Yellow Brick War (4 page)

“Amy—” This time there was no mistaking the hurt in his voice, but I turned my back on him. It took all the strength I had not to look back at him as he watched me walk away.

“All right,” I snapped, pushing my way back into the tent. Gert looked up, startled. “Let's get this done. The last time I saw my mom she was a hot mess. Where'd she end up? How did you find her?”

“Not the last time, Amy,” Gert said gently. “You saw her again. Remember? You saw her in the scrying pool.”

I knew exactly what Gert was talking about, but I didn't want to acknowledge it. So maybe I'd had a vision of my mom in a new apartment somewhere, pathetically cuddled up to my favorite sweater. And maybe in the vision she'd been clean. But if that was true, it was just as pathetic. She'd had to lose me, her house, and her entire life in order to get her act together? If she'd been a real mom she'd have managed it while I was still around. Normal people didn't need tragedy to tell them not to blow the rest of their lives chasing their painkillers with booze.

“How do I even know if that was real?” I asked. “She could
be passed out in a ditch somewhere for all I know. Or dead by now.”

“She isn't dead,” Mombi said, looking a little exasperated. “We found her in a broadsheet!” she added proudly.

“A what?”

“A sheet with news and announcements,” Gert said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “In the Other Place they have pictures”—she turned to Glamora—“can you believe that? Pictures! I think that's a splendid idea.”

“You mean a
newspaper
?” All three witches looked at me, and in spite of myself, I stifled a giggle. “Okay, right. So she was in the newspaper.”

“The broadsheet described the movements of the tornado survivors,” Mombi explained importantly. “
I
used that information and compared it to a map of the surrounding countryside.” She brandished a tattered old highway map that looked like she'd found it in a culvert.

“You could have just Googled her,” I said, laughing.

“I don't know that spell,” Mombi said gruffly.

Mombi had saved the newspaper with the details of the post-tornado emergency cleanup effort. My mom had been moved to temporary emergency housing along with everyone else from this area who lost their homes in the tornado and didn't have anywhere else to go—which, as far as I could tell, was our entire trailer park.

“Great,” I muttered. “It'll be a Dusty Acres reunion. I can't wait.”

We talked for a while about what my plan should be, but the truth was that none of us really knew what we were doing. All we had to go on was a Wickedly half-baked theory that Dorothy's maybe-mythical magical shoes were somewhere in my old high school, and if they were I would be able to find them. It didn't even make sense. None of this made sense. Plus, if the shoes had worked to bring Dorothy back
from
Oz, who knew whether they'd succeed in taking all of us
to
Oz even if I could find them? None of us could use our full magic. We were totally making up this whole thing as we were going along.

But the prospect of action left me weirdly cheerful. Anything was better than sitting around waiting for the end—even visiting a mom I'd been only too happy to leave behind. It was a crazy, stupid, and probably impossible mission, but it wasn't exactly my first crazy, stupid, and probably impossible mission. Once I decided to do it, I felt almost relieved.

Nox hadn't come back inside, and I pretended I didn't care. “You might as well get a little rest,” Glamora suggested. “It's not even dawn yet—you can go see your mother later in the morning.” I wasn't going to argue with that logic. As I settled into a corner of the tent, wrapping myself up in a soft cashmere blanket the color of Nox's eyes (oh
please
, I told myself,
knock it off
), I was almost surprised to realize how tired I was. It made sense, of course. I'd been through a lot, and it wasn't like we'd been taking naps in between battles. But I was tired all the way through to my bones. I felt like I could sleep for a thousand years without waking up, and the thought was tempting. I wasn't just
physically tired—I was tired of everything. Of fighting, of running, of losing. I wanted someone else to take up the burden of saving Oz for a while.

Get some rest, Amy
, I heard Gert say in my head.

A warm tingle started in my toes and spread through my body, relaxing my muscles one by one as if I was sinking into a giant bubble bath. It felt just like the healing pool in the cave where I'd first been taken to the Order. Before I knew it, I was actually
there
. The purple walls of the cavern, studded with glittering amethyst stalactites, met in a high arch overhead. The massive tree, whose roots seemed to reach deep into the very heart of the earth, stretched toward the ceiling with gnarled branches covered in tiny white blossoms that drifted down around me like sweetly scented snow. I was floating in the deep, foamy pool, its water as warm as a bath. My clothes dissolved around me as the water drew out my aches and pains and exhaustion. I knew somewhere inside that I couldn't possibly be back in Oz, that the vision was Gert's doing, but I didn't fight it. I drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The witches let me sleep in. The tent was empty and I could see through its delicate silk walls that the sun was high in the sky by the time I sat up, yawning and stretching. I didn't feel all the way rested, exactly, but I did feel a lot better. I wondered how long it had been noon for, and then I remembered we weren't in Oz anymore. The sun here moved because the earth was spinning on its axis, not because some crazy power-hungry bitch
decided it should be sunny for as long as she felt like it. I wasn't thrilled about being back in Kansas, but that part at least was a nice change.

“Oh good, you're awake,” Glamora said, sticking her head through the tent flap. “Mombi ate all the bacon, but I'm sure we can whip up some more. She says it's important to sample the local delicacies as long as we're here.” I laughed out loud at the idea of anyone calling bacon a “local delicacy,” but my stomach growled loudly, and even Glamora giggled.

I couldn't use magic to fix myself up, so I dragged my fingers through my dirty hair and straightened my clothes as best I could. Gert's magical cleansing vision had been all in my head. I was pretty distinctly in need of a real bath, but I decided not to worry about that either. If my mom wanted a pretty princess, she could brush my hair herself. I'd had about enough of other people's expectations.

Nox was wrapping himself up in his Quadrant cloak, obviously preparing to go somewhere. He refused to meet my eyes. The distance between us that had sprung up last night felt even stronger now. I wanted to say something to him, reach out. But I didn't know how to cross the gulf I'd somehow created. I'd been the one to push him away, but I was already regretting it.

“Where are you going?” I asked in a low voice, and he practically flinched.

“Gert and Glamora want me to protect—” he began, but Glamora cut him off with a breezy wave of her hand. Gert and Glamora exchanged glances.

“We're sending him out to do reconnaissance. Make sure the area is safe.”

Safe? That was a joke. The scariest thing about Dusty Acres was how empty it was. There was obviously something they weren't telling me. Nox mumbled something incoherent that could have been “good-bye,” “I love you,” or “go to hell,” and stalked off toward the road into town.

I caught Gert studying me with a soulful expression that seemed almost sympathetic. They were trying to keep us apart, I realized. If Nox and I couldn't be together, the witches were going to make sure we weren't around to distract each other. I felt a brief surge of fury. Shouldn't that be up to us? Did I not get a say in my own life? What game were they playing anyway? I'd already decided to keep my distance from Nox. But that was
my
decision, not theirs.

After a picnic-style breakfast of bacon and eggs, Glamora waved the dishes and picnic blanket away, and I stood up. “I want to get this over with,” I said tiredly. “Where's my mom?”

Apparently, Gert had been using her extended involuntary Kansas vacation for recon as well as recovery. “I used what we already knew from the vision of your mother you saw in my cave,” she explained. “Her hut is right near the high school.”

“At least I won't have to take the bus to school,” I said. “And it's called an apartment.”

Mombi snorted. “Keep your attitude in check, missy.”

The apartment where my mom was living wasn't far from Dusty Acres, either, and we all agreed it would be better if I just
walked there. Glamora was more tired than she should have been from whipping up our tent and breakfast, and Gert and Mombi admitted Kansas was having an effect on their magic, too. At least it wasn't just me who was suffering, although it wasn't much comfort knowing the witches would have a hard time helping me if anything went wrong. Quadrant or no Quadrant, I was on my own.

It seemed like a bad idea to use their power to transport me a distance I was perfectly capable of walking. The witches offered to escort me, but I only laughed.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “No offense, but this is the twenty-first century. I'm going to have a hard enough time explaining how
I
got here, let alone three old bats who look like extras from a senior citizens' Dungeons and Dragons role-playing party.”

Mombi smoothed her blue cloak huffily. “We don't have dragons in Oz,” she said.

“Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. “I'm fine on my own.”

Gert stepped forward and hugged me, and for a second I let myself get lost in her familiar, comforting embrace. No matter how much the witches had kept from me, and no matter how much I felt like they were using me half the time for some secret, complicated plan of their own, Gert's hugs were still the best. Somehow, she always managed to make me feel like everything was going to be okay. Even when it pretty clearly wasn't.

“We won't be with you here, Amy,” she said. “Mombi will take us all into the Darklands to wait. We'll be safe there, and we can conserve our power.”

“Great,” I said. “So I can't use my magic, I'm completely on my own, I have barely any time to accomplish the basically impossible task you've given me, and on top of all that, I have to move back in with my mom.”

Glamora nodded earnestly, her blue eyes wide. “Yes,” she said. “That's really all you have to do.”

I sighed. Sarcasm was wasted on pretty much everyone in Oz except Lulu.
And Nox
, a little voice piped up in the back of my head. I told it to shut up.

“We'll be with you in spirit,” Gert said, squeezing my hands. “And when you need us—when you're ready to use the shoes to open the portal back to Oz—send us a sign, and we'll rejoin you.”

“What, like the bat signal?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“What do bats have to do with anything?” Mombi asked.

“Never mind,” I said.

The three of them hugged me in turn—even Mombi—and then joined hands. Mombi closed her eyes and muttered something under her breath. Weakened as she was, she was still far more powerful than I was—I'd only ever managed to get myself into the Darklands for a brief period when I was fighting Dorothy, and she was taking two other people for an indefinite stay without even batting an eyelash. Not that Mombi really had much in the way of eyelashes. Slowly, the witches began to turn gray and then fade, like watching a color movie degrade into black-and-white. The brightness seeped from their bodies and their images flattened and grew
transparent. Gert opened her eyes and blew me a kiss, and then they faded away altogether.

This was it. Yet again, I was on my own, and the future of everything was in my hands. I sighed and started walking.

My mom's new apartment was right downtown in Flat Hill—if
downtown
was the right word for a town that didn't have an up. The downtown of my hometown consisted of four blocks of struggling businesses: an always-empty Chinese restaurant, a coffee shop that also sold dusty stuffed animals and sad-looking helium balloons with cheery slogans for holidays long since passed, three bars (luckily for my mom, since she'd been 86'd for life from two of them), a drugstore, a feed store, and a hardware store that still rented VHS tapes out of a curtained room in the back you had to be eighteen with ID to enter. I'd always known my hometown was a dump, but seeing it again after the magic and beauty of Oz was like being punched in the gut. How could anyone stand to live here? How had I managed to do it for sixteen years? I'd known there were other places—I'd just never been to any of them.

And then it hit me—of course. Dorothy must have felt the
same way. And in Dorothy's Kansas, they didn't even have indoor plumbing. No wonder she'd wanted to go back to Oz, and no wonder she'd fought so desperately to stay. Everyone kept alluding to how the magic of Oz ended up transforming people from the Other Place—people like me and Dorothy. If she and I were alike in one way, did that mean I was destined to . . .
No
, I told myself fiercely. I wasn't anything like Dorothy. I would never do the kinds of things she did.

You already have.
I buried that thought so far down that I'd never be able to dig it up again. I had enough to deal with already.

Looking at Flat Hill made me strangely grateful for the tornado that had given me a free ride out of this hellhole. Sure, things had been tough in Oz, but at least a lot of the time they'd been beautiful, too. Most of the people I went to high school with wouldn't ever see the next state over, let alone a flying monkey or a waterfall made out of rainbows.

Suddenly, I remembered one of the last things my mom had ever said to me.
One second, you have everything, your whole life ahead of you. And then, boom. They just suck it all out of you like little vampires till there's nothing left of you.
She'd been talking about me.

Unexpectedly, I felt tears well up in my eyes, and I scrubbed them away angrily with the heel of my hand. I didn't need this shit. Not now, not ever. I almost turned around right there. Gert and Mombi and Glamora could go to hell. I'd figure something else out. I always had.

But what? I couldn't get back to Oz without Dorothy's stupid
shoes, and it's not like I was going to set up a trailer of my very own in Flat Hill. So maybe my only option right now was my mom. That didn't mean I had to like it. Or forgive her. I blinked away the last of my tears and kept walking.

The tornado had wiped out Dusty Acres, but it had missed most of the main part of town. Here and there I saw scattered piles of debris, and one house at the edge of town had had its roof lifted clean off, though the rest of the building was untouched. Someone had tacked blue tarps over the gaping hole where the roof had been. One of them was coming loose and flapped idly in the humid breeze.

Otherwise, Flat Hill was exactly as I preferred not to remember it. Balding, patchy lawns surrounded by picket fences whose white paint had peeled away years ago. Bedraggled flower beds overgrown with weeds. Televisions flickering behind closed windows, even though it was the middle of the day. The late-morning sun already baking down into the carless streets while a dirty-faced girl on a tricycle wheeled around in bored circles. Flat Hill was a place people took their dreams to die, if they'd had any in the first place. I'd never loved Flat Hill, but after Oz it looked even uglier, dirtier, and poorer.

My mom's new apartment building hadn't been fixed up much despite the fact that it was now housing people again, and it had seen better days. It was just four stories, and didn't look like it had more than a dozen apartments. The siding was a shabby, sad gray that was falling off in places. Some of the windows were boarded up. From the looks of things, they had been that way
since long before the tornado. The awning was torn and flapping in the wind, and the glass in the building's front door was cracked. I ran one finger down the list of names next to the intercom until I found
Gumm
in grimy pencil next to apartment 3B. Maybe she at least had a prairie view. I took a deep breath and pressed the buzzer.

After a minute, the intercom crackled. “Hello?” The voice was cautious, but it was definitely hers. I cleared my throat.

“Hi, Mom,” I said finally. “It's me. Amy.”

There was silence for a second—a long second—and then the intercom blasted me with a shriek so loud I covered my ears. “
Amy
? Oh my god, honey—don't move, don't do a thing, I'll be right down—” The intercom crackled again and my mom was gone. A minute later, she was flinging open the front door of the building and sweeping me up in her arms. Instinctively, I stiffened, and she let me go awkwardly.

She looked just like she'd always looked on one of her supposedly good days—too-short skirt, too-low top cut to reveal way too much of her overtanned cleavage, too much cheap makeup hiding the fact that if you took away the tacky clothes and terrible eye shadow she was actually still pretty. But there was something different about her, too. Something sharper, brighter. More alert. She held me at arm's length and looked at me hard, her eyes welling up with tears, and I realized what it was. They were red, but red from crying, not from pills. She didn't smell like booze. Was it actually possible my mom was sober? I'd believe it when monkeys flew. Oh, right. Well, I
wasn't ready to believe it yet.

“Amy, it's really you,” she said, still crying. “Where have you
been
?”

Oh, crap. Where
had
I been? I couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to any of us to think up a story to explain my month-long absence. It's not like I was going to tell my mom I'd been spending my time hanging out with a band of witches learning to cast spells, beheading the Cowardly Lion, and fighting a glitter-spackled chick no one in Kansas believed existed. “Uh,” I said, “I was—I was in the hospital. In Topeka. The tornado picked me up with the trailer and I, um, I got—hurt. So, that's where I've been.”

My mom stared at me for a minute. “But I searched all the hospitals. When you disappeared—wait, what am I thinking?” she said suddenly, shaking her head. “Come upstairs. I still can't believe this is happening. I missed you so much.” She gave me another fierce hug I couldn't dodge and then beckoned me into the building.

Inside wasn't much better than the outside, and I couldn't help but notice a faint but unmistakable whiff of eau de cat pee in the hallway. I followed my mom up three flights of stairs to a short corridor lined with doors painted an industrial gray green. My mom opened the door to 3B and I followed her into the living room.

It was sort of depressing that this crappy apartment was way nicer than our trailer had ever been. It was twice as big, for one thing, and a picture window at the far end of the living room
let in the afternoon sun. It was sparsely furnished with just a couch and a little card table with two chairs, but she had tacked a couple of cheerful prints on the walls and there was a bright rainbow-patterned rug on the floor. None of the furniture was the same as our old stuff, obviously—the government must have given her some kind of stash of emergency funds, because it's not like we'd had money for new stuff before. But it wasn't just that the apartment was nicer—it was clean.

Reflexively, I checked the couch for my mom's usual nest of Newport cartons and takeout containers and blankets, but it was bare. The apartment didn't even smell of cigarette smoke. Three doors lined one wall, suggesting that this apartment actually had bedrooms. Maybe even more than one. My mom was coming up in the world.

“It's not much,” my mom said from behind me. “Just until I can save up enough to get something nicer. I lost everything in the storm.” She looked away for a second. “Including you,” she added quietly. I must have looked uncomfortable because her tone shifted and she brightened.

“Here,” she said, patting the couch. “Let me make you some tea. Sit. We have a lot to talk about.” I perched gingerly on the edge of the couch as she bustled around the tiny kitchenette, boiling water and putting tea bags into two mugs. I wasn't sure my pre-Oz mom even knew tea existed. When we both had steaming mugs of tea, she settled into the opposite end of the couch as if she was afraid I'd run away if she got too close. Like I was a wild animal.

“I'm sorry you were so worried.” Looking at the emotion in my mom's eyes, I
was
sorry. “I couldn't leave the hospital,” I explained. “Because, um, I had amnesia,” I added in a fit of inspiration. “I lost my wallet and everything in the tornado, and I got hit on the head really bad. So I was in a coma for a while. When I woke up, I didn't know who I was. The hospital kept me while they tried to find my parents. And then, um, I just woke up the other day and remembered who I was, and they—um, they must have contacted the emergency housing place, because they told me where you were, and here I am.” I took a sip of my tea.

It was an insane story with about a million holes—who had paid for the hospital visit? How on earth had I even survived being carried that far by a freaking tornado? Why hadn't the doctors contacted my mom themselves? How had I gotten from Topeka to Flat Hill? I found myself holding my breath as Mom's eyes drifted back and forth while she thought it all through.

“That must be why I never found you,” she said. “If you didn't know your own name, you couldn't have told the doctors.” She frowned. “But why didn't they realize I might be your mother, if you were the only patient with amnesia? I made flyers and passed them out, I went to every hospital—”

It took everything I had not to scream at her to just shut up. How many times had my mother lied to me in my life?
I'll take you to Disney World next year. I don't know where the cash in your underwear drawer went. Of course I haven't been drinking.
If I tried to make a list of every lie, it would take me a year. The least she could do for me now was just let it go.

Mom looked at me carefully. “Your hair's different,” she said.

Right. Back in the caves, at the Order's headquarters, Glamora had magically changed my hair from pink to blond. That definitely didn't fit too well into my “I spent the last month in a hospital” story either. I opened my mouth to say something, and my mom shook her head.

It was like she knew exactly what I was thinking. It was like she could hear all my complaints. She might not have known everything that had happened, but she
understood
. If that wasn't a first, it was close. She really had come a long way, I guess.

“All that matters is that you're home now,” she said firmly, and I relaxed a little. She paused. “But . . . I should call your dad.”

I had not seen my father since I was a single digit. And I never wanted to see him again. I had thought that was one thing that Mom and I agreed on no matter what her blood alcohol level read.

Seeing the shock on my face, my mom scrambled to explain. “I had to tell him, Amy. I thought maybe he could help.”

I laughed. It felt—and sounded—bitter. “I'm sure he was out there combing Dusty Acres looking for me.”

“He sent a check,” my mom said simply. “Amy,” she went on, “I really owe you an apology. A big one. Not just for leaving you when the tornado came. I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself for that. But for everything before that, too.”

She was crying again, and this time she wouldn't meet my eyes. “I've been a terrible parent,” she said. “For a long time. I
don't expect you to forgive me, but I want you to know I know, and I'm sorry.”

I raised my eyebrows. This, I had not expected. “What happened to the pills?” I asked bluntly, and she flinched.

“When I”—her voice broke—“lost you, I realized what had happened to me. What I'd let myself become. I quit cold turkey, Amy. I knew I had to be there for you when you came back. I looked for you everywhere after the storm, but it was like you'd just vanished into thin air. Somehow I always knew that you'd come back to me, though, and I wanted to deserve it when you did.” She smiled through her tears. “I'm even working,” she said. “I got a job at the hardware store as a cashier.”

“You quit cold turkey?” I asked, surprised. “That must have been tough.”

“It was the hardest thing I've ever done,” she said, looking down at her lap. “It was awful.” Her tears spilled over, running down her cheeks. “But it was nothing compared to what it felt like when I thought I'd lost you.”

Some part of me wanted to reach across the distance between us and hug her, but I'd fallen for her promises one too many times before. If she'd quit using when the tornado hit, that meant she'd only been sober a month. And a month was nowhere near enough time to trust anything had really changed. But if she'd made flyers and searched frantically from hospital to hospital, that was the biggest effort she'd made for me—for anything other than a bottle of pills—in a really long time. Either way,
it didn't matter, I told myself. I'd already made up my mind that I was going back to Oz. There was nothing for me here. I'd learned to live without my mom. I could do it again. We were both silent for a minute.

“Mom?” I said finally. “I'm really sorry, but Star—um, she didn't make it.”

My mom gave me a sad, are-you-kidding-me smile. “Honey,” she said, “Star's a rat. If I have to choose between a rat and my daughter, I'll take the kid every time.” She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, with a note of false cheer in her voice, “do you want to see your room?”