10. Chapter 10
ten
Something gave the moment Pae made his final push.
For one horrible instant, I couldn’t be sure if it was my sternum. One glance down showed that I remained intact. My corporealness, however, had not stopped Pae’s hand—along with a good portion of his arm—from going through me. Then, as he began to withdraw the arm that apparently had the power to penetrate solid matter—me—my stomach churned.
“Tipa-trap,” grunted Pae, “now would be the time to start, you know, helping.”
Helping? I hadn’t a clue what he’d been doing until this moment. Now, as his fist reappeared, lavender fingers clenched around a black and writhing muck, I understood.
Morella. He was extracting her from me.
The events that had led up to this—the statues, Morella’s appearance, and then Pae’s. Nick’s unbothered response. Everything had happened so fast.
God, Nick had lured me out here because he’d found out about West. He’d known. And he’d known because Pae…must have told him.
“Tip!” growled Pae as he pulled harder, muscles straining, fanged teeth grinding, the strands of black sludge splitting like strings of tar, his payload of muck threatening to slip out of his grip and snap back into me.
Focus. Help him.
These words aided me in shoving my confusion aside and zeroing my concentration in on my interior world, which still buzzed and whirred from the flamebrew. But the liquor had to have been part of Nick’s plan, too. Because Morella did seem to be having a harder time commanding me. Almost as if, due to the alcohol, she could not gain a solid foothold.
Out, I willed. Out.
Morella howled, the wail beginning in my head and then funneling out of my mouth.
“Nnnooooo,” she moaned, “I cannot let her gooooo!”
“I draw you out,” snarled Pae. “I extract you.”
“Nooo!” yelled Morella again as my hand formed into a claw and lashed at Pae’s face.
He didn’t flinch. Not even as a thread of deep violet blood bloomed into view before trailing down his cheek. He just kept pulling.
I, in turn, kept mentally pushing.
And finally, the black muck that had first overtaken me in the clock tower of the Emerald City Palace began to peel up and away from my spirit, my mind, my body.
Go!I screamed in my mind.
Then, just like that, it was out of me. She was out of me. Yanked from my form and slung onto the snow-covered stones like black guts from a rotted fish.
“No matter what,” said Pae in a harried, breathless voice as he jerked me away from the statue, “do not reenter the circle.”
He shoved me hard, sending me through the crust of violet light—and into a pair of waiting metal arms.
Free. I was…free.
The muck regained its structure, becoming West, who shrieked at the sight of me outside of the violet light and with Nick who held me as though he feared I might run back to her.
And as Pae closed the distance between himself and the witch, a dagger now in one hand, I did have the urge to climb from The Woodsman’s grasp, to call out to her, to warn her—even to go to her.
Pae wasted no time. He struck, and Morella took the blade to her chest with a wail.
“I knew there was something you weren’t telling me,” Nick said, his words distracting me from the perverse impulse to reach for her, if not from the terrifying scene that continued to play out before me—Pae twisting the dagger in Morella’s nonexistent heart, then steering her toward the statue of herself. “And not just about Rye…”
“Wraith of Morella Morgana,” Pae said, again adopting that chanting tone, “I, Pae, king of the demons of Oz, hereby seal you to your past, and bind you to this eidolon of your malfeasance.”
“You will rot for this!” bellowed Morella. “I will have your soul—what is left of it.”
“Sounds fun,” grunted Pae, “like that time in the poppy fields. Just before everything…changed.”
With one final growl, Pae plunged the blade into the statue’s chest, and in the same way his hand had gone through me, the metal slid straight into the stone. Morella dispersed into the black muck, which then retracted into the stone figure, vanishing within.
His work done, Pae pushed off from the stone figure, arms falling to his sides in a way that conveyed defeat rather than victory.
A wave of his hand banished the circle of light.
“Are we done here?” asked Pae, tears now streaking his face along with that strange blood.
“For now,” said Nick. “Until the next part.”
“Until then,” said the demon through a sneer as he backed away from the statues of Morella and Eulalie, gaze lingering on the place he had embedded the dagger, which dripped Morella’s black essence the same way the clock hands had in the Emerald City Palace.
Pausing, though, Pae turned my way, aiming a clawed finger at me. “I do not have funny hair.”
Then he darted away before vaulting off the banister and into the air—which swallowed him the same way it had before when he’d disappeared in the bell tower, leaving no trace of him behind. Nothing but a shimmery haze that dissipated as quickly as he had vanished.
“Are you all right, Tip?” came Nick’s voice.
Instead of answering, I glanced down at his hand, which clutched a strange cloth item stitched with rubies and diamonds.
A velvety hat of some kind—golden in hue.
A cap.
A golden cap.