Yellow Brick War (3 page)

“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.”

“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 Wizard 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.

“You think it'll kill me.”

“I think there's a strong possibility,” he said. “You can't use Oz's magic, Amy. Not now, not ever again.”

“It hasn't killed Dorothy. Anyway, I can't use magic at
all
here,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “So it's kind of a moot point for the time being. But if my magic returns somehow, or if we get back to Oz—using magic is my choice to make. Not Gert's. Not Mombi's or Glamora's. Not yours.”

“It isn't just your choice, Amy,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “I can't just think about you. I have to think about all of Oz. If you turn into something like Dorothy . . .” He trailed off, tugging helplessly at the Quadrant cloak. “This is so much bigger than just us.” I knew what he meant; he didn't have to
say it out loud. If Oz's magic made me into another Dorothy, he'd have to kill me, too. But being told what to do still stuck in my throat. Especially after Nox had refused to tell me the whole truth for all this time.

“You care about Oz more than you care about me,” I snapped, hurt and angry. I wanted to take the words back as soon as they were out of my mouth. Of course Nox cared more about Oz than he did about me. Oz was his country, his home, the only world he'd ever known. Oz was his entire life. I was a bitchy, needy teenager who'd crashed the party at the eleventh hour and learned how to be an assassin. If Oz's magic corrupted me, it would be my own fault. Dorothy'd had no idea what the shoes would do to her. But me? I knew all too well the dangers of using magic in Oz.

“You know that's not true,” he said. The reproach in his voice was gentle but unmistakable. I wondered how much damage I'd just done acting like a spoiled little kid. I could feel a new distance, like someone had hung a curtain between us.

“I'm sorry,” I said quietly. My throat hurt like I'd swallowed a pincushion, but I was sick of crying. For some crazy reason, in that moment I thought of Dustin. Good old Dustin of Dusty Acres, my old high school enemy Madison Pendleton's trusty sidekick. Like me, Dustin had wanted out of this dump. I wondered if he'd gotten it. I wondered if Madison had had the baby that had been threatening to pop out when the tornado hit. I wondered if going back to high school meant I'd have to see her—see both of them—again.

“I wish things were different,” Nox said. His voice was tight with some emotion I couldn't pinpoint. Anger? Sadness? Probably he was regretting spending any time with me in the first place. This was war, like everybody kept telling me. Feelings only got in the way. And I was only getting in Nox's. I owed it to him to give him distance. He had to save the world and he didn't need me holding him back.

“Yeah, well, so do I,” I said, making my voice cold and hard as I stood up. “But they aren't. So I guess I'd better get to work, since I'm the one trying to save all your asses.”