“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I was. “He doesn’t mean anything to me.”
The Lion shook out his mane and gave me a wicked smile. “Very well,” he said. He opened his enormous jaws and, as I watched in horror, blue smoke began streaming out of Nox’s eye sockets and nostrils. Blue, the color of his magic. Nox began to shake.
“Stop!” I screamed. I raised my knife and prepared to throw it, aiming it at the Lion’s head—but I hesitated. What if I hit Nox instead? What if it didn’t work? I had been training, but I still wasn’t ready for something like this.
As I stood there, paralyzed by self-doubt, Gert whooshed by me in a streak of white light. As she came to a stop, the beastly guard she’d been holding motionless with her spell began to stir to life all around us. They were still looking dazed and sluggish, but it would only be a matter of time before they recovered their bearings. In other words, we were screwed.
Gert clapped her fists together and as she pulled them apart, Nox went flying from the Lion’s grip and landed in the grass a few feet away.
“Take me instead,” Gert hissed at the Lion. “I’m an old woman, but I have more for you to feast on than the two of them combined.”
“No!” I cried, but she ignored me. The Lion looked her up and down, considering the offer. He must have known that I was more valuable than either Gert or Nox. But he was hungry and hurt. He probably figured he could take her first and still have me when he was done with her.
The Lion nodded. Gert stepped forward.
“Stop!” I shouted again, leaping forward to pull her away. I couldn’t let this happen. But Gert had other ideas. She flicked her wrist at me and I went falling backward to the spot on the ground where Nox was already lying. When I tried to stand, I found that all of my muscles were frozen.
Gert just shot me a sly smile.
It was only then that I knew what she was playing at: Gert was fearless. There would be nothing for the Lion to suck from her. I hoped she had something better to give him in its place.
The Lion had no idea, though. He pawed at the ground and smiled greedily as he unhinged his mangled, blood-soaked jaw. Gert didn’t so much as pause. She looked up at her old enemy with a glint of cheerfulness in her gaze and she pursed her lips into a kiss.
A flash of light blinded me for a second as the Lion began to stiffen and writhe. He tried to pull away, but it was too late.
The stream of energy coursing between his mouth and Gert’s was white, not blue like before. And it was coming from the Lion, not from her. Her body was shaking like a leaf as she absorbed it.
Every muscle in the Lion began to shrink, like a balloon deflating. His eyes widened in something that looked like surprise.
No. Not surprise. Cowardice. Instead of giving him her fear, she was draining him.
Now. Gert’s telepathic voice echoed weakly in my head like a whisper down an empty corridor. I realized that I could wiggle my fingers again. I could move.
Nox realized it, too. He jumped to his feet and lifted his sword one more time. At that same moment, Gert collapsed in a heap. She’d done what she needed to do.
Nox sliced at the Lion’s belly and blood gushed from the wound. The Lion tried to roar, but all that came out was a high-pitched squeal.
I was on my feet then, too. I dove forward, ready to finish him off once and for all. But I was too late. Even in his weakened state the Lion was somehow already bounding away, retreating back across the clearing and into the forest, his army of beasts following their leader.
Her plan had worked. She had beaten him. I stood up, ready to cheer.
But Nox was standing, too, and he didn’t look nearly as happy. “We almost had him. Where the hell was Mombi?”
I had been wondering that, too, but when I saw that Gert was still on the ground, everything else went out of my head. She wasn’t moving. She was lying in front of us like an overstuffed rag doll, her arms and legs splayed out at the wrong angles.
“Gert . . .” I knelt by the witch’s side. Nox was already crouched over her, trying to pull her up and into his chest.
“Hold on,” Nox was whispering. “Mombi’s on her way. We’ll get you to the spring.”
Gert’s lips trembled. She was trying to smile. For me. For Nox. But her soft, fleshy body was spreading out into formlessness, almost like she was melting before my eyes as she sprawled, convulsing, on the ground. What she had taken from the Lion must have been too much to absorb, even for her.
The green grass beneath her turned from green to brown to black charred dirt. It was as if someone had taken a torch to it.
Nox placed his palms on Gert’s chest and bit his lip in concentration. Blue sparks glittered at his fingertips but immediately petered out.
“Come on,” I muttered, willing his magic to work. He did it again, and again nothing.
Suddenly Gert’s arm shot up and she grabbed my wrist, clenching tight. Her lips began to move—she was mumbling something under her breath. At first it sounded like she was speaking a different language, but when her lips stopped moving, I was able to understand her words in my mind.
It was an incantation. “North, South, East, West, wind, fire, sun, earth, protect her and keep her. Protect her and keep her.”
Now I was crying. “Gert,” I managed to say. “Please. I need you.”
Nox was ignoring us, still trying desperately to use his magic to bring her back from the brink.
“Come close, dear,” Gert gasped. Her face was once again the warm, kind face I’d first seen when I’d woken up in the caves, frightened and alone. I saw the witch—Good or Wicked, it didn’t matter anymore—who had comforted me and fed me, who had helped me find my magic. I leaned in over her.
She tilted her head up and kissed me on my brow. I felt warmth wash over me. It started where her lips met my forehead and bloomed all over, until my skin was somehow coated in Gert’s kiss.
“Gert, no . . . ,” I gasped. What had she done? She needed every bit of strength to hold on. Whatever she had given me, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want a good-bye.
“This will keep you safe,” Gert said.
“You have to do something,” I croaked at Nox, tears streaming down my cheeks. He had finally given up and sat back, and had silently watched Gert bestow her kiss upon me. “Please. Save her. Use your magic. You have to.”
Nox shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said, looking away.
Gert looked up at me. “It has to be you, child. You have to do it,” she said weakly.
“Do what?” I asked, somehow believing that as long as I held on to her gaze then she would hold on to me.
“You have to kill Dorothy, Amy.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I woke up the next morning feeling spent and disoriented, my mind a jumble of hazy images that appeared one by one in my head like pages in a horrible picture book.
The burning village. The eerie scene in the forest. Nox’s determined face as he fought back an onslaught of beasts.
I felt like I was being plunged naked into a frigid pool as the rest of it came back to me. The Lion’s gaping, bloody maw; Gert’s tender kiss and the strange way I’d felt the life slip out of her as I’d held her in my arms. Her body dead on the ground.
In the enchanted softness of my bed, I tried to tell myself that it hadn’t really happened—that it had all been a dream. It was only when I felt a tingling on my forehead, in the exact spot where Gert had kissed me, that I knew it had all been real.
At that stinging realization, I jolted instantly out of bed and took a shaky step forward, followed by another and another then another until I was in the center of the room, where I stopped in a state of paralyzed panic. I had no idea what to do with myself.