I felt myself envying her. Now that it was time to go, I suddenly wondered if I should have been so eager to fight.
But it was too late to think about that. In the training area, we all stood in a circle, all of us chanting at once as we worked together to cast the spell that would take us to the village.
Glamora took a step back, still chanting, and stepped out of the circle, followed by Annabel and Melindra. We all joined hands.
Nox looked over at me. “Hold on,” he warned me with a sly, nervous grin.
He squeezed tight.
I felt an invisible force start to lift me, then it yanked me upward like a bullet, and we shot straight up.
I screamed and closed my eyes, knowing I was about to be smushed like a bug against the roof of the cave.
Instead, I felt wind on my face. I opened my eyes and found that my body was horizontal, my arms strained to their limits as I held on to Nox. Everyone else still had their eyes closed, their mouths forming the same chant over and over and over, and we were all fanned out like skydivers in formation, the mountain below us, hurtling out of sight.
We were flying.
It was the most incredible feeling I’d ever had. The sensation of free-falling made me giddy and light-headed, like I was a balloon and my insides were helium. I laughed, almost forgetting that I, Salvation Amy, was on my way to battle the Not-So-Cowardly Lion and his army of monsters. How could my stomach tie itself into knots about what was coming when I was busy tumbling into the sky?
“It never gets old,” Nox said, opening his eyes. “In case you were wondering.”
His normally spiky hair was flattened against his head by the wind, but for some reason his voice came out normal, like we were still standing right next to each other in the training room.
“You could have warned me,” I said. “I thought we were going to teleport.”
“It takes too much energy to teleport this many people,” he said. “By the time we got there, we’d all be ready to pass out from exhaustion. This is more efficient. Plus, it’s fun.”
“Won’t they see us coming?”
“Nope,” Nox said. “We’re traveling in the Space Between Space. They can’t see us if we’re not really here. It’s how we passed through the mountain.”
“Oh,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about.
“I’ll explain later,” he said.
“Should we still be chanting?” I asked nervously, seeing that both Mombi and Gert still had their eyes squeezed tight.
“Nah,” he said. “The takeoff is the hard part. Now that we’re on our way, it only takes Gert to keep us in the air.”
“What’s Mombi doing then?” I asked.
Nox wiggled his eyebrows and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Mombi’s afraid of heights,” he said. “She’s not casting a spell. She’s saying her prayers.”
“Who exactly do wicked witches pray to?”
Nox laughed. “Who knows? She’s just trying to stay distracted so she doesn’t piss herself before we land.”
Our ascent had slowed down by now and we floated easily through the air, a mist of lavender clouds hovering just inches above our heads. In the distance, the sun was rising over the Deadly Desert. Instead of looking down, I looked at Nox as he took in the landscape.
Seeing him like this, away from the caves, away from the cause, I could almost see the boy he could have been. The boy he would have been if Dorothy had never come back. He looked happy. He looked beautiful.
Then he turned dark again. “Almost here,” he said. I followed his gaze and saw thick, black smoke rising up from a forested area at the foot of a mountain range, curling into the sky.
“Get ready,” Gert said, not opening her eyes. “We’re coming in for a landing.”
The knot in my stomach tied itself right back up as our velocity reversed itself and we hurtled for the ground, picking up speed.
But her warning was unnecessary. We landed like feathers in a field on the outskirts of what must have been Pumperdink. It was on fire, its small, dome-shaped houses consumed with flames as panicked townspeople raced in every direction.
The smell filled my nostrils and stayed there, churning. It was disgusting—a horrible combination of smoke and blood and burning flesh and other things, I’m sure, that I didn’t even want to know about.
As I looked around, unsure what to do next, I saw something moving above me. Monkeys—they were weaving through the burning sky. The almost humanlike way in which they swooped and dove into the chaos made me shiver.
“Mombi and I will take down the beasts left in this village and save as many of the children as we can,” Gert said, turning back to me and Nox. “Amy, you go with Nox to find the Lion. Send a summoning spell when you’ve got him in your sights. Don’t try to defeat him yourselves—he’s too powerful for either of you to take on without us.”
Nox nodded and Mombi and Gert disappeared.
He balled his hand into a fist, and when he opened it he was holding a glowing ball of blue flame, which he blew on gently. It spun from his hand and hovered a few inches in the air. Nox blew on it again—it circled lazily around us, then darted back and forth for a few seconds before zinging off in the opposite direction of the village, leaving a trail of blue energy in its wake.
Nox jerked his head wordlessly toward the forest on the other side of the field. I pulled the knife he had given me out of the air, like he’d taught me to do, and his eyes met mine. The rest of his face was stony and emotionless, but his eyes were flashing with something else that I couldn’t place. Pride, maybe? They seemed to be saying, See? This is it. This is what I told you about.
I nodded, hoping he knew that I understood. And we went racing off, chasing the light.
It got darker as we went farther into the trees, until finally the only illumination was the dim light from the tracing charm that was leading us. But my training served me well now, and my feet nimbly avoided every obstacle as if I’d run down this path a thousand times.
After a few minutes, we heard a roar in the distance. Nox put a finger to his lips and slowed down until we reached the edge of a clearing.
“Stay back,” Nox whispered. “They won’t notice us yet if we’re careful.”
The clearing was crowded with animals, some I recognized and others I didn’t. There were foxes and crocodiles and wolves and tigers and bears. A few were walking around on their hind legs, while others were pacing on all fours. It was a nightmare zoo—a menagerie of wild mutated animals of every size and shape. These were the Lion’s beasts.
Did the Lion command every animal in Oz, or did they have a say in the matter? I wondered, thinking of Star. If anyone was stubborn enough to show a little backbone, it was my pet rat. With any luck, Pete was keeping her nice and safe, but if she ever had the bad luck to meet this guy I hoped she would give him a good, hard bite.
The beasts had surrounded a group of Gillikin people, who were lined up neatly in the middle of the clearing like they were waiting for something.
Or maybe like something was waiting for them: at the front of the line, I saw the Lion himself for the first time in the flesh. He had been a vague, hazy shadow in Glamora’s scrying pool, but now, in person, I realized exactly how terrifying he really was.
Really, he was barely recognizable as a lion at all. He looked like a monster, like some warped nightmare version of the king of the jungle. He was huge and golden, with bulging, grotesque muscles and a filthy, snarled mane. His lips were curled back, baring a mouth crowded with sharp, long, crooked fangs.
“Is that what he’s always looked like?” I asked under my breath. Nox just shook his head and signaled for me to keep watching.