The Wicked Will Rise
Page 9

Well, maybe I was.
I twisted my blade. The Lion screamed, collapsing. He had all but surrendered now, but I wasn’t done yet. As he lay there howling in pain, I jumped up and found myself moving almost in slow motion, suspended in the air for a moment before I pushed myself forward and launched myself straight for him, sinking my knife into the roof of his gaping mouth, a geyser of blood erupting.
This time he didn’t bother screaming.
I tossed the knife aside, letting it disappear to wherever it went when I wasn’t holding it. But this time, when I drew my hand back, I pulled a long, dark tendril with it—a black, twisting skein of nothingness.
It was like a tentacle, like an extension of myself. All I had to do was think about it and the blackness twisted out through the air like a snake slithering through the grass. It wrapped itself around the Lion’s neck.
The Lion clutched at his throat, gasping and trying to free himself.
All I had to do was want it, and the noose tightened.
“Beg me,” I said. The words hung in the air, dripping with venom. It barely sounded like me. If I was a character in a comic book, my dialogue would have been inked in thick, jagged letters. This couldn’t be me—could it? I knew what I had to do, but there was no reason to be so cruel about it.
I felt half possessed when I said it again. “Beg me,” I repeated, with even more cruelty this time, as the Lion tried to open his mouth.
His eyes widened, but he was barely struggling anymore; he was using everything he had left just to stay alive.
“Never,” was all he managed to say.
My knife had returned to me, and when I looked down at it, I saw that its blackness was seeping out of it and up my arm, like I was wearing a glove made of tar. My fist was gripping the hilt so tight that it hurt. It was twitching.
Cut him, I heard a voice in the back of my head telling me. Punish him for everything he’s done.
I wanted to do it. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself slicing him open. His stomach. His throat. Like I was watching a movie, I saw myself stabbing wherever I could, not paying attention to where I was striking, just hacking away as he convulsed and moaned, his hot, sticky blood squirting out in every direction while I kept going.
It was just my imagination. But I wanted it to be real. And it could be real. All I had to do was do it.
But then I heard another voice—a real voice this time, not in my head, but from somewhere outside of me. It was soft and lilting, barely more than a whisper.
It was Ozma.
“Come back,” she said simply.
With her, you never quite knew if she meant anything by it at all. I couldn’t even be sure that she was talking to me. But something about the way she said it brought me down to earth, and when I turned to her, I saw that she had dropped her bubble of protection and was now standing just a few feet away. Her bright eyes were fixed on me plaintively, with a look of deep, almost sisterly concern.
That’s when I realized that I wasn’t fighting the Lion to punish him. As much as I wanted to let my revenge fantasies play out, I had to remember that there was a larger purpose to everything I was doing. As much as I wanted to kill him—my body was still screaming out for his blood—I knew it wasn’t that simple. I needed something from him.
It all came flooding like a dream you’ve forgotten until something jogs your memory.
The Tin Woodman’s heart. The Lion’s courage. The Scarecrow’s brains.
With the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow it was obvious. Heart and brains. Duh. But where does a Lion keep his courage?
I looked at him lying there in battered, bloody defeat, toothless and bruised, his mangled tail twitching, the sad little ribbon at the end of it soaked with blood, and then I noticed that there was something strange about it. The tail. It wasn’t glowing, exactly, but it had something like a halo around it. A jittery, golden aura so pale that it barely registered.
It made me take a closer look.
I don’t know how I’d missed it before, but now I saw it. The tail wasn’t even real. It was stuffed and synthetic and made from felt and stuffing, like something that belonged to a doll. At the base, I could see that it was sewn onto the Lion’s body in a sloppy cross-stitch. This wasn’t the tail that he had been born with. Of course: the Wizard had given it to him.
In one swift, smooth motion, I sliced it off. There was a high-pitched hissing sound, like air being let out of a balloon. The Lion gave a weak, stupid whimper.
I held the tail up, and it twitched in my hands. It was angry. I knew that my instincts had been right.
Looking down at the Lion confirmed it. He was cowering on the ground, covering his face with his hands. He would be out of his misery soon enough. I raised my knife over my head and prepared to finish him off for good.
I thought of everything he had done—all the innocent people he had terrified and tortured as Dorothy’s enforcer. I thought of everyone he had killed. Gert. Star. The ones I didn’t know—like Nox’s family. He had done it for no reason. He had done it just because he liked it. Because it was fun. Because Dorothy told him to.
My hand was poised over my head, my knife bursting with magic. I realized that, sometime during the fight, the already graying sky overhead had covered itself in an ominous shroud of clouds.
It was like I had caused that. Like my anger and darkness had spilled out into the land around me.
In that moment, I couldn’t help being scared of myself.
But my fear was nothing next to the Cowardly Lion’s. “Please don’t hurt me,” he wheezed. He was crying now, curled into a fetal ball and rocking back and forth on the ground, clutching his face.