He grabbed the front of her costume and held her aloft. I watched helplessly. “You think you can use my own weapon against me?” The Nome King cackled triumphantly, laughing at her limp form.
Lang’s head lolled to the side and she looked at me. She was smiling. “Take care of Nox,” she said to me. And then Langwidere buried the Nome King’s knife in his chest to the hilt. Somehow she had managed to pull it from its sheath with her good hand. The metal flared with dark magic and burned into her palm, but she didn’t let go.
A tremendous boom echoed through the cavern, knocking me to the ground with its force. Everything in the ballroom froze: the Diggers attacking the guests, the guests fleeing the Diggers, the very air itself seemed to hold its breath. The Nome King’s mouth dropped open in a round O of surprise. He brought one hand to his chest, looking down at the hilt protruding from it in shock.
“My own knife,” he whispered. “You little traitor.”
And then he toppled slowly backward and hit the ground with a thud.
I crawled forward to where Langwidere had collapsed on the dais.
Nox leapt onto the platform, with Madison close behind him He crouched over Lang’s body, her breathing fast and shallow.
“How did you know that would work?” I asked her.
“I didn’t.” She grimaced; I realized she was trying to smile. “Glad it did.”
“We have to get help,” Nox said to Lang. “You’re hurt. We have to get you back to the boat.”
Lang’s eyes were glazing over with pain.
“I’m not hurt,” she whispered. “I’m dying.”
“Don’t say that,” Nox said desperately.
She coughed weakly. “You never could handle the truth.” Her eyes rolled toward me. “You’re a good fighter, Amy. Now go find that bitch Dorothy and write my name with her blood.”
I grabbed her hand. “I swear I will.”
She smiled up at me, her eyelids closing. “And tell Melindra,” she gasped, fighting for breath. “Tell her I said . . .”
But she never finished the sentence. As I watched, the rise and fall of her chest slowed. And then it stopped.
“She’s gone,” Nox whispered. His eyes were brimming over with tears. I wiped away my own.
And then I looked around.
Dorothy and her little servant were gone.
We were alone.
TWENTY-ONE
“Grief later,” I said, pulling Nox to his feet before he had time to let it all sink in. “We have to stop Dorothy and end this once and for all.”
We raced down the narrow passage behind the Nome King’s throne. I hoped that Madison was somewhere behind us, but now I could only worry about Dorothy.
We’d only been on the platform for moments; she couldn’t have gotten too far. When I listened hard, I could even hear the echo of her footsteps, somewhere in the distance. We followed the twisting, turning hallway down innumerable branches and forks, and I had an odd certainty—for reasons I didn’t totally understand—that we were gaining on her.
I was struck with déjà vu from the very first time I’d tried to kill her, when I’d chased her through the halls of the Emerald Palace, before the Tin Woodman came to her rescue. They say history repeats itself. I just hoped the ending was better this time.
Then the passage dead-ended at last in a large chamber, its walls covered floor to ceiling in bookshelves. Dorothy and her strange little servant—still dressed as a bush—were backed up against a shelf piled high with volumes bound in what looked an awful lot like human skin.
She’d taken a wrong turn, I realized. Now she was trapped.
There were three of us. There was one of her.
She realized her mistake at the same moment I did.
“Dammit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I should have made a map.” She looked at my feet with a hateful expression. “I see you still have my shoes,” she said.
“They’re nobody’s shoes,” I said cautiously. My magic was still weak, but so was hers. If her defenses were down, plain old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat might do the trick where magic couldn’t. “If anything, they belong to Lurline.”
Lurline, I thought. If there was ever a good time to make a surprise appearance, now would be it. Lurline, I thought at my shoes. Tell me what I need to do. Please.
“Lurline,” Dorothy said, rolling her eyes. “Whatever. Glinda gave them to me. No take-backs.”
“And now you have a new pair,” I pointed out. “So you don’t need these.” That was all it took to set her off: Dorothy threw herself at me like a little kid who’d been told Christmas had been canceled, spitting and screeching, and we fell to the floor. She raked her nails down my face, leaving long, bloody tracks, while her servant battered at my calves with a book. Nox was trying to pull Dorothy off me; Madison hit her over the head with an inkwell. But Dorothy was like a force of nature, unstoppable in her rage.
“Why won’t you just . . . leave . . . me . . . alone!” she screamed, banging my head into the floor with every word until I saw stars. I elbowed her hard in the jaw and she gasped in pain but didn’t relax her grip.
“Lurline, tell me what to do!” I yelled.
We are made of what shapes us. Her voice echoed in my head. The soothing power of her touch flowed through me.
My boots began to glow with silver light. Dorothy stopped hitting me, her jaw slackening in surprise. Her outline—and Madison’s, and Nox’s, and even the shrub’s—began to shine with the same silvery, angelic glow. The library around us shivered and dissolved.
And then it seemed to re-form. The air was charged with magic. My shoes felt more alive than they had since we left Oz.
We were standing on an open, barren plain under a green-hued sky. The Road of Yellow Brick glittered against the dusty earth, winding its way toward the horizon. In the distance, I saw a castle.
Overhead, storm clouds were gathering with a rumble of thunder. I heard shrieks and howls from the sky and looked up to see a group of winged monkeys circling through the air, spinning and diving. They were laughing, I realized. They hadn’t noticed us.
But they were looking right at us. It wasn’t that they hadn’t noticed us.
They couldn’t see us.
“I know this place,” Dorothy said. Her voice sounded strange, as if something had come over her. Her face was dazed and her expression childlike as she gazed across the ghostly landscape. “I was here,” she mumbled, almost to herself. “A long time ago. I was forced to work here.”
Something in the way she said it startled me, and I realized that, although she was saying the words out loud, I could sense them coming before she actually spoke them. It was almost like her thoughts were flowing into mine.
It was all coming back to her. “I worked for the Wicked Witch of the West,” she said. Or did she even say it?
Then I saw them both. A strangely familiar young girl in a white silk dress, her auburn hair tied back with a white bow and silver shoes on her feet. A small black dog danced nearby. Behind her loomed a one-eyed menacing figure. The girl was sweeping the dusty earth with a broom, over and over.