He fanned the blades of his hand out in front of him as he lunged for my new ally, his crew rushing into the cell behind him.
Sword-Arm was in front of me, advancing with sword outstretched, backing me into a corner. I stepped out of her way, ducked under her, and thrust my kitchen knife toward her chest just as she pivoted to face me. I missed, but I was surprised at how close I’d come, at how the weight and heft of the knife felt so natural.
Suddenly I knew exactly when to thrust and when to parry, when to go high and when to go low and when to twist away. I felt like I could do some real damage with this thing.
So I sliced and diced and feinted as the Tin Soldiers all scrambled to grab me. A line of bright red blossomed across Sword-Arm’s cheek as I connected. I pulled back at the sight of it, but the knife urged me forward again. I gave the head on the bicycle two flat tires in no time, sending him sprawling onto his side on the floor, where he struggled to pull himself upright with his weird, handlebar arms.
When the one with the panel covering his mouth—the one who had killed Indigo—grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back, I pushed against him with my free arm and wiggled loose. He put out his arms in an almost shrug, offering himself up for another attempt, like he was daring me to fail at checking him again.
Then he charged at me, this time crouching low to deliver some kind of deadly head butt.
I ducked out of the way at the last moment but he spun quickly around and caught me in the back, slamming me to the ground. I lay motionless for a second, the wind knocked out of me. He nudged me with his foot, roughly rolling me over. Grabbing me by the neck, he hauled me to my feet and pulled me close to him, so close that I could tell by his eyes if not his mouth panel that he was smirking.
I was over this. I had been through too much. I had seen too much.
I had been angry before. At Madison. At my mom. But I had never felt anything like this. I could feel myself seize up, every muscle contracting at once, gripped by what Dorothy had done to Indigo, by what she had planned for me. But instead of stuffing it down, or blurting out something stupid, I struck.
I jabbed the blade of Mombi’s knife into the thing’s eye socket.
It was for Indigo. It was for me, too.
Blood spurted everywhere as he slumped against the wall and collapsed. I looked down at the knife, at the Rorschach pattern of blood splattered on the ground. I wanted to believe it was the knife that had done that—not me—but I wasn’t so sure.
I felt sick to my stomach, still not quite believing it, but Sword-Arm was on me again, and she was mad. In one swift motion, she knocked my blade from my grip and it went clattering to the ground. I was now defenseless as she shoved me up against the wall.
I punched with my fist, but the hard metal of her arm hurt me more than my punches hurt her and I screamed through clenched teeth. She raised the shiny blade of her deadly arm over her head and I braced myself.
“Mombi!” I yelled.
Without dropping her own attack on the Tin Woodman, Mombi reached her free hand into her robes again and pulled out what looked like a ball of purple yarn. She hurled it in my direction and as it looped through the air it began to unspool, its threads becoming indistinct and unfocused, twisting and curling in a hundred different directions. When the ball hit Sword-Arm, it instantly began to wrap itself around her, covering her in sticky, purple cobwebs. She struggled against it, but her weapon was stuck in midair. Mombi’s magic had bought me some time.
“I can hold them for a few seconds, Amy!” Mombi shrieked from the other side of the room. “Now will you join us or not?”
I knew I had no other choice. “Done,” I cried.
Mombi reached out a hand. I dove across the room for it and grabbed on tight.
As I touched her, the purple rags began to billow out from around her body. The rags curled around the two of us, enveloping us both in a cocoon as the Tin Woodman and his henchmen faded away along with the room itself.
I was smoke now, too.
“Welcome to the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked, Amy,” Mombi hissed as we disappeared.
Chapter Thirteen
Mombi let go of my hand as we materialized someplace dark. Someplace so dark I couldn’t see my hands. But even without being able to see, I could still feel the coldness of the knife in my clenched palm.
The darkness washed over me—a darkness like I’d never experienced before.
“Where . . . ,” I started, and then trailed off, feeling a dizzying, spiraling sense of panic. What had I gotten myself into?
My breathing was getting shallower and shallower when a bright spark appeared in the blackness, just inches from my face. When my eyes focused in on it, I saw a tiny, glowing spider crawling through the air. As it moved in a zigzagging spiral, Mombi’s body slowly faded into view next to me. I looked down at myself and saw that I was now illuminated, too. The light was confined to our bodies, though. Everything around us remained as dark as ever.
“Where—where are we?” I asked the witch, the words catching in my throat. What had I gotten myself into?
“You’ll know in good time, my dear,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “There’s a lot for us to talk about, and I could use a nice, long nap. All that teleportation will take the wind right out of an old girl like me. I’m sure you agree.”
It wasn’t until she said it that I realized I was exhausted, too. My legs were shaky, every bit of my body was sore, and my arm was throbbing with pain. I felt like I could sleep for a thousand years.
Then I started to remember what had happened and my knees began to buckle in on themselves as the memories washed over me. The escape. The fight. The squishy, sick feeling of my knife burying itself in my foe’s eye socket and the thick geyser of blood that had come squirting out.
It couldn’t have been me. It felt more like something I had seen on TV than something that had actually happened to me.
I would never have done that. I couldn’t have. The girl who fought Sword-Arm to a standstill had known what she was doing. I’d never hurt another person in my whole life. Well, not with my fists, at least.
I felt the knife in my hand. It felt good. It felt like it was part of me. Suddenly I understood.
“It was the knife, right?” I asked Mombi. “It’s magic. It was telling me what to do.”
Mombi swatted the question away. “Pish tosh,” she said. “The knife’s enchanted, certainly. It will whisper in your ear a little bit—tell you where to move, teach you a few tricks. But it can’t make something out of nothing. It can’t help you if you don’t have it in you somewhere.” Her mouth spread into a wide grin, revealing a jammed-together row of rotting brown teeth. “Good thing you did,” she said.
From the way she said it, I knew she meant it as a compliment, and I felt a twisted sense of pride rising in my chest. I tried to shove it back down. The fact that I had what it took to stab someone’s eyes out was nothing to be proud of.
No, I corrected myself. Not someone. Something. And that thing had been helping the Tin Woodman. That thing had been responsible for killing Indigo. I had nothing to feel guilty about.
Mombi winked at me as if she knew exactly what I had been thinking. She reached out and wrapped her knotted, spindly hands around my closed fist. “Now,” she said. “You won’t be needing that for a bit.”
“No!” I said, more angrily than I meant to, squeezing hard as she tried to pry my fingers open. The knife was mine. I didn’t want to give it back. It could keep me safe.