I could hear Nox and Madison shouting something but everything was dark. A tiny hand clutched my own, its palm clammy with fear: Dorothy’s servant, I realized. We were falling through darkness, the wind whistling around us.
Not darkness. This place was familiar. The Darklands. Something was pulling us back from the past. Some force so powerful that I could feel it like a tidal wave dragging me from shore.
Don’t be afraid, Amy. I’m bringing you home.
That voice. So familiar.
“Ozma,” I whispered.
A single spark sprang to life in front of me. It spread outward and took shape. Ozma hovered before me, radiant and calm. Her face was peaceful but her eyes were horribly, horribly sad.
“Oh, Amy,” she said gently. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Why?” I asked, dazed. “Where are we? The Darklands?”
She smiled. “Neither here nor there, past nor present. We’re in the place in between while Oz repairs itself.”
“How are you—but we—” I couldn’t shape the words.
“I’m a fairy,” Ozma said simply. “Time is not the same for us. The world is not the same for us. I remember everything that has come before and that will come after.”
I looked around me for Nox and Madison and Dorothy’s servant. They were fast asleep on the ground. Only Ozma and I were conscious.
I could feel my heart splitting apart in my chest. I had done it. I’d undone everything that Dorothy had done to Oz.
And that meant the person I loved more than I’d ever loved anything in the world had no idea who I was. But how had I not forgotten him?
“You will never forget what you have been through,” Ozma said quietly, almost as though she could read my mind—which she probably could. “And for that, I am so sorry. You have saved Oz, Amy, but we have asked so much of you. No one should have to sacrifice what you have sacrificed.”
“Nox,” I said brokenly. She nodded.
“It was a terrible thing to ask of you,” she said. “But you chose well, Amy. You chose the good of all over the desires of your heart. And for that, there is one thing I can give you in return.”
She bent over Nox and kissed him on the forehead. “North, South, East, West, wind, fire, sun, earth, protect him and keep him. Protect him and keep him.”
I recognized those words: they were the blessing Gert had spoken to me in the aftermath of my first battle. The first time I’d killed someone in Oz. The words she’d told me would keep me safe.
She’d been right. After all, I was still alive. And now Ozma was protecting Nox. I was grateful to her for that much.
Nox moaned and stirred. I wanted to reach out, push the hair out of his eyes the way I’d done a thousand times. But he didn’t know who I was anymore. I was a stranger. I fought back a sob.
He opened his eyes and looked at me in incomprehension. It’s always going to be like this, I thought. He’s never going to know what we shared.
“Look closer,” Ozma said to me, smiling. “A fairy’s kiss is a powerful thing, Amy.”
“Amy?” Nox said. He blinked at me, his gaze focusing. “You’re alive!” he said, leaping to his feet. “I thought—”
He remembered me. Ozma’s kiss hadn’t been for protection. She’d given him back our history.
And now, like an idiot, I was crying again. Somehow I didn’t mind. Nox threw his arms around me and I sank into his embrace. I think time might have stopped. I’m pretty sure my heart did. It was too much. Over Nox’s shoulder, Ozma’s smile was turning into a genuine grin.
“Amy,” Nox said hoarsely, pulling me close and burying his face in my hair. “I thought I lost you. I thought you were gone.”
“I thought I lost you, too,” I said. I wasn’t the only one crying, at least.
“There is one more gift I can give you, Amy,” Ozma said. “I can send you and Madison home at last. Whichever home you choose. Remember, if you stay in Oz, no one will know you. No one will know what you’ve been through or what you’ve done. No one but him.” She nodded toward Nox. “Or I can return you to Kansas. Those who belong there,” she added, glancing again in Nox’s direction.
“I don’t know where Kansas is,” Dorothy’s shrub creature said in a tiny voice.
Ozma laughed merrily. “You, my dear Munchkin, belong here in Oz. You are free at last. Free to return to your family, if you wish. Or free to see the world. Whatever you choose, my protection will follow you always.”
“She’s gone?” The Munchkin’s face was astonished. “And I’m . . . free?”
“Indeed,” Ozma said. “And now, Amy, I am afraid you must choose.”
But I’d already chosen. I’d chosen, I realized, a long time ago. I looked at Nox, and started crying harder. “Nox,” I managed to squeak out through the tears.
“That face—you never managed to build a wall instead of a window,” he said, lifting my chin up.
He remembered the first compliment he’d ever given me when I was in training. “You said you liked it.”
“I said you’d have to change it if you were ever going to take out Dorothy. Looks like I was wrong.” He smiled, but the smile stopped before it reached his eyes. He knew what I was going to say but I had to say it.
“I have to go home,” I said. “I have to go to my real home, Nox. To my mom.”
“I know,” he said, kissing me. “I have to let you go.”
I felt a physical pain in my chest like I could barely breathe. It hurt more than anything I’d ever felt in my life. More than my mom leaving me behind over and over again.
Finally, Nox would be able to see Oz the way it had once been. As the place he’d been fighting for his entire life.
I just couldn’t see it with him.
“Oz is going to be so beautiful, just like you told me it used to be.”
Nox shook his head. “Not as beautiful as you.” It was the most unNox thing to say. I felt myself trying not to laugh. I guess I’d changed him, too.
“You are both very brave and very strong,” Ozma said. She nodded at Madison, who was still sleeping serenely. “Amy, undoing time in Oz is not the same as undoing it in your world. Both of you will carry this journey with you always.”
She turned to me and Nox and rested her palms on the tops of our heads. I felt her magic moving through me, cool and cleansing as a glacier-fed stream.
“Everything that has happened before will happen again, and forever is not always forever,” she said cryptically. And then she grinned. “Besides, you still have the shoes.”
I looked down at my feet. She was right. I turned to her.
“Do you mean . . .” I didn’t even want to say it out loud.
But she just smiled. “It’s time,” she said. “I’ll let you say good-bye.” And then she winked.
I buried my face in Nox’s chest, sobbing into his shirt as he wrapped his arms tightly around me. He was still wearing the panther costume. He smelled the way he always did: sandalwood. “I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too, Amy.” He kissed the top of my head and then my lips. I lost myself in his kiss. The memory of being with him in Lang’s hideaway. Everything we’d been through together.
Letting go of him was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
“I’m not going to say good-bye,” Nox said, reaching forward to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Because this isn’t good-bye.”
“Someday, over the rainbow . . .” I said. We kissed again. But it was different from all the other kisses. It was good-bye. I felt the gravity in the kiss and it took everything in me not to give in and change my mind.
When we finally parted, he just smiled that knowing smile of his and held my gaze with his pale gray eyes.
“Thank you, Amy,” Ozma said. And then in a blinding flash of silver light, Ozma and Nox and Bupu disappeared.
I blinked and my vision cleared. Madison and I were in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the drugstore in Flat Hill. The air was hot and still and no one was out on the streets. It was the middle of the afternoon.
I didn’t know what day it was. I wasn’t even sure what year.
But I was home.
“What the fuck just happened?” Madison said, sitting up.
“Hi, Madison,” I said. “Glad you’re awake.”
“I feel like I just got run over by a truck,” she moaned, grabbing her head dramatically. “What happened? Where’s Dorothy? Is Nox moving to Flat Hill? Are we home?”
Home. It had been a long time. And now home meant a lot of different things. Nox, Oz, Kansas.
But in Oz, I’d learned to finish what I started. And my mom and I weren’t done. Not by a long shot. Kansas might not be home in the way it had been before Oz, but it was where I’d come from. And, like Dorothy, I had to make peace with the past before I could face the future.
Especially now that I knew I was strong enough.
“Yes, Madison. We’re back in Kansas.”
“Well,” Madison said, looking around. “This is going to take some getting used to again.”
“You’re telling me,” I said.
“What exactly are we going to tell people about . . . wherever we went?”
“You’ll think of something,” I said.
“Do we really have to go back to high school after all of that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we could get our GEDs.”
Madison sighed and kicked at a pebble. “I guess I could just tell people I was on, like, a really extended acid trip.”
“Sounds about right. You ready to see your kid?”
“Oh my god,” Madison said, a huge grin spreading across her face. “Tell me you remembered to bring a diaper-changing spell back with you.” Then she got serious again. “Listen, Ames, I’m sorry I doubted you. And thanks. For keeping your promise.”
“I would have doubted me, too,” I said. “I mean, considering the circumstances.”
“Yeah, there’s that.” She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “For a boyfriend-stealing trailer park ho you’re pretty all right, you know that?”
“For a glitter-crusted head-cheerleading queen bitch, you’re not so bad yourself,” I said, laughing.
“Well,” she said, taking a deep breath. “If we do go back to school, this is gonna be a hell of a senior year.”
I smiled. “What can I say? There’s no place like home.”
Madison groaned in protest, but I was already walking down the street.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go tell these people we’re alive.”
Flat Hill was never going to be the same again, I thought.
But then again, neither was I.