“What if I want to be angry?” I snapped. “Don’t I have a right to be angry?”
Gert just shrugged evenly, but I kept going.
“Look at what I did back there when I was angry. I set the sky on fire and made it snow ash. Being angry works. It works a lot better than anything else I’ve tried.”
“But imagine if you didn’t have to start there. Imagine if you got to start somewhere good.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I can imagine a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they’re possible.”
“Anything is possible, dear. Look around you.”
I laughed bitterly. “Oz—where all your worst nightmares can come true.”
“Look at us,” Gert said, ignoring me. “We witches spent our lives fighting each other. Now we live under the same roof. Working together for something greater. It just goes to show . . .”
I tried to imagine becoming besties with Madison Pendleton after years of her torturing me. I shook my head.
But Gert wasn’t talking about Madison Pendleton, not really. She was talking about my mother. I felt like if I forgave her, I was just asking her to hurt me again.
“Why are you pushing this?” I asked. “My mom’s a million miles away. It doesn’t matter.”
“She’s the voice in your head.”
“And you want yours to be in there instead?”
“I want yours to be, Amy.”
I refused to look at her, refused to be taken in by those warm, grandmotherly eyes. I knew what was behind them.
I kept staring at the water but when Gert didn’t respond, I looked up to see her fading into white smoke.
Well, clearly she was done with this conversation. I looked back down. The image of my mom was fading away. As it did, the water began to bubble.
Steam began to rise from the roiling, angry water. The pool was boiling, and I knew it wasn’t part of Gert’s spell. I was the one doing it.
Forgiveness can get you places, I guess. But sometimes you need to light a fire.
I sank into my bed that night without bothering to change out of my gown. I’d seen Mom. I’d done magic. It bugged me that even now, my mom was tied to everything I did. Was she seriously still screwing with me from a gazillion miles away? I couldn’t blink away the image of her in the scrying pond, all cleaned up and holding on to my sweater. It made me sad. It made me miss her. But it didn’t magically erase the years of other, grimmer images.
Sleep felt as far away as home.
The next morning, I was almost glad to remember that I had a session with Nox. I needed to punch something. That I would get to punch Nox was an added bonus.
On my way to the training room, Gert’s and Glamora’s voices wafted out at me as I passed Glamora’s chambers. Something about their tone—hushed, yet sharp and full of warning, like they were talking about something secret—made me stop just outside to listen in.
“Don’t encourage it, Glamora.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. That girl has more cracks in her than the road of yellow brick. Nox will break her in two.”
“Or she’ll break him. Don’t pretend you were never young. She has no real connection to any of us. But she and Nox—there’s something there.”
“We are bound. She is warming to me—”
“That’s not enough. You know that I have my own suspicions about exactly who it was that brought Amy to Oz. There are few people with enough power to summon someone from the Other Place, and if my hunch is correct, we both know that a simple binding won’t be enough to hold the girl to us. But I can think of a stronger glue. . . .”
“She’s starved for it, certainly. But I don’t know if our boy is capable of love. He wasn’t built for it. We didn’t build him for it.”
“It’s funny, Gert,” Glamora said. “All that mind reading, and you still can’t see inside the heart. Our boy is starved for it, too. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
I backed away, shaking my head, and rushed down the hall. I did not feel that way about Nox. Maybe he wasn’t the total jerk I’d thought he was at first, but that didn’t mean anything. It definitely didn’t mean he felt anything for me.
Chapter Twenty-One
My pulse was still speeding when I got to the training cave. Seeing him was already going to be different after last night—dancing together, hearing his story for the first time, and feeling the magic that had finally surged through me.
When I walked into the cave, he wasn’t alone. A glint of tin caught the light and blinded me for a second. It was the girls who had interrupted our dinner the other night, covered in blood. They looked fine now—better than fine. Annabel, the tall one with the unicorn scar, was stretching, while Melindra, the half-tin girl, leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, staring at me.
Something about the way Melindra flicked open her metal lashes reminded me of Madison back home. Like she already hated me and we hadn’t even met yet.
“Melindra and Annabel will be joining us today,” Nox explained to me without looking up. “Melindra, Annabel,” Nox said. “This is Amy.”
“We know who she is,” Melindra said. “The girl who fell out of the sky in a tin can to save us all.” There was something sarcastic in her voice, but there was something else, too—like she couldn’t decide whether she was supposed to be suspicious of me or if she was hoping everything they said about me was true.
“Nox told me that you escaped the Scarecrow’s labs,” I blurted. I’d been spending too much time with Glamora. One of her helpful hints about meeting new people was to tell them something you know about them. But for some reason I don’t think she meant bringing up that horrific time the person was tortured by a mad scientist Scarecrow.
But Melindra suppressed a smile, and I could see that it wasn’t such a mistake at all. She was proud—proud of who she was and of what she had been through.
“They wanted to make me join the Tin Man’s secret police,” Melindra said. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I got out of there and came here. No one’s ever done that before.”
I was impressed. I’d needed Mombi’s help to escape, but this girl had done it on her own. I wanted to ask her how but now didn’t seem like the best time.
“We need to see if Melindra and Annabel are ready to go back out there,” Nox said.
“We’re ready,” Annabel volunteered, without looking to Melindra to back her up. I couldn’t believe it—they’d been torn apart by the Lion, but there was still no question of not going back.
“Okay, then show us what you’ve got. Amy can spar with the winner,” Nox said. He still hadn’t looked at me, and now he turned around to busy himself with the equipment.
“Don’t even,” Annabel warned, watching my gaze follow Nox.
“Don’t what?” I asked.
The girls both giggled. It was weird to see the flesh-and-blood side of Melindra’s face contort in laughter while the metal side stayed stiff and emotionless.
“What?” I asked again.
“We’ve seen that look before,” Annabel said. “Trust me, it’s not worth it. Nox only cares about the cause. There’s no room inside him for anything else. Not that plenty of people haven’t tried.” She shot Melindra a knowing glance.
“I’m not . . . ,” I started, but I could feel myself blushing. “I don’t . . .”
I stopped myself.
Nox returned, handing a knife to Annabel, who thanked him with a flirty smirk. Nox ignored it. Or maybe he just didn’t notice it in the first place. Melindra shook her head at the knife and instead offered up a clenched fist. As she lifted it to her chest, a thin, glittering blade folded out from the top of her wrist as easily as a bird would stretch its wings. She looked out at me from behind it with a smirk.