He had a point.

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, waving the idea away, “I could never stomach violence. And anyway, you’re the one from Kansas. . . .”

The grass around us rustled, blown by a gentle wind. I glanced at Pete and found him staring up into the night sky. Suddenly he flinched, and put one hand on the Wizard’s shoulder.

“She sees us,” he said. “She knows where we are.”

The Wizard nodded, as if he understood Pete’s typically cryptic words. “We have to move. There’s still a battle at the palace, but it won’t last long. If she—”

“She who?” I interrupted, more than tired of being in the dark.

“Glinda,” the Wizard said. “Gazing at us through the damn painting I should’ve destroyed years ago—”

The night flashed suddenly white, the air around us forcefully displaced and filling with the smell of motor oil. Startled, Maude and Ollie took to the air. I shielded my eyes from the bright light as the Tin Woodman materialized in front of me, still shimmering with a pale pink glow from the spell that had sent him here. Glinda. It had to be. I was beginning to see by now that she liked to rely on other people to do her dirty work for her. Instead of facing me on her own, she had sent someone else to deal with me.

His ax was raised, as if he’d just been plucked from the middle of a fight and transplanted here. He looked around, his eyes still adjusting to the darkness. He lowered the ax a fraction, but then spotted the Wizard. “You!” he snarled.

“Hello, old friend,” the Wizard replied sadly. “I’m sorry to see that Glinda’s using you as her little errand boy. It’s really not very dignified, is it?”

“You,” the Tin Woodman cried in outrage. I’d never heard so much raw emotion in his hollow, metallic voice before. “I should have known you were part of this.”

He rounded on me next, that all-too-familiar ax poised to strike.

“And you. What have you done with my princess? Where is she? If you’ve harmed even a hair on her head . . .”

“Whoa,” I replied. Had Dorothy gone missing after she’d teleported away from me? “I don’t have her.”

Obviously, the Tin Woodman didn’t believe me. He pulled his ax from his shoulder and took a lumbering swing at me, but I moved backward easily, feeling stronger and more confident than I had all night, and pulled my knife out. I felt my magic coursing through my body, charging the knife with energy.

The Tin Woodman was alone without his soldiers, without Dorothy and her magic. And he looked weakened: his metal body was battered; several of the frightening instruments that had once tipped his fingers had been snapped off. He had a huge dent in the side of his face, stretching from his cheek to his forehead.

The Order had only charged me with killing Dorothy—there’d been no discussion of the Tin Woodman or any of her other cohorts. But they were all just as evil, weren’t they? I hadn’t been able to kill Dorothy, but if I was able to do away with the Tin Woodman, that would at least weaken her ability to torture some innocent people, right?

I could do this.

“Kill him, Amy,” the Wizard urged me. A wounded, betrayed look scrunched the Tin Woodman’s features at the Wizard’s words. “I’ve told you what you need to do.”

I glanced over at the Wizard and saw him weaving his hands through the air—but not to help me. Instead, he was building what looked like a glowing green force field around himself and Pete. Thanks, guys. Very chivalrous.

The Tin Woodman, though, was focused only on me. He put his head down and charged, his ax extended in front of him. As he plowed forward, the ax transformed into a long, gleaming sword that almost seemed to be an extension of his body.

I was ready for him. Just before he reached me, I blinked myself behind him and he kept going, his momentum carrying him forward. He stumbled for a moment, almost falling, but then he recovered, pivoted, and—in one swift motion—hurled his sword straight for me. As it flew through the air, it transformed again: this time into a flurry of knives.

With a few lightning-fast flicks of my wrist, I was able to deflect most of them, but I felt one graze my cheek. Another plunged into my thigh.

Without slowing down, I pulled it out, feeling the warm blood seep down my leg, and tossed it aside. With that and the wound across my abdomen, I was steadily turning into a real mess. My whole body was shooting with a throbbing pain, but I didn’t care.

I didn’t feel weaker, I felt changed. Like I really had become something else—a warrior like Jellia had been when she’d confronted Dorothy—someone capable of taking the worst these assholes had to offer and then dishing it right back to them.

The Tin Woodman was unarmed now. From his posture, it didn’t look like he had much fight left in him.

I launched myself into the air and leaned into a spinning kick that connected with his midsection. The Tin Woodman toppled into the grass and I leapt on top of him.

“His heart, Amy!” the Wizard hissed. “That’s the only way!”

I lifted my knife into the air, letting it fill with heat until the blade glowed white-hot. The magic was rich in this place—I felt supercharged, more powerful than I ever had before, Oz’s natural, mercurial energy flowing like water from the grass and the air and the earth and into my body. Into my knife.

The pain from my injuries was still there, but it was easy to ignore.