Yellow Brick War (Dorothy Must Die, #3)(25)

Everything around me dimmed until the edges of the room were lost in dense, thickening shadow. Tendrils of darkness crept across the floor toward me. A slender, silvery form stepped out of the shadows and looked down at me. It was mostly hidden by the darkness, but I could make out swirling black robes and a pale, bald skull topped with a twisted iron crown.

So, it hissed. I heard its voice inside my head rather than out loud and clapped my hands over my ears in a futile attempt to shut it out. You have found what I have hidden, little witch. My congratulations.

I struggled to say something, but the creature’s magic had glued my mouth shut. Who are you? I thought desperately.

I could feel its smile cutting into my thoughts.

You’ll find out soon enough, little witch. You are strong and clever to have uncovered so easily what I had concealed so carefully. Your witches could not see what I had put away here so many years ago. Even your Dorothy could not find what once had been hers. But you found it without magic, as if it was calling to you. You are very strong indeed—perhaps even stronger than my other little friend.

What other little friend? Did it mean Dorothy?

We will see each other again, my dear. I am beginning to think you shall be quite useful to me. But now is not the time for explanations. Give my regards to your . . . friends.

A knife-sharp flash of pain stabbed into my skull and I cried out in agony. I could see Mombi, Gert, and Glamora, darkness swirling around them, looking up in fear and alarm. Nox, out on the prairie somewhere, staring upward as if he knew I was looking down at him, opening his mouth to say something. The creature laughed and flicked its fingers, and a roiling cloud of darkness descended on the four of them, erasing their faces from my mind.

Until next time, little witch. Watch your back. Not all your friends are trustworthy. And then it stepped back into the shadows and disappeared. I felt its magic loosen its grip on me and I slumped to the floor, tears of pain leaking from my eyes.

“. . . Amy? She’s in the bathroom,” Dustin was saying. “Everything’s cool here, Mr. Stone.”

The shop teacher grumbled something I didn’t catch and the library door swung closed again. “Phew,” Dustin sighed, his footsteps coming toward me. “That was, like, really clo—Amy? Where are you?”

“I’m right here,” I said thickly. My mouth tasted like ashes and dirt. With effort, I pushed away the graduation banner and sat up. Dustin was staring at me with his mouth open.

“How did you do that?” he breathed.

“Do what?”

“You just . . . you weren’t there,” he said. “Amy, you weren’t there. And then you were. You just, like, appeared. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, faking a sneeze. “I didn’t go anywhere, I hid under this dumb banner.” I was still stunned from the effects of the creature’s magic, but I had to convince Dustin he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. “It’s so dark back here, you just missed me. I totally thought I could hide under this thing, can you believe that?” I babbled. “Like a little kid playing hide-and-seek, ha-ha. So silly. Um, anyway, there’s another box in there.”

Dustin was still looking at me like—well, like I’d vanished and then reappeared out of thin air. But the fact that it wasn’t physically possible to vanish and reappear out of thin air was working in my favor. Whatever explanation he was coming up with for what he’d just seen, it definitely wasn’t “some kind of really scary mind-stabbing supernatural entity just walked out of the walls, made Amy briefly invisible in order to drop a bunch of vague sinister hints, and then disappeared.”

“What’s in it?” he asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. Wrapping my hands in the dust cloths, I gingerly lifted the box from the back of the closet. But whatever magic had been protecting it had disappeared with the mysterious visitor, and it felt like an ordinary box this time when I touched it. It was light and small, but something thumped inside it. I lifted the flaps, and breathlessly, we looked in.

There was nothing in the box but an old notebook. I took it out and flipped through the pages. Every one of them was blank. My heart sank as I stared at the book, turning the pages over and over again as if looking at them again would make words appear. A secret, a spell—heck, even a map to Dorothy’s shoes. Nothing. I wanted to cry. All this, and for what? I’d never find the stupid shoes, even if they existed. The witches and I were stuck in Kansas forever. Dorothy was going to destroy Oz, and we had no way to stop her.

“Amy, what’s wrong?”

“I was just hoping for an answer,” I said.. Whoever the mysterious visitor had been, it had been wasting its time protecting a blank book.

“We can keep looking, Amy,” Dustin said, anxious to cheer me up. “We can—I don’t know, Topeka probably has a library. I can drive you over there if you want as long as Mad doesn’t mind watching the baby. It’s no big—”

The library door swung open again and we both nearly jumped out of our skins. “Time’s up!” Mr. Stone bellowed. “Go home, you little miscreants.” Thankfully, he stomped off without bothering to check our work. I shoved the boxes back in the closet and covered them with the banner. At the last minute I shoved the notebook into my bag. Maybe I was trying to remind myself that my mission was more hopeless than finding a needle in a haystack. We locked the library door behind us and returned the keys and our vacuum to a sullen Mr. Stone.