Footsteps pound through the underbrush behind me as the general moves back a step and draws an infinity symbol in the air with one finger. Glowing silver cuffs appear on my wrists, and with them, I feel the energy leached from my body like it’s being siphoned out.
Even if I weren’t already wounded, I wouldn’t have been able to stay conscious.
“Take them back to the city,” Mannix commands, his voice dripping with authority. Here’s a man who’s used to having his orders followed to a T. “And whatever you do, don’t piss off any faeries on the way.”
He takes off into the woods as my heavy lids finally close, and I collapse into the jewel-toned grass of the clearing.The Not–So–Wonderful City of OzNightmares that I haven’t had in months come rushing back, filling my unconscious mind with memories that I’d rather were left buried. Mom’s face, smiling at me as we board the boat. My little sisters begging for ice-cold sodas from the snack bar. My brother slumped on a bench with his ear buds in, playing on his phone.
The storm.
The lurching of the boat.
The cold water.
The darkness.
The silence.
With a gasp, I sit up straight in bed, soaked in a cold sweat and so disoriented that I can’t remember if I’m in Seattle or Kansas or that weird blue-domed Munchkin house.
But as I blink through the horrors inside my head, I come face to face with the ones outside of it.
I’m sitting in a dark room, lit by a single candle on an ornately carved dresser. Both the flame and the candle itself have a greenish tinge that makes me question if I’m actually conscious or still stuck in a strange dream.
“It can be disorienting, at first,” a girl says, lounging on the end of the bed. She’s so still and quiet that I didn’t notice her until she spoke. She leans forward, just enough that her face catches some of the light from the flickering candle. Even her skin is tinted green, her eyes too shadowed for me to take note of the color.
“Disorienting?” I whisper, my voice a husky shell of its former self.
Now that I’m awake, and the nightmares of that day on the lake are fading, I remember other, more recent nightmares.
Stryker is dead.
Taavi is likely dead.
I took a bullet to the right leg.
“The glasses,” she says, reaching up to point at her own face with one, long-nailed finger. I notice as she tilts her face more toward the light that she’s wearing a pair of thin-framed spectacles with big, green lenses. Reaching up my own hand, I find that I’m wearing them, too. Only mine are big and bulky, and when I run my fingers along the edges of the bands on either side, I find that the entire contraption is quite literally locked onto my face. My fingernails trace a keyhole on the back of my head, and my stomach turns over with nausea. When I attempt to push the glasses from my face, pain strikes through me like a hot iron. “Don’t bother,” the girl continues, lounging back on the bed and throwing herself into shadow again. “They’re all locked on, for Dorothy so ordered it when the city was first built, and I”—the woman lifts up a chain that’s dangling around her neck, pulling it out from inside the bodice of her gown—”have the only key that will unlock them.”
“You’re not Dorothy?” I ask, my voice still a shadow of a whisper. But I keep it strong and steady, and I’m goddamn proud of that. Stryker is dead. The thought hits me hard, but I swallow past the lump in my throat. I don’t have time to mourn an acquaintance I barely knew, not when Taavi is missing, when I’m trapped in a strange room with an even stranger woman, when Aunt Em is missing somewhere in this craziness they call the land of Oz.
The woman laughs, and the sound is pleasant enough, but I don’t trust her for shit.
“I’m Dorothy’s guardian.”
“You attacked Taavi.” It’s not a question. This woman, she’s the little black dog from the woods. How she managed to find us, I’ll probably never know. I exhale sharply, forcing back tears. Luckily for me, I’m good at that, keeping the tears in check. “Is he dead?”
“Dead?” the woman asks, tilting her head at me, very much like a dog. “You truly are an awful wizard.” She points down at the floor near the bed, and I scramble out of the blankets, only to come to a grinding halt when pain tears through my leg. Looking down, I see that my thigh’s been bandaged, but it still hurts like a bitch.
I move a bit more carefully, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, only to find Taavi sleeping peacefully on the green rug—as a German shepherd, that is.
