34. Chapter 34
thirty-four
I trailed Dorothy through the gloom, which my ring helped to disperse the same way Rye’s had the first time I’d navigated the labyrinthine passageways. Back then, it had been him leading the way. This time, Dorothy walked ahead while I followed close behind so that the green light from my ring could reach ahead of both of us.
We didn’t speak while we wound through the tunnels. And even though I wanted to ask if she was sure she knew the way, I held my tongue.
Finally, we arrived at a section of the wall with another wood panel. This one, though, bore letters that someone had carved into the dark grain. My hand went to the wood, I couldn’t help myself, and I allowed my fingers to trace the markings.
R + D.G.
Rye plus Dorothy Gale.
“Who carved this?” I asked, the words leaping from my lips, unfairly accusatory.
“Rye carved the R,” she whispered. “He did it to mark the door so that I would know his rooms when I found them. I added my initials after I gave him the ring.”
After they were engaged, she meant.
“So, you didn’t get engaged until after The Wizard had been deposed,” I said.
“It was the day before I left,” she confessed. “He was avoiding me. I went to his rooms to find him. He was hiding out here in the passageways, in this very spot. Of course, I found him. And I gave him the ring. And I promised I would come back to him. I carved my initials next to his and told him whenever he started to doubt that I would return, he could come out here…and look.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
“I had to go home,” she said, staring at the letters. “I couldn’t leave my aunt and uncle to wonder what happened to me for the rest of their lives. They took me in. Raised me. I couldn’t let them think I just ran away or died. Then…things happened. Changed. Em needed me. And I couldn’t even think about coming back to Oz. Not when… Well, now’s not the time to go into all that.”
“Your aunt and uncle,” I said. “Did you tell them about Oz?”
“Would you tell your people?” she asked. “If you went back and they asked you where you’d been?”
“No,” I said honestly. “Well, I would have told Sebastian. Even though, if he’d never come here, he wouldn’t have believed me.”
“I tried to tell Em once,” she said, “about Rye. Hard to talk around the fact that he’s a king, never mind a scarecrow. I learned quick that there’s a loneliness that comes with not being believed. And home was the last place I wanted to feel lonesome.”
She pressed her hands to the panel and pushed. The panel shifted, revealing a keyhole. Dorothy peered back at me with one brow raised.
The question was clear. Could I manage the same trick I had on the boards?
She slid back into the darkness as I took her place in front of the panel. I pressed my palm over the keyhole and dove into the mechanisms with my mind. There came a quiet click, and I gritted my teeth.
“What if there’s someone in there?” I asked.
“Guessing you can’t tell that?”
I frowned and tilted my head because I wasn’t sure. So, keeping my hand pressed to the wood, I shut my eyes and wove mentally into the space beyond.
Static sizzled through the darkness inside, sparks of energy tracing the outline of furniture, the floor, ceiling, and rafters. The energy zipped around the circular bed Rye had brought me to that night he’d locked me into the bracers. Had me underneath him…
I shook the images from that night and followed the flaring light as it zipped out the bedroom door and into the other rooms of Rye’s chambers. Blackness continued to exist everywhere except where the sparks of static touched. The energy traced the windows, the desk, and the bookshelves, which all remained as Rye had left them. At least so far as I could tell…
The flicker of my mental energy, like the spark that consumes a trail of gunpowder, illuminating things as it went, flared and flashed its way to another door, which someone had left ajar.
The energy went in. Only then did I get the sense of something strange.
A presence and yet…not.
“What?” whispered Dorothy who must have noted the darkening of my expression.
I didn’t open my eyes. Instead, I let my spark, the flash of dancing static, wander down the narrow hallway it had found itself in. At least, the space seemed like a hallway. Or it did until the channel came to a dead end.
My spark of awareness traveled up the wall and traced the outline of a cabinet door built into said wall. Following the wall now, running back the way it had come, my mind found another cabinet—and another. They lined the hallway—on either side.
I couldn’t tell what was within the cabinets, though I had an odd sense of being sensed. Like I was looking into a certain kind of darkness that had the ability to, if I stuck around long enough…look back.
That had me opening my eyes.
“I don’t feel anyone in there,” I told Dorothy. “But…there’s something wrong. There’s a room in there that’s a long hallway with a dead end. Something’s off about that.”
“That’s Rye’s crown corridor,” she said.
“His what?”
“It’s a long corridor with glass door cabinets,” she said. “The Wizard had them built as display cases for treasures he collected around Oz. Rye had the artifacts returned to their rightful corners of Oz, and he used the cabinets to house his crowns instead.”
“He has a thing about those crowns,” I observed.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Dorothy replied. “They were gifts from the different regions and peoples of Oz. Aside from that, Rye just likes symbolism. He’s a bit obsessed with his image, but not out of vainness.”
“He lets his attire do the talking for him much of the time,” I said.
“It’s a weapon, in a way,” Dorothy replied. “How he looks, I mean. He frightens some. Others peg him as weak. People’s assumptions can be dangerous. And the crowns. They help to remind everyone what he is. That he is a what…more than he is a who.”
“That sounds like something he would say,” I murmured through an ironic laugh.
“That’s because those were his words,” she replied as she pushed against the door, which gave, allowing us into the darkened space of Rye’s bedroom.
I crept in behind Dorothy, casting my gaze left and right, scanning the shadowed corners and the rumpled bed, which had been pristine and untouched the last time I’d laid eyes on it. Well, at least it had been until Rye had set me on it and, in his human form, scorched me with those lips. Those hands…
Rye never slept. So he didn’t need a bed, even though he had one.
Someone, however, had since claimed this room and this bed. Whoever that someone was slept fitfully.
While Dorothy crept toward the doorway leading out into the rest of Rye’s chambers, I snuck closer to the bed, scanning its wadded dark green blankets and linens for any clues as to who had taken up residence here. Though I expected to find evidence that Langwidere had claimed Rye’s rooms for her own, I instead found a trio of Sebastian’s throwing knives on the bedside table, their hilts wound with carvings of roses and vines.
I seized one and clenched it tight, the familiar embellishments biting into my palm.
Then I glanced down, finding a shirt on the floor. A man’s.
“Dorothy,” I whispered. Glancing up, I found the doorway empty.
Tucking Sebastian’s blade into my belt, I scurried to the threshold and, peering out, searched for her.
Bathed half in shadow and half in the moonlight pouring through the huge windows overlooking the palace’s rear gardens, Dorothy stood with her back to me, facing Rye’s overflowing bookshelves. More books cluttered his desk, which someone had ransacked.
Books littered the floor as well, as if someone had gone through them, searching perhaps for hollowed-out books with hidden items, or maybe tomes with special information.
Perhaps Langwidere, or even someone else, had already taken the volume Dorothy had come in search of. Maybe that was why she just kept standing there, staring at the shelves.
“It’s not here,” she said at last, turning to face me. “Someone took it.”
“Sebastian’s things were in the bedroom,” I told her. “He might know where the book went.”
Dorothy frowned but nodded. “It’s clear someone’s been staying here. Maybe Langwidere gave Sebastian Rye’s old rooms. I could see her taking Glinda’s quarters. They’re larger and more luxurious. And she wouldn’t know about the passageways. So she wouldn’t know the benefits of this room.”
“Langwidere knows about the passageways,” I corrected. “She tried to kill me in one of them.”
Dorothy paused to regard me, her expression unreadable and mostly lost in the gloom.
“Then maybe she chose a different room,” she murmured. “Another one that connects to the passageways since Glinda’s rooms don’t.”
I turned in a circle, again scanning the knickknacks and the furniture, which Langwidere—or Sebastian—had left untouched. Even Rye’s mechanical bird, his Gripline, remained, though the bird did not move or squawk as it had that night I’d been in here with the king.
Now, instead, the mechanical bird remained frozen, as if someone had switched it off, or its gears had run down. I wasn’t sure how he worked since Nick had never explained what powered the clockwork creatures, and I hadn’t looked closely enough at Nick’s version of the bird to tell.
I glanced behind me, in the direction of the door that led out of Rye’s rooms and into the apartment he’d moved me to after Langwidere’s assassin failed to kill me. The chambers that, at the time, I’d had no idea connected to his.
While Dorothy went to root through another pile of books, I continued to stare at the door. But then I shifted my gaze to another door. The one I’d glimpsed with my mind’s eye from the other side of the panel—the one that had been left ajar.
Darkness dwelled within the slit between door and jamb.
As I zoned in on that crack, a wave of foreboding crept over me.
“There’s something wrong,” I said at last, the words falling from my lips as they occurred to me. “There’s something in that room. Something…not good.”
“What is it?” Dorothy asked with a balking tone. “You’re not saying you can sense someone in here with us?”
“There’s no one,” I said. “But… Well, there is something. It feels like…the arms of a spider. Only, there are more than eight. And the spider itself…it’s not there.”
I drifted toward the door, drawn by the mystery it held. By this energetic oddity, I sensed but could not “see” with my powers.
“I think I found the book!” called Dorothy. “It was over here on this table in a pile. Actually, it looks like someone’s been reading all of Rye’s books on dark magic.”
I tilted my head at the door even as my feet brought me closer and closer. I stopped just short of the threshold, lining up one eye with that pitch-black crack.
I couldn’t make out anything in the gloom.
“There’s one on necromancy,” Dorothy murmured, her voice dropping with dark concern. “And another on witches.”
Scowling, I took hold of the door and opened it slowly. The hinges made no sound. I tried to be quiet, too, as I stepped into the space—that narrow and short hall that terminated in a floor-to-wall mirror that had been left intact. Cabinets flanked the walls on either side of me, the glass doors of which my ring now illuminated.
I gasped, the soft sound loud in my ears. And after that, I couldn’t take another breath because of what the cabinets held. They still displayed Rye’s many crowns. But they also displayed something else.
Each cabinet also held within it a different woman’s head, all of them with their eyes closed. Sleeping or dead or some combination of the two.
The crowns glittered and glinted against varying hues of hair—gold against coal locks, silver against auburn tresses, steel against chestnut curls. Jewels dripped from ears. Rouge-tinted pale and bronzed skin alike. Every glass window framed a different beauty. And horror.
The urge to scream rose from the deepest part of me. I cut it off with a gulp as I fumbled back to the door.
“It’s here,” came Dorothy’s voice. “I have it.”
I rushed out just as she arrived, swinging around to shut the door with a quiet clap.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s in there—?”
I smashed one hand over her mouth, then pressed a finger of the other to my lips, my eyes wide with terror, and all that I couldn’t bring myself to put into words.
Just when I worked up enough nerve to begin to speak, however, a voice sounded from within the room—a woman’s.
“Did you hear that?”
“I heard something,” answered a second feminine voice, this one slightly deeper in register. “I think someone’s at the door.”
Dorothy tore my hand down from her face, her own eyes widening with panic.
“Who is in there?” Dorothy demanded in a rasp. “I thought you said you didn’t sense anyone.”
I shook my head, my horror growing because of what these voices meant.
The heads. Even detached from their normal bodies, even detached from Langwidere’s—they could still talk.
“We have to get out of these rooms,” I whispered back to Dorothy, grabbing her by the shoulders and steering her in reverse.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“There’s someone out there,” another voice from within the crown corridor—the head corridor—said, growing muffled now that we’d gained more distance. “And it’s not Sebastian.”
“Two someones by the sound of it,” answered yet another voice.
“It can’t be us,” said one of the voices.
“Unless it is,” replied another.
“We’d know if it was,” argued a dry voice. “We always know.”
Dorothy and I stood frozen, our eyes locked, breaths held. Her lips trembled as she spoke in a whisper.
“I’d ask,” she said. “But this is Oz. So I already know.”
I didn’t answer. But then, I didn’t have to because, keeping the book she’d found tucked under one arm, she seized my hand and, drawing me after her, rushed back to the panel through which we’d entered.
The voices continued to consult with one another, and though alarm entered their tones, their words became lost.
Our panicked breathing too loud, we hurried down the hall, our hands locked together in a fierce grip.
“Where are we going?” I asked Dorothy.
“I don’t know,” she called over her shoulder. “Away.”
Frowning, I let her take the lead until we came to a crossroads. The hallway split in two directions. A third way presented itself in the form of another corkscrewing staircase, this one ascending to some unknown location.
Up wouldn’t take us out of the palace. But then, we still had business here.
“Sebastian,” I said. “We still need to find him.”
“Do you think Langwidere knows we’re here?” Dorothy asked. “The heads. Do you think they can communicate with her?”
“My guess is yes,” I said. Or maybe it was best to assume they couldalert her to disturbances.
“Then we’re running out of time.”
“Sebastian,” I said, my hand clutching the hilt of his dagger.
“I can call Pae,” she said.
“No need.”
The demon’s voice in the dark had us whirling and, jittery as I was, I had to stop a yelp with my hand. Farther down the passageway, near the direction we’d fled, a pair of golden eyes pierced the darkness.
“Pae,” I said, “did you find him?”
The demon stepped forward, tail swaying as he abandoned the shadows. He wore an odd expression—one made even more disconcerting in the green glow of my ring.
“He’s in the bathroom.”
“What?” I rushed toward him. My steps halted, though, when those eyes widened on me, feral and strange. Parted lips showed those sharp teeth. “Are…are you saying he’s waiting for us?”
“If by waiting you mean unconscious. Then, yes.”
“Is he hurt?” I asked.
“I didn’t have time to play cat and mouse,” said Pae who took a step toward me. And then another. “Didn’t have time to explain myself to some upstart boy who is the only thing standing between me and what I want.”
“You knocked him out,” said Dorothy through a growl.
“We need to go,” said Pae. “Rest assured he’s going to be missed.”
I shook my head. Because I didn’t have time to argue with Pae. Or put up with whatever tantrum this was. He might have been scary, but he wasn’t currently the scariest thing Dorothy and I were facing.
Putting his back to us, Pae drew a circle and made the portal. Through the window, I spotted Sebastian. He lay on his side, unconscious next to the bath, naked (from what I could tell) beneath a pale green sheet that had been wrapped around him.
“What did you do?” I demanded as I rushed through the portal and back into the bath chamber.
“Tip!” cried Dorothy. But I peered back too late.
Pae had closed the portal, sealing me off from her. From them.
Her. And Pae.