No Place Like Oz
Page 42

Now it wasn’t.
I looked down in a panic. My shoes were still on my feet. They were as red and shiny and beautiful as ever. But where they had once felt alive—like a part of my body, as important as my arms or legs—they now just felt heavy and separate. Just two ordinary shoes with extra-high heels.
Ozma gave a half shrug and looked away when she saw the distraught expression on my face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t take the shoes away from you. Whatever spell binds them to you is already complete, and magic like that is irreversible, even for me. But I can block your access to the power they possess. And I have. I didn’t want to—I thought maybe you would be able to handle it, that maybe you were strong enough to resist the corruption. You are Dorothy, after all. If anyone could fight off Glinda’s manipulations, it’s you. But the Sorceress is powerful and ruthless. She didn’t outlast the other witches by playing fair, you know.”
“No one could have resisted,” Aunt Em said. She had risen from my bed and walked over to me, placing a hand on the small of my back. I suppose it was meant to be comforting, but I slapped it away. “It’s too tempting,” she said. “It’s not your fault, Dorothy. You’ll see, someday. This is for your own good. It’s time to go back to Kansas.”
“No!” I screamed, whirling around in a rage, looking for something—anything—that I could use against the princess. But it was too late. Ozma waved her scepter and my palace bedchambers faded to white.
When the world re-formed, I found myself standing in the middle of an endless field of waving green grass. I felt dizzy and nauseated, and I struggled to stay on my feet. Was this Kansas? Had it been that easy to undo it all?
No. We were still in Oz—the Emerald City was still visible in the distance, and Ozma was still standing in front of me. Aunt Em was here, too, stumbling around a bit from the transition, and Uncle Henry was a few paces away, holding Toto in his arms. As soon as my little terrier saw me, he wriggled out of my uncle’s grip and raced over to where I was struggling to stay on my feet. Toto circled my ankles, sniffing my shoes in confused concern. He could see that something was missing.
“I sure feel terrible,” Uncle Henry was saying. “You won’t believe me, but I know how much you wanted to be here. I hope you can understand, someday.”
“Sending you home isn’t simple,” said Ozma. “I really didn’t know how to do it for a while—so little is known about the walls that separate your world from ours. I needed to find something that already knows the way.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to find a way to stop her.
“When you arrive home in Kansas, none of you will remember any of this. I think it’s better that way. It will just seem like a pleasant, faraway dream. Something that happened to someone else in a story.”
“No!” I screamed one more time, lunging for her. She might have cut me off from my magic, but I still had two hands, and I would use them to strangle her if that’s what I needed to do to stay here.
But before I could reach her, she raised her scepter, and I hit a wall. I punched and clawed at it, but my fists bounced uselessly against the invisible barrier.
“I’ll always be grateful to you, Dorothy,” Ozma said, ignoring my screams. “You saved Oz. And I’ll always think of you as a friend.”
With that, Ozma threw her head back and lifted her scepter to the sky. Her wings materialized, and she rose up into the air as a column of blinding light shot down from the clouds and surged through her. She began to shine so brightly that she was barely even visible anymore—she was just a vague, burning ball of radiance.
Even in my fury, I couldn’t help being impressed. I had met witches and sorceresses and wizards, but I had never met anyone who could turn themselves into a star.
Uncle Henry put his arm around Aunt Em. Even Toto sat back on his hind legs and stared up in amazement.
As Ozma cast her spell, wind whipped through the treetops. Dark clouds swirled overhead. It looked like a storm was coming. The light changed; the sky around us was now a sick, pale, greenish shade.
In that moment, I felt something happening to me. My feet began to tingle, and then the rest of my body was tingling, too, until it was almost vibrating with power.
No one noticed what was happening.
Ozma must have been too consumed with her own spell to realize that whatever barriers she’d placed on my shoes were falling away. She must not have been able to manage both spells at once.
My magic was coming back.
In the distance, I saw it approaching. The old house—the shack that had brought me to Oz—was flying across the sky, spinning like a top as it drew nearer, getting bigger and closer by the second. That was what Ozma had meant by something that already knows the way. She was going to put us all back in that awful, ramshackle old house and she was going to make it take us back to Kansas.
I wouldn’t stand for it. My shoes gripped my feet so hard it hurt.
It all happened so fast. Important things always seem to, don’t they?
The house was careening through the sky, traveling faster than I thought possible, and then it was right over our heads and it began to hover in place as it made its descent.
My hair was whipping past my face; my whole body was twitching with fear and rage and power. More power than I’d ever felt before. More of anything than I’d ever felt before.