“You did,” Mombi countered.
“I was a kid. It’s easier.”
“Dorothy did,” Glamora added.
“I can speak for myself!” I blurted. “And honestly, what do I really have to know how to do in order to be bait?” I had put it all together in my head. I was now a fugitive from the palace—and one who Dorothy had a very personal interest in. They wanted to use me to distract her. That had to be it.
“I’m right. I’m bait, aren’t I?”
Gert opened her mouth to answer—probably to say something comforting—but she stopped herself. She actually looked surprised, which was a real feat for someone who could read minds. But then I realized she wasn’t looking at me. I swiveled in my chair to follow her gaze and gasped. Standing behind me were two girls, dripping in blood.
They weren’t like any girls I had seen before. The tall one had red hair and a deep purple scar in the center of her forehead, about the size of a silver dollar and as smooth as exposed bone. The other girl had blonde hair and piercing green eyes and a small, heart-shaped mouth. But honestly it was hard to focus on that, because, while half of her face was flesh, like mine, the other half was made out of metal, the two sides bolted together with big, thick screws. Her neck was the same—divided down the center—and her left arm was metal too. I couldn’t see her legs under her pants, but I wondered if her whole body was the same way.
The two girls were leaning against one another. Or rather, the tin girl was leaning into the taller one. I couldn’t see the wounds underneath all the blood, but she looked more hurt.
Mombi was at the girls’ side in a blink. “Where? What?”
“Quadling Country. The Lion,” mumbled the tall girl with the round scar.
Mombi disappeared in a plume of smoke. Instead of helping the bloody girls, it was clear she’d gone to check out the where and the what.
Nox twitched beside me at the word Lion. He leapt to his feet, Gert quick to follow.
Nox picked the tin girl up in his arms. A smile flickered through the woozy pain on her face.
“Melindra, it’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.”
For the first time since I met him, Nox looked like he cared.
Gert’s hand glowed as she touched the girl’s arm. “Let’s get her to the spring.”
Before I knew it, the girls and Nox and Gert were gone. When I turned back to the table, Glamora leaned back in her chair and took another bite of the goo.
Being abandoned with no explanation didn’t bother me. What bothered me, suddenly, surprisingly, was how much more Nox cared about helping this other girl.
“Sit,” Glamora commanded at our next lesson, pointing to her vanity as we entered her cave. I was distracted, still irked by what had happened over dinner the night before. Those girls had shown up covered in blood and I was here to learn how to curtsy? I slouched away from her, knowing how much it would bother her. I didn’t sit. I touched her things instead. The vanity was covered with little glass figurines that looked like maybe they were once part of a really ornate chess set. I rolled a glass queen in my palms and heard a deep exhale from Glamora like she was trying to keep calm. I rolled my eyes, too. It was a small act of protest, but it registered like an earthquake for Glamora.
“Sit,” she ordered again without raising her voice, but she snatched the figurine from my hand and placed it back on the vanity. The other figures moved back into place, too, on their own. I wondered if Glamora’s real gift wasn’t etiquette but some kind of witchy OCD.
I obeyed this time, sitting on the chair but immediately twisting away from the mirror to face her. She took her hair out of its intricate bun and it fell in pretty waves well past her shoulders, framing the deep V of her purple dress and impressive cleavage. With her hair down she looked even more like her evil sister.
“I may not have Gert’s or Mombi’s gifts but I do have many things to teach you, my dear,” Glamora said.
I reached for the queen figurine again. It moved away from me.
Glamora sighed. “Showing is sometimes better than telling.”
I looked up at her as she placed her perfectly manicured hands over her face and then pulled them away like she was playing peekaboo with a toddler. I gasped. Her right cheek had a lunar-shaped hole in it—I could see her tongue. I could see her perfect white teeth.
“What happened to you?” I asked, horrified.
“Family can hurt us better than anyone.”
“Why would Glinda . . . What happened?”
“Glinda wanted to make sure that no one mistook me for her anymore. Looking exactly like your enemy can potentially be an advantage when we are on the brink of war, and she didn’t want me to have that advantage.”
Glamora didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed of it—but letting me see her scar was clearly a big deal, especially for someone so beautiful. And Glamora was still beautiful, even with her face carved up. Beautiful was in the way that she moved and spoke. Beautiful was an action as well as a description.
“Why don’t you use the spring?” I asked carefully.
Glamora ran her fingers over the scar almost lovingly. “When she faces me, I want her to face what she’s done.”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen her. I’ve seen what she’s become. You don’t really think she’ll see this and beg for forgiveness, do you?”
I wondered if she was hoping that there was some part of her that still did. That was hoping Glinda would see the scar and be sorry. I knew a little about hoping for that—and I knew a lot about being disappointed.
Glamora laughed, a big bell of a laugh that went up so high that I felt like I needed to cover my ears.
“There is no more room for forgiveness. Not for me. I want the scar to be the last thing she sees before I end her.”
Glamora’s eyes studied mine, waiting for some kind of reaction.
“She didn’t kill you,” I said slowly. “She was clearly close enough to do that. But she didn’t kill you.”
“When you’re a witch and a twin, you’re connected. I used to be able to see what she was doing, I could feel when she was in pain. But since she did this, I don’t feel her anymore. I don’t see her anymore. There’s a chance that if the knife went all the way through me, then it would go all the way through her as well. Killing me could very well end her own life.”
“But isn’t that true for you, too? If you go after her, you could kill yourself.”
“That’s the difference between us. I wouldn’t hesitate if the outcome was ridding the world of her evil.”
I stared at Glamora as she touched her cheek and the scar disappeared, and she looked perfect and whole once again.
When I first saw Glamora just a few days ago, I thought she was the scariest thing in the world because I had thought she was Glinda. But now that I’d seen the real Glamora, I wondered if maybe she was scarier than Glinda after all.
“Now let’s get started, shall we?” She put her hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around to face the mirror. There were only two mirrors back home in the trailer. The broken one in our tiny bathroom and the one over my ten-million-year-old dresser that was warped and had a kind of fun-house quality that made my face appear even narrower than usual. I spent as little time as possible looking into either one of them.
This mirror was different. Or maybe I was.
I caught my breath. There was something tough in my eyes. Tougher than before if that was even possible. The pink was washing out of my hair, giving way to dirty blonde.