I decide to put it on. Why not? I don’t have a lot of choices; the cyclone took most everything I had.
There’s a pair of bike shorts still jammed into one of the drawers that’s strewn across the floor, so I slip those on underneath, put on some socks, and search around for a pair of matching shoes. Unfortunately, I can only find a single random shoe here or there.
Guess the soggy, bloodied sneakers I was wearing earlier will have to do.
I take the extra pairs of underwear, socks, and a single hoodie downstairs with me, stuffing them into the duffel bag.
Taavi must’ve righted the overturned kitchen table while I was upstairs. The silver shoes are sitting atop it, their sparkles dimmed with the rusty-red color of old blood. Swallowing hard, I move past them and pad outside in bare feet to find Taavi waiting on the porch, his head lifted to the wind.
“Any sign of Aunt Em?” I ask, crossing my arms and watching as a parade of peacocks moves across the lawn in front of the house, their feathers fanned out in glorious displays.
“Her scent is concentrated in the spot where she fell,” he says, looking back toward the open front door of the house. “But there’s no trail leading away from that spot. She’s been spirited away.”
“Spirited away?” I ask, my blood going cold. “Like, somebody took her?”
“Somebody … or something,” Taavi says, turning to face me, his face hard with determination. “Ozora,” he continues, putting his hands on my shoulders. Unexpected heat races through me. Taavi must notice because he draws his hands back suddenly, like he’s been burned. “We will go to the Emerald City and ask Dorothy how to find your Aunt. I’ve heard that her powers include soothsaying; she’ll know what to do.”
“Bain didn’t seem to hold a very high opinion of her,” I start, but the look that Taavi gives me says that he doesn’t hold a very high opinion of Bain. “And then what? I want to go home, To—Taavi.” I scrunch my face up, but he doesn’t look like he cares much what I call him.
“Home? That place was never home,” Taavi says, exhaling as he turns back to the front door and heads inside, hefting the duffel bag onto his shoulder as he passes.
“Yeah, well, I know Kansas was never home, but we’ll never get back to Seattle if—”
“I didn’t mean Kansas,” Taavi says, taking the rest of the bread and butter, and tucking it away in the bag. He turns to look at me, noticing the bloodied silver shoes on the tabletop. “You should put those on, mistress. The Witch of the East was never much to contend with until she found these shoes.”
“You want me to hike god only knows how many miles in heels?” I ask, grabbing the chunky shoes off the table and tossing them to the floor. Despite the blood, I step into them anyway, just to prove my point—that I can barely walk across the kitchen floor in heels, let alone across a foreign land.
As soon as my feet slide inside the glittery heels, a wash of energy sweeps over me, much the same as it did when I kissed Taavi by the creek. Speaking of, we should probably address that at some point …
“Taavi,” I start, as I feel a shift beneath my feet. The shoes melt around my toes, the glittery material turning to liquid and reforming in an instant. It’s a shape-change not unlike the ones I’ve seen from Taavi, from dog to man to beast and back to man again. In a handful of seconds, I find myself wearing a comfy pair of sparkly silver Vans, the slip-on kind without laces.
My favorite.
“What …” I start again, lifting my foot up and studying the unblemished white sole on the bottom. The witch’s blood is gone, and there’s no sign that these shoes were ever anything but an innocuous pair of sneakers.
“They seek to please the wearer,” Taavi says, picking a blanket up off the floor before folding it and adding it to the duffel bag. “They are now your shoes, and nobody can take them from you.”
“Not unless they crush me with their fucking house, right?” I ask, and the way he avoids answering the question tells me that I’m onto something. Great. “Are people going to start trying to drop houses on me?”
“Every sorcerer and sorceress has an Achilles’ heel,” Taavi answers, once again avoiding giving me a direct answer. I grit my teeth, but I’m not a hapless idiot heroine in a fantasy novel. That’s one of my pet peeves in books or movies, when the other characters won’t tell the lead what’s going on with all the fantasy woo-woo magic crap. This is my coma-induced delusion, and I’m in control here.
