a black, twisting skein of nothingness.

It was like a tentacle, like an extension of myself. All I had to do was think about it and the blackness twisted out through the air like a snake slithering through the grass. It wrapped itself around the Lion’s neck.

The Lion clutched at his throat, gasping and trying to free himself.

All I had to do was want it, and the noose tightened.

“Beg me,” I said. The words hung in the air, dripping with venom. It barely sounded like me. If I was a character in a comic book, my dialogue would have been inked in thick, jagged letters. This couldn’t be me—could it? I knew what I had to do, but there was no reason to be so cruel about it.

I felt half possessed when I said it again. “Beg me,” I repeated, with even more cruelty this time, as the Lion tried to open his mouth.

His eyes widened, but he was barely struggling anymore; he was using everything he had left just to stay alive.

“Never,” was all he managed to say.

My knife had returned to me, and when I looked down at it, I saw that its blackness was seeping out of it and up my arm, like I was wearing a glove made of tar. My fist was gripping the hilt so tight that it hurt. It was twitching.

Cut him, I heard a voice in the back of my head telling me. Punish him for everything he’s done.

I wanted to do it. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself slicing him open. His stomach. His throat. Like I was watching a movie, I saw myself stabbing wherever I could, not paying attention to where I was striking, just hacking away as he convulsed and moaned, his hot, sticky blood squirting out in every direction while I kept going.

It was just my imagination. But I wanted it to be real. And it could be real. All I had to do was do it.

But then I heard another voice—a real voice this time, not in my head, but from somewhere outside of me. It was soft and lilting, barely more than a whisper.

It was Ozma.

“Come back,” she said simply.

With her, you never quite knew if she meant anything by it at all. I couldn’t even be sure that she was talking to me. But something about the way she said it brought me down to earth, and when I turned to her, I saw that she had dropped her bubble of protection and was now standing just a few feet away. Her bright eyes were fixed on me plaintively, with a look of deep, almost sisterly concern.

That’s when I realized that I wasn’t fighting the Lion to punish him. As much as I wanted to let my revenge fantasies play out, I had to remember that there was a larger purpose to everything I was doing. As much as I wanted to kill him—my body was still screaming out for his blood—I knew it wasn’t that simple. I needed something from him.

It all came flooding like a dream you’ve forgotten until something jogs your memory.

The Tin Woodman’s heart. The Lion’s courage. The Scarecrow’s brains.

With the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow it was obvious. Heart and brains. Duh. But where does a Lion keep his courage?

I looked at him lying there in battered, bloody defeat, toothless and bruised, his mangled tail twitching, the sad little ribbon at the end of it soaked with blood, and then I noticed that there was something strange about it. The tail. It wasn’t glowing, exactly, but it had something like a halo around it. A jittery, golden aura so pale that it barely registered.

It made me take a closer look.

I don’t know how I’d missed it before, but now I saw it. The tail wasn’t even real. It was stuffed and synthetic and made from felt and stuffing, like something that belonged to a doll. At the base, I could see that it was sewn onto the Lion’s body in a sloppy cross-stitch. This wasn’t the tail that he had been born with. Of course: the Wizard had given it to him.

In one swift, smooth motion, I sliced it off. There was a high-pitched hissing sound, like air being let out of a balloon. The Lion gave a weak, stupid whimper.

I held the tail up, and it twitched in my hands. It was angry. I knew that my instincts had been right.

Looking down at the Lion confirmed it. He was cowering on the ground, covering his face with his hands. He would be out of his misery soon enough. I raised my knife over my head and prepared to finish him off for good.

I thought of everything he had done—all the innocent people he had terrified and tortured as Dorothy’s enforcer. I thought of everyone he had killed. Gert. Star. The ones I didn’t know—like Nox’s family. He had done it for no reason. He had done it just because he liked it. Because it was fun. Because Dorothy told him to.

My hand was poised over my head, my knife bursting with magic. I realized that, sometime during the fight, the already graying sky overhead had covered itself in an ominous shroud of clouds.

It was like I had caused that. Like my anger and darkness had spilled out into the land around me.

In that moment, I couldn’t help being scared of myself.

But my fear was nothing next to the Cowardly Lion’s. “Please don’t hurt me,” he wheezed. He was crying now, curled into a fetal ball and rocking back and forth on the ground, clutching his face.

Seeing him like this it was hard to believe that he had ever been capable of any of the terror he had caused. Without his courage, he was nothing. And I had it now. His tail coiled itself up around my arm like a piece of jewelry. The Lion was less than harmless now. And I felt powerful. Maybe even courageous.

My hands were red with blood; blood had plastered my clothes to my skin. Even my hair was damp with it. Off in the distance, I heard a single bird chirp.

My shoulders loosened. I took a deep, gulping breath. My knife faded from my grip, and as it did, the clouds parted and the sun was shining down on us again. My whole body was shaking as I felt the magic that had filled me during my fight begin to dissipate.

I thought, for a moment, of my mother, and of how fragile she looked when she was coming down from one of her binges. I thought of all the times she’d tried to go clean, and of all the times I’d tried to help her. Of how she’d failed every time.

I stood and turned away from the Lion. “Go,” I said, gesturing out into nowhere.

The Lion rose shakily to his feet. He stumbled and fell, then stood again and looked up, his whole face trembling. “Thank you,” he sniveled. “How can I ever—”

I cut him off. “Do it, before I change my mind.” He flinched, and then went limping off into the forest without looking back, blood trailing his every step.

Two down, one to go. After that, Dorothy would be mine, and one thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to let her off the hook as easily as I had the Lion.

Then the world began to come back into focus. In the rolling field of flowers, Maude and Ollie were standing stock-still, staring at me like they barely recognized me. Ozma, though, had a shy little smile on her face. It almost looked like pride.

I wanted to say something to them. See? I wanted to say. I let him go.

It was true. I had let him go. Even so, I knew there was a line that I had almost crossed, and they had watched me walk right up to the edge of it. I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t have the words to explain any of it.

I was just standing there, still wondering what had just happened, when I saw the rest of them. They were everywhere. I had been so consumed with the Lion that I hadn’t noticed them arrive. Monkeys.

They were sitting in the branches of the trees and crouched in the hillocks of flowers and hiding in the thick shrubbery that blocked the forest. There must have been a hundred of them, monkeys of all shapes and sizes. Too bad I’d never paid much attention in science class; it would have been nice to name all the different types of species that were represented among them.

Like Maude and Ollie, they were just staring at me, unblinking and impassive. Like Maude and Ollie, they all looked scared of me.